The situation where any platform owner has a bug that impacts your software you should try as best you can to work around it because you never know if and when it will get fixed.
This bug, in particular is not a an easy thing to work around, I agree and maybe he did try all sorts of things but none of them worked, we don't know.
My point is - in the general case you should not rely on Apple fixing a bug to make your product work correctly.
There aren't many game concepts which work with just one button. Actually, having just one button is so absurd that people turned this particular limitation into a competition (similar to <=4kB and the like).
He should have learned to adapt instead of wait for a change that obviously wasn't going to happen.
The only choice is to do something completely different, but I can't think of anything that doesn't profoundly change the nature of the game (continuously jump makes a completely different game, use upward motion to jump will have a lot of false positives) and is basically an admission that a game that involves two buttons like this is simply impossible. And that's an unreasonable outcome.
(The continuously jumping game has interesting potential, but it is a different game. Plus I've think I've seen it way back in the day and it's very visually tiring.)
The entire article revolves around a bug that came about from an HTML5 game the author was working on.
> Almost two years ago I noticed a strange multitouch problem in Mobile Safari with one of my games.
TwistedWeasel has a valid point. OS X and iOS are not open source projects one can fork and submit patches to. Neither is Windows or Windows Mobile for that matter. If someone finds a bug, submitting a testcase and doing a lot of legwork is probably appreciated, but none of that will guarantee the bug will get fixed. Finding a workaround is a much better short term solution for the developer because they can continue on developing the way they need to and not have to wait for the black box of Apple's Radar to return a positive result. On some occasions, the developer might be able to search into WebKit to see if the problem is there, and submitting a bug report to that project might return more valid feedback. Significant portions of both OS X and iOS are available in source code form.
Is this ideal? No. Is it how it works? Yes. Can an everyday non-Apple engineer do anything about it? Not really.
Its this kind of behavior some of us strive to avoid on HN. http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I thought my remark was fairly civil. I was not trying to start an argument or flame war, and dedicated a significant portion of my reply to the topic of conversation and tried to be brief in reminding him/her about the reasons most of us visit HN over other news aggregating sites.