Apple's going to annoy a lot of big developers with this. Who's going to use Game Center, when a lot of big games are written with the help of Unity, etc.? There are so many top-10 games affected by this.
Even THQ's Star Wars: Trench Run is affected. You can't really get more high profile than that. I wrote a blog post (http://bit.ly/disQ2C) with some links to various SDKs and their app showcases to give people a bit of an idea of just how many existing apps this SDK change will effect.
Getting away from the frenzied rhetoric, my opinion is that what Apple really wants to prevent is people releasing multi-platform compilers. So taking Flash as just one example, if I can build one app and the compiler can make me an iPhone executable, an Android executable, and so forth, Apple don't want that. In my experience so far with such "cross platform compatibility layers," they always produce results that wa…
Agree, from my experience any good software for a platform should take as much advantage of the platform as possible. And then work around platform limitations. Any cross-platform apps look non-native, missing subtle platform conventions, and ultimately feeling awkward on such a distinctive platform as iPhone OS. This seems to be a consistent line of Apple's, ultimately aiming to project the "quality" image of the platform, and not diluting the valued brand. This is the same line as John Gruber suggested pondering the purge of overly explicit apps. It did not come down to purging crapware developed natively with Xcode yet, but with thousands of apps in each category, the purgatory moment in one form or the other (e.g. if not purging outright, but subjectively separating into premium and "others" stores) probably is not too far ahead.
lets see theres training, and consulting, theres offer the free version, and charge for a more robust paid version, theres pay for customization and don't forget ads. There are many ways to have a business model around "free software". Red Hat, Canonical, and Google are just some of the companies that have found valid business models around "free software".
> Red Hat, Canonical, and Google are just some of the companies that have found valid business models around "free software". That's a fallacy. The majority of open-source sponsors are selling closed systems or services to sponsor their "free software" involvement. Google doesn't have a business model around "free software". Neither does IBM or Sun. I'm also not Mozilla and my apps would probably never get in front o…
> Did I mentioned that I don't live in Silicon Valley nor in Cambridge, but in an Eastern European country? So training is off.
Maybe you should have a look at this again... I've been on a trip to Romania for training (about architecture of some specific piece of OSS) at some point. As long as you can provide good training, it could work for you too.
> 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…
No. Apple knows exactly how much developers will put up with.
Google, Microsoft, RIM, and Palm are wishing it was that easy.
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…
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 don't care enough to remember things.
Getting away from the frenzied rhetoric, my opinion is that what Apple really wants to prevent is people releasing multi-platform compilers. So taking Flash as just one example, if I can build one app and the compiler can make me an iPhone executable, an Android executable, and so forth, Apple don't want that. In my experience so far with such "cross platform compatibility layers," they always produce results that wa…
If the cross-platform experience is subpar, Apple should just let these apps fail in the market.
Part of what people like about Apple's products is the inclusion of Apple's opinions. Both the App Store and the iTouch Platform are Apple products.
I'm no Clojure fan, but if you want to write Lisp-like for a phone, why not Android? Your Clojure app can run on everything from the G1 to the Nexus One to the Archos 5" and 7" tablets, not to mention the wide variety of no-name Chinese tablets that run Android. I've heard you can even get a SLIME/Swank REPL from the emulator or actual hardware. Seems like this beats the iPhone any day; better development cycle, and…
If I won't write for Apple, why should I write for Google (aka 'the NSA frontend') and their OS? The only useful alternative will be a 'free' Linux derivative that does not restrict me in my developer choices and does not want to collect all kinds of data.
Android is completely Free Software. You can compile the git version and install it on pretty much any Android device. If there's spyware, delete it and recompile :)
And your less paranoid users can just grab your software from your website, and run it on their "stock" devices.
The average person's tolerance for faulty software is lower than it should be. I guess Apple wants to raise expectations, so that people are locked into the iPhone. ("OMG, that android app has ITS OWN KEYBOARD!!!111".) Of course, this is why I don't use C, C++, or Objective-C. I'm always a little surprised when someone writes code in one of those languages that actually runs.
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 program I use regularly that doesn't crash on me is Xmonad. And guess which language that isn't written in.
I've just invented a new language: C2010. It looks exactly like ActionScript, for some reason... (Hint: Apple's version of C is unlike any standard version of C, like C99. So technically, you can't use Apple's tools. Or, you can call anything you want C, just like they do.)
This is incorrect. Apple's C is C99; they have also introduced a new optional syntax for blocks that they have submitted for standardization.
"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.…
There are so many flaws in this reasoning, I don't know where to start. #1 - Two of the worst carts preceding the '83 crash were E.T. and Pacman, both developed and produced by Atari itself, not these mysteriously inferior 3rd parties you're alluding to. And how many games has Apple, who logically has the most know-how on the platform, produced? None. #2 - You're making an oranges to apples comparison anyway. The vid…
Referring to your first point, Apple has released a game for the iPhone: Texas Hold'em.