Linked List: December 1, 2015

Tuesday, 1 December 2015

Rich Siegel at Cingleton 2014 on BBEdit Leaving the Mac App Store ★

Rich is one of the smartest and most thoughtful people I’ve ever met — his talk boils a complex argument down to a single word: sanity.

Michael Tsai on Sketch Leaving the Mac App Store ★

Michael Tsai:

One of my bug fix updates for El Capitan is still in review after 59 days.

Bohemian Coding Pulls Hit App Sketch From Mac App Store ★

Bohemian Coding:

We don’t expect this decision to be unanimously popular, but we want to share how we arrived at it. We take your satisfaction and support seriously, and hope you can understand the choice we have made.

There are a number of reasons for Sketch leaving the Mac App Store — many of which in isolation wouldn’t cause us huge concern. However as with all gripes, when compounded they make it hard to justify staying: App Review continues to take at least a week, there are technical limitations imposed by the Mac App Store guidelines (sandboxing and so on) that limit some of the features we want to bring to Sketch, and upgrade pricing remains unavailable.

We should also add that this move is not a knee-jerk reaction to the recent certificate expiration problems that affected so many Mac App Store customers. However, in light of what happened, we can’t help but feel vindicated in our decision that the Mac App Store is not in our customers’ best interests right now.

Deeply troubling indictment of the Mac App Store. Sketch isn’t the first big name professional app to be pulled from the Mac App Store (Bare Bones Software’s BBEdit, Panic’s Coda, Quicken, just to name a few). But Sketch is the poster child for Mac App Store era professional Mac software. It’s the sort of app Apple might demo in a keynote — and the winner of an Apple Design Award. Apple thinks so highly of it that they provide Sketch templates for Apple Watch UI designers. It’s incredibly popular (and was among the top-grossers on the Mac App Store), Mac-only, and they want no part of the Mac App Store.

The Mac App Store should be designed to make developers like Bohemian Coding (and Bare Bones, and Panic, etc.) happy. It should make developing for the Mac better, not worse than selling outside the App Store. These are among the best apps on the platform, from developers who have been loyal to Apple and the Mac for decades.

The Mac App Store is rotting, at least for productivity software. There’s no other way to put it. If this hasn’t set off alarm bells within Apple, something is very wrong.

Bloomberg: ‘Apple Gets More Bang for Its R&D Buck’ ★

Adam Satariano, writing for Bloomberg:

Compared with its resources, Apple has remained relatively quiet. It spent just 3.5 percent ($8.1 billion) of its $233 billion in revenue in fiscal 2015 on research and development, a lower percentage than every other large U.S. technology company, data compiled by Bloomberg show. By contrast, Facebook spent about 21 percent ($2.6 billion) on R&D, chipmaker Qualcomm 22 percent ($5.6 billion), and Alphabet 15 percent ($9.2 billion).

Apple’s success belies the conventional wisdom that a leading tech company must reinvest a sizable chunk of its sales in R&D or risk being overtaken. Apple has never subscribed to that philosophy. Steve Jobs said in 1998 that “innovation has nothing to do with how many R&D dollars you have.” He liked to point out that when the Mac was introduced, IBM was spending about 100 times more than Apple on research.

I’ve always believed (and there are many public statements from him that back it up) that Jobs was averse to “pure” research and development spending — meaning research for the sake of research itself. Jobs wanted it to be product-focused. Figure out exactly what you want to make, then do the research to invent what you need to make it. Lots of great things (Unix, to name a big one) have come from companies that do or did spend big on pure R&D, but it’s seldom wound up benefiting the companies doing the spending.

‘Adobe Is Telling People to Stop Using Flash’ ★

Jacob Kastrenakes, writing for The Verge:

Adobe is finally ready to say goodbye to Flash. In an announcement last night, Adobe said that it will now “encourage content creators to build with new web standards,” such as HTML5, rather than Flash. It’s also beginning to deprecate the Flash name by renaming its animation app to Animate CC, away from Flash Professional CC.

Adobe is also now ready to congratulate the new president of the United States, Barack Obama.

Fraser Speirs: ‘Can the MacBook Pro Replace Your iPad?’ ★

So great. The note at the bottom says it all:

The original title for this piece was “If journalists reviewed Macs like iPads”.