David Emery OnlineApp Store: I’m out.
I will never write another iPhone application for the App Store as currently constituted.
Writing software is a serious investment of time and energy. It also carries the opportunity cost of the other things you could have built. We live in a capitalist economy. Under capitalism, profit is the reward for economic risk. Without a reasonable expectation of profit, the sensible business-person will not invest. Without investment and risk-taking, there is no innovation.
Apple’s current practice of rejecting certain applications at the final hurdle – submission to the App Store – is disastrous for investor confidence. Developers are investing time and resources in the App Store marketplace and, if developers aren’t confident, they won’t invest in it. If developers – and serious developers at that – don’t invest, what’s the point?
I’m very concerned with the policy Apple is adopting with the approval process on the App Store – sure, the ‘I Am Rich’ fiasco made sense (it surely was causing problems with some users accidently buying it) but arbitrarily banning apps destroys developer confidence.
On the plus side, the backlash has been so widespread that I can’t help but think they’ll change their policies – they pretty much have to at this point.
Visit ➔First Look at Cappuccino and Objective-J
The executive summary is that Cappuccino is re-implementation of many of the basic parts of Cocoa, and Objective-J is a language which looks nearly identical to Objective-C and “compiles down” into JavaScript. You can also use JavaScript right inline with Objective-J, similar to how you can use C in Objective-C.
This looks very impressive, and can certainly make interesting looking apps but I’m really not comfortable working so abstracted away from the real code. Coding javascript, html and css well in a cross-browser way is hard and I’m not convinced that 280 North will have solved every problem and bug inherent in the medium.
What do you if your code is right but it doesn’t work? You’re so far away from the actual code you’ve got no chance.
I’m also still not convinced by web sites pretending to be desktop applications – they’re not, and the most successful ones (like Flickr and Gmail) don’t pretend to be.
Visit ➔O2 UK sets pay-as-you-go iPhone 3G prices, launch info
The official pricing for the unsubsidized phones is now much higher than for the devices on contract and will require £350 ($631) for an 8GB iPhone 3G and £400 ($721) for the 16GB version.
They’re going to sell shed-loads of these over Christmas at this price – for comparison the 8GB Nokia N95 currently sells for £449.95 on O2 Pay-As-You-Go.
Very impressive that you get a year’s free data as well…
Visit ➔Google Chrome, Google’s Browser Project
Google Chrome is Google’s open source browser project. As rumored before under the name of “Google Browser”, this will be based on the existing rendering engine Webkit. Furthermore, it will include Google’s Gears project.
I don’t see anything here that excites me in any way – I have no faith that Google can design a better application UI then Apple can (in Safari), and I don’t see what new features this brings to the table. Also, I hope no one with a Mac gets too interested in this – Google have yet to ship a Mac app with a decent interface.
However, anything that broadens the usage of WebKit has got to be a good thing – I dream for the day when most people are using it…
Visit ➔Interfacing With Habari
This looks so much better then pretty much any other blog engine interface I’ve seen – I still need to be convinced that it’ll have both the simplicity and flexibility Textpattern allows though.
Visit ➔Legal P2P Music Service Doomed to Fail
The number one rule for BitTorrent users is: Share. If you don’t share – upload files to others – your download speeds will reduce dramatically. This means that it could take hours instead of minutes to download an album from your favorite BitTorrent site. What Playlouder will offer is a highly degraded version of BitTorrent, and subscribers will not be able to get the great download speeds they are so accustomed to.
I wondered the exact same thing when I first heard of Playlouder’s plans. They offer a ‘legal p2p’ model, where for a flat fee to your ISP you get to download as much music of p2p sites as you can, legally. The catch is it won’t actually work – the p2p traffic is restricted to within their closed network, so for any sharing to work the original uploader must be on the closed network as well, which is extremely unlikely.
Legal p2p actually manages to be no p2p, in this case – a fairly novel way of removing the illegal downloading problem…
Visit ➔Using Photographs to Enhance Videos of a Static Scene
Really interesting stuff – I particularly like the object removal demo (fast forward to 5:58 to see it):
Visit ➔