Woz was never very good with the user experience / selling things to non-experts side of things.
Wozniak calls for open Apple
41–50 of 151 posts
Re: Wozniak calls for open Apple
#42Not gonna happen. Apple devices are abstractions with well-defined interfaces (sets of operations you can perform on them). Not only should the implementation not matter, it is anathema that anyone should know the implementation because that would break the abstraction at a fundamental level. It's absurd for a bunch of hackers to think about, but this is what has made Apple billions of dollars, and it's what made the…
Alas, not gonna happen indeed.
I once believed that BSD with an Apple interface was the Utopia of computing, but no. And it took me a couple of years to understand why. I came up with a different way to say the same thing: Apple is about productizing computing ideas. But it does mean closing them down. A product is not a platform. And Xcode is just a nuisance to Apple, a requisite rather than a goal.
Sometimes productizing means making the same thing much cheaper, like their first mouse. Sometimes it is making the same thing much more expensive than necessary, like present Macs.
But the common thread is to upsell your costumer. To make him come back. This is all Apple is about. It has the advantage of pampering a prized costumer, but it has the disadvantage of locking you.
To the people saying Apple is the new MicroSoft, at first Apple was the one and only personal computer company. It used to be king of the hill. It was busted when the open-ness of the IBM PC turned out to incur cluster effects.
For all we know, this post-PC era can also witness a similar disruption. esr really thinks Android is already doing it. Lets hope.
But Apple can't do open. It is not that it would "diminish returns". It is that it goes against the very company strategy. It is cute that Woz prefers not to acknowledge it, but that is all.
Re: Wozniak calls for open Apple
#43Here is a nice comparison. Buy a mobile device and try to use the standard developer tools to put Hello World on it. Android: Download Eclipse (Windows, Linux or Mac) and the Android SDK (Windows, Linux or Mac) - no accounts or registration needed for either of these. In your phone menus enable development and connect via USB. In Eclipse make your hello world project, and hit Run or Debug. Enjoy. Apple: You must buy…
For WP7: - Download the SDK (free), which includes Visual Studio (For Windows Phone) Express IDE. It also includes an emulator tool. http://create.msdn.com/en-us/home/getting_started Obviously only runs on Windows. - To deploy to your phone, you'll need to become an app hub member ($99 per year). Or there's numerous ways to unlock your phone for app deployment (if you search hard enough). And then you can just deploy…
WP is utterly painless re: deployment; plug it in, give it a dev certificate (automated, you only sign in to apphub), and hit run from MSVS.
What I was more impressed with, they handle signing your xap for release as well; it's all automatic (slightly less so on Android, much less so on iOS).
Re: Wozniak calls for open Apple
#44What would he say to the idea of selling Apple hardware without tying it to an OS? In other words, you can buy the great Apple form factor and design, but you don't have to deal with the restrictions of the OS. You could install your own OS. Obviously this would initially only target hackers. NetBSD can run on some Apple hardware. And there is all the Hackintosh work to build on. Eventually there would be more free O…
This is already possible though. Or you mean just purchasing the hardware with no OS on it to start; which would be a savings of $30?
Don't kid yourself. Some of the high price of an Apple computer includes the real price of the operating system, which is far more than $30. It also includes the majority of the price for upgrades. Apple computers are not worth $2000 in parts. A lot of that money is R&D.
Re: Wozniak calls for open Apple
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
For WP7: - Download the SDK (free), which includes Visual Studio (For Windows Phone) Express IDE. It also includes an emulator tool. http://create.msdn.com/en-us/home/getting_started Obviously only runs on Windows. - To deploy to your phone, you'll need to become an app hub member ($99 per year). Or there's numerous ways to unlock your phone for app deployment (if you search hard enough). And then you can just deploy…
WP is utterly painless re: deployment; plug it in, give it a dev certificate (automated, you only sign in to apphub), and hit run from MSVS. What I was more impressed with, they handle signing your xap for release as well; it's all automatic (slightly less so on Android, much less so on iOS).
What specifically do you have to do to get that dev certificate? Is that for you or for the device? (Note I'm only talking about the case where you want to put you own app on your own device, not about publishing it to the general public.)
Hopefully my original post inspires someone to try this with all the platforms. I'm particularly aware of the requirements to create accounts and registrations, the size of downloads, how limited your choice of host environments is etc.
The next fun step is how do you get your hello world onto a friend's device without using a cable or requiring them to be in your presence.
Re: Wozniak calls for open Apple
#46Here is a nice comparison. Buy a mobile device and try to use the standard developer tools to put Hello World on it. Android: Download Eclipse (Windows, Linux or Mac) and the Android SDK (Windows, Linux or Mac) - no accounts or registration needed for either of these. In your phone menus enable development and connect via USB. In Eclipse make your hello world project, and hit Run or Debug. Enjoy. Apple: You must buy…
The original Woz's Apple II was by default optimized for developers, just boot the computer (about 1 second to boot) and type:
10 PRINT "HELLO WORLD"
RUN
Re: Wozniak calls for open Apple
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
Precisely. Apple is all about hoop jumping. Remember your first iPod? Chances are you were forced to use something called iTunes. Now people do not think twice about iTunes. But back then there was just no sensible reason, from the user's perspective, not to let a user add/remove music from an iPod without jumping through an additional hoop. People had to spend countless hours deciphering the protocol in order to bui…
The alternative at the time was to buy an mp3 player with no way for normal people to load or buy music. It's precisely because of the lack of hoop jumping that iPod took off. Don't confuse the customer experience with the developer experience. Apple has always considered ease of use for end users a top priority and ease of use for programmers to be a distant nth.
What if a developer is also a user, or vice versa?
Re: Wozniak calls for open Apple
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
Two ways I can think of now. Microsoft got docked for just bundling IE with their OS. I just installed Netscape back in the day(before switching to IE coz Netscape started sucking). Apple bans all competing browsers. (Windows RT is a different story). The iOS app store forces developers to use their in-app purchasing with a 30% cut for Apple and bans any links to the developer websites to sell services. The Windows A…
Sigh. This meme. 1) plenty of non apple browsers in app store, try searching. No HTML rendering engines because that's a security issue. 1a) Microsoft did a heck of a lot more than bundle IE. They made it impossible to remove or avoid or even hide. (you can hide Safari on the tenth home screen in iOS -- IE was locked onto your desktop). They also did similar things to screw around with Java, QuickTime. Borland, Parad…
No HTML rendering engines because that's a security issue.
It's not a security issue; there are plenty of apps that download and render content, just not HTML content. You're not allowed to publish browsers on iOS because it's a business model issue. Browsers download and run code. Apple likes being the only one who can decide what code runs on an iPhone, so Safari is the only rendering engine.
Apple simply has some fairly clear up front rules about how to play on its minority platform.
Minority platform? They're outselling all smartphones combined on AT&T and Sprint, and running neck and neck with all Android phones combined on Verizon. They hold 85-90% of app store revenue. The fairly clear rules are "you cannot do anything with your phone that we do not approve of, and we do not approve of anything that potentially interferes with our business model." This should not make you a happy customer.
iOS was incredibly open compared with predecessors.
It was incredibly open compared with J2ME and BlackBerry. It was and is incredibly closed compared with other computers. The iPhone isn't a big deal because it's a better phone; it's a big deal because it's the first usable pocket computer. Why should it be a deliberately crippled one?
Now here's why this is important: Apple is making amazing pocket computers, and teaching people that it's cool for a computer vendor to lock down what software people get to run -- to pay engineers to actively try to prevent people from running unapproved software. It's dominating the cell phone market, and making monopoly plays to lock down its position. It's trotting out a line of bogus claims about why we can't opt out of the walled garden (it's a security issue!), when there are millions of computers with un-locked-down access to cell modems that somehow don't pose a security threat.
I've owned nothing but Macs my whole life; I doubt I'll stop any time soon. But I'm not going to high-five them for taking my money and using it to make my phone less useful, while promoting the idea that computers are too dangerous to let just anyone write software for. Screw that.
Re: Wozniak calls for open Apple
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
This process is truly the most cryptic thing to ever come out of Apple from a developer standpoint (30 years developing Apple software). Amazing that this comes from the company for the rest of us. Believe it or not, it is super streamlined now compared to what it was like when it first opened for business! All of this effort to keep you from writing software for something you bought. I can understand the hoops if yo…
The net result is that if anyone just wants to play home hobbyist I sure won't be recommending going the Apple route. Then again I suppose Apple is keen on keeping the riff raff out! Even installing Xcode was a nightmare for me. It was a brand new Mac so there were a whole bunch of system updates. I told it to go ahead and do those. In App Store I found Xcode and said to install that. You don't get any indication of…
Yep, about that XCode installation: They screwed up when they first made it MacAppstore-only. It has become much better now, it can also update through the appstore without redownloading the whole multiple GB package. The whole Lion software generation was pretty half baked from start if you ask me. It's getting better again now. It sounds stupid but I think as well that Lion has been Apple's Vista. I just hope ML will be their Windows 7.
Re: Wozniak calls for open Apple
#50Here is a nice comparison. Buy a mobile device and try to use the standard developer tools to put Hello World on it. Android: Download Eclipse (Windows, Linux or Mac) and the Android SDK (Windows, Linux or Mac) - no accounts or registration needed for either of these. In your phone menus enable development and connect via USB. In Eclipse make your hello world project, and hit Run or Debug. Enjoy. Apple: You must buy…
I hate when people list "buy a mac" as the first step for iOS development. Some of us already have one. In order to develop for Eclipse, I'd have to buy/own a computer as well.