Slashdot Mirror
The Kafka-esque Nightmare of Palm App Submission
MBCook writes "Jamie Zawinski, shortly after the release of the Palm Pre, wrote two free software programs for the phone: a Tip Calculator and a port of Dali Clock. In trying to get the apps published to the App Catalog, he has had to sign up to be a developer twice; fax contracts around; been told (apparently incorrectly) that he was not allowed to release free software for the phone; and told he had to give PayPal his checking account number. 'It's been two weeks, and I have received no reply. In the months since this process began, other third-party developers seem to have managed to get their applications into the App Catalog. Apparently these people are better at jumping through ridiculous hoops than I am.'"
Palm app clunker?
A who'd've thunker.
What way could this pave,
For another DC save?
Burma Shave
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
This is what's actually good in Windows Mobile. Anyone can write software for it and anyone can start a Store site for it. In this respect Windows and Windows Mobile are quite open architectures. All iPhone, Palm and Symbian are really restricted and closed architectures (Symbian requires you to get certificate for the app too), and getting your apps on the stores are a real bitch.
And they say that Apple's App store process is a pain in the ass. Looks like Palm is emulating more of Apple than we thought. :-)
I wish my lawn was emo, so it would cut itself.
Sounds like it's much more trouble than it's worth. I guess you have to do stuff like this if you want to make money programing for a walled garden like the iPhone or Pre.
There is a war going on for your mind.
The difference between arrogance and hubris is what you can get away with.
Apple's authoritarian submission policies are on one side of that line, and I'm pretty sure that Palm is going to find out that theirs are on the other.
And u carped about Linux. Can u not find a platform that makes you happy?
So Palm decided that they wanted to imitate Apple? After all, "no press is bad press", and Apple sure has been getting a lot of press for the way it runs the AppStore. Locking down the device... it may not be useful to the *customers*, but it couldn't harm the company at all, could it?
Well, not unless they abandon your platform (or never flock to it in the first place) in favor of Android or even Nokia's Maemo -- platforms that allow the USER to control what they run on their devices.
I think I've learned my lesson. I am not buying an iPhone, Kindle, or (after reading this) Palm -- no devices from a company that intends to control what I can run on my device. Offering a store: GREAT idea. Carefully controlling what goes in this store and prohibiting any other means of getting apps onto the device: that makes it THEIR device, not mine, and I don't want to play that game.
Maybe the world doesn't need another tip calculator...
The name Kafka now gets invoked whenever someone doesn't immediately get what he/she wants. Some administrative thingy gone wrong? Kafka! Your broadband connection doesn't allow you to download at 20Mb and the help desk says that the speed is not constant? Kafka! Your microwave's remote control's batteries are not in stock at your local supermarket and it will take more than an hour to restock? Kafka! You wake up and you find yourself turning into a giant beetle? O wait...
The old, imho to date unmatched, Palm OS is dead, the new Palm seems to become a screwup, iPhone/iPod Touch is a lockdown nightmare, WinMobile is a no-go and developing, integrating and deploying to Blackb*rrys is like grating your fingernails.
The Matter of fact is: Mobile is a mess, very much the way desktop computers were in the mid-eighties.
We are in dire need of an eqiuvalent to the Arduino platform in the PDA market. Small, cheap, relyable, open standards, with a simple single-touch screen a neat CPU and some run-off-the-mill LitIon battery industry standard. 6 months into the first batch we'll have FOSS programmers and hardware hackers expanding it to be a cellphone for those who want it to be one.
THAT is what we need.
Just the open standard equivalent of my oldest colorscreen Palm at the price of 100 Euros and an FOSS OS that comes with it, that's all I ask. It can't be that difficult with hardware prices dropping left right and center.
My 2 cents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Seriously. It's a tip calculator, and a clock. These are the kinds of applications we can do with less of anyway. FOSS software is rife with these small and pointless programs. I agree such software is great as learning tools for others to get a foothold with when writing their own more complicated software, but they're hardly worth getting your panties in a twist over. Palm OS comes with a clock, and last I checked, is bundled with a calculator.
I could understand if it were something truly useful that added to the platform, but these programs do not.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
Palm, Apple and MS want you to sign up once pay the fees and have the ability to upload free or paid apps. no one wants to wasted time on a second process for paid apps. the reason for paypal and other access is if you write paid apps and people ask for refunds then Palm needs the ability to get money from you.
While this genius is complaining about these "hoops" others are writing apps and will be getting paid soon.
I can't believe (Ok, maybe I can) that this troll ended up on Slashdot. He put an app out. A tip calculator. One of the forum members asked him to include cents (i.e. to figure a tip from $12.65 if one was so inclined). Instead of doing it, or saying why he didn't want to do it, he added a message into the app "DON'T BE A CHEAPSKATE -- ROUND UP TO THE NEAREST DOLLAR" and went on a rant attack on the forums. Now he doesn't want to be a PayPal verified guy? Doesn't want to re-version his app (when he could add a 0. in front of it)?? Dumbass..
What about Android? TBH I haven't looked into it all that much, despite the hype. A while back (before the iPhone and Android), when I made the decision to move off of Palm OS, I chose Win Mobile for the sheer fact that it looked like the most open platform, which is pretty amazing... And to reply directly to your comment, the problem is that we haven't yet really gotten too far down the line towards open hardware. The level of miniaturization and integration you need to make a small appliance like a PDA is too expensive. As a case in point, I don't see much in the way of "hobbyist" laptops either, and that would be the first platform such attempts would have broken into by now.
I don't suppose it could be, say, the completely and totally overwhelming response from developers has overloaded Palm's limited ability to process new App Store submissions that has led to some isolated developers having issues?
NAH, IT'S KAFKA-ESQUE!
I mean, hey. It's not an Apple product, so WE MUST DUMP ON IT! Let's just ignore the vibrant and rapidly growing Homebrew scene, many of which are already in the official App catalog, with many many more on the way. Let's just focus on the one unfortunate who had a bad experience, and then blow it all out of proportion so that we can all sit back in smug iSatisfaction.
Which iSlave is posting these "stories" and why are they allowed to get to the front page?
Official Heretic from the "Church of Global Warming". Proven right thanks to whistle blowers. AGW = Flat Earth Theory
I believe it would be nice to set up some standards but I enjoy the extreme openness that we have today. Anyone can write an app for the phone, and who cares if it gets published or not. It's truly back to the old days of write whatever you need to make things better and share it. Once you begin to lay done the standards and organize the structure you begin to loose that "wild west" feeling.
There is a golden mean between chaos and order, however I lean a little more towards chaos in this situation.
Oh hardly. The man wants to distribute free software and he had to print out and sign 10 pages of legal documents. Then he had to comply with a whole bunch of ridiculous demands (like setting his version number less than 1.0.0 for a finished app), then deal with mountains of emails.
Does this sound like an efficient organization? Could it be that the reason why they've been overwhelmed is (gasp!) their ridiculous and inefficient distribution process?
Well, no - after all, that would be too much like *bashing Palm*. See how I turned that on you? Instead of *bashing Apple*, I turned it into *bashing Palm*! Neat trick, huh?
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
http://openpandora.org/
It's taking a while, but they are getting there.
I've seen them for android as well, tens, if not more!
it's even a web page going through the 10 best tip calculators for iphone (http://www.everythingicafe.com/news/software/iphone-tip-calculator-smackdown-20080731827/)
Personally I cannot see any use of such an app. What is this about? is it a US thing? (as I understand that tipping is a bit of a bigger business than europe and hence far more advanced formulas are used, derivates, fourier transformations etc).
What happened with doing a simple calc in your head and give 10-12% (if you think you had good service???
if (!signature) { throw std::runtime_error("No sig!"); }
NAH, IT'S KAFKA-ESQUE! I mean, hey. It's not an Apple product, so WE MUST DUMP ON IT!
Wow, insane much?
Official Heretic from the "Church of Global Warming".
Wow, insane much?
... and then they built the supercollider.
WinMobile is a no-go
Tell that to these folks
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
Gregor Samsa awoke one morning after unsettling dreams to find himself transformed not into a monstrous bug, but a feature.
How hard is it to fax a contract and link PayPal to a checking account? I learned how to work a fax machine when I was 8 and linked my PayPal when I was 10. So I guess the real question is: who would want an app from this guy in the first place?
wow. Troll much?
Official Heretic from the "Church of Global Warming". Proven right thanks to whistle blowers. AGW = Flat Earth Theory
In my opinion getting a Palm PRE when you have available good Android phones (I just got the myTouch 3G from T-Mobile and so far I love it) or even an IPhone, is a mistake. If your hobby/business-idea is app development, you won't be able to generate enough of a network effect on a Palm PRE as there are not enough users and hence won't be able to make money or be able to get the pleasure of a lot of people using your app. Android, in my view, is a good programming platform and has a good chance of catching on to the I-Phone in terms of app users (or at least generating a non-trivial user base). Of course you get the best network effect with the iPhone but then you also face the challenge of making an app which stands out among the plethora of already available apps (apart from dealing with app-store rejection idiosyncrasies). If you bought the PRE because you happen to love the classic Palm (like me), well, my main reason for liking the Palm was the ability to use the stylo to write on it. It made life easier for me. The PRE doesn't have that...
Life is about being a Phoenix!
In all fairness, their app store just opened up and they are completely swamped with submissions. They've already apologized for this and are attempting to smooth things out.
Android's a step in the right direction, but it still seems to be a little locked-down with third-party code being forced into Java.
Right now, the most free option looks to be the Maemo platform that Nokia's pushing with their new N900. Like Android, it's Linux-based, but it apparently also gives you access to a root shell and native code.
It should be noted that the developer had his own particular requirements:
* Would not sign NDA
* Would not even TALK with Palm about signing an NDA
* Would not change version numbers
* Would not get PayPal verified account
In other words, Palm had certain policies in place. Maybe they were good policies, maybe they were foolish ones. But that was not really the issue. The real sticking point was that the developer felt that, since he was distributing his apps for free, he had an entitlement to be at his own discretion exempt from any policies Palm put in place. And Palm didn't see it that way. Seems to me that there was simply not a meeting of minds and he's better off following his own device and developing for a more open platform. But by his own admission clearly there are plenty of developers who aren't bent out of shape by Palm's policies, which I would certainly not describe as "nightmarish" given the issues stated in his article. To be honest, I was more put off by his whining, histrionic melodramatic tone than by yet another example of Palm's notoriously poor business sense. On a scale of Palm's Pre snafus I'd rate poor battery life as a 10, annoying cursor is annoying as a 2, and the issues outlined in his story as a less than a one.
(Speaking of "annoying cursor," OT but does anyone else have a problem with trying to drop a cursor on the right hand side of Slashdot's comment box?)
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
... there is a thriving homebrew community which Palm supports. Precentral.net has a heck of a lot of apps available for the Pre that are not available in the official Pre store.
(I am not affiliated with Precentral.net, I just have a fair amount of homebrew apps on my Pre).
Eviscerati.Org: All Hail the Eviscerati
It sounds very much like an organization that has never had to deal with this type of application submission situation, and is still working out the kinks in what what would naturally be a complicated process whole at the same time dealing with a significantly larger response than expected.
Is Palm and their App Store submission process perfect? Hell no! But to call it Kafka-esque is crude hyperbole of the most insulting form.
Oh, and this IS /. Lots of Apple fanboys submit stories all the time here. Or have you not noticed the overwhelmingly positive iPhone stories, even back when they were initially launched and had many similar issues? Or are you blinded by your own fanboyism?
Official Heretic from the "Church of Global Warming". Proven right thanks to whistle blowers. AGW = Flat Earth Theory
If you'd RTFA, you would have seen that the morning after he submitted the apps to Palm for approval, he turned into a giant cockroach. Therefore, Kafkaesque is a completely appropriate adjective.
$comment =~ s/($verb)\s+($noun)/IN SOVIET RUSSIA, $2 $1s YOU!/g;
Please.
For an Apple fanboy to submit this, they would have to care about it. To them, all that exists is the iPhone, and they do not deign to recognize any other handset.
To them, there can be no iPhone killer.
dont write apps for conglomerates that treat you like dog shit. with a lack of developers any project offering collaboration with a community will die a very swift death. Teach megacorps how to properly court and foster an open community of developers. make sure you blade on the sword always points the other way.
Good people go to bed earlier.
I wasn't going to get a Palm Pre, but if it had a Tip Calculator - I'd get on for me and for my father
The author must be color-blind. Seriously, I have a headache from attempting to finish reading it.
Wow, take yourself too seriously much?
Oh, insane, right...
Why bother with proprietary APIs and Appstore and its wannabe competitors when you can deliver your application to your customer directly.
The web gives you faster time to market, unlimited distribution -- no platform comes close.
Just optimize your site for the various smartphones.
http://stevehanov.ca/blog/index.php?id=72
We are in dire need of an eqiuvalent to the Arduino platform in the PDA market. Small, cheap, relyable, open standards, with a simple single-touch screen a neat CPU and some run-off-the-mill LitIon battery industry standard.
Coming this holiday season: the Pandora PDA. It's a gaming PDA wrapped around what is essentially a BeagleBoard. Like the iPod Touch, it's not a phone, so I'm not billed per month for services I won't use.
Seriously? The Pre is the most open platform out there (including Android with its locked down ROM).
QuickInstall and the average user can hack the WebOS and install programs to load whatever homebrew they want. No jailbreaking, easy as pie.
It's called freedom: You get to choose which monopoly owns your ass.
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
Hmmm...is it only me that remembers the initial announcement from Palm back at CES? That announcement explaining how apps will be approved for the app catalog based on whether or not they will harm the phone...and nothing else? No Apple-esque "we want you to change the app so that it..." kind of BS. Yet now...
... that this is the same d-bag who not only refused to add a decimal point to his tip calculator application for months, he bitched and moaned about his users who were giving him feedback for being cheapskates, and even was pathetic enough to add a warning about "being a cheapskate" into the application when he finally did add it.
Good for him, stay the hell away from the Pre, we'll be better off for it.
The original article is definitely from an iPhone loving troll. The Pre doesn't run Palm OS. Palm itself has declared that Palm OS is dead. They spent the last several years creating a very powerful, elegant development environment called WebOS. They also published information on how people can write their own apps, and have publicly supported the homebrew community as a valid outlet for applications that you don't charge for. Complaining about the hoops to get your application placed into a store when you don't want to charge for it is akin to complaining that the corner bakery won't let you give away the cookies that you and your mom baked last night. They're not saying that you can't bake cookies or give them away, they're just saying that you need to go to the appropriate place to do it. WebOS Internals and PreCentral have got huge, thriving homebrew communities for the free WebOS apps, and both of those mentioned in this article have been widely available through there since shortly after the phone's release.
You were correct until scripting for Android http://code.google.com/p/android-scripting/ was released;
now "Python, Perl, JRuby, Lua, BeanShell, and shell are currently supported, and we're planning to add more."
So without trying to offend anyone - if a developer can't manage to bang out an app in one of the many languages
now supported, do you really want to run their app?
Windows mobile may be ok for devs, but its terrible for users. Ive only ever heard one person claim winmobile was awesome, and that was only because of the apps. Everyone else seems to agree its slow, bloated, nonintuitive, and a hassle to use. When you need to click 5 buttons to get to the phone function, and it takes ~6 seconds for the machine to get there, its a disaster.
> Jamie Zawinski
Ah, the maestro has struck again.
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
New Slogan: Palm: Like watching a hand cleaving thin strips off the side of a head.
Great new book on Evolution: The Greatest Show on Earth by Richard Dawkins
integrating and deploying to Blackb*rrys is like grating your fingernails.
It is? Have you actually done so yet? So far, I've been finding it pretty easy... hope to post my first submission to BB appworld later this year.
Except Apple's entire marketing plan revolves around bad-mouthing their competitors; it's how they established Apple as a sort of cultural movement. It gives art students something to be smug about other than vegetarianism.
The really die-hard fanboys take the Palm Pre as a personal affront. It's an iPhone ripoff. Palm "hacked" iTunes. It's so posers can pretend they have an iPhone, you see.
What about Android?
What about following established J2ME/CLDC standards instead of going in a completely different and incompatible direction, meaning that all of the existing J2ME apps that work on phones and devices around the world simply can't , in spite of the fact that android is a java platform.
Erm, oops. A bit of bitterness leaked through there...
In Soviet Palm, application must fill out forms and wait for bureaucracy to submit you!
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
Meanwhile, the rest of the world gets on with their lives...
1993 called, they want their site design back.
Oh, and this IS /. Lots of Apple fanboys submit stories all the time here. Or have you not noticed the overwhelmingly positive iPhone stories, even back when they were initially launched and had many similar issues? Or are you blinded by your own fanboyism?
Apple fanboyism on Slashdot? Are we talking about the same Apple that gets repeatedly attacked on Slashdot for their ridiculous app store approval policies?
Or do you think that Palm should be allowed to be more draconian than Apple because they're smaller?
You're the one getting defensive when his favourite company gets attacked, so who do you think is the real fanboy here?
Were weren't even talking about Apple. You brought them up. Are you so obsessed with Apple that you have to keep talking about them?
Apple Apple Apple
There. Feel better? Why don't you just get up the nerve and ask Apple on a date.
Fanboi.
Wow. Overuse of the word "wow" much?
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
It's not an Apple product, so WE MUST DUMP ON IT!
Yes, nobody ever dumps on Apple products in here! They get that free pass, you know! You won't hear a single bad word about the App Store!
I press the green "phone" button and get straight to the dialing interface. It loads instantly.
Strip out the bloat, and it runs really well. Three days battery life, no resets / powering off, and plenty of storage space.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
Any situation that requires printing, signing, and scanning plus giving your checking account number to a 3rd party (in this era of identity theft and bank account hoovering) to GIVE AWAY an app certainly is Kafkaesque. This is especially true when they could just let people download and install the app like they did with every previous Palm product including cellphones.
It seems that Palm has caught Apple's attachment issues. They manufacture a product and then offer it for sale, but when you hand over your cash and they put the product in your hands, they just can't bring themselves to let go. They recognize in some sense that it's yours now, so they let you leave with it, but they follow you wherever you go so that their precioussssss is never out of their sight.
They REALLY need to see a shrink about that, it's not healthy!
Palm OS,
Tragic loss.
WebOS.
Brand new boss.
Apple mad,
Rant and rave.
Start afresh-
Burma shave.
WoW, it's not just for sluts.
I had to sign one document and fax it through (a w8 ben). I think everything else was online.
When they reviewed my app, they gave me an extremely helpful feedback pdf which included a bunch of required changes and also a bunch of suggested changes.
I have implemented all the required ones (mostly relating to lack of clarity about how they want the about/faq pages to work) and most of the suggested ones.
I too got bitten by the 'has to be less than 1.0 as this is a beta catalog) thing. It took me about 5 seconds to change the version number.
Palm are trying to get the store ready for developers to sell apps. My guess is that the requirement to be verified by Paypal is nothing to do with getting paid. It's to do with providing a verifiable identity so that Palm know who is putting apps on the store.
I think that's a reasonable requirement. I'm a bit happier to download apps when I know that the developer is ready to identify themselves to Palm. That should add some incentive to stop developers doing 'bad things'.
Jamie Zawinski seems to want everything his way. Apart from his paypal paranoia, his response to Palm's feedback is:
"The other small code changes you asked for, I don't agree with, and I'm not going to do."
Perhaps he should stick to distributing things his way and not expect Palm to make exceptions on his behalf while they are trying to get a basic store up and running. Personally I'd rather they concentrated on working with the many developers who don't consider the process arduous so that we can sell our apps.
Perhaps they'll have more time to coddle him later. Perhaps if he made an effort to play nice, he wouldn't be in the situation where other apps seem to be getting released ahead of him...
VLC Remote for iPhone and Android
The ironic thing, is that jwz has never had to publish on a "real" console for Nintendo, Sony, or Microsoft. The iPhone dev process is a dream compared to any other platform. Hopefully Palm will take some lessons, and make it _easier_ for devs to get their app published (& noticed) without too much fuss. With apps (software), a platform (hardware) is dead / useless. Apple reached critical mass due to making it relatively easy to publish.
Of course, one could argue that it leads to [market] over-saturation. i.e. Just how many variations on "scientific calculators" do we actually need listed in the App Store??
But at least the consumer has _some_ choice in what to download.
--
Artificial Ignorance will become Intelligence when it adds the missing variable to the equation: Consciousness. Not the other way around of somehow it "magically" appearing.
That green button down on the bottom? The one with the little picture of a phone on it? Yeah, that one. Press it. Yeah, just like magic, there's the phone.
Karma: Poor (Mostly affected by lame karma-joke sigs)
Did you just call Jamie Zawinski an iSlave? Good job in combining an ad hominem attack and a statement revealing your total ignorance about why people would care what he thinks in a single question.
Please try to keep in mind that the author of these revolutionary applications without which Palm will surely crumble is the same guy who threatens people on Yelp if they dare to complain about the fact that the toilets in his gothy little nightclub don't have any seats on them.
Don't you people get it? How else to test out a new platform than to feed a trivial app through the system to see what happens? It's called debugging. Do we have to spell it all out for you? Have some fscking insight - please!
Maybe the world doesn't need another tip calculator...
Why do we need any? Is it really that hard to work out a fairly simple percentage in your head? Perhaps it's easier to leave a small tip when a machine is telling you to do it. "It's not me that's cheap, it's my iPhone."
Expecting a tip is anti American. The minimum wage is so low that these people working as waiters depend on tips to make ends meet. However who decides minimum wage? The government, and in our beloved capitalistic country which is the very definition of the word American I get to choose who I want to tip. I choose none, and if you critisize me for it then you too are anti American.
Think about it.
Restaurants are actually at liberty to consider tips as a part of the waiters' wages. Thus they can effectively pay them [i]under[/i] minimum wage (as low as around $2/hour), and rely upon tips to bring their wages up to a legal level.
IMO, this is also bullshit. It means hidden costs for patrons of the restaurant, and it means employers can weasel around minimum wage laws. But if people are willing to work under those conditions then I guess it's their choice.
On the flip side - what this system provides is a very direct system of evaluation with (in theory, at least) payment adjusted correspondingly. The restaurant doesn't need to spend resources evaluating employees constantly because they know a good portion of their wages is coming from tips... But then the problem is that patrons have been largely trained to always leave that tip, regardless of the quality of service. And then there's situations like large parties, in which the restaurant will itself add the tip automatically to your bill. If people don't actually fairly evaluate their service and consistently adjust the tip accordingly, then the whole system just breaks down into a way for restaurants to hide the true cost of the meal from their patrons.
Bow-ties are cool.
Jamie misrepresents several things in his rant
His apps were definitely not the first two 3rd-party apps submitted. Palm approached some developers and vendors in the fall of 2008 and had them in process already. One of the apps that came out of that process was the Spaz twitter client. If Jaime had bothered to pay more attention to things besides porting dali clock to yet another platform, he would know that it is an open-source app that has been available both in the catalog and as source since long before he had his freakout over the "no other distribution" clause. My own app is open source, and Palm hasn't given me any trouble about it. The newest agreement specifically mentions distributing source code as acceptable as long as you don't charge for it.
The way it reads to me, the reviewer contacted him about the ipk (closest thing there is to a binary file for webOS) being available on his website, not about source code. Aside from the financial incentive issues, a malicious developer could get a clean copy of an app onto the catalog and then distribute an ipk that included malware, and users could be duped into thinking the file was okay since it was also listed on the catalog. Rather than discussing the issue with the reviewer or anyone else or presenting his concerns or questions, Jaime threw a fit.
The fee is certainly an issue people can debate all day. It comes down to two things, a filter to reduce the number of "my first app"s being submitted and reduce the flood of apps to just those who are at least a little serious about it, and a way for Palm to cover some of the costs involved. Even if it's a free app, it still has to be vetted, and then there are the hosting costs. $8.25 a month is hardly a bloodletting, and the entire development environment is provided for free even if you choose not to pay the fee and submit app through Palm's channel. Perhaps more important, Jaime conveniently doesn't mention that the current fee being charged for developers already in the process is only $5 for the first year. Not wanting to use Paypal is another issue, and it's a reasonable question as to why Palm chose only one method of paying the fee and verifying the developer as a "real person". On the other hand, the alternative would be for Palm to develop their own payment site and some sort of step to make sure there was an actual entity responsible for the legal obligations of the agreement.
Jaime also very much misrepresents the homebrew side of things. First of all, Palm has been at least hands-off, and if anything supportive of the homebrew community. Several free apps have already made the jump from homebrew distribution to Palm's app catalog, and one developer that I know of who was using undocumented internal api's was told by Palm to keep distributing it as homebrew until he either removed the offending portion or the api's were opened up. The biggest part of this aspect though, is that the homebrew installation process is not hard for users at all. You download a little app and type in one string on your phone then plug it in. After that, you can browse all the homebrew apps on your phone and download them as easily as the official catalog.
All kings is mostly rapscallions. -Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Everyone is saying "wait for Palm to iron out the app store" and "he should be able to make PayPal work for him", you're missing the goddamn point. The point is that on PalmOS, you could write Free Software, post a .PRC on your website, people could download that with their phones, and it was installed a couple of clicks later.
Palm have decided that users shouldn't have that ability anymore, and have to either get approved apps through their app portal, or else install a bunch of 3rd party app installers and/or root their Pre and install the SDK on their computers to install apps. That is WAY too much work.
What he, and I, really want is for a developer to be able to make an app, post it on their site, and have users download it. Why does it need to have an "App Store" that Palm needs to "figure out"? Just let me install things on my damn phone. Yes, HAVE an app store, but also allow people to install directly!
I like music
Kafka did write other things than Metamorphosis, you know...
We are now seeing large scale integration happening. One nice thing about the MS Windows is it can be deployed as a single large structure. It does not matter what machine one is on, essential data can be easily transferred and mounted to the machine. The computer itself is secondary to the job. MS has clearly not done a good job make MS Mobile intergrate seamlessly into windows. Other people have. Apple has made iPhone work seamlessly with the big OS.
Any open source phone is going to have integrate into some larger OS, be in *nix or MS Windows of OS X. Palm tired this, but chose the cheap right so Apple slapped them. Resources will not only have to be spent on the phone, but also integrated the protocols to communicate with other devices. On the OSS side, this might mean making decisions. For instance, google can provide a central contact management, but that is closed solution. Perhaps one selects a OSS online solution, then give people the choice or setting up their own server, or contracting with someone else.But then the desktop to phone conduit is controlled by a third party.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Who is Kafka?! Tell me now!
"It sounds very much like an organization that has never had to deal with this type of application submission situation, and is still working out the kinks in what what would naturally be a complicated process"
Complicated process? BULLSHIT.
Dev: Hey I have an app.
Palm:Make it free, prove you're serious by giving a totally unrelated company your bank account, never release a 1.0 version, and here while we're discussing this we need to you sign some NDAs.
It isn't a naturally complicated process. In fact I can make this so simple it'd make your head spin.
Dev: Hey, I've got an app.
Me: Alright, just send it and the source our way for testing, give us two days to allow one of us to tinker with the program and make a report on how it functions (to ensure functionality as advertised,) and if all is in order you'll have your software up on day three. All future improvements you make will be placed in a repository with all older versions of your software, for your posterity. No paypal or NDA needed, my friend. Spread the word and draw attention to our platform!
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Funny coincidence, I just put in my pre-order for a Nokia N900 last night. Amazon has it at a 10% discount from Nokia's pre-order site.
I've been a long-time Palm fan (I'm still carrying my Palm T|X with the funky touchscreen around, for crying out loud, and still keep all of my PIM sync'd with jpilot). I'd been waiting eagerly for years for their new Linux-based PalmOS to save them, but the lack of expandable memory in the Pre convinced me to keep waiting.
Maemo has a free Palm Garnet emulator, so I should still be able to run most of the legacy PalmOS apps I've grown used to having. On the Pre, you have to pay extra for their legacy Palm app emulator :P
I've also been a big Debian fan for the past decade, so Maemo's roots in that will be quite welcome and well worth the extra premium.
I've been a Voicestream / T-mobile customer for even longer, but I don't care to renew my contract with them and am a bit antsy about the handset customization.
When you send a submission request starting with, "Yo dawg... I hear you like apps, so I put an app in your store so you can...", you shouldn't be surprised that Palm ignores it. That meme is getting old.
Yea that approach has worked really well getting Linux adopted on the desktop......
FOSS programmers do some things REALLY well, they tend to do things involving a GUI somewhere between mediocre and just bad. FOSS just hasn't for whatever reason, been successful in doing awesome UI and good, consistent workflows. One problem is about 20 different UI toolkits, all mediocre, 10 different audio standards, a hundred different window managers. The Mac and iPhone are very successful because there is more or less one very well executed set of libraries to code to in Cocoa, one good multimedia framework and Apple works pretty hard to compel developers and apps to be consistent and predictable.
I predict a FOSS mobile device will have an awesome core and the GUI will suck and when you are talking mobile devices the GUI and application work flows are probably THE most import things.
Its also a plague on FOSS that things get done really well if someone good wants to do them well and is willing to invest a LOT of time for free and love. The problem starts when you hit a problem no one wants to solve and since no one is being paid, and they will all tell you that, it often never gets done or gets done badly.
And then of course in FOSS you can count on there being a fork every time there is clash of personalities or some other dispute. Forks are good when it kills off bad branches. They are horrible when they result in a jungle of competing branches squandering and diluting resources reinventing the same wheels and fragmenting the user base so none of the branches/distros end up as good as they would have been if all the wood was behind one arrow.
@de_machina
All languages that you list are still bytecode interpreters running in a VM. Also note that Java is not JIT-compiled on Android, either (yet). For quite a few tasks, the performance of those things simply isn't adequate. On WinMo or Symbian, you code directly in native opcodes, and can use all the pointer tricks and such to get the most out of it (or crash, as it may be).
No.
I am in no way affiliated with OSU, but recently saw a link to their OSWALD handheld. It's yet another TI OMAP handheld, designed to be hacked on, running Linux. I have no idea if you can get one as a civilian, but it looks great, and appears to be available now.
There have been a couple recently. The OpenMoko and Android devices are pretty freak'n open.
Heres the catch though, people don't actually want that. YOU may want that, normal users don't give a shit, they want stuff that works. 'Open' isn't part of the equation, when will people start to understand that?
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Actually the proper term is Machiavellian but then who's counting.
But an overwhelming number of todo lists,tip calculators and floppy clock apps for an OS that no one uses is still a steaming pile of crap no matter how you present it.
At least the cost of entry is enticing, and the debugging is easy.
Why bother
well the "iPhone Killers" to date have spectacularly failed to even dent it.
Why bother
Get it together Palm, or you might find yourself in dire straits like Palm.... wait a minute...
True, but the reference in the article title is more specifically to The Castle than to The Trial. Regardless, the GP's comment is funnier than both of ours.
The company that made 68K a-like SoC handhelds. The one where I just built a cross compiler for on FreeBSD to write programs. The company that very good documentation for the time about how to program the PDA. There was a free and an open source emulator. You could buy Code Warrior to dev on if you did not feel like using a gcc+binutils cross compiler. The way to get data to and from your PDA was free for Mac and Windows, plus there were a bunch of open source tools to do the same. If you wanted to distribute your programs, you could just put them on a web or FTP site somewhere. You could sell the programs on CDs or whatever you felt like as well. The only thing that was anything remotely like this, was that there was a web site where you could reserve a 4 character creator code for your applications. As long as it was free, it was yours.
Apple gets a lot of negative press here true, but it does also get a fair amount of inane "ooh shiny" posts, about possible new hardware and some random cool app for the iPhone. Compared to Windows which gets pretty much only gets negative news, and Palm which seems fairly neutral, I think it's safe to say that yes there is fanboyism on slashdot. There's also a lot of anti fanboyism here as well. The site pretty much plays it both ways, but we can't deny both aspects exist. I suppose one could argue the two extremes lead to a kind of middle ground however...
This says it all:
http://twitter.com/jwz/status/4455819770
The company is reaching out to him personally, and he basically says "I can't be bothered to talk to you". That sums up everything
Palm isn't being draconian as much as whoever set up their app store process was thinking of the typical closed source, for profit, software development model, not open source. They just need to work those details out of how open source projects will fit in with their app store.
That being said, it's ridiculously easy to load webOS applications on the Pre using several different 'homebrew' methods. Preware is probably the best of the 'on device' app catalog programs. IMHO, it's better than Palm's.
I thought their changes to java were to optimize it further for efficiency/stability/security, or were those just Google excuses for putting something more proprietary? Would you agree that Android still seems to be the most open & promising phone/pda OS out there currently?
Huh, nobody mentions Open Moko? They used to praise it into heaven before it came out... Anyway, there's your answer. If you want something open and blah blah, you get a pile of crap that is openmoko. Some things are better not designed in a commission.
Every experiment which ends in a big bang is a good experiment.
Not. The iPhone data usage stats has reduced by 6% last month and 2.8% the month before. The lost share being taken by Android primarily and Symbian (5800, N97, Samsung HD). Looking at the shape of the graphs, Apple better do something.
You can do the same in Android using JNI. Which is supported and allows programming directly in C/C++.
You can do the same in Android using JNI. Which is supported and allows programming directly in C/C++.
Yep, apparently my experience is outdated - I distinctly recalled it being not supported in 1.0 (at least in any official kind of way), but they've fixed that now. Which is good, since it makes Android a truly full-featured platform, and hopefully one that will eventually be as application-rich as iPhone is, as well (and open to boot).
Here's hope this will be enough to constrain iPhone (and the associated Apple's nasty lockdown habits) in the long term...
What about Maemo?
Based on Debian, access to root via a terminal, and soon to be available on what looks to be a rather nice smartphone.
Being a vi developer and then and IE developer, I think that Jamie Zawinski has been a giant cockroach for years...
I thought their changes to java were to optimize it further for efficiency/stability/security, or were those just Google excuses for putting something more proprietary? Would you agree that Android still seems to be the most open & promising phone/pda OS out there currently?
Well - the optimizations could be done at the JVM level, without tossing out the standards-based APIs, etc. The only reason I can think that they would ahve done this is to keep android apps exclusive to android.
Because of this, I can't agree that it's the most open & promising phone OS out there.
In addition, almost every other major phone out there has a java runtime that is also capable of running those same apps -- that's literally hundreds of thousands of J2ME apps that google decided they don't want running on their OS. This also means anyone developing for the wider J2ME market who also wants to release for android must re-create their software from scratch -- a J2ME build and an Android build.
If they had written this as a new OS, without Java, I would probably love it. But to call it Java without supporting any of the Java standards -- indeed, not even compatible JVM implementation -- is frustrating.
As far as I know Android is not a Java platform. It may be backed by a JVM, but is in no way advertised as a Java platform to its users. And therefore, it shouldn't be expected to adhere to J2ME any more than webOS, iPhone OS, or anything else would.