Tristan O’Tierney | Mac Geek

For awhile this was a post I didn’t want to write out of fear. Fear because of people like Craig Hockenberry who’ve received nasty-grams from Apple for crossing the *******NDA line. Fear from my experience at working at Apple, and knowing what speaking out against them can do for you in the long run. However, I feel ethics are my foundation. If I don’t stand up for what I believe in, how can I respect myself?

My position on the AppStore rejections was simple: What Apple’s doing isn’t the greatest, but like almost always don’t attribute to malice what is more likely explained by ignorance. Apple is a hectic place, I know, I’ve worked there. More often than not, your favorite missing feature or most annoying bug is not some ulterior motive to kill babies and kick puppies. They probably just didn’t get the time. So, when I saw what was going on with these rejections I figured the reason was simple: The perfect policy hadn’t been put in place yet. Not because Apple’s “Evil” but because they just hadn’t formally established criteria for inclusion into the store well enough yet.

That was until rejection letters became NDA. To call this action anything less than the exact opposite of a benevolent response would be an understatement. This is at the point that I expect a response from the Steve himself relatively shortly on all the bad publicity it’s generating. Now mind you, I’m not writing this as an attack on a company I hate, but out of love for a company I feel so utterly passionate for that I can’t stand by and let it ruin the opportunity to change humanity forever over what I ultimately feel is just a lack of formal policy.

The simple truth is the current policy cannot stand, and we (third party devs) await a response as soon as possible. We know how hectic it can be there, but we can’t wait forever. To all my friends at Apple: we know you’re probably annoyed by all this nagging. We just want things to change for the better, and we think you agree too.

Broken iPhone
Originally uploaded by tristanotierney

So awhile back (just after macworld) Quynh’s iPhone mysteriously cracked. We didn’t drop it, we didn’t step on it, it just spiderwebbed in the corner for no apparent reason. Needless to say we were hesitant to take it to an Apple genius because anything involving what appears to be user-inflicted-damage is shrugged off. Well, we were browsing the mall today and said screw it lets give it a try. 20 minutes later we were blessed with a brand spanking new phone! I had a similar experience with Ikea, in which we actually brought in an photo of a broken drawer shelf (on our iPhones of course) and they didn’t even ask questions! They just went into the back room and gave us the new board we needed to repair the drawer. Not to go off into too much of a tangent, but I think these two companies share a lot in common.

(Most) everyone knows about the iPhone SDK, so I’ll try not to be redundant. In short, I think what was delivered was awesome. It’s a pretty good compromise on almost all levels. If you want to distribute software on the app store for free, you can. If you want to charge, they take a pretty fair percentage. The enterprise additions were all icing on the cake to me. Normally I wouldn’t care, but I’ll directly benefit from Exchange support since VMware is an Exchange company (ugh). It’s increasingly depressing that no one seems to be giving Microsoft Exchange competition, still, and it’s the year 2008 but that’s another blog post all together. Another thing that has me pleased and amazed is the $100 million iFund. This is a drop in the bucket for Apple, with nearly $18 billion in the bank. Yet that’s a lot of money. I’m frightened, in a good way, to think what can come out of this initiative.

Frankly I wasn’t quite surprised that they chose not to make a Windows compatible SDK. The entire iPhone development suite, from building tools (gcc, xcode, ib) to debug tools (instruments, which depends on dtrace) are just entirely incompatible with Windows. Even if Apple did keep Yellow Box alive in secret, it would be a monumental effort to port all those tools. So I guess that’s that — in order to code for the most popular mobile device within the next few years, you’re going to need a Mac. If that doesn’t pull in a whole new class of switchers, I don’t know what will.

So I know I shouldn’t complain too much, coming from Safari not too long ago, but I felt I must rant about something. In my quest to bring YouTube support to FlickrBooth (is that app name even going to make sense after such a feature?) I’ve come to the sad realization that NSURL sucks. It doesn’t have a feature-rich enough API, making you have to break down to CF functions. It makes you use important to forget string functions like [NSString stringByAddingPercentEscapes] which have fun ways of creating bugs you didn’t anticipate. It lacks any sort of GET/POST automatic query generation. It has no helper functions for cookies, which are this entirely separate-but-shared entity. I feel like Apple ported (or did they write it from scratch?) it on top of WebKit for Panther and basically let it wither without any substantial feature additions since. I suppose on one hand you could argue that it means the API will remain stable, making it easier for future development but Apple does seem to have a hit and run policy of releasing a new awesome library, then basically never touching it again except for bug fixes. WebKit in particular I would not account such harsh words to. The API adapts quite rapidly, despite many additional functions winding up on the “Unofficial but available” headers. But this is by virtue of it’s OpenSource facing policy. AppKit/Foundation doesn’t exactly have the same liberal policy.

Good news! For those waiting for an update to FlickrBooth, I’ve got all my hooks in photo booth updated. Now I just have to clean up my flickr authentication code (it’s torn apart right now due to some refactoring) and it should work. In the process of all this I’ve created a “PhotoBooth plugin API.” Which I’ll be releasing separately for those interested in writing their on photo booth plugins. Give me another few nights, and I’ll have something to share with everyone.

So you upgraded to Leopard and FlickrBooth no longer works? There are a few reasons, but the basic one is Input Managers (a service offered by Mac OS X) are severely limited in Leopard. Long story short my plugin is loaded as an “Input Manager” and thusly takes over PhotoBooth, allowing me to put in my own buttons, menus, etc. So my answer to any questions that may soon arise is yes I am aware it doesn’t work, and I’ll work on a solution but it’s hard to say how soon the fix will be published. It depends on how bad my work and class schedule is, which is to say, hectic. It’s likely I’ll have time to look at it as we get closer to Thanksgiving week when I’ll have some free time.

My friend Mathieu Martin just started on ProKit this week! And it’s likely another friend of mine, Eric Newport, may join the Software testing team. I like how every company I end up at a few friends end up joining along the way Makes the days pass a little quicker, and generally more cozy of a place to work. It’s tough jumping into an environment of not knowing a lot of people.

Apple just put up an official developer information page at developer.apple.com/iphone. Good info all around if you’re trying to make some at-home web apps for the iPhone

So here are all the juicy secrets.. Just kidding. I picked an interesting time to join Apple in general because right around the corner (a month in fact) is WWDC and not long after that Leopard. Needless to say it’s BugFest 2007. Still, so far, it’s been great. I’ll get some pictures of my office (yep no more cube!) up as soon as I finish it. I’m still looking for a couch and some better lights for it and I need Quynhie to put that sorta girly touch on it and make it all purdy as well. My team is awesome and it’s kind of a different atmosphere than Yahoo! in a lot of ways. I guess I just never worked with such a large group so closely and my first reaction is it’s a lot better than being isolated to a one-or-two man team. It’s also still surreal working on Safari. THE Safari. Hard to believe I got here but then again I’m humble.

I’m not sure who reads my blog, but for those interested — I’ve accepted a job with the Safari UI team and will be starting in mid-May! I’m totally stoked and think this will be wild ride. As a lot of my friends knew I had a back-and-forth debate between VMWare and Apple and couldn’t decide on one or the other for any substantial length of time. My decision rested on the fact that, right now, I could probably make a bigger dent in the world through an application as universal as Safari than VMWare Fusion. Well without going into too much of a monologue that’s that.