1. Jul 23rd, 2008

    Java does the iPhone dance

    I made a promise (to myself) to avoid talking about the iPhone, but I’ll break it to let you know that a long standing issue has been finally resolved. Now you can run all your favorite Java apps on Steve’s platform.

    Rejoice.

    (Thanks Nathan)

    Printable PDF | Posted by Assaf Filed in general 9 Comments »

    1. Jul 24th, 2008

      n8

      You’re doing a much better job than I am of avoiding talking about the iPhone. The whole thing does, sort of, make my head explode. But I’m sure that in ten years we’ll be looking back at this and laughing, both at a failed attempt to lock down a platform and our own (my own, anyway) hysterical reactions to it. There will be Apple “phones” and competing phones all running some amount of free software (and all working over IP). Apple will have retreated from the ridiculous DRM fortress they’re currently holed up in, simply because it’s an enormous competitive disadvantage, and I will probably be using some reasonably-open palm-sized Apple product just as I have in their traditional computer forms for the past decade. Steve Jobs being gone will threaten the ability of the company to remain unbearably arrogant, but I’m sure they will find a way to keep hubris alive.

    2. Jul 24th, 2008

      Assaf

      I think Apple would always be “as DRM as the market can bear”.

      On the desktop, I love Linux and OS X the same. Linux lets me tinker more, but Linux also forces me to tinker more. In a phone, I’d take something that works over something that’s infinitely flexible.

      And if Apple wants to trade core functionality for less options — which they claim are technical reasons, but we all know are business reasons — I’m fine with that. If I wasn’t, would buy WinMo or RIM.

      I think that’s where Apple’s market is.

    3. Jul 24th, 2008

      n8

      The irony being that, as far as I’ve heard, iPhone 2.0 is less stable than jailbroken iPhone 1.1.3. There is a a lot of air between the current iPhone and Linux, including a happy medium that is not so different from a jailbroken iPhone or regular Macintosh. But like you say Apple has made a business decision and that’s that, for now. I can’t think of a reason for Apple customers *not* to push back on it, especially owners of the products affected. You know you want ssh for emergencies (and not Sshh!! by Kumbia Kings, the closest result currently on iTunes).

    4. Jul 24th, 2008

      Assaf

      In all fairness, jailbreaking just added another application (the installer) but didn’t change the underpinning, while 2.0 is a significant upgrade of the entire OS. So you can expect 2.0 to bring stability.

      Life in the jailbroken lane was not all rosy. First installer was crashy, only the most recent one is rock solid. Most apps were buggy, some refused to install or upgrade. If you closed a session in the terminal app you had to reboot the phone. The setting for turning SSH daemon off didn’t work, so I have to uninstall it. Twinkle and TTR crashed on occasion. I had one app that didn’t do anything but refused to uninstall.

      It was a mess. But who are you going to blame? Apple didn’t sanction them. Can’t blame hackers for filling in the gaps.

      Now that it’s coming from the AppStore, it’s very tempting to blame Apple for every bug you find in every app you install, and for every application that doesn’t already exist (and the store has only been around for a couple of weeks). Overall the installer is great, and the apps are much better, but there’s also a scapegoat.

      It’s a matter of perception.

      Not to absolve Apple. 2.0 is so bad it shouldn’t have been released to begin with. The upgrade process takes forever, and I had to research and do some voodoo to break out of a repeating crash cycle during the update. Vista bad.

      But if Leopard is any indication, 2.1 will be better, and better releases will follow quickly, and the apps will only get better and richer. And it will still be a locked-in platform that plays to Apple’s business interests.

    5. Jul 29th, 2008

      n8

      “tempting to blame Apple for every bug you find in every app you install, and for every application that doesn’t already exist”

      I haven’t installed any apps or found any bugs, but ssh… sheesh. I’m just saying the situation is lame. A scapegoat being something with blame unfairly (and absurdly) foisted upon it, I don’t see how Apple could be that with respect to their own product and their own decisions. I’m not sure when or if anyone will be able to bring an ssh terminal into existence that is compatible with the current AppStore terms, as terminals tend to bring freedoms Apple and AT&T do not want for iPhone users. Since there has existed, for six months at least, an ssh terminal for jailbrokenland we don’t have to speculate that a blessed AppStore version would exist if not for Apple’s non-technical demands. So, sure, I blame Apple for that, irrelevantly. What I’m really doing is begging the company not to continue in this direction that I refuse to follow it in both out of principle and practicality.

      “And it will still be a locked-in platform that plays to Apple’s business interests.”

      Interests which could be played to in infinitely many unlocked ways, as well as locked, but I think we all know that. What no one knows is what strategy would be maximally profitable in the long term, or how long Apple will maintain its current course.

      (I hope you don’t mind me continuing this conversation here. It’s helping me not post about the iPhone!)

    6. Jul 29th, 2008

      Assaf

      When someone says 2.0 is less stable than jailbroken, giving my experience with both, they’re scapegoating Apple for all the broken apps. Also, committing the typical bias fallacy, forgetting how long it took Installer go get as decent as Apple’s first version of AppStore, and that the Installer is still broken in many places.

      It’s the “open source holy” mentality, which in my experience comes from trying to find fault in everything vendors do. I don’t mind that, but I also noticed it’s strongly correlated to tolerating really bad open source software. The thing is, most people, myself included, don’t care if it’s open source or not, first make sure it works. That “open source is just better” mentality just perpetuates bad open source alternatives by being too forgiving, hurting open source in the long run.

      So you can see why, being an open source advocate, I have no tolerance for scapegoating Apple. Scapegoating comes at the expense of learning and improving.

      Vista was a huge window of opportunity (apologize for the bad pun) for other operating systems. OS X did very well to capitalize on that, meanwhile Linux is just sitting there in the corner happy that it’s more open source than anything else on the planet, but doing nothing to bring that open source to more people.

      Apple will keep it as lock for as long as they can, they did it with the Mac and iTunes, why change? And they’ll get away with it. If there wasn’t a big uptake on the iPhone, there wouldn’t be a big uproar on how closed it is. You don’t like it? Buy something else. The problem is, a lot of people do like, they crave it, just wish it did more because there’s nothing else they’d rather buy.

      I don’t mind keeping the discussion here, for the same reason of not wanting to post about it. This is more interesting than getting into the echo-chamber.

    7. Jul 29th, 2008

      Assaf

      BTW just to be clear, jailbroken apps played a factor in me deciding to buy an iPhone, and anything that will kick Apple to open it more is a plus. I’m not trying to excuse their actions.

      But even though I consider all the other smartphones to be more open (yes, even the MS branded ones), I wouldn’t buy any of them. It’s Apple insistence on doing things a certain way that tips the scale in favor of the iPhone.

      And you have to respect that some of these decisions result in both pros and cons, depending on how you look at it. The exact same thing exists on the Mac, some decisions drive me crazy, but a lot of them also have upsides.

      Likewise, Sun wanting things a certain way played into what is currently the mobile Java ecosystem. Except, in that case it made we want to ignore their platform altogether, and choose iPhone instead. Judging by the lines in front of the store, I’m not alone.

    8. Aug 7th, 2008

      n8

      Let me be the first to link to this App Store ssh app:
      http://arstechnica.com/journals/apple.ars/2008/08/07/iphone-and-ipod-touch-get-their-first-ssh-client-touchterm

      Okay now that that’s out of the way. :) You keep talking about Linux and I keep talking about unlocking Cocoa Touch devices to be more like Mac OS X. This is not about freetardedness, at least not for me, and we’d all be better of if whoever is writing for the FSF would either shut up, or learn to make an argument and learn something about Apple and its products. I don’t have much of an opinion on desktop Linux, or other smartphones, or how bad Java ME is. I used Ubuntu as a work machine for 1.5 years because my company at the time refused to buy anyone a Mac, but that has changed. I’ve never had a smartphone. I’ve used other people’s iPhones a fair bit. I’m just expressing my disappointment that Apple has not made the product I’ve been craving, and for wholly non-technical reasons. (I’ve been waiting for the Steve-forsaken “tablet” for a decade, only to watch Apple dance around that category while pulling off far more difficult technical feats.) You’re right I “don’t like it” (the policy) and there are two things I’m doing as a result: 1) not buying it (maybe I’ll buy something else, maybe not) 2) trying to convince other people not to like it (until they tell me to be quiet).

    9. Aug 8th, 2008

      Assaf

      I bring up Linux because in some way Apple symbolizes a lot of what I liked about Linux. There’s a passionate community that’s very knowledgeable about their machine. A lot of work to make desktop computing better, but also do it the UNIX way. And, there’s a benevolent dictator with a vision.

      Just ask Linus about DTrace …

      Separately, I’m empathic because I would have done things almost the same way. I would start with a limited options, and expand those over time. Restrict first, get the experience right, learn from mistakes, expand, get the experience right again, rinse, repeat. I do the same thing in the projects I manage.

      The only thing I would have done different: wave a white flag at the jailbroken crowd. Control the experience for people who want it, let everyone else do as they please with their hardware.

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