mikeash.com: NSBlog

Tags: iphone rant appleDuring a recent discussion on Twitter about Apple's draconion App Store policies, I mentioned that there's a long list of apps I want which Apple does not allow, and thus these restrictions directly hurt me not only as a developer, but as an iPhone user. This made @pbur curious, and he indicated he'd like to know what those apps are. So I sat down and came up with a list of apps that I really want for my iPhone but that Apple won't let me have. To the best of my knowledge, every single one of these ideas is completely feasible in a technical sense, wouldn't destroy the cell network, wouldn't make your phone's battery life unusably short, and are kept out of my hands solely because Apple thinks it knows what's best for me.

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Mistakes and Chains of Events at 2010-04-19 19:18

Tags: apple iphone rant link rogueamoebaFor those of you who don't read my employer's blog, I just made a post over there titled Mistakes and Chains of Events. It discusses the recent news about political cartoonist Mark Fiore's iPhone rejection, the bigger picture of Apple's system and policies, and my perception that Apple is not learning the right lessons from the various problems that they're encountering.

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Friday Q&A 2009-12-04: Building Standalone iPhone Web Apps at 2009-12-04 19:29

Tags: iphone web javascript htmlWelcome to another edition of Friday Q&A. This week I'm going to talk about building standalone iPhone web apps, web apps that have an icon on the home screen, and which start a separate program when tapped, just like native apps, a topic suggested by Mike Shields.

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Deconstructing Apple's Copyright and Trademark Guidelines at 2009-11-17 02:08

Tags: apple iphone evil rant stupidIt's well known that every member of the official iPhone developer program is bound by Apple's iPhone SDK agreement. What seems to be much less well known is that the agreement also binds developers to follow Apple's "Copyright and Trademark Guidelines", which add a huge list of restrictions to what an iPhone developer can and cannot do.

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The iPhone Development Story: One Year Later at 2009-09-17 16:56

Tags: iphone rantA year ago today I posted The iPhone Development Story, detailing all of the insane and largely pointless steps required to build an iPhone application. The article was incredibly popular, seeing tens of thousands of hits that weekend and still generating fresh comments even to this day. Now, a year later, it's time to look back and see where we stand today.

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Reading Between the Lines of Apple's FCC Reply at 2009-08-21 23:17

Tags: iphone linkI've just written a blog post for my evil taskmasters which I thought this audience would be interested in too. It's called Reading Between the Lines of Apple's FCC Reply and talks about Apple's response to the FCC's inquiry over the rejection of the Google Voice iPhone application. My favorite part is, "With 17,000 reviews per week and 45 reviewers, that means each reviewer performs 378 reviews per week. At 40 hours per week, this is 9.4 reviews per hour, or one review every 6.4 minutes." I encourage you to make your way over to Under the Microscope and read the whole thing.

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Nanogolf at 2009-05-08 16:22

Tags: iphone linkI'm afraid I have to skip Friday Q&A one more week but I hope to be back up next week, because one of the things that's been keeping me busy has finally shipped! It's called Nanogolf, and it's a multiplayer mini golf game for the Mac and iPhone. My partner and I have been hard at work on this for a long time and it's nice to finally see it out in the wild. The Mac version is free, the iPhone version is cheap, and they can play against each other. Go forth and soothe your Q&A pangs with a nice round of miniature golf.

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The iPhone Development Story at 2008-09-18 00:30

Tags: iphone rantI just got my first application in the iTunes App Store, and I wanted to tell the story of what it's like to publish one, from start to finish. The app, NetAwake, is an independent project I wrote with my friend Joshua. It makes an interesting story, I think, because unlike the sordid tale of some people's struggle to get accepted into the iPhone developer program, my personal experience was perfectly normal. (As far as I know.)

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NetAwake at 2008-09-15 02:28

Tags: link iphoneI just wanted to make a quick post to note that I've released my first iPhone app, NetAwake. It's a Wake-on-LAN program with a fancy ZeroConf-based MAC grabber to make it accessible to people who think that MACs are the computers you buy from APPLE. Credit should also go to my partner Joshua, who did all of the work on the GUI.

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Welcome to iPhone: Your Crappy Mac of Tomorrow, Today! at 2008-08-01 17:23

Tags: iphone rantNote: this post is a long non-technical rant. Please skip it if you don't want to read that kind of thing. I promise that this will be a rare event.
My employer got me an iPod Touch shortly after Apple announced the official iPhone SDK, but it ended up not doing much for a while. Due to various things beyond the scope of this post, I didn't do any SDK work with it. And since I rarely listen to music outside of my office and my car (which has no iPod hookup), it didn't get used very much for anything.

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Deconstructing the iPhone SDK: Malware at 2008-03-20 16:58

Tags: iphone rantIn part two of my potentially ongoing series about the iPhone SDK, I want to discuss the platform's potential for malware.

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Performance Comparisons of Common Operations, iPhone Edition at 2008-03-19 21:40

Tags: performance cocoa objective-c iphoneI finally got a chance to run my performance comparison code on an iPhone, so we can see just how much horsepower this little device has. I still am not able to load my own code onto the device myself, so I want to thank an anonymous benefactor for adapting my code to the new environment and gathering the results for me.

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Deconstructing the iPhone SDK: No Multitasking at 2008-03-15 01:02

Tags: iphone rantThe recent release of the iPhone SDK has created a great deal of controversy in the Mac community. In typical fashion, two sides have formed, with each side thinking the other side is a bunch of fools. I'd like to explore one big point of controversy: Apple's prohibition against running applications in the background.

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