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Wozniak calls for open Apple

itnews.com.au

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Re: Wozniak calls for open Apple

#31

Post by eludwig »

rogerbinns wrote: post #30
Rudism wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Apple song and dance involves creating developer certificates, project-specific code-signing certs, installing them all on your Mac and your device, and then setting up XCode to use the correct certificate combinations for the correct projects in the correct environments when signing the code (I can't say for certain how this all works because I basically trial-and-errored it until it miraculously started working…

I still haven't figured out how to do the song and dance. (All I want to do is run hello world on "my" device.) You eventually end up at this technical note, which of course leaves out any links: http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#technotes/tn2250/_in... How I become a team (of one) admin, or where to find this "iOS Provisioning Portal" are of course left out.

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 you want to sell your app on the official Apple store, but I think it would be very reasonable to allow devs to create and sideload apps. It's your device, your risk. That seems like a post-Jobs compromise that everyone could live with.

Re: Wozniak calls for open Apple

#32

Post by bitwize »

Not 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 them the best technology company on the planet: the construction of devices completely defined by their simple interfaces, with all else hidden from the end user.

Re: Wozniak calls for open Apple

#33

Post by rogerbinns »

eludwig wrote: post #31
rogerbinns wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still haven't figured out how to do the song and dance. (All I want to do is run hello world on "my" device.) You eventually end up at this technical note, which of course leaves out any links: http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#technotes/tn2250/_in... How I become a team (of one) admin, or where to find this "iOS Provisioning Portal" are of course left out.

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 progress at all. A while later I came back to the machine to discover it wants to reboot, so I let it.

Can't find Xcode anywhere so I look back in the App Store. There is an install button but clicking it has no effect. My best guess is that it never occurred to anyone at Apple that a 1.8GB download could be interrupted by a reboot (from Apple's own system update tool) and that being able to continue would be useful. I had to do lots of Googling before figuring out I wasn't the only one and I could do a manual Xcode download from Apple's developer site. Then it took a lot of faffing around to figure out /Developer versus /Applications and how things were looking for it. I'm still not sure it is right, why I have to create symlinks but at least everything works.

For me the single most amusing thing about Macs and the legendary attention to detail is how the first thing I did was use Finder to go into Applications. Despite being on a 1920x1200 screen the default Finder window size is smaller than the Applications view so there were both horizontal and vertical scrollbars to look around the contents. Why can't the icons auto-arrange based on window width? If using a fixed area, why default to a window size smaller than the fixed area? Why default to postage stamp sized window on such a large screen?

Re: Wozniak calls for open Apple

#34

Post by primecommenter »

bitwize wrote: post #32

Not 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…

This is nonsense. It's absurd for you to argue that the difficulty of writing "Hello world" on an Apple device is somehow a good thing for Apple or anyone else on the basis of a wishy-washy concept like "abstraction".

Re: Wozniak calls for open Apple

#35

Post by Tloewald »

oldschooltaper wrote: post #28
rogerbinns wrote: post #21

Here 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…

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.

Re: Wozniak calls for open Apple

#36

Post by Tloewald »

rogerbinns wrote: post #21

Here 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…

Installing xcode is staggeringly more pleasant than installing eclipse in my experience. The developer certificate song and dance is a total pain in the butt, but note that you can test and build your hello world for iOS without a device at all, no hoops to jump, and it works really well.

Re: Wozniak calls for open Apple

#37

Post by myko »

Tloewald wrote: post #36
rogerbinns wrote: post #21

Here 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…

Installing xcode is staggeringly more pleasant than installing eclipse in my experience. The developer certificate song and dance is a total pain in the butt, but note that you can test and build your hello world for iOS without a device at all, no hoops to jump, and it works really well.

Really? The App Store makes Xcode installs fairly easy (though upgrading from pre-App Store Xcode breaks things in my experience), but what could be simpler than downloading Eclipse's zip, and then unzipping it?

Or do you mean it's a pain setting up the Android SDK within Eclipse? This could certainly be more stream lined (though I think it's fairly simple to setup as well).

Re: Wozniak calls for open Apple

#38

Post by wluu »

rogerbinns wrote: post #21

Here 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 from within Visual Studio to a USB connected device. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff928362(v=vs.92).as...

There's probably more to it, but I personally have yet to deploy a WP7 app to a device. I've written a few test apps though.

Also, found this blog (first in a series of a few) that attempts to develop an app using Visual Studio (for WP7 dev), Mono Touch (for iOS dev) and Mono Droid (for uh, Android dev)... Might be of interested to some: http://nicksnettravels.builttoroam.com/post/2011/04/04/Windo... And the rest of his articles are easier to get to via the archives - http://nicksnettravels.builttoroam.com/archive.aspx#Mobile

Re: Wozniak calls for open Apple

#39

Post by Tloewald »

cooldeal wrote: post #10
fjarlq wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How?

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, Paradox, etc. etc. all of which is on the public record. And all while owning 95% of the desktop market and even more of the app market.

Apple simply has some fairly clear up front rules about how to play on its minority platform.

You. Have. No. Idea.

2) iOS was incredibly open compared with predecessors. It's less open than WebOS was and Android is precisely because they came after and used "open" to try to compete.

Again, people coming after iOS and trying to set competitive terms to attract developers are meaningless. Where are the guyS who were nicer than Apple when they were in top position? Amazon pays much less to writers than Apple, is the dominant player, and cries to the government.

Re: Wozniak calls for open Apple

#40

Post by myko »

oldschooltaper wrote: post #18

What 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?
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