61–70 of 97 posts
The talk about the DMCA and reverse engineering is a red herring - Apple is not taking legal action against Rogue Amoeba. You're seeing the full power of Apple's control over the app store, though - they can stop distributing apps they don't like for any reason. The same power that Barnes & Noble has over the book market, and your cable provider has over your local TV market.
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Exactly. Despite Apple's schizophrenic application of their guidelines, Rogue Amoeba simply needs to take responsibility for everything you pointed out here. To continue to do otherwise is unprofessional and only hurts them in the end. Apple will continue to make billions. P.S. Who else had to Google clef-de-voûte? FYI: It basically means "most important component" or "key element." (via bab.la)
Why is it that in every thread discussing Apple's potential misbehavior, people bring up their extreme profitability as if that were somehow relevant to the question of right and wrong? Drives me nuts.
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Why is it that in every thread discussing Apple's potential misbehavior, people bring up their extreme profitability as if that were somehow relevant to the question of right and wrong? Drives me nuts.
I guess the argument(I don't really agree) is that ~99% of their customers don't know about all this and don't care, thus Apple need not care about some random developers because it doesn't hurt sales in the least and that Apple exists to make money for their shareholders and not to foster openness and innovation or necessarily doing what's right for their users. Also see http://daringfireball.net/2011/03/dirty_perce…
Until Apple stops their stupid policies and starts communicating openly, they will embarrass themselves again and again.
Once more, a reminder that we - the hackers - should stop giving Apple our money. This is not the kind of computing environment we want to encourage. It's time for someone to re-edit Apple's 1984 commercial and swap the logos.
At the same time, Apple is under no obligation to make it easy for us to trample on their licensing deals for technologies that form part of Apple's unique selling proposition in a consumer's mind. AirPlay is so well implemented, consumers find it magical. To keep that mystique, Apple has a right to review and license AirPlay to those vendors that it finds aligned with its long term goals. If you want Apple to be forced to do something different, you're not a "hacker", you're on the side of big government and "Big Brother" demanding to oversee and meddle in a company's right to sell the product it wants that works in the way that it wants.
Finally, I personally want to encourage the hell out of a computing environment that makes everyday people find computing approachable and fun. Just as you don't want a power outlet that needs constant tweaking before you can plug something in, normals don't want a computer or smartphone that requires maintenance just to be able to have fun and get things done.
Apple's forced the mainstream computing industry to stop designing for ourselves, and start thinking about everyone else. This is why computing has finally gone viral.
Did you use that first Mac? It was never about "open" or "hackable", it was about appliance computing that gets the computer out of the user's way.
Nothing has changed since Apple's 1984 when Apple adopted the slogan, "The computer for the rest of us."
Once more, a reminder that we - the hackers - should stop giving Apple our money. This is not the kind of computing environment we want to encourage. It's time for someone to re-edit Apple's 1984 commercial and swap the logos.
And hackerism is not the computing environment Apple wants to encourage. Besides the obvious benefit of more control = better stronghold of their market, Apple is also philosophically in favor of closed, well defined systems and minimal end user confusion, not pro open-ended, experimentation lands, "we give you the building blocks, you make it whatever you want".
And, as much as I like the notion of open systems and hacking, there should be room for the other side too, systems that are designed top-to-bottom and sold "as is".
I believe that history has proved that while it is possible to get quality UIs from open ended/open source style development projects, you get them with LESS consistency that you get them from an Apple-like process, and you also get more competing stuff/chaos/design by committee, unless you coordinate the whole process, from the kernel, to the end user apps.
Open source projects are mostly islands, so you don't get to have that long term vision / whole stack co-ordination.
To put it another way, an OS called OS X exists as ONE thing where one person had ultimate responsibility for what's included and in what shape to ship it. An OS called Linux does not: it only exists as disparate things collected and distributed together (a distro). The Gnome desktop environment, for example, is not produced for a specific OS: it's produced for whoever wants to use it, from various flavors of Linux, to FreeBSD, its apps even run on OS X.
>It's time for someone to re-edit Apple's 1984 commercial and swap the logos.
Why, did Apple ever changed course? The Mac was about a "computer for the rest of us" (ie simple users), and it remains the same now. Neither Mac, nor the 1984 ad was about tinkering. It was about empowering people with simple technology (a simple spreadsheet, a simple text editor, etc), not about empowering hackers to build things.
Actually, now, with the Unix underpinnings, the Mac is also a computer that lures tons of hackers (prevalent in any programming convention and most alpha hackers use a Mac, --even Linus, although he runs Linux on it), but the main market for Apple was an is the common user.
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RA did state that they inquired as to licensing it for a software product and were told that there were no plans to make that available. So, they didn't ignore the procedures as much as they ignored the response. In the end it's Apple's store with Apple's rules. The rules have changed without warning in the past and will likely do so countless times in the future. The tradeoff for this is what is likely one of the mo…
Except if you build a system to which millions (yes, millions) of people contribute in one way or another, pretend everyone's invited, and then decide to do something very self-righteous against the good of nearly anyone else involved just in order to feed your fat butt, then you are labelled an oppressive, opportunistic sociopath, and very rightly so.
In fact, the first iOS didn't have third-party apps, and when the API finally appeared, it had very clear restrictions and a $99/year fee attached.
They may have re-implemented that work, but they did not reverse-engineer.
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Exactly. Despite Apple's schizophrenic application of their guidelines, Rogue Amoeba simply needs to take responsibility for everything you pointed out here. To continue to do otherwise is unprofessional and only hurts them in the end. Apple will continue to make billions. P.S. Who else had to Google clef-de-voûte? FYI: It basically means "most important component" or "key element." (via bab.la)
Clef de voûte is the polygonal piece at the center top of a voute (big wall opening in cathedrals for example). Without it everything falls appart.
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Is the warranty the issue here? Isn't it the right to add some functionality to the device? I could see your point if there was an argument between Amoeba and Apple about voiding warranties. But I don't see that being the issue.
A warranty is just a contract, much like the contract put in place that allows Rogue Amoeba to sell software on the iOS and Mac platforms. Adding in support for AirPlay to an app and selling that won't void your or my iPhone's Warranty if we were to install it, but it can void the contract put in place between Rogue Amoeba and Apple, if even just for that singular app. Here is the real reason Apple threw this app out…