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Original post by stimarco Try walking into a shop sometime and see how far you get telling the owner how to do his job. Trust me, they're unlikely to take it well. Why do you expect Apple—or, indeed, any other corporation—to be any different?

Try walking into a shop, buying a product, getting home and then having the shop owner show up in your house and tell you how you are supposed to use it, and what you can and can't do with it. Trust me, I am unlikely to take it well. Why do you expect me, or indeed, any one else to be any different.

Its a two way street man. Its not like Apple is doing me any favors by releasing a new "iProduct". Nor am I doing Apple any favors by buying one. Its a transaction. At some point, on both sides, the responsibility ends.

I've always been a DOS/Windows guy, so I don't have a bone to pick with Apple, at least not one gained from experience using their products. That said, here's an interesting denunciation from a long time Apple customer.

This Mac devotee is moving to Linux

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... Apple is pushing computer users as fast as it can toward a centrally controlled computing ecosystem where it makes all the decisions about what native applications may be used on the devices it sells -- and takes a cut of every dollar that is spent inside that ecosystem. This is a direct repudiation of its own history, and more broadly that of the larger personal-computing ecosystem, where no one can stop anyone else from writing and distributing software that other people might want to use. Steve Jobs says Apple is a curator, nothing more. This grossly understates the control. Jobs says Apple has "made mistakes" in being the police, judge, jury and executioner in its Disney-style world, and is working hard to perfect the system. But this is a disconnect with reality. Central control, no matter how well-intentioned, is itself the problem, not the solution. The "enlightened dictator" is fiction. And dangerous. ...

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Original post by stimarco (More ranting about UIs.)

Why are you harping on and on about UI design? Nobody's said "screw Apple, I want my buttons to be huge, pink and toroidal!" Rather, it's the heavy-handed and often excessive methods of enforcing the iWay on their platform that bugs people. If we pretend that those policies are indeed a method of QA, then Apple is trying to swat mosquitos with a semi automatic rifle, taking out the refrigerator and dishwasher while still letting a whole bunch of insects through. Unless those thousands of fart apps have a really polished UI, of course...

For the record, I'm not the least interested in playing in Apple's sandbox. That, however, doesn't prevent me from having an opinion on it, especially when it's dangerous for my neighbor's kids.

Not getting into this UI discussion, but I'd like to comment on this bit:

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Original post by stimarco No. You still don't get it: If Apple's guidelines say, "Thy "OK" Buttons Must Be Placed X% From The Right Margin", that's what you're REQUIRED to do. If you aren't willing to comply with their rules, you don't get to play in their sandbox. It really IS that simple. YOU might have other ideas about how UI design should be done. You may disagree with Apple entirely, or only slightly. But your opinion matters not one whit. It's their damned baby. Their house. Their rules. Not yours.

Actually, no.

When a company achieves a certain level of market and user penetration, then it does not own all of "their house" anymore. Trying to brutally enforce ones own rules, without any regard to competing opinions or products whatsoever, can trigger a legal failsafe which will eventually force that company to let anyone into their house, so to speak. Microsoft already noticed that a few times and they learned from it. Apple has not yet reached that point. But eventually they will have to.

There has already been talk of Anti-trust investigations into Apple and the iTunes/iPlatform setup so that moment is getting closer than some might think.

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Original post by Valderman I also don't see how forcing developers to use outdated tools...

Apple's tools aren't outdated. Instruments is excellent, unparalleled on any platform. Even being based on DTrace, it goes well beyond its progenitor. LLVM and LLVD are excellent technologies (and open source, natch); LLVM provides an up to 60% (but generally around 20%) runtime performance boost for the same source code vs GCC.

Objective-C 2.0 has a very comprehensive and competitive feature list compared with the other smartphone platform options (Java, C#). I find it to be a very reasonable balance between feature-richness and control without sacrificing performance, unfamiliar syntax (for most programmers) notwithstanding. (And, really, shouldn't we be over syntactic nits by now?)

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Original post by way2lazy2care Flash

Can you point me to any smartphone or mobile device on sale today on which I can run Flash - not Flash Lite, but full Flash?

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Original post by Valderman Do developers really automagically write better programs with better UIs if restricted to C/C++/ObjC? How would Python, Lisp, Haskell, Ruby, Java, etc. lead to worse programs? Apple could ensure the same level of quality by specifying an ABI and banning anyone who strays from it (by using private iOS APIs for example) but they don't.

Actually, Apple is moving toward this.

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Original post by Yann L When a company achieves a certain level of market and user penetration, then it does not own all of "their house" anymore. Trying to brutally enforce ones own rules, without any regard to competing opinions or products whatsoever, can trigger a legal failsafe which will eventually force that company to let anyone into their house, so to speak. Microsoft already noticed that a few times and they learned from it. Apple has not yet reached that point. But eventually they will have to.

And people wonder why Apple never makes moves that would give it marketshare dominance...

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Original post by phantom There has already been talk of Anti-trust investigations into Apple and the iTunes/iPlatform setup so that moment is getting closer than some might think.

Mostly in the EU, which from a North American sometimes gets overzealous with the antitrust stuff. (Windows XP N? Windows browser ballot?) I wouldn't expect anything significant to come out of this.

While I don't know about the outcome its certainly not an EU only thing, in fact personally I've not seen any reference to the EU, only US Federal investigation.

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Original post by phantom While I don't know about the outcome its certainly not an EU only thing, in fact personally I've not seen any reference to the EU, only US Federal investigation.

Ah. I was talking about the iTunes music sales, which has drawn some EU attention (originating in France, I believe). This merely speaks to an inquiry, something the Justice Department does to determine whether a full-fledged investigation is warranted. We're a long way from "anti-trust investigations."

By the way, I was wrong about music. Apple is also the subject of a US Justice Department inquiry into its music selling practices, spurred by allegations that Apple was pressuring labels not to participate in an Amazon program.

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Original post by Oluseyi Can you point me to any smartphone or mobile device on sale today on which I can run Flash - not Flash Lite, but full Flash?

most Android phones can run flash 10.1, but I meant more about how they won't let Flash compile to iPhone runnable apps.

Here's an interesting thought:

The way Apple runs its App Store - gives me enormous incentive to make software for other platforms!

If I could start development on a (bonafide) project and have a 100% expectation that I would get into the App Store when I finish it (and then not subsequently get kicked out) --

Then I could merrily spend more and more of my time writing software exclusively for Apple's platform. At first it might just be sub-components, like (for example) a renderer. And if that worked out well - it could easily become entire products or even all my products being iOS exclusive!

But with Apple's propensity for changing the rules (like banning entire development methodologies without warning) --

Every second I spend writing software - and every dollar that I invest - that is exclusively for iPlatform entails a huge degree of risk. And not diversifying that risk out to other platforms would be unthinkable!

---

Also: since when is it "ok" for Apple to push out an update that actively seeks to remove (access to, on a technical level) other software? Software that I installed on my device, without going through their App Store? (ie: via jailbreak.)

Now what about my customers installing my software on their devices, without going through the App Store? Is it ok for Apple to remove that?

And what if Cydia pushed an update which removed the App Store icon, and all your App Store purchased applications? Would we be cool with that?

[Edited by - Andrew Russell on June 23, 2010 2:50:01 AM]