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Steve Jobs Weighs In On iPhone Programming Language Mandate
Dotnaught writes "Greg Slepak, founder of software company Tao Effect, wrote Apple CEO Steve Jobs to complain about Apple's mandate that iPhone applications be originally written in C/C++/Objective-C. Job's response was to endorse a post by John Gruber on the Daring Fireball blog. Jobs called it 'very insightful,' suggesting Gruber's prediction that third-party iPhone development tools are out might be right. Jobs sent a second reply that also doesn't bode well for third-party iPhone development tools: 'We've been there before, and intermediate layers between the platform and the developer ultimately produces sub-standard apps and hinders the progress of the platform.'"
I would wager that it has to do with the way that it gets compiled, if they aren't using Apple's compiler and profiler they may not be taking advantage of the APIs needed to do all that super neato app backgrounding and such.
You call the timing dubious, I say they are pre-emptively stopping thousands of app rejections on a legit rule.
You are bashing Apple for making a system you aren't forced to buy and complaining that you can't 'hack' it in your language of choice. Apple doesn't care about JailBreaking anymore than the bare minimum for legal reasons, if you want to run any old app you can, no Apple approval required.
Fact of the matter is, Apple is a company that makes more money in an hour than you do in 10 years, they aren't stupid people.
"But hey, it's Steve Jobs, the Big Brother himself, and he knows what's best for us, right?"
No, only YOU know what's best for YOU. Tell me, would it be best for YOU to boycott Apple? If so, do it and move on.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Do you have any real arguments or are you just throwing personal attacks at me? If you can't say anything useful, just shut up... (Hint: I know more about OpenCL than you do.) But should you want to widen your limited horizon a bit, try to find an answer to the following questions: How can VLC and mplayer decode video so much better than the flash player, even though they have the same API access? (Answer: They use more than just one CPU when playing back, and don't use a complete CPU when idleing.)
Wow, you must be clueless as they come.
The iPhone economy is the largest in the world where over 4 billion apps have been downloaded.
If you are mobile developer wanting to make the *most money* developing commercial applications, to make efficient use for your resources *you have no choice* but to develop for the iPhone/iPad.
Every other platform is a second-class economy that you only support if you have the time/resources.
The mandatory language requirement is an artificial limitation placed by a monopolist in commercial mobile applications market creating an a legal lock-in by forcing developers to only target the iPhone. This limitation is in no way technical or based on merit.
I respect quality hardware products with good usability so most of my hardware has an apple logo on it.
But I will never condone this behaviour and will never buy another apple product until this rule stands. This is a personal attack on my free time and is detrimental for developers, competitors and customers - in the evil-est of ways the only beneficiary is Apple.
Honestly the RDF force is a lot stronger than what I think it is, as it makes me sick that he still has customers supporting this behaviour (he really can do no wrong) - This really is thinking different.
Speaking as someone who has to deal with 64 bit flash on linux
this was hard once, but then we got nspluginwrapper to make it easy. Then Adobe released 64 bit flash "beta" for linux (works better than many of the released versions that have passed, AFAICT) and now it's super easy. But since the iPhone doesn't come in different flavors like that (yet?) then you're not going to have that same kind of problem. Consequently, 64 bit flash is a red herring. Stop it.
Apps running using native platform tools do fairly well, cross-platform apps suck a lot of the time. You windows users have seen this too -- itunes, quicktime and safari are dogs on windows because they had to import all their own libraries.
So you're saying that because Apple is bad at cross-platform, it's a bad idea? As far as I can tell, you've offered only evidence of Apple's incompetence.
On Apple machines these are lighweight apps that are fast.
Go on, pull the other one. On Apple machines, iTunes and Quicktime are both still chunky and funky. Safari is pretty speedy, though it is not as speedy as WebKit on Linux . Or in other words, it's not really that fast. It's slower than the performance-oriented competition. Hell, it's slower than what it's based on. I consider that a failure. Apple does NOT write small, efficient applications for most any purpose.
And let's face it, as nice as open software is, working well is what sells units, ideology is secondary.
Bullshit. Polish is what sells units. Apple's stuff is shinier. But there's plenty of room for a backlash when users find that all the apps they want are on all the other phones, and the only one who doesn't have 'em is the iPhone. Give it a year and this will start to happen.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
ASSEMBLE!