skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I am not sure that it'll be exceedingly difficult to determine if an app was compiled using another tool, and not written in Objective-C.

I'd expect many languages and frameworks are going to have many very signature functions and patterns of code. If Apple decides to enforce this, they won't have a hard time.

On top of that, if they miss it, and let a bunch of apps in, then later on determine those apps were crosscompiled, they can revoke the current versions and block that developer...
Apple don't believe in a free market / free competition. If they did, then they wouldn't have an App Store.
I wasn't particularly gentle with my MacBook Pro and it never got scratched or damaged.
There is no longer any debate as to who the "bad guy" is in this story -- Apple has proven themselves to be anti-competition, anti-developer, and anti-consumer.

Just created a new "I'm with Adobe" Facebook Group:

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=113492765344092
Quite, but would you admit publicly to having done so?
I think Apple could have done with some explanation on this, despite all the anti-compertative conspiracy theories, this has probably got more to do with weeding out apps that wont be able to multi-task on the new OS 4 platform, than being another salvo in an apple-adobe wars. Thats why the Rule change has been couched more in terms of how you can write apps (objective-c, api's etc), and not in terms of how you cant which is pure conjecture at the moment.
It's not just with the consoles. I used to develop Lotus Notes applications. The problem with Notes was that the barrier to entry for developers was too low such that it hurt the platform, and it made it hard to distinguish good developers and good apps from the chaff. When a bunch of unqualified developers fill the world with junk it gives the entire platform a reputation as being junky.

I now develop iPhone applications, and I personally agree with Apple in this respect. If you want to develop iPhone applications, spend some time and become proficient with the tools.

And, @raganwald is correct that it's still lock-in, it's just a matter of where the lock is.
Yes it does. My comment was about Flash however.
Interpreters being banned is old news, this is about compiled stuff being rejected because you chose a 'wrong' language.
I talk a lot about how we do business here in my HN comments if you're more interested in the hows.
We're a development shop that focuses on web development, not far from Toronto. We're dipping our toes into iPhone and iPad development - we have someone who is trained, but no app in the App Store yet. We're working on a new app right now that we intend to be free, just to build credibility. But I'd be happy to quote on your project. I'd cut you a deal given that it'd be great exposure and experience for us.

I realize that stating up front that we have limited experience in the area probably doesn't inspire confidence. However, we're a high quality shop with excellent design skills. We produce quality software, and wouldn't let you down.

Contact info in my bio if you're interested.
It's being phased out in the next version.
Couldn't you have a non-fascist solution to this?

Do something like Reddit, Digg, or Hacker News... let people guinea-pig apps and upvote/downvote them and sort in each category.
Asher, awhile ago you told me you could clone 280 Slides using NOLOH relatively quickly, and now this. Do you have any examples of similarly rich and polished applications built using NOLOH? I'm genuinely curious, because the only NOLOH application I've seen is your website.
There is storage--and the ability to run offline--thanks to HTML5, and the same web apps will work the same (more-or-less) on Android and webOS (Palm) phones. You get a SQL db (up to 5MB), plus a persistent key-value store and a window-local "session" key-value store that isn't persistent.

But yeah, no camera/GPS/microphone/etc.
What? I can't imagine spending that much money on a non-game development effort for a mobile device. What the heck does it do?
Hadoop at Twitter
That isn't silverlight, that's video, which the silverlight media server now just provides in a format the iPhone/iPad already supports. No .net running on iPhone OS at all.
Think OS/4, think opening up multitasking to 3rd party apps, perhaps thats why they are being so anal about how apps should be written, if they are planning to make changes to the low-level libraries to support 3rd party app multitasking then they are going to want to make sure that 3rd party apps are linked against them.
I've been wondering about this a bit lately. I've so far chosen not to support the iPhone OS for the reason you mention, instead favoring Android.

However, I'm ultimately interested in serving my application to the largest number of people, and it seems clear to me that the App Store is the best way to achieve that today.
So, do you cave in and develop an iPhone version? Or, do you stand by your morals, and, in turn, limit your audience?
Yes, but is relevant if they are not judged to have a anti-compoetitive effect on the market as a whole. Clearly a company does not have to be a 100% monopoly in the literal sense to run afoul of anti-monopoly laws, but these sanctions are not applied to EVERY company. In Europe, it is not even a matter of behavior illegal for 'monopolies' to engage in, if they are a 'monopoly' there can be sanctions.
Considering that games are the most popular form of application in the app store (currently 9/10 top grossing and 6/10 top free apps are games), I think the percentage is quite high. With an XBox Live-like framework for achievements and friend leaderboards even single-player games can be social.
Check mail. Thanks!
I think you have it there. Developers probably need to be ready to submit their source code along with their binary. That is my guess on what will happen when one sees the "denied because it isn't hand written."

What this will absolutely stop is Adobe calling out developers who have added apps to the app store compiled with CS5. Those apps created that way will also be unable to move upwards to the new OS version. I would imagine it will also completely stop Adobe and others from any development on any OS 4 bridge because they would have to agree to the license to test against the actual SDK and they can't do that without legal problems.
"that life is inherently unfair and often dark"

I disagree completely. The universe is benevolent by default because it has absolutely no supernatural character, and no inherent conciousness to make it anything else. Without this, science would not be possible (according to my biochemistry professor, who said "Nature does not play tricks.") I go one step further say that this applies to morality; that life is what you make of it in the vast preponderance of cases.
ROFLCon: a gathering of Internet celebrities, April 30 at MIT
ex. Something Awful forums, $10 registration fee since 2001.

Pros: It creates a community sense and people used to give out ridiculously cheap web hosting deals just for being a goon.

Cons: Extreme procrastination hazard
Yes, modulo some semantics.

"Chance" is a very frequentist word. It's Better to say "correlation makes us more willing to believe there is causation."
Game mechanics for society, culture and people (Part 1 of 3)
There's a trend focussing on game mechanics and how businesses can influence their customers to behave in certain ways. I propose there's more value and meaning in reversing this and having customers influence business to behave in certain ways that people find valuable.
Enjoy being Apple serfs, developers! The guys over at Titanium [1] can give you genuflecting lessons if you need.

Apple has definitely crossed-over to the dark side. After 26 years of being a fanboy, they've finally exceeded what I can stomach.

[1] http://developer.appcelerator.com/blog/2010/04/apple-4-0-and...
[2] http://ipadmakesmesad.blogspot.com
And how could this ever be proven?
Because the apps will be running on controlled development libraries that might be able to.... perhaps multitask in OS 4.0, remember guys this is a phone we are talking about here, not a games console, security is paramount, and apple is just trying to put the the genie back into the bottle before a mass of insecure apps are elevated up the permission chain in 4.0 to be able to operate on a par with apple authored apps.
It's still there for me, but here's the text:

By now, most of you have probably seen or heard about Apple iPhone SDK 4.0 and a little hidden gem in their freshly minted 4.0 Terms of Services, notably 3.3.1:
“Applications that link to Documented APIs through an intermediary translation or compatibility layer or tool are prohibited.”

It’s clear that products like Titanium, Unity3D, Ansca, MonoTouch and others are now a bit in question for iPhone 4.0+ with this language. We’re all trying to get our heads around what this means and trying to reach out to Apple to get clarification.

Hang tight, we’ll try and give you more information as we can figure it out from Apple. We don’t want to make any false promises or claims – and most importantly, we want to make sure we’re abiding by Apple’s rules.
The going rate for a great developer/designer with lots of mobile experience here in SF is in the ~150 an hour range. I've seen this price go up significantly in the last couple months, primarily due to high demand at the moment. You can probably get a little cheaper outside the area and definitely less offshore, but even then a good offshore house will run you $60 and they often don't like doing fixed bids at those prices.

My experience is that app development for a medium to high complexity app with location features and accessing a 3rd party API for data would typically take 4-6 weeks including QA but really depends on the complexity.

I've done about 30+ mobile apps now so ping me if you need any advice
We're well past that anyways. 185,000 apps? What percentage of those are complete and utter crap?
Cocoa devs?
Why does it matter what language I used to develop an application, if it produces a binary that runs acceptably on the platform and otherwise follows all of the rules? I can write a more stable application in SML, Haskell or even untyped Scheme than most of the clowns I see making app store junk in Objective-C.
Regulators looking at antibacterial in soap
That would be Apple's dream. All mobile developers coding on macbooks.
I started up a small development shop about a year ago with a couple other people from Hacker News, and we have done a lot of iPhone development. I would be glad to talk with you about your project. We deliver quality work, and charge much less than some of the more well known shops.

We just launched two iPad apps this past weekend, and they are in the top 100 in both overall categories (free and paid). And they are a #2 and #3 app in their respective subcategory. Send me an email (its in my comment).
But of course, this makes for unhappy users too. "I just lost the $5.99 I paid for that app!"
I did, unfortunately, other things crept to the top of our list and it didn't make sense to invest any resources into that effort. We also realized that it would mostly piss you guys off.

There's a list of some of our users' websites at http://www.noloh.com/#/poweredby/, and there's also a video demonstration that we recently did at Confoo showcasing a few applications http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLFc-aF2fDI.

Unfortunately many advanced applications are not public as their user generated and many are intranet or still in stealth mode. While we encourage all our users to post to our website, not all do. We'll finally be launching a demos section in the coming month where you should be able to see a plethora of examples and advanced applications.
The best process for me at the moment seems to be using 3 tools in the following way. The 3 tools are: Google Reader (through a mac app - Gruml), Instapaper (a bookmarking service thats great for text) and Diigo (a bookmarking service).

- I go through Google Reader once a day scanning for useful things. Anything that I can't go process in a few minutes or don't want to deal with immediately I save.

- Anything I come across during the day (from emails, friends, colleagues, etc) that I want to look at later also gets saved.

- I save things in two ways: articles/text to Instapaper, and everything else to a 'temporary' bookmark folder on my browser.

- When I have some time, 3 to 5 times a week, I'll read through the articles on Instapaper. I'll archive the articles after I read them on Instapaper, deleting any that weren't useful.

- 2 to 4 times a month I'll go through the 'temporary folder'. Deleting anything that isn't useful and and using diigo to archive everything that is.

- The key thing so far for me is to make sure I relentlessly remove anything that I am reasonably sure isn't useful especially from my RSS reader.

Its not as simple as I'd like it to be, mostly because I'm using two archiving services. I like instapaper's ability to easily convert articles into a readable format. At the same time for organizing and archiving everything else diigo works great.
The usual build process is generate .class files -> translate to Dalvik. So while the phone runs Dalvik "if you have JVM bytecodes", your app is going to work on Android.
See also: Probability, The Logic Of Science, by E.T. Jaynes.

http://www.amazon.com/Probability-Theory-Logic-Science-Vol/d...

Available here: http://bayes.wustl.edu/etj/prob/book.pdf

The introduction/first chapter has a nice example about a policeman concluding a crime is being committed that's very relevant here.
How about the Corona SDK (http://anscamobile.com)? They use Lua, but they claim they're allowed by the pre-4.0 SDK. I don't know how it works behind the scene, but I think they were allowed because the SDK didn't allow you to load code on runtime (e.g. think about a C64 emulator), but as long as the code was fixed it's fine. It can't execute arbitrary code because the app signing process ensures that the only code that runs is the same code submitted to Apple.
Apple wants developers to take 1/8th of your phone
A lot less than if Apple had opened the floodgates.
I'm a bit confused, what is C++ doing in there? I thought the XCode path was all Obj-C for iPhone apps...?
I want to code in Objective-C, and I don't think Android allows that, so I'm stuck programming for iPhone/iPad. I wish Google will support Objectice-C calls against their APIs.
This is seriously putting me off. I was not thinking of a third party approach, but it limits me when I want to use my OWN scripting language when developing apps.

Does this stretch to build scripts??
A friend and I went to a few dev shops with an iPhone app idea. We got bids from $10k up to $50k.

I really like the work these guys do:
http://www.ubermind.com

You might also post in 37signals' job board–they have an iPhone category.
If I won't write for Apple, why should I write for Google (aka 'the NSA frontend') and their OS?

The only useful alternative will be a 'free' Linux derivative that does not restrict me in my developer choices and does not want to collect all kinds of data.
Found Functions: The mathematical arts meet nature
This is addressed in the original post. As of now, projects that were made other the the approved ones would have obvious file layouts characteristics.

Theoretically, you could make it hard to tell the difference, but in practice its pretty easy to tell machine generated from human written code.
It's quite neat that they work this into the product launch. I was really hoping the real answer were partly because they've read good literature though. Some sort of guide for hitchhikers maybe?
Easy - they can and should just refund the money if they take the app away.
66626,64,18506,1024,1024,69760,80,2114,65552,16960,512,18432,72,17418,0,8194
I'll be happy to talk to you about your app. I've been developing freelance iphone apps since day 1 of the beta. I've had apps featured at the All Things D conference, NY Times, all of the gadget websites and one of my apps was chosen as one of the top 20 apps of 2009 by a prominent magazine.

I live an Ann Arbor MI, but I've done several projects from companies in CA including a prominent app for a San Jose based company.

Please contact me via email and I'll turn all of this theoretical stuff into real names and places.

<edit>My rate is $75 per hour, which is why I think many CA firms don't mind working with a remote resource<end edit>
Because those sites aren't full of bullshit...?

(HN is, IMO, above the rest but it's certainly not immune to mob rule)

Besides, with the money involved in high rankings you'd have to constantly police the system against gaming, which would be, I'm guessing, more work than policing the submissions directly a they do now.
That's what I said. The comment I replied to is about the potential for educational apps that require interpreters, which were already prohibited.
what does language have to do with that? you can include your own C libraries within your project if you want, the language is no different. if people use other language interfaces to Cocoa, like RubyCocoa or MonoTouch, what is the problem, they are still using apple's libraries. the language has nothing to do with any of that.
Even if it can, that's not the point.

Is this the kind of company you want to build software for? This is bullshit. Do I really even want to play along anymore?

This company makes great products, but they can do completely dickish things.
sounds quite an experience
Over the years, I've tried to limit what I get caught up reading. I've sworn off all local news, given up Slashdot recently and pretty much only read HN and whatever it or my Twitter feed links to.

Despite the overload of information on the net, very often I find myself sitting there in the evening, no new emails to look at, nothing new on Twitter or HN, and I think "Well, I've caught up on the Internet again." Then I wait five minutes and do another round of compulsively checking email, HN and Twitter. And another.

And next thing you know, hours have passed and I've done virtually nothing productive.

I'm about to move house and I am purposely leaving the phone/net connection until last so I'm forced to go a few weeks without the net at home until it's sorted out. I used to garden, cook, read, etc and more recently I barely find time for any of these things.

Sometimes, the busier you feel, the less you're getting done. At least, in my experience.
Except most iPhone apps accepted to the store already are utter crap.
using a different language doesn't affect security, the executable is still within the same sandbox. please read up on the plethora of projects allowing other languages to work with Cocoa, including desktop OSX, including Apple-funded projects like RubyCocoa.
Yeah, it's other universes all the way down...
This argument makes no sense. These third party tools are using only the publicly documented Apple APIs. They are simple doing so through an intermediary layer. It has nothing to do with using private or low level libraries.
Boycotting the Mac platform (which is pretty much free of any such absurdity)

For now.

That's the thing about Apple's capricious, passive-aggressive contract language... you have no idea, and no way to even guess, if your business model will be the next one they target for termination.
I don't think there's any government intervention forcing people to work on (or not work on) app store apps.

I think apple is doing well in the (presumably free, it's way more open than other places) market, because they are very good at negotiating their property rights.

I guess it's just fashionable to imply the "bad guys" are "communists"

Do you mean the FCC approval process for new cell phones is a massive barrier to entry? I'm sure it's not free, but i can't imagine they'd want more that a few dozen phones and $100k of studies. maybe a half a million?
Why does anyone think Microsoft protects your privacy any better than Google does?

FFS, Google was the ONLY search engine which went to court to protect your searches from collection under COPA: http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9588_22-146420.html

Microsoft, Yahoo etc just handed their logs over.

Gmail's still the only webmail provider which uses SSL by default.

There are numerous similar cases.

Microsoft can't use "Privacy" to market against Google because they do less to protect your privacy that Google do.

(They could argue "we are less competent than Google are at doing things with the information we also collect, so you are less likely to get freaked out when our services appear to read your mind". However, I'm unconvinced that lack-of-competence is a winning marketing strategy. But hey.. it seems to be working for Sarah Palin, so what do I know...)
Google Chrome And Mozilla Firefox Shortcut Keys
> Say hello to the new boss, same as the old boss

Who do you mean by this? Microsoft doesn't make sense in this context.
The evolution of mobile banners
please try to distinguish 'cross platform compilers' from using alternate languages to write for Cocoa APIs. it doesn't matter if you're using C# or Ruby, your program is still structured around all the native APIs necessary to function. Unless somebody reverse engineers a similar platform with identical APIs (and thus, likely built on Obj-C as well) you aren't getting around targetting CocoaTouch specifically. And there isn't anything stopping anybody from releasing cross-platform-compiler 'meta platforms' which DO use Obj-C and thus qualify under Apple's new rules.
Have you tried writing your Haskell-based app for Android? Or perhaps Windows Mobile? or Palm?
Apple isn't interested in proving a point about market viability, they just don't want that on their platform.
Kottke:  Avg dude vs. pro football player in 40 yard dash
"your dumbass platform with kiddie languages."

That's ironic.

Objective-C, C, and C++ are kiddie languages?

I seriously doubt that there will be any sort of exodus away from iPhone development because of this. Apple provides some awesome development tools, and they want developers to use them because they improve the quality of the applications that people write.
It's not MacRuby, it's RubyCocoa, but yes, they have their own project using a language not included in this list. No, I'm not expecting consistency here against their own "baby", but what kind of environment does this set up? Would you even want to use RubyCocoa in this environment, much less a 3rd party language bridge to Cocoa (which is 100% targetting Apple's platform and APIs).
> They can't get atomic syscalls working in OS X.

Have you filed a bug?
What language and tools do you think Apple uses for the apps they provide and/or sell on the iPhone/iPad?
some low level libraries and frameworks are written in C and C++, which can co-exist with Objective C in the same project.
For example, the Chipmunk physics engine is in C, and the Sound Engine multi-threaded sound library is in C++