Keeping in mind all of this crap that’s been floating around the internet for the past few days (in no particular order):

1. Official Google Voice App Blocked From App Store
2. Apple’s Chickenshit Approval Process Has Gone Too Far
3. There’s No App for That: VoiceCentral Removed From App Store
4. What Steve said about the App Store and why we need to suck it up
5. IPhone SMS Attack to Be Unleashed at Black Hat
6. iPhone Jailbreaking Could Crash Cellphone Towers, Apple Claims
7. Is the iPhone causing Apple to lose the plot?

Apple, I’ve stood by you for a long time now, but you’re just being stupid.  Your App Store rules of rejection and acceptance need to be TRANSPARENT.  And when you reject an app like Google Voice, man up and give a freaking reason for it.  The Beckettian back and forth in #3 above is something I would expect from Dell.  And quite frankly, you deserved the unofficial response you got from Google’s Marissa Mayer (passive though it was).

As for #4, I completely agree.  If developers keep putting up with this, they’ll need to suck it up.  But after #3, why on earth would any sensible company want to spend months developing for iPhone, wait a month or more to be accepted then rejected with no explanation and no suggestions for how to get the app back into the store?  As a developer it makes my blood boil.  Makes me want to start coding mobile apps for basically any other platform — Android, WebOs… even Windows Mobile.

And as for the crap you’re trying to pull against the EFF and their campaign to make Jailbreaking a legal option, can you smell what you’re shoveling?  How can you say Jailbreaking would crash a cell tower?  Sure it’s a possibility.  But do you really think a serious terrorist would use an iPhone to do that?  You can do that with just about anything that can connect to the cellular network (an eval board, an old cell phone… basically anything but a tin can).  PLUS, unless you fix that SMS bug in #5 above right quick, a hacker wouldn’t even NEED to jailbreak his phone.  He could just send a text message and not only overwhelm the cell towers but crash all of the system’s iPhones in the process.  I only hope the courts can see right through that one (see #7 for more analysis on this one).

I’d been a pretty satisfied iPhone customer since the 3.0 (iPhone mind you.  not AT&T.  AT&T can suck it. I only hope Apple doesn’t renew their exclusive contract with them and I can ditch them for another provider when my contract is up.  And if they don’t I hope there are better iPhone alternatives by then.)  Most of the apps that I installed via Jailbreak were accounted for or rendered unnecessary with copy/paste, better integration with Google Calendar, etc.

But now, just out of principle, I’m going to jailbreak my phone again.  I advise you all to do the same.  This walled garden that Apple’s is creating is really stagnating for developer innovation (when there’s 15 variations of ‘Pull My Finger’, how many of those ‘approved’ applications do you really think are useful?).  And frankly, their guardianship seems to be done by a gang of ADD monkeys (I need to be 17 to use Wikipanion? Really?  And AroundMe?  It’s like you understand only the letter of the law, but not the spirit.  And frankly I’d rather not have a guardian of my phone than have an overprotective, uncommunicative one).

I guess in my mind, for any healthy industry to thrive, there needs to be some competition.  Where’s the competition?  Android, step up your game!  Palm, your marketing sucks.  Do better.

Until then, the best we can do is rebel in mild ways.  Like Jailbreaking.  Thanks Dev Team, for giving us that option.

UPDATE: A bold move from Michael Arrington of TechCrunch: I Quit the iPhone.
UPDATE 2: Developer Steven Frank is ditching the iPhone too.

The Saga Continues: Why The FCC Wants To Smash Open The iPhone
EVEN MORE: Apple Rejects Dictionary App for Containing Swear Words

It’s not enough that they have a warning on Wikipanion that some of the content in THE OPEN SOURCE ENCYCLOPEDIA might have content that’s inappropriate for children under 17?  They now ban dictionaries for swear words?

It’s like they have the Three Stooges manning their application approval process.  I really hope the FCC beats Apple to a pulp on this one.  They deserve it.

Hulu iPhone App Coming Soon, ‘Badass’

Sweet!!!

My favorite part is the end:

“Thank you for that, Jeff.  It remains to be seen whether the MacBook Wheel will catch on in the business world where people use computers for actual work and not just dicking around.”

photo by Enrique Aguirre

Stanford University: Finding a Nerd to Art quotient of 1.

See a nice narrated slideshow on The Mercury News

Check out video of SLOrk in Beijing

And visit the SLOrk website for more

Regarding your recent behavior towards your iPhone Developer Network: please stop being such fascists.

It’s one thing to hold your developers to high standards and reject apps that do not meet those standards (I’m looking at you, AIM).  It’s quite another to reject applications because they are like yours and (heaven forbid) possibly even perform better than your own.

Be nice.

Sit back, relax, and remember just how much you rely on the developers of the open source community — how much of their code you’ve rolled into your own.

What’s wrong with a little competition?  What do you have to be scared of?  People should be challenging you to improve your own applications.  Let us, the users, make the choice.  If we want to have 3 mail applications, 12 versions of Sudoku and 85 different ways to upload our photos to Flickr, we can agree that’s stupid, but that should be our choice to make.  And really, we both know your apps are going to be better in the end anyway.  But let us figure that out for ourselves.

We’re smart.  We bought your iPhone in the first place, didn’t we?  Trust us to put what we want on it.

I don’t want to hear any more crap like this from you.  Really?  A statement of confidentiality to gag your developers, preventing them from venting that they just blew months of dev time on an application you rejected for no reason? Come on.  You’re better than this.  Or at least you used to be.

Shape up!

Until you do, I will scream from the hilltops that Jailbreak is the only way to iPhone.

Sincerely,

Jeff
Lord Geek Supreme
Geek Chic

what are you doing, Steve?

Over the weekend, a lot of dirty laundry was aired about Microsoft’s anti-Apple campaign, including:

1. The entire campaign was created on Macs, as evidenced by metadata scraped from some of the ad campaign’s photos.
2. The ad agency behind the campaign, Crispin Porter + Bogusky, was profiled a few months ago on Apple’s Pro site as being fanatical Apple users.
3. Microsoft’s Mojave experiment — designed to convince users to take another look at Vista — apparently fudged a lot of its numbers.
4. The Times quote that Microsoft uses on all of their campaigns, ‘Windows Vista is beautiful,’ was apparently taken out of the context of a highly critical David Pogue article, in which he talks about how clunky the OS is and how most of the interface was ripped off from Apple.
5. RoughlyDrafted wrote a concise, chilling rebuttal to Paul Thurrott calling Apple ‘the Bad Guys’ and ‘liars’ for exposing Vista’s flaws (which brings up a very good point — could Microsoft possibly make the argument that MacOS has huge flaws?  I’d like to see that one.)

All of this adds up to what looks like a huge embarrassment for Microsoft.

Ok.  It’s better than the Seinfeld ads.  I’ll give it that.  But that’s not that much.

My beef with it is this: these people are not cool (that’s the point, right?).  They’re fine.  They seem perfectly nice.  But the thing the Mac vs PC commercials got right was the attitude of the Mac.  He just seems like a great, smart guy who you’d want to have a drink with.  You want to hang out with that guy.  You want to be that guy.  So in the traditional advertising sense, they’re selling you an image: buy a Mac and you can be cool.

So fine.  Not all ads have to play into that old-school ad logic.  What does this ad have to say for itself?

What this ad tells me is that many dull people who lead semi-adventurous lives are already using Windows.  I knew that.  They all seem like people who are not particularly savy or tasteful — and wouldn’t necessarily know the difference between a Mac and a PC.  Or, like, they get grant money from Microsoft so they have to buy PCs.

With this crowd it doesn’t seem like an issue of taste or any sort of discerning opinion. As a savy (albeit ferociously pro-Mac) technology consumer, I don’t get the idea from the commercial that this product will help me lead a more productive, fun life.  It just proves that too many other people of all walks of life use PCs.

As far as I know, Microsoft is losing market share to Apple primarily in the 18-25 range. That age range cares more about looks, ease of use, and general coolness quotient far more than the fact that a large number of older people do their perfectly interesting jobs just fine in spite of the fact that they own PCs.

So what’s the point?  To make people who already have PCs feel like they’re in good company? Maybe.  I guess that’s valuable.  But then this whole campaign is more of Microsft trying to plug the dam of the outflow of users — rather than a counter-attack.

Safety.  Make people feel safe and secure in the boring products they already own.

I guess it’s just what you’d expect from Microsoft.

It comes in regular and extra-snarky:

Case in point: Apple released the new iPhone 2.1 Firmware last Friday.  By Saturday morning, the Dev Team had cracked it.

If you’ve got an iPhone and you’re looking to do some Jailbreaking, accept no substitutes. These guys are the real deal.  I’m seriously looking forward to the point when these guys have a solution for actually unlock the phone for use on any network.

Or the day when Apple makes Jailbreaking (and even unlocking) irrelevant.  Their current pattern of rejecting applications for the App Store without having any sort of clear acceptance standard (AFTER developers have paid $100 for the privilege of being able to submit to Apple in the first place and invested countless hours of unpaid development time) is pretty tyrannical, imho.

I would fully support anyone who wants to Jailbreak their phone  — if it didn’t violate my service agreement, of course.  There are a lot of useful applications out there that, for some reason or another, Apple does not want you to use (iPhone Modem, NemusSync, Snapture, VideoRecorder, BigBoss Prefs, Searcher, WinterBoard, Customize, not to mention Terminal and OpenSSH for the hardcore nerds.  And that barely scratches the surface).

It’s my feeling that –  I paid through the nose for this particular piece of hardware.  Like any hardware that I own, I should be able to control how I use it.  Apple doesn’t dictate to me what color my MBP’s desktop is.  Why shouldn’t I be able to customize what my iPhone Springboard looks like?  The camera on the iPhone can record video.  Why shouldn’t I be able to use an application that takes advantage of that?

For more about how to Jailbreak your iPhone using the PwangeTool or QuickPwn, check out the Apple iPhone School.  Or just jump right in with QuickPwn.  It does all of the heavy lifting for you.

As I said, I cannot condone this sort of behavior.  And I’ve never even considered Jailbreaking my iPhone.  I mean, that would violate my service contract, now wouldn’t it? And I wouldn’t want to piss off AT&T…

The iPod Touch. Why?

The new Nanos look pretty sweet.  No argument here.

But can we talk for a second about the iPod Touch?  Seriously.  Why?

Is the Touch’s existence for the sole purpose of making one look stupid for not getting an iPhone?  Why on earth would one pay $400 to get a limited 32GB of disk space and the occasional opportunity to access one of 2 open WiFi points in your general vicinity? (if you’re lucky — thank you “Liberal Media” for scaring everyone into locking their networks… You are all pawns in the ISPs game to make more money.)

So what is the iPhone good for, exactly?  The App store?  Just how many copies of Sudoku do you need?  The Nanos now come with an accelerometer, so that cool feature is no longer exclusive.  It doesn’t come with a camera, so that’s out.  And only the flaky pseudo-GPS.  The touch screen?  Seems cool, but if you can’t do anything on the device it doesn’t really matter what the mode of interaction is.  Silly putty responds to your touch and you don’t have to pay $400 for it.

So I ask again, what good is this expensive little hunk of plastic and metal?  Why does Apple keep it around?

Anyone?