bonaldi.me

Mac developers are angry about Apple’s rejection of the Podcaster app from the iPhone’s app store. Fraser Speirs is pulling out of developing new apps. Paul Kafasis is deeply chilled by the move. Steven Frank (aping last month’s overheated Mike Ash) predicts an app store for the Mac. Dave Winer reckons this makes the iPhone an unreliable platform. Harry McCraken says this could have killed Photoshop. Chuqui doesn’t get it. Even Gruber says it’s either a disaster or proof the process is broken.

In the rejection note for Podcaster, the reason given was:

Since Podcaster assists in the distribution of podcasts, it duplicates the functionality of the Podcast section of iTunes.

The assumption is that this means the iTunes application, but this doesn’t add up when there are so many other apps already that “duplicate functionality”. There are calculators, notes apps, stocks apps, weather apps. Pandora does streaming radio, just like iTunes.

I think they’re talking about the iTunes store. That’s what you don’t get to compete with. Hence the reference to duplicating a “section” in the rejection note. Since when did apps have sections? The store does, though, lots of them. The iTunes Store is a big strategic deal for Apple. Would they allow Amazon to make an Amazon Music Store app? Not likely. Anything that looks like a store has to be verboten.

In fact, this makes the vetting process way more plausible. “No bandwidth hogs” always seemed a little bit lame. Apple wouldn’t care, right? “No threats to iTunes Store”? Ding. You want to make a portable music store, you’re not doing it on the iPhone and especially not on the iPod. You’ll need to build the web service, the desktop app, the phone, the phone OS and then the phone app.

This leaves the other horn of Gruber’s dilemma:

If this is truly Apple’s policy, it’s a disaster for the platform. And if it’s not Apple’s policy, then Podcaster’s exclusion is proof that the approval process is completely broken.

… and, yes, the approval process appears completely broken. The reasons given so far tell volumes about the low level of the people doing the vetting, and that speaks of the charade the process really is. (Which should have been obvious. The store is full of shite.)

Some of the calls for an Evangelist are right. Even a halfway decent explanation of what isn’t acceptable would help. But, it’s doesn’t seem like Apple employees are hiding this criteria from developers maliciously; it feels like they don’t know.

They don’t know because, again, this isn’t really about any of the half-assed reasons they’ve got for only allowing apps to install via the App Store. It is about maintaining Apple’s control so that they can stop people barging into the middle of their Greater Unified Jukebox. That’s why the whole thing is such a shambles: they’re winging it, app by app, trying to make up a coherent strategy as they go. With apparently little more to go on than “we are keeping control of what gets on the iPod. You make up some reasons why.”

Is Instapaper. It works like this:
1. Sign up at Instapaper.com and install their bookmarklet in your browser.
2. Install Instapaper on the phone via the store
3. When you see something good on the web but don’t have time to read it, click the bookmarklet.
4. Open Instapaper on the phone: it downloads and converts the page and saves it locally so you can read it whenever you like, even offline.

It’s genius, really.

So much for my pledge not to start another link blog, but this is a top little essay on how to write:

Psychology no doubt makes us better men and women, more sympathetic and tolerant, but it doesn’t make writing any easier. Had Shakespeare been confronted with psychology, “To be or not to be” might have come out, “To continue as a social unit or not to do so. That is the personality problem. Whether ’tis a better sign of integration at the conscious level to display a psychic tolerance toward the maladjustments and repressions induced by one’s lack of orientation in one’s environment or — ” But Hamlet would never have finished the soliloquy.

(via the goddamn great Big Contrarian)

So build she did, around the clock for 38 years until her death on Sept. 5, 1922. The house now has 160 rooms, 47 fireplaces, 10,000 window panes, 17 chimneys, 950 doors, and 40 staircases. It is famous for its nonsensical architecture, with hidden rooms, staircases leading to nowhere, cupboard doors open to solid brick walls and secret passages.
–Winchester Mystery House

From the super cool places you should visit blog.

So, yes, it does kill your router, most usually after 5 and a bit minutes. BT know about it. (The Home Hub is the same horrible router branded by lots of people, including Be. It’s an Alcatel Speedtouch, I think. Awful. Avoid.

Tiny post: the new 3G iPhones don’t include a stand, which you’re really going to want. (They did the same box-stripping with the 2G iPods as well)

it’s often suggested that Quine must have been wrong because conceptual analysis is what analytic philosophers do, and there must be something that they’re doing when they do it. That put a brave face on it, but there were guilty consciences wherever you looked.Jerry Fodor