Steve Jobs Doesn't Want Shit In His App Store, And Neither Do I | Hacker News Reader

Steve Jobs Doesn't Want Shit In His App Store, And Neither Do I

flyosity.com

17 pointsraptrex19 comments

I have collected screenshots of 39 apps from the App Store: http://nativegui.posterous.com/ It's just a small fraction of what you can find there. I think they are all written in Objective-C. Now, what's the argument again?

FWIW, not all of those apps are using native UI components. Some have their own that are drawn.

Are we really still having this discussion?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1255858

I'd like to think that both sides are clear -

Steve Jobs - "We’ve been there before, and intermediate layers between the platform and the developer ultimately produces sub-standard apps and hinders the progress of the platform."

My point of view said well by the author of the article I linked - "Crappy developers will make crappy apps regardless of how many layers there are, and it doesn’t make sense to limit source-to-source conversion tools like Unity3D and others. They’re all building apps through the iPhone developer tools in the end so the situation isn’t even comparable to the Mac where applications can completely avoid using Apple’s frameworks by replacing them with others."

At this point I think we've reached the point of "agree to disagree", where neither side is going to change the other's mind.

This is the first time I hear that Steve Jobs quote and I think I must add: Yes Steve you have been there before and when you were there before you had a practical monopoly on the PC market and you lost it.

Since I'm not sure the Blog owner is going to clear my comment there, I'll repost here as well.

Your logic is flawed in that you assume that "meta-platforms" can only produce crappy non-Apple like applications. This is simply not true.

The world is going cross platform and it's time to get on the bus. The risk Apple runs now is whether the iPhone becomes 'not worth it' to develop for anymore. Any developer knows that having to maintain X code bases for X platforms only hamstrings your productivity to your end users because of the overhead. I personally like to target more than one user set for my products.

It's interesting how the crack down came well AFTER the platform was an established brand, not when it launched. Had Steve Jobs only cared about purity of the platform they would have established the rules up front. They didn't do this because that would have been a huge roadblock to platform adoption and iPhone app base would not have grown to anywhere near the size it is now. Instead they choose to implement new rules now that they have an attractive user base and a "locked in" developer base. This is not about purity, this is singularly about control.

Sorry, haven't approved any yet as I'm in an airport without wifi. I'd never not publish a comment just because someone puts me in my place :)

No worries at all! Saw your tweet after I posted here. Thanks!

Truth is nobody knows shit about what Steve Jobs wants or about what the directions Apple has taken.

For all I care, this might be a maneuver to get rid of both the external competition (Android, WinMo, Symbian) and the internal one ... reducing developers on their platforms to mere contractors that are doing their bidding.

And you can't prove that I'm wrong because neither you nor I know shit about it.

So stop apologizing for them. If you believe their choices are for better quality, quality can speak by itself and nobody needs you rationalizations on the matter. It's as if you're defending your own choices and directions, which shows you have doubts.

On the other hand the bitching and moaning of mistreated customers (yeah, we are also customers) might do some good.

We keep hearing this argument, but it simply cannot survive the facts of the App store.

After searching for 'fart', I stopped counting at 30 items. Are we supposed to believe that Objective C source code and Cocoa Touch style somehow turn this crapware into elegant masterpieces of 21st century design?

This is a valid argument, but you can find plenty of data to back the counter argument if you want to. Take a look at the "crapware" on the internet as a whole - all of it to a good approximation is made with Flash. Likewise, to a good approximation every AAA game and major software package (MS Office, operating systems etc.) released in the last 20 years was written with C or C++. I'm not saying this data is more appropriate (it isn't) but it is still worth noting that, at least historically, C/C++ was used for the best quality software and that rapid application development is almost directly responsible for the large amount of poor quality software available today.

This guy uses jQuery on some of his sites. The language used in jQuery's selectors is a superset of CSS. That's right, it's not CSS. jQuery is translating/interpreting that new language for you. jQuery is more than just JavaScript it's an interpreter/compiler for a new language. (FYI, not allowed by Apple's rules).

For some reason when this guy target multiple browsers using jQuery it's OK. But when other developers target multiple platforms he calls the end result "shit" and tells them to get the hell out of his AppStore.

  jQuery is translating/interpreting that new language
  for you. jQuery is more than just JavaScript it's an
  interpreter/compiler for a new language.

What? Care to explain what does jQuer "compile" your "new language" to? The fact that jQuery uses CSS syntax to target DOM elements does not turn it into compiler. Or are you saying that it somehow runs the selector?

Because jQuery's selectors are a superset of CSS, there is no browser that supports them. So something must must be parsing them and interpreting their meaning.

That means jQuery has a built in interpreter. Now, if jQuery ever turns that selector text into a slightly more efficient internal representation before it gets executed, then it has compiled the selector language to some intermediate form.

Another example is regular expressions. For example, any time you use a regular expression, your expression gets compiled into a NFA or DFA. Your input text is then is "run" on that machine.

Sorry, but you are talking nonsense. jQuery uses CSS3 syntax (most browsers understand this syntax just fine) plus some extra. Selector in jQuery is just a parameter. If I tic-tac-toe which has function t3(position, value) and pass call it t3("top left", "x") would you claim that "top left" somehow is compiled and executed? Really, how do you execute CSS selector? jQuery uses sizzle (http://sizzlejs.com) as CSS selector library, it parses CSS and returns elements matched but it does not run anything. Or do you think that Apple really did ban parsing of parameters passed to JavaScript functions? On the other hand I'd love to see iPhone app written in CSS selectors.

If you look at the source code for Sizzle, and know something about compilers and virtual machines, you'll see that the Expr object is modeled as as set of VM instructions. chunker is a regular expression that "tokenizes" the selector into sets of instructions. The appropriate VM instruction is then run for each chunk inside a loop in the Sizzle function.

That's my explanation for how these selectors are, in fact, a language that is compiled and executed.

Sorry, but if you knew what you are talking about, you would not call a parser with callbacks a compiler with VM. Maybe SAX parsers are also compilers and run some VM? What does parsed CSS selector compile to? Where is that VM and what does it run? Bytecode?

Sizzle is just a parser what parses given selector into parts, gets matchin DOM elements, filters them and returns what matches. There is no compilation or virtual machines involved, just some string parsing, callbacks and DOM API.

Saying the initial programming language has anything to do with creating an "iPhone-like" UI is laughable.

Apple wants the conversation to be about Steve Jobs and not their shitty products. It's working.

I agree with this completely! I think that 3.3.1 will make it easier to find good apps, and that alone will help keep Apple on top.

If Apple's policies are incorrect, people will switch increasingly to competing platforms. But that's not going to happen, because Apple makes great stuff! Other companies could do it, too - if they copied Apple's principles, and not just random features or random visual elements.

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