All Articles Tagged daring fireball
UPDATE: iPhone dev extraordinaire Erica Sadun investigated over at Ars and found the following: Google is both linking to Private Frameworks and using unpublished APIs. While the latter is likened to jaywalking, the former is apparently a ban-worthy offense. Yikes. Check out her complete investigation for more. And now that it’s public, the question shifts to what if anything Apple will do about it? Cave to Google over a killer feature and betray the confidence of other developers, or yank Google’s app, alienating a huge (if guilty) partner and likely creating another furor among users?
Original post:
Is Google using private (i.e., not publicly available via the official iPhone SDK) APIs to create the silky-smooth “raise the phone and talk” activation for their new Advanced Voice Search feature in the update Google Mobile App? That’s the latest question Daring Fireball’s been looking into, and here’s what they’ve found so far:
If you use something like the command-line strings utility to examine the UIKit framework, you can see that there’s an undocumented (and therefore private to Apple) method named proximityStateChanged. And if one were to strip the FairPlay DRM from the current Google Mobile application binary — which, of course, you wouldn’t do, because you’re not supposed to strip FairPlay DRM, but I’m just saying if one were to do this — a class dump of the application binary would show that Google Mobile does in fact implement proximityStateChanged.
DF posits three possible explinations: 1) No one at Apple noticed the private API usage, 2) Apple noticed but turned a blind-eye, or 3) Apple approved the use of a private API. Citing sources, DF claims #3 to not be the case, and perhaps that’s why Google promoted the feature so heavily, and stirred up interest so high Apple would feel pressure to approve it (though we wonder if Steve Jobs’ Apple ever feels that type of pressure?)
By contrast, DF states #1 is not without precedence, while #2 would be grossly unfair to other developers, and either way, users may suffer if Apple makes changes to their private APIs (which is one of the reasons to keep them private after all).
So what do you think? Which scenario is most likely? And what would you rather, that developers (Google or not) use officially unsupported features if it means better apps but also apps that might just break when the next firmware drops?
UPDATE:
The New York Times gets clarification from Opera (via Daring Fireball):
“We stopped the work because of the prohibitive license,” to Mr. von Tetzchner wrote in an e-mail.
Turns out it was an internal project.
ORIGINAL POST:
So we, along with half the interwebs, picked up a paraphrased comment by Opera’s president that pretty much indicated Apple had rejected popular mobile browser Opera Mini from the App Store.
Well, John Gruber over at Daring Fireball did some digging and found out that it just ain’t so:
My understanding, based on information from informed sources who do not wish to be identified because they were not authorized by their employers is that Opera has developed an iPhone version of Opera Mini, they haven’t even submitted it to Apple, let alone had it be rejected.
(“Unique” by Hamed Masoumi, licensed under Creative Commons)
On Monday, TiPb Senior Editor Dieter Bohn debuted his new bi-weekly feature, TiPb of the Avalanche, by asking about the iPhone App Store and the “Long Tail” business model.
Looks like he’s not alone. PCalc developer James Thomson (via Daring Fireball) recounted his struggles with Apple’s new policy of listing Apps by original release dates, ignoring update dates, and forcing older Apps to the frozen hinterlands of the last few pages in a list growing well past 5500. Under the old model:
Sales started to slow down over time, but with each of the 1.0.1 and 1.0.2 updates they went back up into the stratosphere as PCalc moved to the front page of the Utilities section again.
And now?
As it stands, the App Store is too crowded to find anything if you don’t know exactly what you are looking for by name.
So while, according to Apple Insider, the App Store may still be climbing faster than iTunes Music did, GigaOm is pishing the posh on the iPhone bump in general.
During Apple’s Q4 conference call, Steve Jobs said that the App Store would reach 200 million downloads today spanning over 5500 Apps in 62 countries. How will Apple’s (continuing?) tweaks on App Store organization help or hinder developers moving forward? And will they, as Dieter is suggesting, have to start putting as much time, money, and effort into marketing as they do coding? Or are there no easy answers?
During Tuesday’s “Spotlight on Notebooks” Keynote, Steve Jobs wasn’t the only jean-and-dark-shirt uniformed Apple exec on stage. COO Time Cook took an unusual turn, discussing Mac business. SVP of Design, Jonathan Ive, an even more unusual presence in front of the audience, introduced the new “brick” unibody concept. And Marketing VP Phil Schiller — who’s no stranger to Keynotes — took part in the Q&A at the end.
It wasn’t all Steve, all the time.
Because of this, Gizmodo’s Jesus Diaz says Steve may be thinking of leaving in the near future, to live out his days on the beach, content that he’s shown investors and customers that Team Apple will Boom! along quite nicely without him, much as Microsoft is… er… doing without Gates in the daily driver’s seat:
Steve Jobs is leaving Apple. Not tomorrow, but probably very soon. That’s why he started to say good bye today, doing something more important than just presenting new MacBooks, MacBook Pros, and an updated MacBook Air. Today’s event was a play in which he clearly told everyone that the company is more than himself. Since the very first minute, when he immediately sat down to let Tim Cook talk, he was saying: “Hey, look, Apple is more than Steve. These are The Guys, the Goodfellas, the A-Team. They share the same vision I have. And they are going to push the company forward when I change my office chair for a hammock and caipirinhas on my private beach in Hawaii”.
Daring Fireball’s John Gruber, however, says Steve isn’t going anywhere. He points out that Jobs has shared the stage before, often letting adepts take the more highly specialized presentations, like introducing Leopard at WWDC. Gruber says:
But so long as he’s healthy, working at Apple is exactly the thing Jobs wants to do. He’s consumed by his work, and I think it’s only in the last two or three years that Apple has gotten to the point where Jobs feels he has a decent set of crayons at his disposal. In Jobs’s mind, the iPhone is only the beginning of what a truly flourishing Apple can produce. Why would he leave now? “A hammock and caipirinhas on a private beach” would be living hell for Steve Jobs.
We’re with Gruber on this one. While Diaz is saying what many of us were likely thinking during the show, Jobs doesn’t strike us as the casual CEO. His investment in Apple is lifelong. He’s not Woz, he’s the Wizard, and they’ll have to pry his hand off Apple’s perfectly balanced, aluminum and gloss black steering wheel if that’s ever going to change.
Daring Fireball has posted an interesting article that focuses on trust-issues developers have with Apple’s current App Store approval process. In a pod-shell, they can’t depend on Apple not to reject Apps they’ve invested time and money on, hence they are reluctant to develop the kind of Apps that require time and money, which are typically just the kind of innovative, mind-blowing Apps we really, really want them to develop and Apple not to reject. While DF’s solution is both simple and profound, it’s an analysis of just why Apple may have rejected PodCaster and MailWrangler, the two Apps whose rejection made manifest this developer fear:
The theory is that there is an unpublished rule that Apple — and in this case, where by “Apple” I really mean “Steven P. Jobs” — will not publish third-party apps that compete with or replace any of the four apps in the iPhone’s default “dock”: Phone, Mail, Safari, and iPod.
Why?
And so my guess is that while there may not be any logic, there’s at least a notion, if only in Jobs’s mind, that these four apps are sacrosanct because they define the iPhone. Everything else, both from Apple and from App Store developers, is piffle, secondary to those four apps.
While I remember there being another issue stated for MailWrangler’s rejection: that it didn’t allow users to edit their account information, it’s impossible to know at this point whether or not fixing that and resubmitting it to the App Store would have gotten the developer any further (though I hope he at least tried?)
What do you think? Could a lot of the current App-angst be traced back to Apple’s (and Steve Jobs’) holding the iPhone dock applications sacred? And if so, if they clearly stated in the SDK “Thou Shalt Place No Apps Before the Them”, would that go anywhere towards calming developer fears, or only increasing their frustration?
Daring Fireball points to this Twitter from Raven Zachary as a reason why developers will put up with Apple’s capricious and communication-challenged App Store:
Trism, the $5 gravity/tilt-assisted iPhone puzzle game by Steve Demeter, has made $250,000 since July 11.
We’re pointing to DF because they’re right.
And for more on the other side of the App Store debate, check out the latest episode of MacBreak Weekly from TWiT, where Scott and Alex take complaining developers to task, pointing to PodcasterGate as something that could threaten Apple’s revenue stream if Amazon or another major company sited it as precedence for releasing their own music catcher Apps, bypassing iTunes, instigating Apple shareholder lawsuits, and other corporate level intrigue.
Agree or disagree, all sides of the issue are definitely upping the debate. (And Trism may just have given one side 250K more arguments in their favor…)
Seems it wasn’t a hair that broke the blogerati’s back, it was an App. Or more precisely, it was Apple’s denial of the Podcaster App that let loose the floodgates of negative internet reaction. Or even more precisely, it is the continued lack of certainty among developers as to what can and will be denied by Apple, leading many to reconsider the return on investment of hours upon hours of coding with 11th hour rejection hanging perpetually over their heads, like a virtual Sword of Damocles.
According to Read Write Web, Podcaster will be turning to Ad Hoc to distribute their App for nowwhile everyone from Daring Fireball to Roughly Drafted cover (and in some cases, recover from) the various comments and implications flinging back and forth across the blogsphere, the New York Times has decided to escalate the attention level:
I can’t see how distributing the program will hurt Apple. If anything it will make the iPhone a tad more valuable. On the other hand, treating developers capriciously is most certainly going to discourage them from spending nights and weekends working on new and useful applications that may give more people reasons to buy an iPhone.
Sure, the App Store is growing twice as fast as iTunes Music (though starting from zero is an easy way to generate an opening curve), and may well hit a billion units moved by 2009, but with Android’s open marketplace on the horizon, and Microsoft me-too’ing their way in with Skymarket, there could be alternatives. If Apple doesn’t take a page from their MobileMe fiasco playbook and rapidly standardize and clarify the rules of the game, they could lose their early lead. And that could cost them the Mobile Internet Platform dominance they so currently crave.
Don’t get us wrong. It’s Apple’s platform and they, like a Nintendo with the Wii, have the absolute right to approve or deny anything developed for their platform. But developers have the same right to stop developing for a platform they don’t think serves their best interests. And consumers have the same right to stop buying it for the same reason. As with the Blacklist push-back, that will be the ultimate officiator of this debate.
And a terse one-line email from Steve may not fix things if Apple waits too long…
Om Malik says Apple is clueless about scaling MobileMe:
There is no-unified IT plan vis-a-vis applications; each has their own set of servers, IT practices and release scenarios. Developers do testing, load testing and infrastructure planning, all of which is implemented by someone else. There’s no unified monitoring system. They use Oracle on Sun servers for the databases and everything has its own SAN storage. They do not use active Oracle RAC; it is all single-instance, on one box, with a secondary failover. Apparently they are putting web servers and app servers on the same machines, which causes performance problems.
John Gruber retorts, with the US’ #1 online music retailer firmly in his corner:
But the iTunes Store does gangbuster traffic and has a terrific track record for uptime. The message I read from yesterday’s reorg that put MobileMe under Eddy Cue (Apple’s VP for iTunes) is that MobileMe could and should be as responsive and reliable as the iTunes Store.
The crazy thing is, MobileMe should have been an iTunes-learned breeze for Apple in terms of meeting service levels, given their pedigree. But then iTunes uses WebObjects (which I believe is old school Java-based) and MobileMe uses SproutCore (which is all dressed up in Ajax-y 2.0 objectivity), and the pretty much disastrous July 11th launch, which took down both iTunes iPhone activation, and slammed the MobileMe servers into weeks of problems, show something clearly is different with the new kit on the block.
Hopefully Cue will bring some of the iTunes luster to MobileMe, but only time will tell. What do you think? Which blog wins this round?
"
