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It is being widely reported on the blogosphere that the US government has “okayed” jailbreaking of iPhones and expressly made it legal. In the interest of getting to the truth, I located the three year announcement on the Library of Congress website that seems to cover these exceptions for the DMCA . It is worth reading and interpret it as you will. The sections on software do not appear to inherently allow jailbreaking except within a narrow set of conditions for use – however it could be that other reports are based on information found from another source.

Recently visiting my daughter’s high school and their newly remodeled media focused building, I came to the realization that Apple has completely given up on teaching programming to kids. This will come to many as a complete surprise since Apple has a reputation for being the best solution for the K-12 market. Read the rest of this entry »

Despite that I have some very contrary views to Apple on handling their SDK licensing, I still like many Apple products.  For example, I think the Mac Mini is about the best value desktop computer available.  It packs a huge amount of value into a nice looking and, more importantly, very small case. I noticed something very odd this morning though when following a link from Macintouch to Apple.com to check out the specs of the just announced update to the Mac Mini – accessing the Apple.com website from my Windows based, non Safari browser was extremely slow. Could this be intentional? Read the rest of this entry »

Now widely reported, the Groundhog Software and publishing partner Shifty Jelly App Store app MyFrame was deleted from the App Store with no warning. The reason finally given after writing Steve Jobs was “We are not allowing apps that create their own desktops. Sorry.”  On a smaller scale, this demonstrates again that Apple has a hidden set of standards it will use on anyone it perceives to be a competitor or, possibly contrary to its own goals. iPhone and iPad developers should take this as a warning that after spending months developing your application, you could run up against a hidden or competitively motivated response from Apple that will entirely negate your investment.

Steve, it isn’t that you have these policies that is the problem, especially if they were in place when you made it possible to develop for iPhone. The problem is that these changes and decisions come from some hidden agenda, and that any developer at any time could be excised for doing nothing more than following your own guidelines.

Around the Internet: Slashdot | Reddit | The Guardian | Macworld Australia | TechCrunch

At the recent D8 Conference, Steve Jobs continues his tired HTML 5 vs Flash smokescreen.It doesn’t take a high school education to see that HTML 5 is an unfinalized standard for rendering web pages, whereas Flash is a cross platform tool set which supports deep integration with an operating system. I am going to start tracking the HTML 5 vs Flash argument in more detail – but first, let me call attention to that portion of Steve Job’s Thought’s on Flash that very clearly spell out that this isn’t about HTML 5 at all. Read the rest of this entry »

Kevin Miller, CEO of Runtime Revolution writes about how Apple is harming the software industry in CIO Magazine in the UK. Says Kevin Miller:

Whilst we understand the reasons behind Apple’s decision, we cannot ignore the opportunity that presents itself. That opportunity is Google’s Android platform and Apple may have given its rival a new set of fans with a point to prove.

It is clear that Steve Jobs would like to keep all eyes trained on his HTML 5 vs Flash smokescreen argument. HTML 5 is just being implemented and it simply cannot deliver all the functionality of Flash, though it can be used to deliver media in ways that Flash does – like audio and video. But Flash is much more than that. Just like the argument is not HTML 5 vs Flash but Apple vs Cross Platform tools that include Flash, but also include tools like Runrev, REALbasic and Unity.

Apple supporter and more recently, MacWorld journalist John Gruber on DaringFireball has given some coverage to how Apple has squashed RevMobile for iPhone and iPad. You’ll recall that RevMobile was to bring deployment of Runrev applications to iPhone and iPad. It was also the top topic for a day over on Slashdot as iPhone SDK Agreement Shuts Out HyperCard Clone. Read the rest of this entry »

Planned obsolescence or “Designed to Fail” planning happens in the technology market. In the software business though, it isn’t always the software vendor doing the planning but your hardware or operating system vendor. Read the rest of this entry »

Technology reporter Dennis Sellers wrote an interesting piece on Macsimum News on a survey in regards to iPhone developers and on the margin split of 30/70%  on sales -  Survey: 30/70 revenue split is unfair. Dennis also brings up some interesting points about what developers really want, though based on margin realities in retail, its likely they would want what they do even if the split were different. Read the rest of this entry »

There is an interesting discussion about the history of Mac OS development. Most prehistoric mac apps originated a couple of steps before xcode. Don’t forget that Codewarrior saved Apple when Apple moved to the PPC architecture and the available tools for it were simply terrible. Before Codewarrior – ancient history. Quite a few apps still around originated on Apple’s interfaceless MSW (sorry, I only tried it once) or even Symantec’s Think tools. Read the rest of this entry »