iPhone SDK Agreement Shuts Out HyperCard Clone 610
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.'"
Re:DRM, restrictions, outcry (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:DRM, restrictions, outcry (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Stupid is as stupid does... (Score:5, Interesting)
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! [npr.org] 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?
Easy dev tools = too many apps to vet (Score:3, Interesting)
Apple are already struggling, and widely criticised, for their slow and inconsistent 'approvals' process.
Imagine the explosion of apps that would happen if multiple, and easy, development paths were opened up on the iPad/Phone.
They'd drown...
I
No MacBook mini (Score:3, Interesting)
You can develop however you like on OS X, which would be the analogous case to developing on Windows.
Find me a 10" MacBook on Apple's web site. The closest thing is iPad.
Re:DRM, restrictions, outcry (Score:3, Interesting)
You've got your PCs running Windows. With the exception of kernel driver signing requirements on 64-bit Vista and later, you can pretty much do whatever the fuck you want.
Then you have the Xbox360. Here, you can either pay nontrivial money to be Microsoft's special development buddy, and do native development and have your binaries cryptographically blessed, or you can pay substantially less money to be one of the XNA-based 'app store' developers. More accessible to small timers; but your applications still only run by the power and mere pleasure of MS.
Since this is Microsoft, and they are huge, you also have the divide between WinCE/WinMo6 and lower and Windows Phone 7. The former is largely open, from the application perspective. The latter, Microsoft has said, will basically be a
Re:If Apple wants HyperCard for the iPad (Score:4, Interesting)
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:
Re:Jobs wants 'hypercard' on the iPhone? Yeah righ (Score:3, Interesting)
I'll bet that HyperCard app would look cool on an Android phone if the developer decided to port it over... hint, hint.
Re:Same problem Flash had... (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [unity3d.com] "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
Re:Stupid is as stupid does... (Score:3, Interesting)
Saw Douglas Crockford's talk about the history of programming languages and development a week or so ago, and I came to the conclusion that largely, yes, programmers need to be told how to do their jobs and with what tools otherwise you wind up with crap like Windows and x86.
http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/theater/video.php?v=crockonjs-1 [yahoo.com]
Re:DRM, restrictions, outcry (Score:3, Interesting)
Ummmm....they actually ARE banning all dev environments other than .NET (silverlight) on WinPhone 7.
That's different. Requiring use of .NET is fine; any compiler that generates CLR bytecode will work. It's no worse than requiring Java applets to be in JVM bytecode. The problems with Microsoft's managed environments are 1. the required app store and 2. useful APIs not being made public, such as (notably) procedural audio output on XNA.
XNA Creators Club (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:iPad is not a PC - Where is my Prius SDK? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:DRM, restrictions, outcry (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Sucks to be those guys.... (Score:3, Interesting)
And I'd like it if Apple would be at least a bit more open about any number of things (like java 6 being two years behind)... But Apple's been pretty clear about at least a few points:
1. Don't ship crap. Say what you will about the iPad/iPhone... the hardware and software is definitely not crap.
2. Write once run anywhere always has issues (abstraction layers too). I'm a long time java swing guy and >I know that java apps are not ideal for normal end users.
3. Badly performing apps create a stink that gets on everyone.
#3 is ultimately what apple wants to avoid. A bunch of apps written on some third party abstraction layers that ALL break when apple does an update (apple can't QA everything). Then people think the iPhone/Pad suck... not the hidden abstraction layer.
And like it or not they are now at least being consistent about it. No abstaction layers for anyone!
Re:DRM, restrictions, outcry (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:iPad is not a PC - Where is my Prius SDK? (Score:4, Interesting)
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. [slashdot.org] When iPads are all that exist, no one can compute anything Jobs doesn't allow. And that happy thought is what keeps him alive.
Enterprise deployment? (Score:3, Interesting)
What's to stop them from making an enterprise deployment? Or have the rules for that changed? Looking at Chapter 5 of the guide (http://www.apple.com/support/iphone/enterprise/), you can use the iPhone Configuration Utility to deploy a signed package, the only thing you need to do is get a signature via Apple, then send out a config that includes instructions on how to get the app.
What am I missing?
Monopoly is semantics (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:InformationWeek on Windows Phone 7's app store (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:DRM, restrictions, outcry (Score:1, Interesting)
See: Nokia N900.
OpenMoko failed because open-source hardware is almost impossible to make work in practice. (Major kudos to the handful of companies making >1M$ sales we heard about the other day, but the very fact that that's newsworthy reveals the issue here.) So the hardware wound up sucking compared to all the other options available. Even going for a fully open-source stack on proprietary hardware is hard, but at least you get decent hardware that way.
But if you're willing to step away from open hardware altogether, and accept a stack which is mostly open-source and fully non-restrictive, it _can_ be commercially viable. Maemo is exactly that.
Re:DRM, restrictions, outcry (Score:5, Interesting)
"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??
Phone alone (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
When not if (Score:3, Interesting)
The PC is going to become a niche product. It's only a question of when and not if.
We've already seen this once when desktops were turned into a niche product by laptops. Laptops already have "good enough" power for anything any mainstream user needs.
When a mobile phone has the same power as your current general purpose computer, what do you think the sales of general purpose computers is going to look like?
Bearing in mind that cutting edge mobile phones can already be hooked up to external keyboards and monitors.
This is exactly why we have a Constitution (Score:3, Interesting)
The average person, even the above-average intelligent person such as those you find on this fine website, drastically undervalues hazy and amorphous future benefits such as freedom.
We have a Constitution, because if given half a chance, at every opportunity, ordinary men, and the greedy leaders who prod them on, would sell freedom up a creek for a little temporary gain.
If the average man would sell his freedom of speech away for pennies, what do you think he would sell something even more vague and speculative for, such as the freedom of others to innovate and create new products that may interest him?
The fact is, freedom does not make a very good bullet point on marketing materials, and arguing that it is not important because the OpenMoko failed is ridiculous.
The only reason we have any freedom at all is because freedom is something that can be idealistically assigned an out-sized value, such that some people do all the caring for the rest of mankind.
Logical Conclusions (Score:3, Interesting)
Apologies for the double post, somehow must have clicked anonymous the first time I posted this.
Let me see if I can draw out your argument to its logical conclusion. Correct me if I misstate your views, or if an additional fact I provide means you will have to add additional nuance or caveats to your original point.
Your argument:
If you sell something and advertise it not as a computer, but as a device, you have no obligation, moral or legal, to make it more open to 3rd party development.
Hypothetical:
Year is 2018. The iPhone 15G controls 95% of the consumer computing market. General purpose computers are relegated to niche status, only owned by corporations that need major processing power and enthusiasts. The iPhone has followed the example set by gaming consoles, and is completely locked down, with no security holes realistically accessible to the average consumer. Apple has continued its policies regarding controlling what software can, and cannot, run on its device. The iPhone 15G satisfies all mainstream computing requirements, but Apple denies any software it considers offensive, including software that states any political message that does not align with Apple's, or competes with Apple in any way.
Logical Conclusion:
You are totally okay with this situation, and any consumer that complains suffers from an entitlement complex, as Apple never advertised the iPhone as a general computing platform.
Re:InformationWeek on Windows Phone 7's app store (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:DRM, restrictions, outcry (Score:3, Interesting)
Neither were Microsoft back in the 80's. I love the knee jerk fanboy response "but Microsoft is a Monopoly" argument as it completely ignores that Apple is doing the same things that Microsoft did before it was convicted as an abusive monopoly. Fanboys, you must also include the word "abusive" as that is the operative word, MS wasn't convicted of being a monopoly, that is 100% legal. Microsoft was convicted of abusing their monopoly position not of being a monopoly.
The date on the conviction is 5 November 1999, which means MS had over 10 years of being abusive before they were actually convicted of it, date is on the first page of that very link you posted.
Apple is a monopolist...but gets off on definition (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Calm down, take a deep breath - and try this: (Score:3, Interesting)
So Apple sees this Hyper-Card clone that already has a good sized institutional market lined up and decides not to approve it. Rather than hyperventilate about DRM and lockin, why not just go with the simpler explanation of greed.
It would be so simple for Apple to come out with their own Hyper Card for the iWhatever; they've got the background and the copyrights. With an already existing market this would be a easy win; I'll bet that there's Apple developers at work on this right now.
It's not all about control, guys - it's about money. If you follow the money you won't have to pull out that old "reality distortion field" handwave to explain what's going on.
Re:Apple is a monopolist...but gets off on definit (Score:3, Interesting)
The tragedy is your tiny view of monopolies being only what you are told they are.
No, I view monopolies as what they are considered and agreed to be under law. This is useful because that way, when the grown-ups are talking, we all get to talk about the same thing.
No one else is allowed to provide a "plug-compatible" platform that will run those applications. There is no competition. If you want a device that will run all of the apps in those specific spaces, you must by from Apple.
And if you want to fit a Ford ECU, you need to own a Ford. You can't fit them to a Toyota. There's NO monopoly in either example.
We can sit and redefine terms to our heart's content, but that doesn't move this forward. I can redefine "small minded dickhead" to be a picture of you, but that wouldn't necessarily make this the commonly agreed upon use for this term. In the same way, your use of the word monopoly is misinformed and more importantly, wrong.