Thursday, October 08, 2009

As Adobe flips off Apple, so should it be returned.

[Bynkii’s got a rebuttal & comments here. Read that instead. Thanks, John..]

So, I’ve been following with bemused interest how Apple has been repeatedly flipping off Adobe over Flash on the iPhone, and for good reason. And now Adobe returns in kind.

Of course some think it’s ‘good’ that this can be done, and some like me think it’s ‘bad’, but really, this is an opportunity for Apple to ‘fix’ or make vers 2.0 the AppStore. Hear me out:

If Apple’s preferred dev environments are C/ObjC/CocoaTouch and/or HTML5, then set up source code repositories for the developers that use those technologies. Devs and Apple can actually refer to code inside dev.apple.com and bounce shzt back and forth.

Apple can have little greppy bots compiling a list of public and private calls and run Clang or whatever else, the point is that there’s a first filter to kick the dreck back to the newbie coders like I may someday become. You can grep for calls in source and when private call/api combos are found, kick it back to the newb with a wagging finger and no-no-no. Or if you’re Google you get to slide. But I digress. There’s a top level pass/fail so that devs aren’t left in limbo over the painfully obvious.

Next is the reviewer, where code gets audited in its totality ONCE. Now the fun begins. Instead of having this 2 week plus wait over little code or even string changes, the dev checks in the change and a reviewer does a diff and a launch test. In fact, for string changes there’s no wait.

If everything’s kosher that’s it. Right now, if an AppStore dev finds an ohshit bug, in general he’s gotta fix, re submit, and wait 2+ weeks for a review to peer around his blackbox. So remove the black and make it glass box already.

They can also put a label in the AppStore that says to me, an enduser, ‘code audited by Apple’ like some Good Housekeeping Seal o’ Approval. Devs using Apple’s approved tech get preference.

Now, for Adopey, if they wanna compile a binary and spoof a signature and put a black box over the binary that’s fine with me. They can go thru the bynzantine clusterfcuk that is AppStore 1.0. I really don’t want half-assed crap on my iPhone, if I can help it, and I don’t think anyone else does either.

My point is that yes, ‘developers of all levels’ should be encouraged to submit apps. And they should be treated, if at all possible the way devs wanna be treated. In other words, not like the hoi-polloi.

There should be incentives and rewards for those devs who go the extra mile. And there should be an invisible [back]hand that encourages the jailb^h hobbyists to move up the ranks to where Apple wants them *cough* RedLaser *cough* Snapture *cough* etc etc etc.

Apple kinda hobbled their baby, so they kinda have to have barriers to entry to maintain the model. Or it becomes Windows 98^h^h^h^h MacOSX ‘Home Edition’ [no logging, no backgrounding.. yet, etc].. with all those problems we know and lovelike user privacy problems.

And there should be a wall, or every VBScripting phishy moron will contribute to the crap ratio of the store. And, as we know, what Apple’s really afraid of now is trojans and payloads. Two real threats and counting. These guys getting slapped because ‘different content than what was reviewed’ piped thru their crApp.

So audit the code. And for the visigoths & barbarians of Fuh-lash & the ‘Compiled Script Kiddies’, you can make them wait 2+ weeks at the Great Wall o’ Segfault. That’s what walls are for, keeping the riff-raff out. And the current wall works. Just not for the Devs.

If anyone at Apple is discussing this, it’s YOUR IDEA. It just so happened to occur to me. So none of this ‘not invented here’ that you’re so famous for.

Still bashing my head on ch. 7 of this. Laugh your asses off:


“Learn C on the Mac (Learn Series)” (Dave Mark)

1 comment:

John C. Welch said...

http://www.bynkii.com/archives/2009/10/seriously_get_a_grown-up_comme.html

i know that blogger doesn't make your comment system THAT bad.

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