Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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
Donate free food here
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.
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
"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??