Dave Winer: Apple Apps Promote Lock-In

Dave Winer, yesterday:

Another one — the apps Apple bundles are marvels of lock-in. Try to get your data out of them. No no, says Uncle Steve. We own your ass. Or at least your data.

I’m not sure what Winer’s talking about here. iPhoto stores your photos as JPEGs and lets you export as JPEG. iTunes lets you share any music file that isn’t from ITMS by just dragging it out of iTunes. (And you can share ITMS songs with up to five other computers.) iMovie imports and exports standard movie file formats. iCal publishes and subscribes to the open-standard iCalendar (ICS) format. Address Book imports and exports open-standard vCard files.

What’s his beef? That they don’t use OPML for anything? (Update: That’s obviously not it, since Winer has previously praised iTunes’s OPML export. Thanks to Jeremy Phillippe for the link.)

★ Thursday, 4 May 2006