Multithreaded

Just been listening to the March 14th newscast from the JavaPosse where they spend a lot of, very interesting, time talking about the new SDK on the iPhone and the apparent restrictions in the terms and conditions which prevent people from distributing apps which run on a VM. This would mean that developers could not distribute Java applications which required the VM to be present to run. They discuss a lot of interesting points, and speculate a lot on the motivations, sinister or otherwise, of Apple in deciding to limit developers. Obviously, not being Apple, they’re not able to draw a lot of definite conclusions.

I’d like to offer a different perspective on this issue. As developers, we see the iPhone as a development platform with huge potential. Since the moment it was released, I’ve been wanting to have other apps running on it. It makes a great connected device and it’s easy to compare it with other, open, platforms such as the Nokia N800. However, I believe Apple did not create the iPhone, and are not looking at it, as a device for developers. This is a consumer device, first and foremost. Apple’s priority at all times is that someone who has bough an iPhone, as a consumer, should get the best possible experience all of the time and if that means that developers are left frustrated then so be it.

I think that the directive against VM-based apps it based on this principle. Apple do not want people to come browsing the software on the iPhone store, seeing something they like and then being told they need to download one or more other components in order to get it to run. Or worse, downloading (and perhaps paying for) an app only to find it won’t run because they didn’t know that they needed to download (and possibly pay for) another component before it would run. Supporting this in the iPhone store would mean dealing with dependencies between components and then you get into all the problems of version handling - what happens if I have the Java 5 runtime installed but another app needs Java 6?

Looking at my experience of using a Nokia N800, it was great that it is a very open device and that there are lots of third-party apps for it, but my experience of installing those apps was often frustrating as I needed to locate libraries that those apps depended on and download them separately. Even as a programmer I found it very annoying and tedious. I can well see that Apple to not want that to be the experience of the average user who expects things to just work.

In fact, I would not be surprised if Apple did not take “it just works” as their yardstick for deciding how and when to open up aspects of the iPhone. As the JavaPosse discussed, the delay in releasing the SDK was probably not down to not wanting people to develop for the iPhone, but rather taking the time to ensure that the experience the developers have is a great one which probably meant considerable cleanup of the libraries and tools between the launch of the phone and the release of the SDK. For iPhone users they are going to be even more stringent in applying that principle.

Of course, another aspect of that is that they would want all apps on the iPhone to be as consistent as possible in their look and behaviour. The first part of that is the visual component library which means getting people to use the native SDK as much as possible. The second part is the UI guidelines, but Apple developers are usually pretty good at sticking to those. I have used Java apps on Symbian 60 phones and generally they look and behave very differently from the native S60 apps which can cause a lot of confusion and just be downright annoying sometimes. Again, a situation Apple would love to avoid on the iPhone.

In conclusion, I think that if you take a step back from your developer viewpoint and look at the iPhone SDK and software distribution system from the point of view of a consumer then Apple’s behaviour seems a lot more understandable and a lot less sinister.

A post by Fake Steve Jobs led me to Jason D. O’Grady over at ZDNet who has blogged about how much he hates the new Apple keyboards. I bought one when they came out to try it out and since then I have replaced they keyboards on all my Macs with the new ones.

It seems that the feel and design is something you either love or hate. I really love the low-profile light touch on the keys. I am a programmer and I use my keyboard probably 10 hours a day. Whenever I use an old-style keyboard now all I can think is how clunky and heavy it feels. It feels like I’m using an original IBM PC keyboard. Interestingly, my Mac Book Pro keyboard, which always used to feel light, now feels quite solid and I actually enjoy using it more now that I’m using the new desktop keyboards.

I don’t mind that Jason doesn’t like them. It really comes down to a matte of taste. His other objections centre around the design and here I think he is on shakier ground. I love the low-throw of the keys. They give enough click sound to give me the feedback I need without the tactile feedback. And objections to the change in the location of they various function keys are really just complaints about change. Millions of new Mac users in the coming year will never care about that and it’s something that most people can easily adapt to.

But most importantly, the keyboard and mouse are two of the most easily replaceable components on a computer. Okay, there may not be as many Mac-specific keyboards on the market as there are for PCs, but there are still plenty to choose from, so if you don’t like the one that Apple puts in the box then go get another one. Personally, although I love the design of the Mighty Mouse, I don’t really like using it so I use a Microsoft Intellimouse (actually, I’ve always felt that MS were a far better at hardware than software) which, of course, works fine.

I agree that it would be nice to see a full-sized bluetooth keyboard, but I’m still looking forward to receiving the cut-down one when it finally ships to me here in the UK.

My point in all of this is that I’m fine with Jason hating the new keyboard, but please don’t try and justify it with opinions dressed up as objective design complaints. There’s far too much of that already in the world.

That was an interesting move by Apple at the WWDC yesterday, making Safari available on Windows. There seem to me to be a couple of good reasons for this:

Firstly, on June 29th the iPhone will be released (in the US at least, we Apple fanboys in the rest of the world will have to wait a little longer to get our hands on one) and a million or so people, not just Mac users, will be buying them over the next few months. Of course, Safari is the browser on the iPhone. Not a cut-down, limited version of Safari, but the full Safari 3. All at once there is the possibility of running the exact same browser on your Mac, your PC and your phone. Bringing Safari to Windows gives all the non-Mac iPhone users an opportunity to have the same browsing experience on their desktop, laptop and mobile phone.

That’s the short-term reason I see. The second, longer-term, reason is that this is giving more ‘ice water to someone in hell’ as Steve Job’s commented when asked why iTunes was so popular on Windows. Making Safari available is another way of giving Windows users a little more taste of what the Mac experience is like. A lot of long-term Windows users have no idea how using a Mac is just different from using Windows. I certainly didn’t until I made the switch two-and-a-half years ago. I remember the excitement of realizing that this wasn’t simply the same ideas as Windows packaged differently, but that the whole approach was different. By making more of that available to the 93% or so of computer users who have never experienced a Mac, Apple will tempt a lot more of them to go for the full switch.

In the future I can see more and more of the core apps being ported over to Windows. Mail, Address Book and iCal would all sit very comfortably alongside iTunes and Safari. There’s no direct economic benefit, since they’ll all be free downloads, but the aim would seem to me to be to infiltrate the Windows territory, give a taste of what’s on offer and get people to switch. Apple currently has about 6% of the computer market. Currently they’re not aiming for 93%, they’re aiming for 10%. You can see that in the Mac/PC ads - they’re not designed to appeal to everyone, but they are designed to appeal to the next segment of users that Apple want to attract.

Apple clearly have a long-term strategy going here and seem to be very effective at executing it.