Companies Lose their Minds, Then their Partners, Then their Customers, Then...

Following is a comment which I posted to Jason Kincaid's article on TechCrunch, "Why Apple's New Ban Against Sexy Apps is Scary". I don't know why Apple seem to be deliberately shooting themselves in so many ways on the iPhone recently; I am sure that they are leaving golden opportunities for Palm, Android and anybody else who isn't Apple or Microsoft.

Even if you're not developing for the iPhone or even for the Mac, this whole drift should concern you — because its most likely effect is going to be that you have fewer choices in what should be a rapidly-expanding marketplace.

Thanks for reading.

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Exactly; they're pulling a Singapore here. They're saying "we're better than anybody else" because they've got this App Store with hundreds of thousands of titles, and hundreds of useful apps. Then they turn around and say "we're the only game in town; we're not going to let you sell your apps to customers any way except through us — and oh, yeah, we can be completely arbitrary and capricious before, during and after the fact."

Let me be clear: up until very recently, I've been an unalloyed Apple fan; the only sensible response to 25+ years of Windows development and user support and 10 years hitting similar but different walls in Linux. I'm typing this on one of the two Macs sitting on my desk. I've got logs and statistics that prove I'm far more productive on my worst Mac days than I ever was on my best Windows days. And I've had several Switcher clients over the past few years who say the same thing.

I can write and sell any app I want on the Mac; Apple even give me all the (quite good) tools I need right in the box. I can use any app I want to on my Mac; the average quality level is so far above Windows and Linux apps it's not even funny. In neither of those do I need the permission of Apple or anyone else outside the parties to the transaction involved. Apple do have good support for publicising Mac apps; browse http://www.apple.com/downloads/ to see a (far earlier) way they've done it right. But developers don't have to use their advertising platform.

With the iPhone, and soon the iPad, they're doing things in a very untraditionally-Apple way: they're going far out of their way to alienate and harm developers. You know, those people who create the things that make people want to use the iPhone in the first place. And a lot of us are either leaving the platform or never getting into iPhone development in the first place.

And that can't be healthy for the long-term success of the Apple mobile platform (iPhone/iPad/iWhatComesNext). As a user, as a developer, as a shareholder, that disturbs me, as I believe it should disturb anyone who cares about this industry.

Browser Support: Why "Internet Explorer 6" Really Is A Typo

(Experienced Web developers know that the correct name for the program is Microsoft Internet Exploder — especially for version 6.)

Case in point: I was browsing the daringfireball.net RSS feed and came across an article on the 37signals blog talking about Apple's new MobileMe service dropping support for IE6. The blog is mostly geared towards 37signals' current and potential clients who, if not Web developers themselves are at least familiar with the major technical issues involved. Not surprisingly, virtually every one of the 65 comments left between 9 and 13 June was enthusiastic in support for the move; not because the commenters necessarily favor Apple (though, clearly, many do), but because anybody who's ever cared about Web standards knows that IE6 is an antediluvian, defiantly defective middle finger thrust violently up the nostril of the Web development community; the technological equivalent of the Chevrolet Corvair: unsafe at any speed.

The degree to which this is true, and to which this truth continues to plague the Web developer and user communities, were brought into sharp focus by three of the comments on the post. The first, from 37signals' Jason Fried, estimates that 38% of their total traffic is IE, of which 31% is IE 6.0 (giving a grand total of 11.8% of total traffic — not huge, but significant).  The second is from Josh Nichols, who points out that Microsoft published a patch to solve the problem with IE6 in January, 2007; he notes, however, that an unknowable number of users may not have applied that patch. Finally, Michael Geary points out that later versions of Internet Explorer (version 7 and possibly the now-in-beta Version 8) also have the problem of not being able to "set cookies for a 2×2 domain, i.e. a two-letter second level domain in a two-letter top level domain with no further subdomain below that," (including his own mg.to blog domain). The fact that relatively few domains fall into that category can be argued to be part of the problem; users running IE, particularly an out-of-date version of IE, are likely to be less experienced, less able to recognize and solve the problem correctly, than to blame it on "something wrong with the Internet". For those people and companies who've paid for those perfectly legitimate domains, the negligence and/or incompetence of the browser supplier and/or user mean that they're not getting their money's worth.  And ICANN, the bureaucracy "managing" the domain-name system, is now "fast-tracking" a proposal to increase the number of top-level domain names (TLDs) used. (In time-honored ICANN custom, the press release is dated 22 June 2008 and "welcome[s]" "Public Comments" "by 23 June 2008." Nothing like transparency and responsiveness in governance, eh?