Code Design Has To Be Slick Politics
Evil Apple contd.
As a follow-up on this, Nullriver has now officially declared that Apple banned their application from the App store. The disturbing thing is this part:
We are seeing a lot of similar reports from various developers who’s applications were abruptly removed and banned from the AppStore without any violations of the terms of service.
This behaviour (on part of Apple) is incredibly arrogant and unprofessional, and it discredits the platform for developers. Would you invest in the development of an app if you knew that someone else could later pull it off the market on a whim?
The most amazing thing is how they manage to pull this off – obviously the Mac fanboys are willing to go through anything…
Edit: It continues: Apple also refuses applications for no other reason than that they compete with iTunes. It even stirred up some bad press. Apples solution: Make the rejection letters confidential.
And even more: Seems that email clients aren’t allowed either. Oh, and not only do they want to have the last word on the App Store, but they’ll also rescind your ability to distribute your application by other means.
Between Freedom and Coolness
I love my Mac. It’s slick. I’m almost in line to buy an iPhone (here in Italy it almost makes sense).
Still I admit that Apple, as a company, is probably one of the most evil there is.
This post from Coding Horror sums up some of it: People give up control over their devices, trading it in for a good user experience.
But even if people will flock on the side of coolness instead of freedom: Locking down your customers’ devices is an unacceptable practice and ought to be outlawed.
Update: It seems they can even remotely kill applications from your device. In the, it’s much preferable to have a solution like Nokia/Symbian that is based on technical criteria. It also asks for confirmations of sensitive operations. Apple goes the path of “give us full control, we take care” – after you go through their “review” you can do things like accessing the address book without the user ever noticing.
Law and morality
While I don’t usually bother too much with television, I’ve used an open source software called “TV Browser” for a while. It’s a nice little piece of software, giving you a electronic program guide right on your desktop.
This week, we were checking out the Italian TV (which can be quite odd, but that’s another story). The point is that the TV Browser doesn’t contain any Italian channels. To my astonishment I also discovered that, by design, the software doesn’t support importing the quite common XMLTV format.
The reason (according to the developers) is that some of the “grabber” scripts included in XMLTV may not be legal to use in some jurisdictions. Thus the origin of some xmltv data files might be questionable. Thus the TV Browser people don’t provide any generic support for the XMLTV data format. Because, possibly, maybe, could it be used by some people to view “illegal” data.
It pisses me off to no end, and not only for selfish reasons.
Passwords, logins and OpenId
The software that I’m currently developing will use OpenId to provide a single login for multiple sites. If you haven’t heard of this yet, OpenId is the newest, coolest (at least in the eyes of the “Web 2.0″ crowd…) thing for “single-sign-on”. Meaning that you only have to remember one password for all your web sites.
The whole thing works like this: You go to a page where you log in. You provide your OpenId url (which is the same as your user name) You are sent to your OpenId provider. You log in to your OpenId provider. You go back to the original website, and now you’re logged in. The idea is that you only have to log in one time to get access to all your web services.
It got a bit of a hype now, since some of the big players announced “support” for it.
So I checked out this toy, and I found that there are already a lot of providers, and a lot of libraries to add support to your own web application. You can also have a plugin for WordPress, Trac, you name it…
So I got an OpenId account, installed a plugin on my blog And disabled it again.
The Rails Cult from the outside
When I was back for the new year, I (of course) noticed Zed Shaw’s rant about the Rails community. Even the Italian Rails mailing list opened a little thread about it. It seems that the man really had to vent.
Zed is opinionated, and he’s got some balls – which is actually why I contacted him for the Rails to Italy keynote in the first place. After meeting him in person I have to say that he’s a really friendly guy and was fun to have around.
I kind of enjoyed the rant because, hey, it was fun. Maybe that’s me; I also enjoy Gordon Ramsay’s shows because of all the cussing and cursing.
Still, it’s a bit like all this “Emacs vs. Vi” and “Linus vs. Richard” stuff, which is only really interesting to the people involved and some fanboys. If I’d tell my old boss (an excellent coder) that Zed Shaw hates Kevin Clark’s butt, he’d stare at me blankly.
But Zed’s rant addresses some “deeper” points, which get lost a bit.
I’ve been watching the “Rails community” as a newcomer and a kind of an outsider, and as someone who has no big stakes in the whole thing. And other than Zed, I’d not say that Rails is a ghetto. At times it feels more like a cult.