Duplicating Apple functionality? Well, not so much.
Posts Tagged ‘iPod touch’
Another Apple App Store rejection
Saturday, September 20th, 2008Some Geek In Tennessee on the App Store
Wednesday, September 17th, 2008I hope he’s wrong, but it’s probably a vain hope. Some Geek In Tennessee recaps the disappointments Apple’s App Store.
Fraser Speirs on iPhone development
Friday, September 12th, 2008Fraser Speirs is dropping out of new application development on the iPhone, and I don’t blame him:
Apple’s current practice of rejecting certain applications at the final hurdle – submission to the App Store – is disastrous for investor confidence. Developers are investing time and resources in the App Store marketplace and, if developers aren’t confident, they won’t invest in it.
This is something I’ve been struggling with as well. Every time I convince myself that I have a good product idea, another developer goes public with an iPhone application rejection. You’re fooling yourself if you think we’ve heard all of the rejections.
Apple has really screwed this up.
MobileMe: Thumbs down
Friday, July 25th, 2008I’ve been playing with MobileMe for about a week. The vision has expanded since I last looked at .Mac, but it’s still nowhere near ready. Unreliable push contacts on the iPod touch are not worth the grief or the money.
One day, though. Maybe.
One App At a Time… Always?
Friday, March 14th, 2008Gruber at Daring Fireball writes about the restriction of one application at a time on the iPhone. Read it before you go on.
Writing a background task for Touch OS X would be very, very hard. Well, actually, not so much hard as taking a lot of skill, time and effort. I can really understand why Apple wouldn’t want just anyone doing it. But before I get too stressed over it, it’s worth asking a few questions:
First, what kind of program does this actually affect? Not many, probably. In fact, basically, polling network software or network software that receives pushes is the most common scenario.1 An instant messenger program is an obvious example; it needs to keep the connection alive and plays some sort of beep when a message comes in.
So we’ve established a program this affects. Now it’s worth asking a second question: Is it possible this rule is up for negotiation? At the right price, would it go away? And if so, what might the right price be?
- An application that background operation is critical to.
- An application that Apple thinks is important enough to be worth the resources on the iPhone and the effort. Because make no mistake, it’s going to take effort from Apple.
- Doing the work on campus with an Apple engineer’s help.
- Payment for the engineer, possibly to be waived in some cases.
In short, if I was to write a program that beeped on the hour, I probably wouldn’t get an exception. I wouldn’t even know who to ask. But AOL Instant Messenger? That might happen. AOL might not even have to ask.2
In short, as developers we need to worry more about we are going to do, than what someone like AOL is going to do.
iPhone App Store
Friday, March 7th, 2008Craig Hockenberry writes Hello App Store. Not sure I agree that $99 is too low, though. I think most of those who downloaded the SDK will never buy a signing key.
iPod touch SDK beta
Thursday, March 6th, 2008I’ve downloaded it and looked over some of the samples. There’s a lot of stuff that can be done with it, but a lot that can’t.
The sticking point is that the most interesting part of the iPod touch is the accelerometer, which the simulator doesn’t provide. So you need to actually test on real hardware. But you can’t test on real hardware without signing up for the iPhone developer program, which isn’t available to Canadians. So, basically, I can’t write code that uses the accelerometer.
That’s no big deal, though. At least as long as keys are available before June when the SDK comes out of beta. The accelerometer is the icing on the cake for the first thing I want to work on.
32GB iPod touch
Tuesday, February 5th, 2008Apple’s quietly (so far) introduced a 32GB version of the iPod touch. I thought 16GB would be too small, but it actually seems to be just right for me.
A theory on the $20 iPod touch application update
Wednesday, January 23rd, 2008As you’ve heard by now unless you don’t follow anything iPod-related, Apple put out an application update for the iPod touch. It costs $20 and adds a bunch of useful new applications. Generally accepted reasoning is that the Sarbanes-Oxley Act is to blame for Apple charging for it. A great recap on that argument is here.
Which begs the question that if the 802.11n enabler was $2, why was the application update $20? Why not $2? The generally accepted reason is Apple are charging what people will pay1.
I’d like to float a different theory. This is a complete wild guess, mind you, but since I’m currently watching progress bars in another window I have very little else to do but type crazy theories.
I think Apple is charging $20 so they can realize the revenue using a subscription model without it looking ridiculous on paper. Why might they want to do this? Because then they can add additional features to anyone who’s paid the $20 without accounting problems.
This would have been stupid for the 802.11n enabler. There are quite simply no more magic hardware features to pull out of the hat. Any new features, then, will be unarguably software, and will probably come in the form of a for-fee 10.6 “Lion”2.
I guess we’ll know when Apple adds features that aren’t simply updates and fixes to the shipped applications. My theory is that it’ll be free for anyone who purchased the application upgrade, and not available to those who haven’t.
What does it matter? Well, you need to look at what major feature is on the horizon for the iPod touch.
Third party applications.
Yeah, it’s hard to argue that supporting third party applications isn’t a major new feature.
So my prediction, and I’ve been wrong many times before, is simple: Installing a third party application will require that you have installed the “application update” and paid the $20 fee.
Because here at tewha.net, we’re not afraid to make wild-assed guesses based on no facts at all.
I want my ↩!
Thursday, October 18th, 2007Curiously, the iPhone and iPod touch are missing the ↩ glyph1. I’m sure it’s missing because Apple never thought anyone would use it, but it’s being used as a footnote return character by John Gruber, Allen Pike and mx, among thousands2 more.
Apple does respond to feedback, so it’s worth asking. If you’ve got an iPod touch, file feedback here. If you’ve got an iPhone, the feedback site is here.