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New iPhone Agreement Bans Flash-to-iPhone Compiler & Others

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Re: New iPhone Agreement Bans Flash-to-iPhone Compiler & Others

#321

Post by Bones »

wvenable wrote: post #278
api wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The hardest thing to me about ditching Mac would be that Apple is the only company capable of doing a user interface. ALL other user interfaces by ALL other vendors suck. For some reason, no human beings on the entire planet other than those that work at One Infinite Loop in Cupertino are capable of doing a UI.

I can't stand the Mac UI. In every way that it's better than Windows, there's some way that it's worse. The dock is a terrible interface element and having a menu at top the of screen may have made sense when screens where 512×342 pixels but makes little sense with giant resolution screens and multiple monitors. I'd say the all user interfaces from all vendors suck, including Apple.

There’s a reason it’s at the top of the screen, and it has nothing to do with screen resolution. Try looking up Fitt’s Law (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fittss_law).

Essentially, the menu items are infinitely tall hit targets… no matter how fast the mouse moves towards them, one can never overshoot them vertically. Menus in Windows and most *nix environments require both horizontal and vertical precision.

Furthermore, why are you bothering with the Dock when Exposé and Spotlight (or Quicksilver, Launchbar, etc.) offer great power user alternatives?

Personally, I still can’t stand how Windows and Linux make no distinction between applications and windows.

Re: New iPhone Agreement Bans Flash-to-iPhone Compiler & Others

#322

Post by Bones »

jrockway wrote: post #208
MichaelGG wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not sure that it'll be exceedingly difficult to determine if an app was compiled using another tool, and not written in Objective-C. I'd expect many languages and frameworks are going to have many very signature functions and patterns of code. If Apple decides to enforce this, they won't have a hard time. On top of that, if they miss it, and let a bunch of apps in, then later on determine those apps were crossco…

But of course, this makes for unhappy users too. "I just lost the $5.99 I paid for that app!"

NetShare users kept using the app months after Apple pulled it. I think people finally stopped using it to tether because an update finally broke it, not because Apple deleted it off people’s phones…

Re: New iPhone Agreement Bans Flash-to-iPhone Compiler & Others

#323

Post by Silhouette »

wvenable wrote: post #170
tzs wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"If the cross-platform experience is subpar, Apple should just let these apps fail in the market" Perhaps, like Nintendo, they learned the lessons from the collapse of the home video game market in 1983. When Nintendo was contemplating developing the NES, they took a deep look at what had caused the collapse. What they concluded was that the main cause of death was the market being flooded with too many crappy games.…

This is exactly what I thought the original app approval process would be for: an Apple "seal of quality". That would be a fine trade off for users -- they may only get the approved apps, but at least they're screened for quality. However, that isn't what the approval process is. There are literally thousands of crappy applications that were happily approved and clogging up all categories in the app store. It seems n…

> This is entirely about protecting Apple's own interests and the comparison to Nintendo's lock down of the NES is not applicable.

What I don't understand is how this isn't anticompetitive behaviour. By creating an app store and lock-in for application vendors, Apple become the only provider in the market. They now appear to be leveraging that monopoly to restrict another market, that of developer tools, to their commercial advantage and at the expense of a competitor.

I'm not a lawyer and don't live in the US where presumably any legal action would be brought, but can someone please explain to me how this isn't black-and-white illegal under US law?

Re: New iPhone Agreement Bans Flash-to-iPhone Compiler & Others

#324

Post by jacquesm »

If the installed base of the products is large enough, no matter how draconian the terms there will be a subset of all potential developers that will be swayed by the money to be made so they'll accept the terms. Any attempt at boycotting will simply fail because of that.

Re: New iPhone Agreement Bans Flash-to-iPhone Compiler & Others

#325

Post by jlees »

thought_alarm wrote: post #254
Zak wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple has consistently demonstrated that they don't care about what developers want. They seem to believe, and have so far been shown to be correct that if they can get the consumers, developers will follow. The only way I can see this changing is if a killer app that consumers want becomes available on another platform and not iPhone OS due to Apple's restrictions.

> Apple has consistently demonstrated that they don't care about what developers want. The facts disagree. The App Store model is unusual and it is not perfect. Few developers have any experience with Cocoa or Objective-C. Developers must use a Mac. iPhone software only runs on the iPhone and is not easily ported to other platforms. Despite all of that, Apple has attracted developers to the App Store and the iPhone i…

"It would seem Apple knows exactly what developers want."

Aye, money outweighs freedom even today.

Re: New iPhone Agreement Bans Flash-to-iPhone Compiler & Others

#326

Post by Peelman »

Silhouette wrote: post #323
wvenable wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly what I thought the original app approval process would be for: an Apple "seal of quality". That would be a fine trade off for users -- they may only get the approved apps, but at least they're screened for quality. However, that isn't what the approval process is. There are literally thousands of crappy applications that were happily approved and clogging up all categories in the app store. It seems n…

> This is entirely about protecting Apple's own interests and the comparison to Nintendo's lock down of the NES is not applicable. What I don't understand is how this isn't anticompetitive behaviour. By creating an app store and lock-in for application vendors, Apple become the only provider in the market. They now appear to be leveraging that monopoly to restrict another market, that of developer tools, to their com…

Apple's market is one of their own making, and is in fact something of a submarket. They control the platform, period, and when you agree to the terms of their developer agreement, you agree to be bound by them, so you are subject to the same rules as everybody else. They don't have any market monopolized, they merely have their corner of the market locked down.

and they aren't locking in any body. You don't forfeit rights to your source code, you're welcome to write some crossplatform app using some shared code library you build in-house. You just have to build apps natively, rather than use some watered down piss poor Common language that breaks standards on all platforms. This is the same reason adobe apps suck on macs. They have tried to abstract away the os from their applications to the point where they don't look, act, or function properly on any platform. They look like ass and run like ass on everything .

Re: New iPhone Agreement Bans Flash-to-iPhone Compiler & Others

#327

Post by wvenable »

Bones wrote: post #321
wvenable wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't stand the Mac UI. In every way that it's better than Windows, there's some way that it's worse. The dock is a terrible interface element and having a menu at top the of screen may have made sense when screens where 512×342 pixels but makes little sense with giant resolution screens and multiple monitors. I'd say the all user interfaces from all vendors suck, including Apple.

There’s a reason it’s at the top of the screen, and it has nothing to do with screen resolution. Try looking up Fitt’s Law ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fittss_law ). Essentially, the menu items are infinitely tall hit targets… no matter how fast the mouse moves towards them, one can never overshoot them vertically. Menus in Windows and most *nix environments require both horizontal and vertical precision. Furthermo…

> There’s a reason it’s at the top of the screen, and it has nothing to do with screen resolution.

I understand the original reason for it. However, hitting the menu is an extremely large distance from what you might be working on now. I'm typing this on a multi-monitor machine -- this app is totally self-contained on one monitor. Why must I move my mouse across two monitors just use this app's menu?

> Personally, I still can’t stand how Windows and Linux make no distinction between applications and windows.

I can't stand how you can close all windows on a Mac and still have the process around with the only indication being a slightly difference in the menu bar. Amazingly confusing.

Now this may be personal preference but it still shows that the Mac GUI isn't some ultimate model of perfection that everyone agrees on.

Re: New iPhone Agreement Bans Flash-to-iPhone Compiler & Others

#328

Post by wvenable »

johnrob wrote: post #299
wvenable wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Handheld computers (with and without a phone) have been around forever. Apple has changed the game from that open reality to this and have been quite successful with it. You have it backwards.

Hand held computers capable of rendering standard web pages have not been around for very long, unless I'm overlooking something.

Moore's law. Even desktop computers capable of rendering today's web pages haven't been around forever. But a web browser is just an app -- and all platforms have them now. I'm not sure what point you are trying to make.

Re: New iPhone Agreement Bans Flash-to-iPhone Compiler & Others

#329

Post by buster »

viraptor wrote: post #285
drats wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a massive exaggeration. I went from OSX to Ubuntu and I am more productive on Ubuntu in interface terms. The dock is very silly and graphical when you have quicksilver or gnome-do. Chrome is a better browser and browser UI experience than Safari in my opinion (and lots of people like firefox and opera more). The Finder vs Nautilus differences aren't big enough really, there are pros and cons to each. Apple st…

As much as I agree with the "it's not that bad" opinion, I can't understand why do you say "UI is far too overrated over actual features". No "standard user" will want to know about apt-get. They have synaptic and others. Normal users don't want to use the console at all. Command line is good for developers and power-users - and that's a minority. Majority wants to work based on recognition, not recall because they d…

I agree, that's why Ubuntu comes with the "Ubuntu Software Center" which is basically a frontend for those tools my grandma could use.

Re: New iPhone Agreement Bans Flash-to-iPhone Compiler & Others

#330

Post by wisty »

jrockway wrote: post #288
aaronbrethorst wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, the Linux kernel, Mozilla, Chrome, Safari, Emacs, vi, Mac OS X, iPhone OS, Windows 7, Google search, Apache, Nginx, the very first web browser, et cetera are utter crap.

As an Emacs developer, I can tell you with 100% confidence that the C part of Emacs is utter crap. The good news is that there isn't very much of it. The rest of the software is buggier than it should be. My web browser has remotely-exploitable security holes. Random drivers in Linux randomly regress as the version number increases. OS X and Windows 7 crash for no reason, and don't support enough hardware. The only p…

Xmonad claims to be about 1000 lines of Haskell. I'd say that's equivalent to about 10-100k of C.

It doesn't crash because it's simple, not because it's written in a good language.

Well you'd probably have 100X as many bugs in a C program (it takes 10X as many LOC, and I bet bugs scale with N^2), so Haskell is a bit better, but language isn't as important as scope. Big programs have more bugs.

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