Haha will I was busy doing stuff and just haven't managed to hit the sack yet!!
I downloaded tapa talk yesterday but find that a load of crap!
How much does it cost to create an app??
It costs nothing to develop an app, you just need a mac and a developer account.
It costs £59/year if you want to run the app on real hardware and make it available through the iTunes store.
This is not a trivial application, it requires adding a whole load of stuff into vBulletin (as TapaTalk have done).
Push notifications would all have to go through a TapaTalk server as only that server would have the necessary keys and authorisation to push to the apple servers, I assume TapaTalk haven't done this because given the amount of forums that use it, they'd use a hell of a lot of processing time and bandwidth sending out the notifications.
TapaTalk is far from perfect and it crashes a lot (although it's getting better in that respect) but it does offer a much better viewing experience on the iPhone than mobile safari.