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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

#391

Post by eru »

api wrote: post #157
Zak wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Boycotting the Mac platform (which is pretty much free of any such absurdity) doesn't make a lot of sense to me. That's where Apple is doing things right . You should of course, shun iPhone OS devices if you feel this way. The system76 laptops are probably generic machines from Clevo, Sager or some such with a custom badge. Alienware used to do the same thing.

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.

> The hardest thing to me about ditching Mac would be that Apple is the only company capable of doing a user interface.

Some systems have a CLUE (Command Line User Environment).

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

#392

Post by eru »

l0stman wrote: post #351
jrockway wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

To be fair, the part of Emacs implemented in Lisp looks nothing like poetry. I wouldn't qualify it as ``utter crap'' but it's a lot messier than I thought. Some of the default packages looks like straight C code translated verbatim to Lisp. My take is that even if it's easier to screw things up in C, that doesn't mean that if you program in a higher level language, you'd automatically produce elegant code.

Emacs Lisp is a mess. It doesn't even have lexical scoping.

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

#393

Post by eru »

ghshephard wrote: post #171
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.…

Poor comparison. All you need to be an authorized Apple Developer is $99. They aren't really trying to lock down the developer market, only the developer-compiler market.

And what if I don't want to write in one of the languages mentioned?

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

#394

Post by pygy_ »

bad_user wrote: post #27
WilliamLP wrote: post #18

> Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine Controlling programmers like this seems positively insane, doesn't it? Does this mean that games can't do scripting in something like Lua either, under the letter of Apple's law?

Games never could do scripting in Lua, since you can't run interpreted or Jitted code on the iPhone anyway. What they are forbidding now is the usage of any third-party compilers that are producing native executables ... Adobe CS5, MonoTouch, Unity.

That's patently wrong.

Until now, you could link to an interpreter, as long as all the code that it running was bundled with the app as downloaded from the App Store. No code could be generated by the user or downloaded from the net, though.

A lot of games use interpreters. ScummVM is used for the official Broken Sword port, the original SCUMM engine is used in the remake of The Secret of Monkey Island, and a lot of commercial iPhone game frameworks use Python or Lua as a scripting language.

That said, I have an implementation of Conway's game of Life on my iPhone, downloaded from the app store. Life is Turing equivalent, and the user can create his own patterns. I guess the app reviewers didn't know about it (or don't care about it since the applications are very limited).

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

#395

Post by eru »

newobj wrote: post #203
wvenable wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but then the app still wouldn't be "originally written" in Objective-C.

And how could this ever be proven?

Apple just sues you, if they suspect, and the court will find out.

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

#396

Post by eru »

plinkplonk wrote: post #302
dirtyaura wrote: post #5

I find it same time amusing and hard to believe that this kind of requirement (writing apps only in C++ & Obj-C) is legally possible.

"I find it same time amusing and hard to believe that this kind of requirement (writing apps only in C++ & Obj-C) is legally possible." Is this technically possible? If I write my app in language L and also write an L->Obj-C translator, how is Apple going to know? I don't think Apple looks through your source code before putting your app on the App Store(do they)?

It could still be enforcable in court.

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

#397

Post by api »

stse wrote: post #387
city41 wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think I'm already gone :( I am now seriously considering mowing down my iMac and MacBook and putting Linux on them. (Not that this makes a lick of difference, but it will make me feel better)

It does make a difference. Linux needs more users, both active and passive. I'm actually surprised how many people that would be the target audience for Linux have come to use OS X instead.

User interface, user interface, quality of hardware, and user interface.

"Quality of hardware" boils down to user interface... just at the hardware level.

Their UI ability is the secret of Apple's success. Everyone else treats UI and design like an afterthought.

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

#398

Post by api »

drats wrote: post #260
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.

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…

What Apple really has down about UIs is sparseness. "Exterminate features." I loathe clutter, both in real life and in technology.

When something on a mac looks like it should be able to be frobbed, dragged, etc., it usually can and in exactly the way that it seems like it should.

This is not the case on Windows, Linux, or anything else.

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

#399

Post by eru »

cmars232 wrote: post #38

Wow, this could also ban iPhone apps from using Scheme ( http://jlongster.com/blog/2009/06/17/write-apps-iphone-schem... ) or maybe even model-driven tools ( http://code.google.com/p/iphonical/ ). Telling developers which languages to use? Might as well stick with enterprise software development, more innovation going on over there Apple!

Actually, yes. My employer caters to the enterprise market, but we use, say, Ocaml and Python, and are experimenting with Haskell.

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

#400

Post by juasko »

eru wrote: post #393
ghshephard wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Poor comparison. All you need to be an authorized Apple Developer is $99. They aren't really trying to lock down the developer market, only the developer-compiler market.

And what if I don't want to write in one of the languages mentioned?

Then don't, thank you!
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