Application Generation

Really? I love Apple products. I have an Air, a MacBook Pro and an iPhone. I’m pretty much the certified Apple fanboi. But recently, I’ve been having some really weird flashbacks to when I used to use Windows X . . .

Firstly, my Macs seem to need to be rebooted all the time. I’m losing count of the number of recent Snow Leopard upgrades to things like iTunes which have required a reboot. Really? A reboot on a *nix powered system just to upgrade one of the applications? What is up with that? Reminds me of WinXP.

And then Apple got into the whole AppStore debacle where they basically said to developers – you go, work on an app, and thern using arbitrary, undocumented rules we’ll decide whether to let you sell it to anyone. We’re not just (reasonably) enforcing published standards on what we’ll sell through the AppStore. We’re saying that if we don’t happen to like your app, you can’t sell it to anyone with an iPhone or iPad – period. Way to go pissing off developers. Reminds me of how Visual Studio seemed to completely change the way you had to work every year or two making me choose to develop using anything but VS. Also reminds me of how for a long time Microsoft tried to tie you into their (lame) VSS vcs offering and made it hard to use best practices like CI and automated builds until they finally wised up and started treating the alt.net community as a resource instead of the enemy.

And now they’re categorically blocking anything developed in anything other than objective C (from what I can tell) – and certainly Flash based apps (including flex based apps) from their platform. I get it – I really do. Old school business 101 is to use what you have to gain more control of your customers and to push out large potential competitors using whatever leverage you have. I definitely see how it could be in Apples interest to make this move – especially if we let them get away with it.

And let me make it clear – despite the fact that I was an Adobe Community Expert in the past, I’m not exactly an Adobe fanboi. Heck – I do work for Railo – a direct competitor to Adobe’s ColdFusion product, I don’t use CS as I am a horrible designer, and I don’t have any kind of affiliation with Adobe. I just expected more from Jobs and Apple.

Oh well. Anyone want to suggest the best hardware for running a linux dev laptop? I heard that a while back at one of the RubyConfs, anyone who still had a Windows laptop in the midst of all the MacBook Pros got a “think different” sticker or something similar. Hopefully by this time next year either Apple will have got the message and opened up the iPad, or we’ll all have Dells running Ubuntu and anyone at a conference who still brings their MBP along will get a “Think Proprietary” sticker handed out instead.