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AC wrote: http://jens.mooseyard.com/2009...
"I could have told the Wave people about what I'd learned, except I didn't know Wave existed until April (shortly before the public announcement), and even then I was just some guy lost in the crowd at the demos....
    Part of the problem, in both cases, is that live typing is one of those Cool Demo Features that looks really awesome when showing off the app. Features like that can be dangerous because they are legitimately very useful during the app's gestation, when exciting demos are a key survival trait; but then they can't be removed later on because they're so well-known, even if they turn out to be useless. Sometimes these features aren't actually harmful to the user experience, they just make the code more complex and harder to maintain. Instant typing is both, unfortunately."

"iPhone, and other net-connected services, people will burn-out, and sales will plummet."

burn out from paying 99 cents for iPhone apps? Doubtful, but I must admit with so many 99 cent apps I'm now to the point where I won't even pay 99 cents if the app doesn't have a free version to test first.

Yeah, working for a big corporation can suck at times because to really get ahead there you have to do OYOT stuff, but that's something that society's most productive - and essential - members will ALWAYS do.

Tell that to the guy who wrote Stickies. Apple asserts ownership over any coding you do while working for them, even on your own time.

...Now only if it were secure...

Apple's stuff has the distinct feel of being written by a few very select programmers. Microsoft's stuff has the distinct feel of being forced together from many disparate pieces none of which quite work the same way. If Microsoft is going to compete they are basically going to have to fire most of their employees. The problem is, you're already seeing the good ones start to leave for greener pastures.

This is really interesting. Apple *has* several teams since they also have Carbon and their own Java runtime. The Java team has obviously got their agenda set, but not much is happening with Carbon. Jens Alfke, an Apple engineer, was knee-deep in the Java runtime for some time but defected to another team and wrote the iChat prototype after just one week of internal Cocoa training. Not to mention that around the time when the plans for Mac OS X were made public, they said they'd just use their Java port of QuickTime, and now they're rewriting basic layers in Objective-C to be eased in with 64-bit (where the old versions are not ported). Apple was very unsure of Cocoa when they first acquired it as the OpenStep APIs, and now it's one of the company's most valuable software possessions.

And Microsoft, of course... Microsoft seems to have very happy and genuinely enthusiastic developers. This isn't their problem, it's one of cobbling together something coherent with that many people, and being under the onus of needing to provide "Enterprise stuff" - expensive but unneeded and acronym-heavy solutions, all regularly updated to new, wildly incompatible versions at the drop of a hat to keep it 'fresh' for CIOs. (Uh. Not that I'm bitter.)

I hate to say it, but that's how it works. Companies do this all the time and I'm sure apple will make it right.

Let's take the Stickies application written by Jens Alfke for example:

For a while it looked as though Apple was going to get Antler Notes / Stickies at no cost -- wotta deal! As it happened, however, some of the nice people mentioned earlier in this story arranged for me to get a bonus, not officially in any way related to Stickies of course, but it made me feel better.

You can read the whole story about how Jens wrote the stickies program as an Apple employee and had it claimed as Apple's while they made sure it was dealt with at the same time here.

-davidu

Nope. The only public evidence it ever happened is at the author's personal site.