That's interesting. The alert should only be presented to you twice - if you respond No to both cases, it should simply disable location services for the app.
Mind you, I did that manually - at least once I discovered it leaves them enabled the whole time the app's running, which means a significant battery hit on the GPS.
They're probably using a similar strategy to Alchemy: map AS3 library calls to a Flash framework implemented in the target language. (In Alchemy's case Scott Petersen implemented a C VM in AS3, linked with the C std lib.) Most likely the entire framework is being bundled with every release, without regard to dependency.
Thanks robc and ed. In that case, I don't think this is as impressive from a technical perspective as some people thought. Again, this AOT compiler is not what made Flash apps technically possible on the iPhone; Adobe could've used this same bundling technique with the JIT compiler. It looks like they've done this just to satisfy Apple's terms.
But in Rails land, there have been significant changes over the last two years in addressing a number of the issues.
Of course, let's not forget that Rails 3.0 (which is where the merge with Merb will be accomplished) will give Rails more of the points he highlighted in that article.
I'd love to see a balanced comparison using more up to date versions and see how it fares...
Mind you, I did that manually - at least once I discovered it leaves them enabled the whole time the app's running, which means a significant battery hit on the GPS.