By John Gruber
Mux — Video for developers
Linked List: September 24, 2008
Wednesday, 24 September 2008
- Jason Snell: ‘Don’t Drive iPhone Developers Away, Apple’ ★
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Jason Snell goes deep with a comprehensive look at the App Store situation:
If you don’t want to sympathize with developers, let me rephrase it to describe how this will affect users: If developers are afraid to write programs for the iPhone that aren’t games, to-do lists, and tip calculators, for fear that all their hard work will be wasted by a malicious or capricious Apple rejection notice, they will stop writing programs for the platform. And the well of innovative, interesting iPhone software will dry up.
A must-read essay. Apple’s stewardship of the App Store, to date, can only be explained by malevolence or incompetence. Either way, they should change course.
- ‘Killing Our Enthusiasm’ ★
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Craig Hockenberry:
You should also be aware that much of the discontent is being masked by the NDA that’s currently in place. I, and many others, do not want to anger Apple and there are no forums to voice our concerns privately.
Because of the NDA, and because of some unpublicized incidents of petty intimidation from people at Apple to iPhone developers, there is a climate of fear in the Mac/iPhone developer community. You cannot judge the depth of long-time Apple developers’ unhappiness with the current situation by the available public comments, because it isn’t being expressed publicly. It’s a tip-of-the-iceberg situation.
- Pragmatic Cancels iPhone Programming Book ★
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The Pragmatic Programmers:
We’ve had the iPhone book ready to go beta for some months, but were prevented from publishing it because of the iPhone SDK’s Non-Disclosure Agreement (which affects all publishers regarding this material, regardless of whether the reader is a member of the ADC or not). […]
It now appears that Apple does not intend to lift the NDA any time soon. Regrettably, this means we are pulling our iPhone book out of production.
- Dan Moren on the iPhone NDA ★
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Dan Moren:
There may very well be a good reason for the NDA to remain in place—but that shouldn’t prohibit Apple from explaining that reason to its developers.
It’s that simple.
- T-Mobile G1 Video Hands-On ★
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Good example footage of a G1 in use side-by-side with an iPhone 3G.
- Beneath Apple ★
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Brent Simmons:
This behavior is definitely beneath the company that makes the software and hardware I adore and love developing for.
I’m starting to get The Fear.
- Android and T-Mobile G1’s Five Worst Flaws ★
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The lack of multi-touch is a hardware deficiency in the G1, not an Android deficiency. But it highlights the problems developers will have if they want to create iPhone-quality experiences. If you require multi-touch in your app then your app won’t work on some Android phones. If you don’t require multi-touch, then you’re stuck writing extra code and designing alternative interface gestures.
If Android developers tend to take the easy way out and just target the lowest common denominator of device capabilities, then the platform will never rival the iPhone — and it will only fall further behind each successive year.