Geek Chic

Alright.  I’ve been holding my tongue about Apple’s iPhone App Store and their general iPhone shenanigans for awhile now, but I’ve had it.  Apple, you’re being stupid and you need to shape up.

Keeping in mind all of this crap that’s been floating around the internet for the past few days (in no particular order):

1. Official Google Voice App Blocked From App Store
2. Apple’s Chickenshit Approval Process Has Gone Too Far
3. There’s No App for That: VoiceCentral Removed From App Store
4. What Steve said about the App Store and why we need to suck it up
5. IPhone SMS Attack to Be Unleashed at Black Hat
6. iPhone Jailbreaking Could Crash Cellphone Towers, Apple Claims
7. Is the iPhone causing Apple to lose the plot?

Apple, I’ve stood by you for a long time now, but you’re just being stupid.  Your App Store rules of rejection and acceptance need to be TRANSPARENT.  And when you reject an app like Google Voice, man up and give a freaking reason for it.  The Beckettian back and forth in #3 above is something I would expect from Dell.  And quite frankly, you deserved the unofficial response you got from Google’s Marissa Mayer (passive though it was).

As for #4, I completely agree.  If developers keep putting up with this, they’ll need to suck it up.  But after #3, why on earth would any sensible company want to spend months developing for iPhone, wait a month or more to be accepted then rejected with no explanation and no suggestions for how to get the app back into the store?  As a developer it makes my blood boil.  Makes me want to start coding mobile apps for basically any other platform — Android, WebOs… even Windows Mobile.

And as for the crap you’re trying to pull against the EFF and their campaign to make Jailbreaking a legal option, can you smell what you’re shoveling?  How can you say Jailbreaking would crash a cell tower?  Sure it’s a possibility.  But do you really think a serious terrorist would use an iPhone to do that?  You can do that with just about anything that can connect to the cellular network (an eval board, an old cell phone… basically anything but a tin can).  PLUS, unless you fix that SMS bug in #5 above right quick, a hacker wouldn’t even NEED to jailbreak his phone.  He could just send a text message and not only overwhelm the cell towers but crash all of the system’s iPhones in the process.  I only hope the courts can see right through that one (see #7 for more analysis on this one).

I’d been a pretty satisfied iPhone customer since the 3.0 (iPhone mind you.  not AT&T.  AT&T can suck it. I only hope Apple doesn’t renew their exclusive contract with them and I can ditch them for another provider when my contract is up.  And if they don’t I hope there are better iPhone alternatives by then.)  Most of the apps that I installed via Jailbreak were accounted for or rendered unnecessary with copy/paste, better integration with Google Calendar, etc.

But now, just out of principle, I’m going to jailbreak my phone again.  I advise you all to do the same.  This walled garden that Apple’s is creating is really stagnating for developer innovation (when there’s 15 variations of ‘Pull My Finger’, how many of those ‘approved’ applications do you really think are useful?).  And frankly, their guardianship seems to be done by a gang of ADD monkeys (I need to be 17 to use Wikipanion? Really?  And AroundMe?  It’s like you understand only the letter of the law, but not the spirit.  And frankly I’d rather not have a guardian of my phone than have an overprotective, uncommunicative one).

I guess in my mind, for any healthy industry to thrive, there needs to be some competition.  Where’s the competition?  Android, step up your game!  Palm, your marketing sucks.  Do better.

Until then, the best we can do is rebel in mild ways.  Like Jailbreaking.  Thanks Dev Team, for giving us that option.

UPDATE: A bold move from Michael Arrington of TechCrunch: I Quit the iPhone.
UPDATE 2: Developer Steven Frank is ditching the iPhone too.

The Saga Continues: Why The FCC Wants To Smash Open The iPhone
EVEN MORE: Apple Rejects Dictionary App for Containing Swear Words

It’s not enough that they have a warning on Wikipanion that some of the content in THE OPEN SOURCE ENCYCLOPEDIA might have content that’s inappropriate for children under 17?  They now ban dictionaries for swear words?

It’s like they have the Three Stooges manning their application approval process.  I really hope the FCC beats Apple to a pulp on this one.  They deserve it.

From Silicon Alley Insider:

Hulu iPhone App Coming Soon, ‘Badass’

Sweet!!!

I love The Onion:

My favorite part is the end:

“Thank you for that, Jeff.  It remains to be seen whether the MacBook Wheel will catch on in the business world where people use computers for actual work and not just dicking around.”

The Stanford Laptop Orchestra.  Featured today in shiny technicolor on the Apple homepage.

photo by Enrique Aguirre

Stanford University: Finding a Nerd to Art quotient of 1.

See a nice narrated slideshow on The Mercury News

Check out video of SLOrk in Beijing

And visit the SLOrk website for more

Dear Apple,

Regarding your recent behavior towards your iPhone Developer Network: please stop being such fascists.

It’s one thing to hold your developers to high standards and reject apps that do not meet those standards (I’m looking at you, AIM).  It’s quite another to reject applications because they are like yours and (heaven forbid) possibly even perform better than your own.

Be nice.

Sit back, relax, and remember just how much you rely on the developers of the open source community — how much of their code you’ve rolled into your own.

What’s wrong with a little competition?  What do you have to be scared of?  People should be challenging you to improve your own applications.  Let us, the users, make the choice.  If we want to have 3 mail applications, 12 versions of Sudoku and 85 different ways to upload our photos to Flickr, we can agree that’s stupid, but that should be our choice to make.  And really, we both know your apps are going to be better in the end anyway.  But let us figure that out for ourselves.

We’re smart.  We bought your iPhone in the first place, didn’t we?  Trust us to put what we want on it.

I don’t want to hear any more crap like this from you.  Really?  A statement of confidentiality to gag your developers, preventing them from venting that they just blew months of dev time on an application you rejected for no reason? Come on.  You’re better than this.  Or at least you used to be.

Shape up!

Until you do, I will scream from the hilltops that Jailbreak is the only way to iPhone.

Sincerely,

Jeff
Lord Geek Supreme
Geek Chic

what are you doing, Steve?

Over the weekend, a lot of dirty laundry was aired about Microsoft’s anti-Apple campaign, including:

1. The entire campaign was created on Macs, as evidenced by metadata scraped from some of the ad campaign’s photos.
2. The ad agency behind the campaign, Crispin Porter + Bogusky, was profiled a few months ago on Apple’s Pro site as being fanatical Apple users.
3. Microsoft’s Mojave experiment — designed to convince users to take another look at Vista — apparently fudged a lot of its numbers.
4. The Times quote that Microsoft uses on all of their campaigns, ‘Windows Vista is beautiful,’ was apparently taken out of the context of a highly critical David Pogue article, in which he talks about how clunky the OS is and how most of the interface was ripped off from Apple.
5. RoughlyDrafted wrote a concise, chilling rebuttal to Paul Thurrott calling Apple ‘the Bad Guys’ and ‘liars’ for exposing Vista’s flaws (which brings up a very good point — could Microsoft possibly make the argument that MacOS has huge flaws?  I’d like to see that one.)

All of this adds up to what looks like a huge embarrassment for Microsoft.

Round 2 of Microsoft’s “We’re not as lame as you think we are” campaign aired last night during The Office.  Check it:

Ok.  It’s better than the Seinfeld ads.  I’ll give it that.  But that’s not that much.

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