No Shit in the App Store? Oh Please
designbygravity.wordpress.com
designbygravity.wordpress.com
"Few will remember, but, when the Mac debuted in 1984, there were no arrow keys on the keyboard. That was a big deal. Almost every application then in existence depended on the arrow keys (then called cursor keys) for navigation. With that one stroke, Steve reduced the number of apps that could be easily ported to the Mac from tens of thousands to zero, ensuring that this new computer would have a long and painful childhood.
Steve’s button mania, which grew from his earlier parts-count mania, was already in full flower, and many have ascribed this crippling omission to some sort of self-destructive obsession. It was not. It was one of several strategies specifically designed to ensure that existing software would not run on this new machine because existing software, in Steve’s eyes, sucked (an opinion I share). The absence of those four keys ensured that any developer who wanted to have software appear on the Mac was going to have to start over and write software that conformed to the Mac interface, not the keyboard-oriented precursors to MS-DOS.
Steve’s fearless crippling of that original Mac saved that computer and saved the graphical user interface." [2]
There are likely still places where sh!t will get you past someone's laughable idea of a profanity filter.
But like I said in a comment earlier today, I'll gladly welcome a lack of 'quality' for a nice big helping of choice as a consumer.
I don't understand the thought process that leads to the conclusion that since there are low quality apps in the AppStore, Apple should go out of their way to bring even more of it in.
Also, Apple would get a world of crap if they decided to add something as arbitrary as taste policing to their AppStore review process.
It's more like Apple doesn't want meta-platforms on top of iPhone PS for completely different reasons (control, independence, etc), and aren't willing to compromise because nothing about more cross-platform shovelware intrigues them.
The AppStore is at a place right now where quantity is not an issue; quality is, so that's what they're going to optimize for. Who knows, maybe they'd be more welcoming of cross-platform apps if the AppStore had a quantity-problem (probably not, if history is anything to go by).
And it's silly to ask why Apps are censored but movies/music/TV isn't. The answer's obvious - iTunes includes parental controls for media that allow for blocking content based on industry-standard ratings, and there's no such rating/control system for apps. If the App Store contains a Daily Tits Calendar App, then parents have to completely block their kids from getting apps from the App Store themselves, whereas parents can let kids buy PG-13 stuff in the iTunes store without worrying about them buying R-rated movies or explicit songs.
Also, not to sound like a broken record, but Playboy app is there and doing well.
That's true, but it doesn't really apply to games, where even "native" apps almost always use their own UIs. And it doesn't apply at all to frameworks like MonoTouch, which call exactly the same native UI methods that ObjC apps do.
It's a power grab pure and simple. Flash is the primary target, Android is secondary, and if as a tertiary effect it reduces the percentage of crap apps, that's a nice bonus.
Flash CS5 isn't going to be used to build the next big application. It will, however, be very useful for creating (or porting) games and other multimedia experiences. The iPhone 4G will likely have a higher resolution screen and Flash itself mostly resolution independent -- it might not take long for Adobe to update CS5 and all those developers could have 4G ready high-res apps in less time than it takes an Objective-C developers to fire up Photoshop. It's really not as simple as you make it out to be.
> Do previously submitted applications using Apple's APIs directly automatically inherit the camera switch button?
Most likely not.
> Is the user going to sit there fumbling with the app annoyed that they can't use the features of the new phone they bought?
It's been mentioned many times when discussing Apple's rule changes that developers and apps are easily replaceable. If Joe Developer doesn't update his app, it'll just be replaced by another app by another developer.
Right, because Adobe has always been known for the speed and quality of its updates, especially on the Mac platform.
Typically, you'd use the technology that supports the things you want to do. If you want to program a 3d shooter, at the time being you wouldn't choose HTML 5 as the underlying technology. For a Twitter client HTML 5 might be preferable to OpenGL. Likewise, if your app needs a camera, you'd pick a framework that supports a camera.
Also, even if you don't use the Apple SDK, you would still have to use the Apple API, so you would still get all the benefits of the Apple UI anyway.