tewha.net

Gruber 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?

1. An application that background operation is critical to.
2. 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.
3. Doing the work on campus with an Apple engineer’s help.
4. 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.

1. Time-based software is also a possibility, but let’s discard that for the moment. [↩]
2. Although I doubt they have anything running in the background at this point. For the purposes of a prototype/demo, a simple, customized back end would make more sense. [↩]

Craig 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.

I’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.

Apple’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.

As 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.

1. Which is sort of a nice way of saying Apple is a bunch of greedy jerks in this case, given that we paid a pretty large price for the iPod touch not too long ago [↩]
2. Name pulled out of the air. [↩]

Curiously, 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.

1. If you see a box it’s still missing [↩]
2. ten thousands? [↩]