Padraig

The article makes a great case that Motorola is the real winner.

The buyout can't have been solely for the patents, because Motorola are losing patent battles. It's unlikely that it was just to own a phone manufacturer, because why buy a 3rd rate one at a 60% premium? So why? Because Motorola had Google by the balls and could have further fucked Android up for everyone else.

It's a shame how every discussion of a Daring Fireball article here collapses into 'Gruber is a fanboy', but it's particularly frustrating when it's an insightful article like this one. If he's half as bad as some of you make out, it should be easy to argue the points without resorting to attacking the man.

Has the documentation situation improved much in the last year? I tinkered around with it a few times and it really felt close to being great. But... aside from the 2 or 3 intro tutorials, I found the docs really lacking. I only made actual progress by reading the framework code.

Any suggestions on the best way to come at it?

Other factors like Facebook finding and removing spam accounts, users enabling privacy features, etc. seem like a much more likely cause.

I could see people getting bored / busy and not bothering to use it any more, but it's unbelievable that 1.5 million would delete their accounts in one month.

Right, sorry.

I'm getting very different numbers... I may be wrong though?

(7,000,000/8) = 875,000 bytes/s = 0.834 MB/s

0.834 * 60 * 60 * 24 = 72,057 MB/day

(EDIT: Tweaked numbers, had mistyped 0.834 as 0.844 — doesn't affect the point)

On this "Apple should buy / copy Dropbox" thing...

Dropbox is wonderful. I love it. But Apple is slowly moving away from exposing the filesystem to the user, so if they do anything, I don't think it'll look or work like Dropbox. For example, Dropbox's solution to syncing conflicting versions is to let you browse revisions on the website. I don't see Apple doing it that way.

I would foresee an SDK level feature with each app responsible for integrating and syncing its own data. This is possible now, if the app maker is willing to host a server but the overheads of running a server long term discourage it.

Who really thinks Apple is going to build it and give it away though? Sure, there'll be efficiencies in terms of code reuse and scale if Apple provide it, but it'll cost the developer somehow (and there'll probably be another storm in a teacup when they announce it. but that's another day's work.)

AFAIK, very little iTunes music is DRMed these days anyway.

There's plenty of room for 'respecting dangerous invisible shit that can kill you' between those two extremes of being a scaredy-cat and acting macho.

tl; dr's rarely do justice but I think that's a bit snipey.

The point I took from it was in the organisational culture in the team that looked after the reactor. A macho attitude celebrating exposure to radiation does not inspire confidence.

Sounds great but I am never going to pay a subscription for my IDE, or my FTP program or my Twitter client. Relationships require trust and effort from both parties and it's simply not a perfect model for every piece of software.

I don't want a relationship with a company. For most apps I want to buy and own a thing as it is now.

This "old and broken" model persists because it's something that customers get instantly and can commit to knowing in advance what their full investment will be.

You can have a fast internal development cycle without devaluing the established concept of major version numbers.

I don't appreciate this because I make money from software. To me, a new major version number is:

a) an indication that there have been major changes. It's not something that increments every 12 weeks.

b) something most people reasonably expect to pay for.

I know Mozilla isn't first with this approach. It still sucks.

Edit: Interesting that it has been driven by the same company that rendered the term 'beta' meaningless.

Edit 2: Why the downvotes?

My argument is that violent protests would do very little to help. We're having an election that will throw the ruling party out. The next government are campaigning on the basis that they'll get a better deal. I doubt they will succeed, but rioting on the assumption that the problems can be decided away won't make it any more likely.

Ha! That doesn't surprise me at all. What's the book called?

There is an appetite to reform this stuff now, but it's hard to imagine the winners of the game when played by those rules deciding to change it dramatically.

I wonder about that. I view our (lack of) reaction as mature, not passive. People died in Greece and they burned all kinds of things. They still have a huge debt to pay back. We're taking it like grown ups and having an election.

One fundamental problem we have in Ireland is the way in which we elect our Dáil (parliament).

There's a 4 minute section in this video (43m45s onwards ) http://www.rte.ie/player/#v=1090239 which explains better than I can, but here goes:

In short: 1. There are multiple seats (often with a few candidates running from the same party) per constituency. 2. It doesn't take many votes to get elected (Any more than 8,000 votes got you elected in my constituency of 86,000 people).

Politicians don't compete on the differences between their parties because they're also competing against another locally running party member. Instead, they wage very local personality based campaigns. Since they only need a few thousand votes, they can and do call door-to-door to chat with everyone they can. Pothole need filling? Let your local candidates know and by god it'll be fixed immediately.

This means that the people who end up making important decisions on whether or not to take on 100s of billions of euros worth of debt are the people who came across best on a few thousand house calls.

It's hard to disagree with his analysis of what the practical outcome will be.

Google's not stupid though, so there's either another piece of the puzzle still to be revealed or Google's aim with this is to throw a spanner in the works for Apple's various iOS projects. AirPlay comes to mind in particular as a major feature that would neutralised by reversing the trend towards standardising on h264.

This is ok. Google can do this if it wants. Just don't dress it up like it's some selfless contribution to the good of mankind.

So glad to see this getting tackled at last. SproutCore's lack of decent documentation has been my single biggest difficulty in adopting it.

Fair enough, but your use of long-ago deprecated HTML tags to make your point doesn't exactly inspire confidence in your expertise!

I'm looking forward to a proper response to these design issues.

I have quite a bit of my savings invested in Apple and, while a recall would be bad, an Apple that doesn't recognise it's own fuck ups would be far more serious.

They've made it much harder for themselves with Jobs' obnoxious e-mails and that dishonest press release.

Apple's Mobile Me service is built on this. It has its problems, but it's a pretty impressive web app. Amazing things can be done with this.

But the _fucking_ documentation!

I've 'dived in' to SproutCore a couple of times (spending about 2 days each time) and beyond the initial tutorials and a few random blog posts on third party sites there is almost no useful documentation. A lot of the info on the wiki is out of date or irrelevant to anyone but the developers. (I've been advised to visit the IRC channel numerous times, and it's great that it's there, but that's support not documentation.)

You pretty quickly end up reading the source code, and wasting time on trial & error approaches.

Look at the user guide for Code Igniter, a PHP framework, http://codeigniter.com/user_guide/ — SproutCore desperately needs one of these.

We worked it out:

http://padraig.tumblr.com/post/355936709/resolved

You can verify this for yourself, but it'll cost you the price of both apps: about $7.

1. Buy them, right click on both apps in your iTunes Apps list and choose 'Reveal in Finder'.

2. Copy both to your desktop.

3. Rename them to .zip and unzip them

4. Click on the app file and choose 'Show Package Contents'

5. Compare dublinbus.db with dublinbus.png2

They are not totally identical, but there is a very significant overlap that cannot be down to chance.

Also, his e-mail to me admits that he copied my 'layout'.

Though, I agree that his website doesn't him look 'dodgy' by itself.

Good idea — well.. good advice for next time, anyway.

Thanks, I appreciate that.

I'm not sure that it's as clear cut as doing something that can't be easily copied — any iPhone app that stores data locally is vulnerable to this. (In fact, I'd advise other iPhone developers reading this to have a close look at any suspicious competitors). I'm cool with someone 'stealing the idea', just not when they go selling my implementation of it.

Some lawyer friends have advised me of the same here in Ireland*

I'd be happy to have someone with some authority in Dublin Bus even notice it though!

* we're not in the UK ;)

I was in contact with Dublin Bus during the development of the app. Sent them screenshots, etc. Anyone who responded thought it was a good idea, but passed me on to talk to someone else in the bureaucracy (it's a public company funded by the taxpayer).

In the end, the leads fizzled out and I didn't get written permission to use the data from Dublin Bus. I continued to keep them up to date on it, hoping that they'd even call me up on it so that we could figure something out. My objective was to get at the data cleanly without having to scrape, and also to form a relationship that might allow me to use the upcoming real-time data.

As I mentioned in the post, there was no app available for this before mine. Dublin Bus website is a mess (they've updated it in the last few months, but it's still awful) and it's particularly awkward to use on a small screen.

They're a government owned company and others have pointed out that 'data' can't have a copyright, but I'm not really sure to be honest. I suspect they're aware of it and are choosing not to act since it's benefiting their service.

I would argue that this is a different issue to what this other developer has done: He has taken my schema and my translation of the data which is my own original work.

I just sent a message through a general app questions in iTunesConnect... does anyone know of a specific Apple e-mail address for these kinds of issues?

http://talkingpointsmemo.com http://fivethirtyeight.com

Did you even open the link?

I think the point is that given a set of skills and resources (i.e. Cocoa & great design skills) it's way more profitable (5x in TapTapTap's case) to direct them towards iPhone development.

There are different opportunities on the two platforms, but the difference in profitability will absolutely draw some people away from Mac development: it's drawing people away from everything — I know at least 5 ex-Java or .Net guys doing iPhone development full time now.

> it wouldn't be long before the majority moved back to the Mac when the iPhone Dream didn't materialise.

It might be less competitive, but it's not like Mac development is a sure bet that you can just fall back on.