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iPhone OS 4.0: Now With Added Evil
Hidden among the details of Apple’s announcement of the next version of the iPhone operating system last week was a nasty, snide little addition to the terms and conditions that iPhone app developers must agree to in order to get their apps into the App Store.
In effect, it says that you must use Apple’s developer tools and preferred programming language to develop iPhone apps. Which, on the face of it, is uncontroversial. It’s Apple’s platform, so you use Apple tools and languages. The problem is that there are significant efforts from other companies and projects to make it easier to transition to iPhone app development from other platforms, such as Microsoft’s .NET and Adobe’s Flash, as well as to make it easier to write apps that run on multiple mobile platforms. Apple’s devotees have had problems with these alternative platforms before, as I wrote a few months ago, but now Apple have taken the extraordinary step of embedding their own language preference in the terms and conditions of even being an iPhone developer at all.
The new rule expands section 3.3.1 of the developer agreement to state that “applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine”. Objective-C is the language that most developers use to write applications for Mac OS X, and it’s by far the most popular language for iPhone apps, too. C and
C++ are probably the most popular languages for writing games, a key part of the App Store’s success.Apple have had problems applying their guidelines consistently in the past, and that’s partly because the wording of the developer agreement is fairly loose. The new additions are no exception.
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Umair Haque is Confused About the iPad
It’s been a tough month for Umair Haque. First, he conducted the world’s most boring and pointless interview at SXSWi, and now he blogs his extraordinarily muddled thoughts on the iPad.
It’s tough to sum up what he’s saying because it’s so confused. He seems to want the iPad to be more open both physically and in terms of installing apps and content. This is understandable in some ways, but he’s an economist, and his argument seems to be saying that Apple will not succeed with the approach they’ve chosen for fundamental market-based reasons. It’s just that he fails to provide any evidence at all that this is so.
Let’s take it one paragraph at a time.
The iPad’s like an amazing hairdresser — who wants to monitor your bathroom for authorized shampoo, conditioner, and water. By building a device that liberates services, but locks down “product,” Apple’s shooting itself in the iFace. It’s as if Apple wants to step into the hyperconnected network age — but also keep one foot firmly planted in the industrial era.
Hahahahaha! iParadox? iFace?! Those are great gags! Oh, hold on, I think I just pissed in my iPants.
Puerile jokes aside, the analogy is nonsense. Critics of the openness of the iPad (and the iPhone) often conveniently ignore the fact that it has unmoderated access to the entire internet (minus anything written in Flash) through its browser, Mobile Safari. The entire pitch for the iPad emphasises this: “it’s like holding the Internet in your hands”.
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iPhone Abroad: Usability Nightmare
Last month almost the entire company decamped to Austin for the South by Southwest (SXSW) interactive festival. My experience with my iPhone there was frustrating, to say the least.
My carrier, O2, prices a 3G data connection when abroad so rapaciously (at £6 per megabyte), that there’s no realistic option of having a network connection when abroad, unless you can find a functioning wifi network. Open wifi networks appear to more common in Austin than they are in London, especially in hip cafés and bars (not that I ever visit such places in London), but at times when you are genuinely out and about, you’re stuck with no data at all, and the iPhone in effect becomes an iPod Touch.
To be fair to O2, something that does not come naturally to someone who’s been consistently underwhelmed by them for years such as myself, they do send you a text message as soon as you emerge from your airplane mode, warning you about what a rip off their data roaming charges are. At those rates I’d have more respect for them if they walked up to me with their finger making a pretend gun in their coat pocket and asking for my dinner money.
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Content design with cojones
Or so I tweeted whilst watching the recent Apple keynote. A month later and I don’t think I could have been more wrong.Immediately after the iPad’s reveal, the interweb rippled with an argument between two tribes, those that want a computer that allows them to tinker under the hood, and those that don’t care about getting their hands dirty – they just want to email, surf, watch and listen. For me, this isn’t the interesting debate. It’s how the speed, screen size and controlled environment of the iPad now means that content design on screen can finally come of age and grow some balls. Big ones.
Or so I tweeted whilst watching the recent Apple keynote. A month later and I don’t think I could have been more wrong.
Or so I tweeted whilst watching the recent Apple keynote. A month later and I don’t think I could have been more wrong.
Immediately after the iPad’s reveal, the interweb rippled with an argument between two tribes, those that want a computer that allows them to tinker under the hood, and those that don’t care about getting their hands dirty – they just want to email, surf, watch and listen. For me, this isn’t the interesting debate. It’s how the speed, screen size and controlled environment of the iPad now means that content design on screen can finally come of age and grow some balls. Big ones.
Your content isn’t the same as my content
There are some sites that people check two or three times a day. BBC News is one of them for me. However, out of the 50 or so articles on their home page in the morning, I’ll probably only read around ten stories. As I check back during the day, there’s a law of diminishing returns, in fact every time I visit I usually end up reading half as many stories as I did the previous time.
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Time for a reassessment of the human-computer interface
A great blog post by Lukas Mathis has been floating around Twitter for a few days now. In it he talks about the removal of features in software development. Specifically:
If you don’t pay attention, what started out as an elegant, simple application that perfectly solves a single problem, can quickly turn into a huge behemoth of an application that solves a ton of problems, but solves all of them poorly.
This, and some other tweet comments, got me thinking about the iPad (who isn’t?) and how I believe it’s a glimpse of the future for how we interact with personal computers.
In the 35 years since the arrival of the personal computer we’ve been on a continuous upward trajectory of feature enhancement and specification bloat. It’s not just the software, it’s infecting the very machines that we run the bloated software on.
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What if Apple became a bank?
RRW have been trading on a rumour that Apple’s new iPhone is going to have NFC functionality in the coming Spring. About bloody time if you ask me. NFC (Near-Field Communication) will technically allow you to use your phone as not only an Oyster card, a passport or a debit card but will also allow you to read RFID chips so you can see how much is on your Oyster card, check the microchip of a lost pet against the Pet ID database or even take payment from other people. There’s a wealth of possibilities. Nokia already has devices on the market with NFC built in but has never managed to make it appeal to the public.
Apply being Apple, there’s no doubt that if they were indeed to implement NFC (clearly they’d call it something completely different) they would have some business model built around it in order to maximise profit from the new feature. And banking, micropayment and payments in general could do with a real shake up at the moment.
It might sound ridiculous, it might sound scary or far fetched, but I don’t see why not. If you were to tell me 10 years ago that Apple were going to be the number one music retailer in the US, I’d have laughed in your face and insulted your intelligence. Probably.
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iPhone Developers and Language Snobbery
[Update: Jeff LaMarche (author of one of the best iPhone books on the market) wrote one of his trademark 'no tact' responses to this post. I'd be very interested to know what people think about his post.]
[Update 2: Guy English (aka kickingbear) chimes in on this debate with what is the best response I've seen from a hardcore Cocoa developer. Basically: Apple's tools are probably better at producing better iPhone apps, but let's see what MonoTouch and Flash can deliver before we definitively say that they are no good.]
Novell recently announced a product called MonoTouch, which allows developers to write iPhone applications using C#, a language invented by Microsoft (but since standardised). It’s a very clever piece of work that allows someone without experience of Objective-C – the only option that Apple gives you for iPhone development – to write an iPhone application with a reduced learning curve.
Yesterday, Adobe followed suit and announced that they are working on a way to make native iPhone applications with their Flash technology.
Naturally, this is a good thing. Talented C# and Flash developers will be able to write excellent iPhone apps and we can all go home happy. The fact that two heavyweights in the technical space have made these tools is a massive compliment to Apple’s achievement with the iPhone.
Not if you listen to many Objective-C programmers it isn’t.
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How Apple Exemplifies a Culture of Love Over Greed
A quick follow-up on my post about love, greed and innovation.
In some discussions since, I’ve pointed to Apple as an example of how greed is trumped by love. It may seem surprising to think of a multi-billion dollar corporation, famed for its premium products and ruthless business practices, as being motivated by love, but there are a number of things that show this is true.
First, there’s the Netbook category. Apple are not making one because they “don’t see a way to build a great product for … $399 [or] $499″, according to Tim Cook, Apple’s COO. Note that he didn’t say “we don’t see a way to make money“, just that the product wouldn’t be “great”.
Then, consider this quote from Jonny Ive1, Apple’s Senior Vice President of Industrial Design:
“Apple’s goal isn’t to make money. Our goal is to design and develop and bring to market good products…We trust as a consequence of that, people will like them, and as another consequence we’ll make some money. But we’re really clear about what our goals are.”
I think this perfectly encapsulates why Apple’s products can so often be game-changers, and how they can come to a market late and yet still dominate people’s conception of how good a product can be.
Clearly, someone as rich as Steve Jobs is greedy, but his primary motivation is creating products that he can be proud of. The money flows from that.
1 Hat tip: Mark Rock
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