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IPhone =/= Debian app

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Re: IPhone =/= Debian app

#61

Post by ugh »

Splines wrote: post #59
rakslice wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does everyone discount the idea of people finding apps through the search box? Are the users assumed to be unimaginative and unresourceful? Is the long tail too flat for anyone to make a living off of?

Maybe it's just me, but the process I use to determine what software I choose is not done in the store. Research via reading reviews and recommendations from others is usually the way I go about it. The problem I have in the App Store (wrt. finding apps that are "free floating") is that I don't know what's out there, and it's difficult to predict what will show up when I type in a specific query. I'm a gamer, so let'…

Read Touch Arcade.

http://toucharcade.com/2009/12/14/red-conquest-a-complete-bu...

Re: IPhone =/= Debian app

#62

Post by yonilevy »

aboodman wrote: post #50
korch wrote: post #46

While I agree with this point completely, I also think bitching about Apple's iPhone and Ipad "apps" is a moot point. 5 years from now it's all going to be html5, and all of these apps will run on any mobile device web browser. Apple now has such a head start on their app platform that pretty much the only reasonable strategy their competitors can do is collude and standardize on html5 for all apps. Then Apple has a…

Ah, 3d games and image manipulation. The last resort of all native arguments. This is going to change pretty rapidly with native client I think.

Native client, as the name implies, runs native code.

Re: IPhone =/= Debian app

#63

Post by jrockway »

derefr wrote: post #51
mikecane wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I keep wondering why Jobs keeps pushing HTML5. He too must realize the unsustainability of it all. A collapse has to happen -- and then how many "real" apps will remain for sale? And how many devs will migrate to the web where they don't have to have the approval of Apple or Google or any other hardware maker in order to create and publicize/sell something?

Jobs never liked the idea of Apps in the first place (probably because he knew it was unsustainable); he was fully prepared to go with a pure-webapp strategy until developers revolted. He's probably trying to get back out of that market as quickly as possible.

Unsustainable, but 30% of every sale probably makes it worthwhile.

Re: IPhone =/= Debian app

#64

Post by jrockway »

docgnome wrote: post #38
dman wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

a) Because I stare at a computer screen ~10 hours a day at work. When I am reading in the evening I prefer to have a book, which I can underline and scribble in. b) Every programmer over time develops tiny helpful apps that make life bearable, having to rewrite all those apps / utilities in a fresh new language is a burden that I would like to avoid. c) Admittedly I am a bit more aggrieved than most people because my…

I prefer to read from books but the information in most programming books is out of date very fast. For this reason, I prefer learning languages from the web.

For the same reason, most information you find on blogs is also out of date.

Re: IPhone =/= Debian app

#65

Post by albertzeyer »

mclin wrote: post #11

What about the barrier to entry: $100 + a Mac + an iPhone. As compared to a computer, which pretty much everyone had by 1998. Also iPhone programming is way harder than HTML. I had a mandatory high school class that taught HTML. Maybe I'm underestimating how many people are jumping on this, but my intuition is it can't be as many as were jumping on web. Twitter/social media marketing however... :P

iPhone programming (i.e. ObjC + optional C/C++) is harder than HTML+CSS+JS+(PHP/Python/Ruby/Java/whatever)?

Despite stuff what HTML is made for (like static websites), almost everything else is much easier to develop in ObjC with Cocoa (in some IDE like Xcode).

Let's take a simple 2D top-down game (like Legend of Zelda) as an example, with an inbuilt level editor and some way to save/load games on/from your local disk (or for the web equivalent: somewhere in some database).

That is quite easy to do with ObjC. I, for example, started to learn coding with Visual Basic many years ago, and that example was my second project (after a few weeks of coding -- never ever coded before). (Ofc VB is way different than ObjC but they are similarly easy to handle.) The point is, leave some newbie alone with Xcode and he will manage to implement something like this (without much extra documentation because most stuff is straight forward).

Now, let's leave some newbie alone to implement that in HTML + JS + whatever serverside language he prefers. He maybe will fail already to setup the web server.

Re: IPhone =/= Debian app

#66

Post by joubert »

Splines wrote: post #59
rakslice wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does everyone discount the idea of people finding apps through the search box? Are the users assumed to be unimaginative and unresourceful? Is the long tail too flat for anyone to make a living off of?

Maybe it's just me, but the process I use to determine what software I choose is not done in the store. Research via reading reviews and recommendations from others is usually the way I go about it. The problem I have in the App Store (wrt. finding apps that are "free floating") is that I don't know what's out there, and it's difficult to predict what will show up when I type in a specific query. I'm a gamer, so let'…

Metacritic also publishes iPhone game ratings, like they do for consoles: http://features.metacritic.com/features/topics/iphone/

Re: IPhone =/= Debian app

#67

Post by mjgoins »

aaronbrethorst wrote: post #25
telemachos wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> I don't see a lot of debian apps doing better than facebook.. There's no possible scale of values that you could use to evaluate this comparison. It's not even apples to oranges. It's like saying Facebook is doing better than beagles. The things don't fit into the same category at all. Here's a random example: one of the Debian apps is aptitude. It manages packages on the command-line. If you are a Debian sys-admi…

Facebook is doing way better than beagles! Beagles are predisposed to epilepsy; Facebook is not. Beagles did not generate $800MM in revenue last year; Facebook did!

According to some quick searching, pets and their food, etc. in the US in 2009 was a $45 billion industry.

Re: IPhone =/= Debian app

#68

Post by mclin »

albertzeyer wrote: post #65
mclin wrote: post #11

What about the barrier to entry: $100 + a Mac + an iPhone. As compared to a computer, which pretty much everyone had by 1998. Also iPhone programming is way harder than HTML. I had a mandatory high school class that taught HTML. Maybe I'm underestimating how many people are jumping on this, but my intuition is it can't be as many as were jumping on web. Twitter/social media marketing however... :P

iPhone programming (i.e. ObjC + optional C/C++) is harder than HTML+CSS+JS+(PHP/Python/Ruby/Java/whatever)? Despite stuff what HTML is made for (like static websites), almost everything else is much easier to develop in ObjC with Cocoa (in some IDE like Xcode). Let's take a simple 2D top-down game (like Legend of Zelda) as an example, with an inbuilt level editor and some way to save/load games on/from your local dis…

I know how hard web apps are, but the article isn't about that. It's about kids making static HTML pages, pre CSS and JS for everything except rollovers, which they certainly succeeded at.

Re: IPhone =/= Debian app

#69

Post by illumin8 »

mclin wrote: post #11

What about the barrier to entry: $100 + a Mac + an iPhone. As compared to a computer, which pretty much everyone had by 1998. Also iPhone programming is way harder than HTML. I had a mandatory high school class that taught HTML. Maybe I'm underestimating how many people are jumping on this, but my intuition is it can't be as many as were jumping on web. Twitter/social media marketing however... :P

When I began programming in the late 1980s, we learned Turbo Pascal running on 80286s that cost around $2000. I'd call $2,000 worth of hardware in 1980s dollars a pretty high barrier to entry, wouldn't you?

Now your only barrier to entry is a Mac mini and an iPod touch. Both of which can be had for less than $1,000 in 2010 dollars. The real barrier of entry is about 25% of the price we paid in the 1980s.

Re: IPhone =/= Debian app

#70

Post by ptomato »

jrockway wrote: post #63
derefr wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jobs never liked the idea of Apps in the first place (probably because he knew it was unsustainable); he was fully prepared to go with a pure-webapp strategy until developers revolted. He's probably trying to get back out of that market as quickly as possible.

Unsustainable, but 30% of every sale probably makes it worthwhile.

Doubtful. That's not really making Apple any (significant) profit when you look at their overhead for that.
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