If you need to "originally" write your code in Swahili, while listening to Milli Vanilli, while reclining in a patch of mud, and then you need fifty oompa loompas to translate the Swahili into C, that is none of Steve Jobs fucking business.
I’m a principled person. Apple’s offended my principles. Consequently, I’ve decided to abandon iPhone development. I won’t work in this ask-permission environment any longer.
What happens if the iPhone application you’ve based a business on is found to depend on a library that is forbidden with iPhone OS 4? Do you start over or give up? A lot of developers are asking themselves that question today.
You know how you tell when an app for the iPhone was written in MonoTouch? It doesn’t leak memory.
It’s hard to build a business on a platform where you feel like you cannot trust the men in power. If they can take down Adobe a few days before the launch of their flagship product, what hope do smaller players hold?
They can ship their own product and give it away till you go bust, then start charging for it; and use secret APIs you can’t see; and they can break the published APIs you use. All of these things have historically been done by platform vendors.
Either way, nobody likes stepping in shit. And nobody likes cleaning up shit. So the whole interaction starts off on the wrong foot, perhaps the one covered in shit. Your job, as developer or as reporter, is to deliberately steer it back to being a positive one where the developer wants to fix shit and the reporter wants to continue to report shit.
Code up top for quick reference, details down below—we’ll prepare typefaces for use on the web, go through @font-face CSS line-by-line, and get the experts’ take on browser support.
Download hundreds of prepackaged @font-face kits
Apple puts itself in an untenable position trying to play gatekeeper while simultaneously having such a broad and deep marketplace structure. It's like watching a character from Alice in Wonderland attempt to beat Kurt Godel at a game of chess by trying to change the rules faster than those rules can be exploited.
So what Apple does not want is for some other company to establish a de facto standard software platform on top of Cocoa Touch. Not Adobe’s Flash. Not .NET (through MonoTouch). If that were to happen, there’s no lock-in advantage.
Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine, and only code written in C, C++, and Objective-C may compile and directly link against the Documented APIs (e.g., Applications that link to Documented APIs through an intermediary translation or compatibility layer or tool are prohibited).
In the end, progress doesn't care about ideology. Those who think of themselves as great fans of progress, of technology's inexorable march forward, will change their tune as soon as progress destroys something they care deeply about.
If memory-starved tablets become ubiquitous, we’re looking at a future in which there are “normal” computers, and then “special” computers for creative people.
It's ironic that a company whose name is synonymous with "Switch" has built its entire product strategy around lock-in. The iTunes/iPhone/iPod combo is a roach-motel: customers check in, but they can't check out.
The way you improve your iPad isn't to figure out how it works and making it better. The way you improve the iPad is to buy iApps. Buying an iPad for your kids isn't a means of jump-starting the realization that the world is yours to take apart and reassemble; it's a way of telling your offspring that even changing the batteries is something you have to leave to the professionals.
We’re not in the age of CD-ROMs now. Our price-points are all over the shop, and a sealed environment like the iPad permits all kinds of unnatural pricing inversions. We’ll pay more for a ringtone than a full MP3. We pay $10 for a README file on our Amazon Kindle, and a dollar for a pocket application that plays farts.
Now in 2010, the iPad takes the same ideas to their logical extreme. It is a beautiful and nearly perfect machine. It is also Jobs' final triumph, the final step in Apple's evolution away from Wozniak and toward a closed model.
Categorically that the most expensive question a manager can ask is "What are you working on?"
Imagine clicking “send” for an email message and watching your message appear in a brief queue. Perhaps it counts down about ten seconds before sending, more than enough time to cancel an erroneous send, but little enough time in the scope of e-mail communication as to not interfere with normal usage.
If we want mobile applications to stay around as a sustainable business, we need to be more honest about the strengths and weaknesses of a touchscreen UI, rather than salivating about an imaginary realm of unnamed possibilities.
We’re making changes to how :visited works in Firefox. We’re not sure what release this will be part of yet and the fixes are still making their way through code review, but we wanted to give a heads up to people as soon as we understood how we wanted to approach fixing this.