Steve Jobs, circa 2020: "Thoughts on country roads"
startuptrekking.com
startuptrekking.com
Far away from this setting, in the more urban environments, there is a phenomenon where consumers take vehicles - even those that might otherwise be suitable for these roads - and they modify them to make them exceedingly unfit by lowering the suspension. It has been going on for so long that the song "Low Rider" by the band War is used as a cliched reference to the 70s.
I know of someone, in the 2000s, who had a terrible time finding an apartment because his Jetta, modified at great expense, couldn't survive an apartment with speed-bumps in the parking lot. Not long afterward, he totaled his car - going over a speed bump he did not see.
At the other end of the suspension-spectrum we have millions of SUVs on the road, many of them capable of taking all manner of abuse, only to be driven exclusively on concrete to tame destinations like grocery stores and shopping malls. These vehicles are a suburban male peacock display: the suspension serves no function other than to signal virility.
I'm not trying to extend the analogy by mentioning any of this. But I do think that if we're looking to the automobile industry for guidance we should probably take note of the diversity and realize that there's probably room in the mobile computer space for devices without Flash.
People who want the full road can still buy traditional cars, right?
Vote with your dollar.
I've considered some passive "beacons", shaped as nails, to be placed in roads, that can outline the lanes, complete with information about direction, speed-limits, exits etc. A smart car should be able to use those, along with a (ra|li)dar, to provide automated steering on equipped roads.
Part of this is just a failing of the analogy; Apple has much tighter control over their platform than they ever could over roads networks.
Many, many people live in areas where they could get away with using public transit only, most of them still own cars because sometimes they still need or want them. Only I can know whether I need to drive on gravel roads, and even I won't know whether I will need to in the future.
If I think Flash is a nuisance, (and I do) I am free to avoid it. But I don't want Steve Jobs or any company making such decisions for me. Jobs is free to sell his phones with whatever policy he wants, and I'm free to think that he sucks for it.
But today, when I want to turn on to a country road / visit a site with Flash, the iCar / iPad won't let me. I, as a consumer, don't care what that ugly/bumpy thing might evolve into. I care whether I can access it right now.
By the way, I own both an iPhone and an iPad, and I like them. It's just that sometimes I wish I could drive them onto "bumpy roads".
Flash developers are unique people as well because it is a unique tool that merges code and design. Try Neave out if you haven't: http://www.neave.com/ Flash Earth, planetarium, the rebirth of slick. This stuff won't be cross browser in html5 for years, especially webcam, mic projects.
This work is being reimplemented in html5/canvas/svg and it has added benefits.
The problem with the analogy is that all Apple has to do to allow the iCar to run on country roads, is allow people to steer onto it. To get flash onto the iPhone/iPad, they have to allow a completely different development team to run code on the root user of their device. They would have to change the OS, to allow unproven code to run, from a company who can't even get the desktop version to work well.
It is about telling the user where they can and cannot go.
We wouldn't accept that in a car for any reason.
Wanna go to Yosemite, great! But that parking lot isn't paved, so you can't stop there. You can drive by and see the rest of it from the highway though!
Oh, that highway is nice and paved, but it leads to google and some fancy voice technology they built. I'm sure as a driver you'd like to see it, but you'll just have to stick to our roads and roads that don't compete with us on any level.
Really? I see these on the road all the time and I would have no trouble whatsoever finding a road they couldn't handle.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_(automobile)
Consumers do, in fact, willingly buy cars that limit their travels. Heck, a lot of people willingly buy cars that don't have enough oomph to take an entirely paved route over the rocky mountains.
'maybe' a Smart car shouldn't go on an unpaved road, but that decision isn't made for you by the manufacturer, or anybody else. You're free to take the Smart car you purchased anywhere you want.
If your objection rests upon such a distinction, then shouldn't we be a bit more disciplined about exactly who the restriction is being placed upon?
You imply that it's a restriction against the person buying the phone, but this is not the case. They have no such restrictions placed upon them. Section 3.3.1 is in the Terms of Service for the App Store, not in a license for the phone. It is the developer who it restricts, not the owner of the device.
Bingo!
It's like if an Italian suite maker somehow made it impossible for you to eat a hot dog while wearing the suite, because of the increased risk of getting mustard on the suite, thus ruining the experience of wearing the perfect suite. Look, I paid for the suite, I know that eating some foods will increase the probability that the suite will be soiled, and, I want to be allowed to make the decision whether or not to take that risk.
This upsets the people who understand the risks associated with eating hotdogs while wearing their suits, while protecting other suit-wearers who don't appreciate the risk of soiling.
The problem with this analogy is that while any reasonable person can foresee condiment spillage, the average consumer is utterly unaware of the tradeoffs that Apple appears to be concerned about. Nor should they need to be.
All of the goals Jobs mentioned in the article could be achieved just as easily by imposing those restrictions on the App Store, but still allowing users to install apps on their own. Apple's policies are harmful to its users compared to the alternatives.
With that said, a car that couldn't drive on rural roads would make sense if it drove itself, but required infrastructure that wasn't universal.
Also, real infrastrucures are a bit distant than web-infrasctructures. I mean, Google could possibly switch it's search engine from XYZ platform to ABC platform in a matter of months (made up numbers), try to switch road infrastructures of a country.
I don't understand this point of view, you want less choice? Maybe you miss your mommy making decisions for you?
Lotus (say) isn't saying you can't drive here or there, they just build cars that happen not to be suitable for a given activity. A passable analogy since car manufacturers have far less ongoing control might be Lotus voiding the warranty for your Elise if you took it on a rough track.
In any case, if that choice is not one you're comfortable with don't buy $PRODUCT, problem solved.
Another car analogy (which cuts both ways) I can think of is the Nissan GTR -- it has a speed limiter built in that stops you going over a certain speed on normal roads -- but then when you are on a racetrack all limits are off.
You have three choices: Buy Apple and color within the lines. Buy Apple and jailbreak, lose stability in favor of features. Buy Android.
Frankly I find it difficult to muster much outrage over Jobs' tyrannical jihad against openness (or whatever) when there are so many available alternatives. Many people are quite content with a walled garden approach; castigating Apple for taking their money seems backwards.
And OS 9.
And built-in modems.
Surprisingly, nobody misses them.
Yawn. More histrionic nerd-posturing. It will be forgotten soon enough.
And as another poster wrote, we can always vote with our dollars.
How else could one be said to have "killed" Turing equivalence unless it didn't remain after other source languages were excluded?
Melodrama trumps computer science today?
(As I understand it, JavaScript doesn't belong on the list. It's permitted, but some of the Cocoa Touch API isn't accessible, so it's not really a substitute for the others.)
Your opinion of the languages does not trump the reality that the overwhelming majority of iPhone OS applications were written in them, as was the OS itself, even when it was not a requirement. Trying to make it sound like recent changes to the App Store agreement are the only reason people use Objective-C is a big stretch.
Melodrama: (noun) a sensational dramatic piece with exaggerated characters and exciting events intended to appeal to the emotions. Language, behavior, or events that resemble drama of this kind.
This is exactly like a "Won't somebody think of the children?" appeal. What else do you call it when the company rejects both a programming tool and a dictionary for "bad language?"
If you want to make a case that they are making emotionally overwrought appeals, you should have the decency to provide a direct quote to make your case. Abusing quotations marks by putting them around your own subjective interpretation just tells me that you've got nothing to offer.
(see http://www.macruby.org/)
That is, if you had a floppy disk that you had to read, there was a workaround, even if Macs stopped supporting them natively.
There is no adapter/peripheral/workaround to view some website with Flash that you want to view. (Unless you consider it a workaround to carry, alongside your iPad, a laptop so that you can view websites that haven't yet transitioned to HTML5)
Built-in modems aren't dead, they are still on a surprisingly number of laptops.
He killed OS 9 so he could sell OS X. That's like saying Microsoft killed Win95. That's planned obsolescence.
Overall, as a developer I'm highly in favor of open platforms, language choice, etc. However, I can't help but thinking that a tightly controlled application space the way that Apple has maintained so far is what has helped make the iPhone and iPad successful. One thing I notice on android is the lack of consistency in UIs. Sometimes the back button takes me back a screen in an App - sometimes it dumps me back to the Home screen. Sometimes it dumps me back to the last App I was using.
The iPhone apps tend to look relatively uniform UI wise and behave as expected. Encouraging the idea of cross platform apps means you start to get less and less "platform integration". It means we end up with 4 or 5 smartphone platforms none of which have any advantage because they're all running inconsistent crap.
I want my hardware + software platforms to be able to be unique and tailored towards themselves. I have seen very few truly cross platform apps which actually work well. iTunes itself is a great example - it acts weirdly and looks woefully out of place on Windows. It's the ugly duckling, and it behaves like someone chopped one of it's legs off.
The benefits of tailoring software to a particular platform should be obvious, and I much prefer them.