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iPhone SDK Agreement Shuts Out HyperCard Clone
Halo1 writes "Demonstrating it's not just about Flash, Apple has officially rejected for the first time another alternative iPhone development environment following its controversial iPhone SDK Agreement changes. Even though RunRev proposed to retool its HyperCard-style development environment to directly expose all of the iPhone OS's APIs, Steve Jobs still rejected its proposal. The strength of RunRev's business case, with a large-scale iPad deployment project in education hinging on the availability of its tool, does not bode well for projects that have less commercial clout. Salient point: at last February's shareholders' meeting, Jobs went on the record saying that something like HyperCard on the iPad would be great, 'but someone would have to create it.'"
See, I think (and I think some people on here might agree) is that yes: We don't like the business practices of Apple. But somewhere deep down inside, we want to see what will happen when Apple does these kinds of things. We're silently hoping that it shuns developers to other platforms, thus weakening Apple's product as a whole, and we can finally say "I told you so" when their stocks drop from bad ideas such as this.
On the other hand, we also like the idea of "Apple has the freedom to do what they want with their product" (notice that I cannot purchase a Microsoft Desktop, they don't have the full verticle control thing going on). It seems if we press on locking them down, the whole system will be locked down, and thats not good for everyone.
So we give them a bit of leniency because they are kind of our guinea pig. Big enough to try things out, but we don't have to depend on them.
You mean like they do on the XBox and the Zune?
And we really do not know what they will do with WIndows Phone 7... Hey they took out copy and paste and multitasking to copy the iPhone so who knows.
And yes people are crabbing to high heaven about Apple. The thing is the answer is simple. Buy and Android phone or a Palm WebOS phone like my wife and I did.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Steve is really trying to sell himself short, here. His reality distortion field has gone to his head, and he thinks he's bulletproof. And you know what? When he was the only game in town, he was bulletproof.
But he's not the only game in town. In fact, as of 1st Q 2010, he's not even the biggest game in town! As an application developer myself, the recent shenanigans around dictating to developers like me how we can or can't do our job and/or what tools we can use make the iphone a non-starter.
Sorry, too hostile for me, too much lockin for my clients, and not enough benefit. Android it is!
Isn't it ironic that the company responsible for opening up the smartphone market is now offering the most closed platform?
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Then perhaps the question should be phrased as:
- how would this app need to be created so as to meet the requirements of the license?
That's exactly what they asked Apple, including offering several suggestions of their own. The result, quoting the article:
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Everything that has gotten approved so far uses XCode as a build step. You don't necessarily have to do all your development work in XCode (i.e. Unity game engine),
Where have you seen that Unity has been approved by Apple? All I've seen is the Unity people saying "we think we're fine because Apple can't afford to remove all apps on the appstore that have been built with our engine, but obviously we can't offer any guarantees".
Cross compile to an XCode project with things like static libraries for your runtime and everything will be fine.
I'm not sure how you can interpret an SDK agreement stating, a.o.,
as
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Microsoft is doing what it always does: Copying.
But in this case, the copying went the other way around. Microsoft had the XNA Creators Club ($99 per year) and Xbox Live Indie Games several months before Apple had the iPhone Developer Program ($99 per year) and App Store. This is just Microsoft extending the XNA model to phones.
I'd hate to tell you this, but no one cares about openness except a handful of geeks.
This is why when I flew last weekend I saw two groups of devices being handled by passengers flying. E-ink readers and iPads.
Not tablets, slates, netbooks. iPads and Kindles/nooks.
Revolution isn't about what YOU as a super nerd can do with devices it's about what everyone can do with a device.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
Bullshit. 3G has a higher power drain, but not even in 2007 was it so high that a smartphone should've gone without.
This is why there will never be an iPhone killer. Better features are dismissed without reason, and any device offering all of the iPhone's strong points would be derided as a copy.
My Sig: SEGV
Apple is not selling the iPad as a PC or even as a computer. It's a device.
Ah, but the PC Folks' world is slipping away. When iPads are all that exist, no one can compute anything Jobs doesn't allow. And that happy thought is what keeps him alive.
Unless you're referring to the word monopoly by its legal definition, which would not be relevant to discussions of whether what Apple does ought to be considered a problem, how you define whether something is a monopoly is crucially important.
Everyone loves to trot out that Nokia owns something like 50% of the global market for smartphones. Then they gleefully point out, Apple isn't a monopoly!
However, you take the players that are bigger than Apple on the market, and you examine their products. Nokia's so-called smartphones are not used as smartphones by the vast majority of their users. What percentage of Nokia users have ever installed a program on their phone? Likewise Blackberry's so-called smartphones are used basically as email/messenger terminals. The only significant installed programs on Blackberry's are those that are pre-installed by the corporation's IT department.
The only major player besides Apple in the real general purpose mobile computing device market is Google Android. However, despite their recent uptick in sales, at the moment, if we were to look at installed base of Android and iPhone OS mobile devices, iPhone OS is in a monopoly position.
It may not be a legally cognizable category to act upon (yet), but the real market we need to be looking at is mobile general computing products. Mobile computing very likely will replace what we now call desktop computing in the future, and if current trends continue, we may find ourselves in a situation where what we can run on our computers is in the hands of a single company that has exercised power ruthlessly in the past.
Long story short, Apple is a monopoly in an emerging market that looks like it will be incredibly important in the future. When it acts like a dick with the power that it has now, I'm going to try to convince others to consider Apple's business practices as a bad thing.
What are you talking about? Android has the best of both worlds - by default you can ONLY install apps via the marketplace, and some cost - some don't - but billing is unified.
You can fiddle with a preference in the phone and get all kinds of dire warnings about security, but it will let you install from another source if wanted.
"The best cut n paste UI of any mobile device."
That must mean cut and past on everything else is horrendous. I don't have an iPhone but I now have an iPod Touch and I use it around the home mostly for web stuff over Wi-Fi. Every once in awhile, when I am trying to scroll around on the display, the 'copy' mechanism kicks in and grabs some text instead. A minor annoyance and usually I can deselect it without hitting a hyperlink and Safari flitting off to some other web page.
Yesterday for the first time, I wanted to cut and past something. I've installed QuickOffice on the thing and I wanted to save some text from a web page.
Nothing that I could do, or figure out how to do, would trigger the 'capture text for copying' function that I've inadvertently triggered in the past.
That is NOT my definition of a good cut/paste user interface. There's nothing intuitive about it. I guess I should go out and find an O'Reilly manual for the iPhone OS. They publish the 'Missing Manual' series after all.
Apple's interface design decisions are always highly political and steeped in dogma. It's been that way since the launch of Macintosh.
It's good that you've stepped forward to be the spokesperson for 'the fanboys' Baselbrush... but this is developers.slashdot.org not your usual apple.slashdot.org. Don't you feel kinda out of place here??
I don't know anyone here in the US personally who gets by with their iPad/iPhone alone
That's because it has to be synced to iTunes before it will work. Once Apple drops that restriction, watch people start "get[ting] by with their iPad/iPhone alone". A lot of people in Japan, where homes are smaller due to exorbitant land values, already get buy with other models of phone alone.
Android probably never will go down that route, and as a result, no matter how successful Android phones become in the market, Android apps will never be as successful as iPhone apps.
Do you have any idea what you're talking about? Apparently the reality-distortion field extends to Slashdot. Android phones are going to leave (are leaving) iPhone sales in the dust. Fragmentation is an issue, but that's no more a problem, when you get right down to it, than that faced by PC developers every day. And there is this thing called the "Android Market" where you can (yes, it's true!) buy applications! Amazing, isn't it, that someone was able to come up with something that's just as functional as an Apple product? More to the point, a developer can sign up for the market for the princely sum of $25, and the SDKs are free (yes, free.) None of Apple and Job's bullshit with non-disclosure agreements, limits on what tools you can use and, for me, the capper of suffering Apple's utterly drain-bamaged and developer-unfriendly approval process. Jobs is an arrogant ass who cannot be trusted who will cheerfully screw over an individual or company that wants to sell software for the iPhone, often for no readily-apparent reason. Frankly, Google has been pretty damned non-Evil when it comes to managing their Market, in how they treat both developers and users ... Apple has been decidedly otherwise. As a software developer, I want nothing whatsoever to do with Apple, Steve Jobs or an iAnything.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
That's only because of the limited and artificial way in which 'monopoly' is defined'.
If apple computers were "PC-compatible" and could run all PC programs just as well as any Win7 box, then I'd say they can be judged in the same class. But that's not the case.
Apple's != PC's. Therefore, they should be judged as being in a separate container.
There are few or NO competitors to Apple in the OS-"x" (x={6,7,8...}) space.
There are no competitors to Apple in the "iphone-compatible" space. There are no other phones by other manufacturers, that can run iphone programs. When there ARE, then we would have 'competition'. But Apple is a monopoly in this space. As well as in the OS-x space.