Does Apple really have a financial interest in rejecting Firefox?
I bought several iOS devices understanding that the app market is an exclusive, curated, walled garden, with all of the advantages and shortcomings that that implies.
I'm a long time Mac user too, and an exclusive, curated, walled garden is most certainly not in line with my expectations on that platform. I'm happy to have the option of a curated marketplace, but if it's exclusive, I can tell you that I'm going to stop buying Macs - probably in favour of linux laptops. And I'm sure that I'm not alone.
But Apple already rejected alternate browsers from iOS, they already demonstrated their willingness to abuse their power over iOS market, with dropbox, amazon, the ibooks debacle, and already set up barriers for developers on Mac OS, as if I remember correctly, the Gatekeeper license is supposed to cost serious money.
So I'm not exactly holding my breath, even though I'm writing this from a MacBook.
But Apple already rejected alternate browsers from iOS
Have they actually rejected alternative browsers? I know you can't execute mmap() on iOS to do javascript jitting, but have they actually rejected them for some other reason? Opera Mini is available, after all.
they already demonstrated their willingness to abuse their power over iOS market, with dropbox, amazon, the ibooks debacle
Well, I disagree with abuse. Remember that 99% of the programming guidelines that get apps rejected are to prevent egregious abuse of the end-user, like uploading the users whole address book to a server, logging IMEIs, or using trickery, obfuscation, and confusion to upsell iPhone users into cloud storage data plans.
If you're a 'rockstar programmer', and the only thing that matters is you and your fans, then iOS might not be the platform for you.
and already set up barriers for developers on Mac OS, as if I remember correctly, the Gatekeeper license is supposed to cost serious money.
It's $100 for the OSX developer program license, unless this has changed from when I last heard. And you don't need it anyways - just install with a warning. Why shouldn't the user get a warning when they're asking to install a program from an unknown and untrusted source?
So I'm not exactly holding my breath, even though I'm writing this from a MacBook.
I've been using Linux Mint 12 for some work tasks lately, and it's awesome. It's not OSX, but I know now that there's a viable alternative to OSX if Apple really messes things up.
You misunderstood the JavaScript issue: if you built a JavaScript interpreter (which people of course have, and which most of these JITs have as a fallback already) and used that to make a browser, you still would not be allowed in the App Store because you are downloading new code and functionality for execution to execute in a scripting engine that did not come with the iPhone.
In my experience those rules can be bent a little bit, i.e. for an app that displays 3D graphics like an augmented reality application, it's generally fine to use Lua or JS to script those, even if the code is downloaded from the web. Of course you still can't jit this, but luckily I've found that JavaScriptCore and LuaJIT with the jit turned off are very fast on iDevices anyway.
The function of the rule is to prevent people from creating an alternative app platform. For example, one based on the Flash runtime where you could download new applications from within this app, thereby bypassing the app store.
> The function of the rule is to prevent people from creating an alternative app platform. For example, one based on the Flash runtime where you could download new applications from within this app, thereby bypassing the app store.
A full-fledged third-party browser would inevitably be an alternative app platform. In some ways, that's the point.
3) (mostly Mozilla-specific) CAs need Mozilla far more than Mozilla needs CAs. Mozilla can always ensure that at least one major browser trusts their certificate, after all.
No one is complaining about signed/certified binaries from a security perspective. It's the process behind the signatures and certification that is at issue.
> Graphene is fundamentally vanilla Windows Phone, except with all Windows/Microsoft branding removed in favour of Facebook
Not a chance. Microsoft would never compromise their branding. They're not THAT desperate yet, and their still in a stronger position than Facebook in terms of having money to throw around.
> phone functionality swapped with a custom Skype UI (integrated with Facebook contacts)
You'll never get the carriers to agree with that. Not yet. Even Apple couldn't do it.
> For data service, Facebook makes a deal with one carrier in every region on Earth to become a "dumb pipe" of unlimited 4G/3G, negotiates a reasonable globally consistent rate, and handles billing with users (acting as a middleman between users and carriers, effectively becoming its own carrier with borrowed infrastructure).
Again, for the same reason, it's extremely unlikely that carriers would agree to this on any level. Not yet. They've still got a few dying gasps yet.
> In the end, we get a Facebook-controlled and Facebook-powered "Facebook Phone" which shuns legacy telephony technology and seamlessly moves between regional 3G/4G and Wi-Fi networks (and makes Facebook, Microsoft, and Nokia a ton of money).
I still disagree that Facebook are in any position to heavy-hand away the branding of either Microsoft or Nokia. Especially Microsoft. They're not going to hand over the OS they spent a lot of effort developing for no recognition, even if it makes them tonnes of money in licensing.
It's a good idea, but I don't think it's likely at all in this climate.
> Seems that Sidekick and Kin are counter-examples to that statement.
Microsoft threw away the working Sidekick OS and re-built it from the ground up on Win CE so that they could brand KIN as a "Windows Phone". So isn't that really a perfect example?
Exactly. Sidekick was thrown into the trash before the customers even knew it, and Kin was pitched into the dumpster before the launch party was even over.
The only non-Microsoft brand to come out of Microsoft is, curiously, the XBox.
In addition, with all the semi-frequent frenzied branding changes, Microsoft leadership seems to be acutely aware that they lack a well-regarded image with the consumer market. Perhaps they would decide against such a strategy, but "never" is a bit extreme.
As far as the carrier issue, let's just say XCom Global and the individual carriers all snub Facebook. Even without Microsoft, Facebook has more than enough cash on hand to directly buy out Sprint Nextel and/or its assets. A foothold in the US alone would be a strong enough starting position to make this feasible.
The header: "Apple 2.0 - Covering the business that Steve Jobs built" shows the category that this blog post is in.
While it doesn't point out in big letters that this is an opinion piece, this article is in the category of a well established Apple opinion blog in their tech blogs category.
It's also pretty clear from the writing style that this is an opinion piece.
Sure, it's probably easy to tell for someone who's a regular reader of CNN. However, I believe that most people - even several (if not many) from HN - will see the CNN header, then read the article and assume it's CNN. They should be A LOT clearer about it being an opinion piece.
Quite the opposite, in my experience. I can read my feed on my 'phone, with a better UI than the website (turns out native app beats webapp, even when it's tiny screen vs. desktop), so why would I ever bother going to the website?
There's no one standard definition of "4G". A myriad of differing technologies all claim to be 4G, which is why it's just about impossible for a vendor to produce a device compatible with every one worldwide. If "4G" had a solid definition, and everybody was using it, but iPad didn't support it, then it would be understandable.
While I agree theres no standard definition, theres a general agreement between all parties that LTE is "4G" and HSDPA+ is "3G" (or "3.5G" if you will).
To argue the semantics of what "3G" and "4G" really is only confuses customers even more - and thats exactly what Australia and the UK are trying to prevent.
This works in theory. Once you start getting into complex projects, it quickly breaks down. Merge tools don't properly understand that, even though the closing tag (e.g. "};" in a project file or an XML node in a storyboard file) is the same, it doesn't mean that the contents are the same. You quickly end up with a corrupted file because it leaves off the closing tag on one of the two.
Give p4merge a try. We have a huge codebase, and I've found that p4merge, though not perfect, tends to do better than the default.
Another thing we've done to keep the insanity down is break our monolithic project into a few library projects to keep the project file merge damage to a minimum.
