David Bovill wrote:
On 20 May 2010 16:46, J. Landman Gay <jacque at hyperactivesw.com> wrote:
Richard Gaskin wrote:
I believe Apple would allow a HyperCard-like app for the iPhone/iPad only
if they could have complete assurances it would be available EXCLUSIVELY for
iPhone OS.
Kevin offered to do exactly that, and was still refused. It's in his blog
post.
What Kevin wrote there is:
In order to support our active and growing revMobile customer
base, we submitted an in-depth proposal to Apple that we create
an iPhone-only product that uses native Cocoa objects, supports
100% of their API, works perfectly with multitasking and battery
life, but uses a variant of the revTalk language to use these
objects and APIs, and then translates those into native code.
So I see where his pitch was for an iPhone-specific version of the
engine, but in my reading it's unclear whether that necessarily
precludes making a similar engine for other platforms.
Blowing off the other 83.9% of the mobile market (Apple says they have
only 16.1%) just to appease His Steveness would have been suicidal, so
if that was the intent we can all be glad the proposal was rejected.
The beauty of the Rev engine is that it liberates us from the whims of
any single OS vendor. OSes come and go, but if it stays true to its
mandate there will always be Rev.
Yes he did - and I don't agree it is about exclusivity - it is about not
being locked into the lower common denominator. It is about the apps being
better on the iPad than they are on anything else - and the danger is that
the opposite would happen over time - as it has before with Apple based
software.
Whether it's apps or app features, the goal is the same: exclusivity
for iPhone OS.
Steve seems worried that Apple can't deliver an unquestionably superior
experience on their own, and can only differentiate itself from other
mobile offerings by arbitrarily raising development costs high enough
that developers will have to choose between his mobile OS and the rest
of the world.
Big gamble.
After all, it's not like the rest of the desktop OSes don't have
overlapping windows, and it's not like other mobile OSes don't have
accelerometers, GPS, and multitouch.
If Steve can't come up with compelling differentiators, it's not Kevin's
or any developer's fault.
Yet its developers who are being asked to pay the price for Apple's need
to differentiate: either double your development costs with two code
bases, or lower your revenue by deploying only to iPhone OS.
There is indeed a radical revolution afoot, but not of the sort the lay
press is enamored of with their talk of The End of The Computer with
some sort of replacement being more specialized devices like iPad.
The real revolution is the ever-increasing commoditization of operating
systems.
There, I said it.
Operating systems are becoming ever more similar to one another, and
there's nothing any of them can do to slow that down. It's as natural,
pervasive, and unstoppable as the migration from AppleTalk to TCP/IP.
If this makes Steve uneasy he's missing the point of what Apple does:
Apple's OS X isn't the only OS with deeply integrated search, or the
only one with good multitasking, or even the only one with the strength
of having Unix at its core.
What Apple brings to the table is that they make BOTH the OS and the
hardware, and therefore have an unmatched harmony between the two.
I think that's worth paying for. Indeed, I'm typing this on a Mac.
If Steve thinks he needs to push hard on developers to differentiate
Apple products, he's missing the point.
There are less expensive ways to communicate the value Apple delivers
than forcing developers to move to Android.
Hopefully he'll find a way to communicate that, and lighten up a bit on
developers.
In the meantime I'm happily writing my single-code-base apps for Mac,
Win, and Linux, and look forward to Android, Maemo, WinMobile, and
anyone else who joins the Rev revolution.
--
Richard Gaskin
Fourth World
Rev training and consulting: http://www.fourthworld.com
Webzine for Rev developers: http://www.revjournal.com
revJournal blog: http://revjournal.com/blog.irv
_______________________________________________
use-revolution mailing list
use-revolution@lists.runrev.com
Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription
preferences:
http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
