iPhone SDK and Apple's deal to developers

Source: FlickrWhen Apple held their press event for the announcment of SDK previous thursday I was watching closely what will come out of it - after all, there was a whole bunch of rumors and predictions about the direction that Apple could take and how it can either win the hearts of developers or burn in hell with it's platform by it's side.

As far as I'm concerned I think Apple more or less won my heart. Although I already downloaded[1] the iPhone SDK and installed it, I haven't yet programmed anything with it - one notable obsticle is that I am far more into web development and have almost no experiance whatsoever with Objective-C. But as I spend more and more time reading about Objective-C and watching various iPhone Application Framework videos of what can be done (and how) I am becoming a bit more confident to say that Apple's aproach is the right one.

Not only does a developer get a stable enviorment that Apple itself used to develop it's mobile version of OS X and has a lot of similarities with desktop/server version of OS X (this is one of those things that any Mac developer will appreciate because they can start programming without having to re-examinate yet another platform), they also get access to huge userbase that is accustomed to using iTunes and ready to pay for things they like.

App Store, the store which Apple will use to distribute software among users and give them a one-click-away solution for purchasing all software ever developed for the platform is what in my opinion distinguishes Apple's platform from other already developed and marketed solutions. It will be installed on iPhone and integrated into iTunes and therefore have a tremendous userbase - and it's userbase is what gives Apple an edge over it's competition. It is consisted of people that pay for their music, are a bit more tech-savvy than avarage population and will therefore appreciate the ease of use and user experiance that Apple will give to them. And gladly pay for the software that will be useful to them.

Business model used also seem rather fair to developers - if you want to charge for your applications you get to share 30% of your income with Apple and remaining 70% gets into your pocket. I find it a bit less friendly if you are prepared to give your application away for free - you will still have to get yourself iPhone Developer Program account that will cost you $99 per year - but I do not mind paying up those 99 bucks if they provide good enough value with their offical support.

Another very pleasing sight is how other software companies began stepping up their efforts for an emerging platform - my biggest surprise was Sun's announcement that they will develop Java for iPhone. I understand how they can develop it with the technology provided but I am very interested knowing how they will bypass various legal issues. Not that I mind if Java is developed for iPhone - on the contrary, I will be more than pleased to use a whole bunch of already developed Java applications.

How will all this come together in reality is yet to be seen in July when Apple will relase final version of SDK and give users second version of it's iPhone software that will include support for applications from 3rd party developers. I will however try to get familiar with Objective-C and start playing with SDK soon - and hopefully there will be a follow-up to this blog post in near future that will discuss my experiences with development itself.

[1] you need to have Apple Developer Connection account in order to download the SDK - free account will do

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"Apple Cripples Non-Apple Software"

Source: FlickrIt didn't come as no suprise to me when I first saw this sensationalistic title appear on Slashdot two days ago. But it was sad to see how a wonderful piece of work like that produced by Vladimir Vukićević in his blog post got distorted and taken out of context (or at least part of it) for the purpose of the argument.

As Vladimir was looking how to give Firefox 3 for OS X some performance boost he did quite some research and testing to locate origins of bottlenecks that made OS X version of Firefox a black sheep in the past - at least compared to it's Windows and Linux siblings.

During his research he discovered that Apple was using some undocumented methods to give Safari some boost in performance. Not realy a very nice thing to do for sure, yet he still emphesized that there are other non-programaticall ways for gaining the same boost. But the news of Apple's Evil had already began to spread in the wild and blow out of proportion.

Personally I think Apple was right this time not to publish this part of API - David Hyatt himself said that this code was more of a hack and they themself are not happy with that part of WebKit's code. As any developer knows publishing hacks is never a realy good idea - even using hacks is not a good idea but sometimes due to time constraints or some other reason you just have to use them.

One one side, using them can get you in such an awkward position as Apple has arguably found itself in, yet publishing information about them is still wrong - you lose the ability to fix the problems and remove hacks in the next release and are faced with maintaining them for a forseable future. Unless, of course, you want to be hated by developers using your API for making such (dramatic) changed over night.

But one is still left wondering if there are some other hidden and undiscovered cookies in Apple's jar. They are, after all, only a company and even if most of it's empoyees are open-source minded, there probably hides a genious or two in the dark corners of Apple that thinks otherwise and could destroy Apple's reputation on this matter and create a picture of another company with Microsoftish malpractice.

Facebook - your lifelong partner

Source: WikipediaI never realy knew a lot of people who were involved in social networking sites. Sure, there were few people I knew over the internet or a person here or there that I knew personally but that was about it. But when I joined the university this quickly changed and friend invitations became a daily phenomena on Facebook - as predicted by the Metcalfe's law the number of people using Facebook increased faster and faster as more people began using it and as it became a useful (or not) tool for nurturing old and new friendships.

Personally I never liked to share all the juicy details about my life or my conversations with other people - maybe some tiny paranoid bit of me was always thinking about what can happen if something goes wrong and published information end up in the wrong hands. That's probably why I hadn't joined any other social networking sites (with the notable exception of LinkedIn) before I was almost forced to.

Unfortunately it didn't took long before I started reading all kinds of horror stories about Facebook. A news that someone lost his job because he called his boss an idiot or got kicked out of school for posting pictures of drinking parties on his MySpace profile is realy becomming "business as usual". And as long as I or majority of my friends weren't using those sites the problem didn't seem important enough to bother or give it another thought - after all, everything was happening in the United States and Europe is still lagging behind in social networks usage.

Or does it?

Viadeo recently published survey data that 62 percent of British employers checked Facebook, Bebo or MySpace to see what kind of dirty things their future staff has done in the past and at least a quarter had already rejected a candidate because of their findings. With continuing trend of increased social network sites's usage the rest of Europe will probably follow - if it hasn't already.

In the end the simplest observation is to enjoy social networking sites as long as they benefit you in the collage when you still meet new people but when you grow up and get yourself a serious job the best course of action would be to just erase your Facebook/MySpace/Something profile and forget about those things you did during collage. Well, for Facebook at least, this is where things get messy. Until recently you could only "disable" your account - Facebook was hoping you would one day come back and to ease your pain you could just reactivate your account and continue where you left - which is still not good enough when you just want your account deleted, plain and simple.

Nipon Das, who faced this problem, had to start threatening with legal action against Facebook before the company got serious about it and finally deleted his account - which, acording to New York Times, still didn't prevent a reporter from sending him an email message. The deletion process did get a tiny bit better just two days after the publication of that article in NYT but a simple and obvious "Delete" button is still no where to be found.

What is then to do about your online identity? Probably the best solution is the one that was around all along and none of those involved into horror storied realy thought about - common sense. Would you show your parents how you got drunk and puked around someone's aparment? Would you want that to be seen by your boss? Probably not.

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