Linked List: August 7, 2008

Thursday, 7 August 2008

Gary Krakow, Jackass or Just Stupid? 

This piece by TheStreet.com’s Gary Krakow is so jacktastic it’s hard to know where to start. (See also: this not-jacktastic-but-still-wrongheaded piece by Tom Yager, upon which Krakow’s “analysis” is based.)

What I wrote in October still stands: unsupported means “not supported”. Jailbreaking has never been supported, and has only worked because of bugs in the iPhone software that have been exploited. When Apple fixes those bugs, they’re not taking anything away that they had previously allowed.

Group and Organize Your iTunes Sales Stats 

Of possible interest to iPhone developers: Jonathan Johnson has written a Python script to parse the sales data from the App Store:

Introducing appstats.py, a simple script that scans its own directory looking for daily dumps from the iTunes store. It will then gather all the statistics and output several reports in a tab delimited format that Numbers (and I’m sure Excel) can read. It makes it a couple clicks to get a great graph for your data.

Chuq Von Rospach on MobileMe 

Unlike everyone else who’s commenting on MobileMe and Apple’s ability to do large-scale web infrastructure, Von Rospach speaks from experience inside Apple.

The $1000 iPhone App 

Kottke makes the case for “I Am Rich”, the $1000 do-nothing iPhone App:

Excluding I Am Rich would be excluding for taste…because some feel that it costs too much for what it does. (And this isn’t the only example. There have been many cries of too many poor quality (but otherwise functional) apps in the store and that Apple should address the problem.) App Store shoppers should get to make the choice of whether or not to buy an iPhone app, not Apple, particularly since the App Store is the only way to legitimately purchase consumer iPhone apps. Imagine if Apple chose which music they stocked in the iTunes store based on the company’s taste.

But on the flip side, here’s a screenshot of a comment from I Am Rich’s App Store page, from someone who claims to have purchased and been charged for the app accidentally. If everyone who “buys” this app is then demanding a refund or credit card chargeback, you can see why Apple, or perhaps its author, Armin Heinrich, would take the app down. And what makes me think it was Heinrich, not Apple, who pulled the app is that with the App Store, developers pay the refund fee. It’s entirely possible that Mr. Heinrich is already on the hook for hundreds, perhaps thousands, of dollars in refund fees.