Simon Willison’s Weblog

The crisis Flash now faces is that Apple has made it clear that Flash will no longer be ubiquitous, as it won’t exist on the iPhone platform, thus turning “runs everywhere” into “runs almost everywhere.” As Web developers know, “runs almost everywhere” is a recipe for doing everything at least twice.

— Rafe Colburn # 5th May 2010, 12:10 pm

Imagine if 10% of the apps on iPhone came from Flash. If that was the case, then ensuring Flash didn’t break release to release would be a big deal, much bigger than any other compatibility issues. [...] Letting any of these secondary runtimes develop a significant base of applications in the store risks putting Apple in a position where the company that controls that runtime can cause delays in Apple’s release schedule, or worse, demand specific engineering decisions from Apple, under the threat of withholding the information necessary to keep their runtime working.

— Louis Gerbarg # 12th April 2010, 5:24 pm

We all think of Java as a boring server-side language now, but the initial idea behind Java was that software developers could write applications in Java rather than writing them for Windows, and that those applications would work everywhere, thus defanging Microsoft’s desktop OS monopoly. Microsoft took various steps to prevent that from happening, but they lacked a tool like App Store that would enable them to just ban Java. Apple has that card to play, so they’re playing it.

— Rafe Colburn # 10th April 2010, 6:42 pm

Programmers don’t use launch-fast-and-iterate out of laziness. They use it because it yields the best results. By obstructing that process, Apple is making them do bad work, and programmers hate that as much as Apple would.

— Paul Graham # 19th November 2009, 10:13 pm

We’re at a critical juncture in the evolution of software. The web is still here and it is still strong. Anyone can still put any information or applications on a web server without asking for permission, and anyone in the world can still access it just by typing a URL. I don’t think I appreciated how important that is until recently. Nobody designs new systems like that anymore, or at least few of them succeed. What an incredible stroke of luck the web was, and what a shame it would be to let that freedom slip away.

— Joe Hewitt # 15th November 2009, 8:50 am

This is very interesting technology. But that Adobe would go to this length suggests that they suspect that Apple will never allow the Flash runtime on the iPhone.

— John Gruber # 6th October 2009, 7:33 am

Developing for the iPhone at the moment is like picking up dimes in front of a bulldozer.

— Tim Bray # 21st September 2009, 5:30 pm

iPlayer usage, for streaming, peaks about 10pm—just a little later from TV. But interestingly, iPlayer on the iPhone peaks at about midnight. So people are clearly going to bed with their iPhone and watching in bed. And we also see on the weekends, there’s a peak of Saturday and Sunday morning usage at about 8 to 10am in the morning on iPhone.

— Anthony Rose # 23rd May 2009, 12:42 am

Perhaps it’s just frustration speaking here, but when Apple ties my hands behind my back and lets users punch me publicly in the face without allowing me to at least respond back, it’s hard to get excited about building an app.

— Garrett Murray # 22nd April 2009, 12:17 pm

The App Store has an inscrutable, time-consuming, whim-dependent approval process. The App Store newsgroup postings are full of angry claims that this is a bug, but I bet it’s a feature. If you can’t get an app approved until it’s working perfectly, and you have to wait a week or two -- or more -- between approval rounds, you’re much more likely to put a lot more effort in up front to get it right.

— Marc Hedlund # 12th April 2009, 1:49 pm

How could the major players have left a gap in the market so wide that a complete novice in mobile telephony could so instantly shame them?

— Stephen Fry # 10th December 2008, 6:21 pm

I’ll put forth one central, overriding guideline for iPhone UI design: Figure out the absolute least you need to do to implement the idea, do just that, and then polish the hell out of the experience.

— John Gruber # 4th November 2008, 12:02 am

I can’t question that [the App Store] is probably the best mobile application distribution method yet created, but every time I use it, a little piece of my soul dies.

— Steven Frank # 17th August 2008, 11:15 pm

Using the patent application as a guide, Apple appears to be making room on the iPhone for flash memory, which means an end to Apple’s standoff with Adobe (ADBE) that’s kept iPhones from easily viewing a plethora of Internet videos.

— Ben Charny # 6th June 2008, 9:08 pm

Let me just say it: We want native third party applications on the iPhone, and we plan to have an SDK in developers’ hands in February.

— Steve Jobs # 17th October 2007, 6:04 pm

All the big guns want an iPhone killer. Even I, mad for all things Apple as I am, want an iPhone killer. I want smart digital devices to be as good as mankind’s ingenuity can make them. I want us eternally to strive to improve and surprise. Bring on the iPhone killers. Bring them on.

— Stephen Fry # 19th September 2007, 7:15 pm

For any song you already own on CD, Apple is asking you to pay three times for it in order to use it as a ringtone on your iPhone: once for the CD you’ve already purchased, again to buy a needless duplicate of the track from the iTunes Store, and a third time to generate the ringtone.

— John Gruber # 14th September 2007, 8:15 am

The other interesting thing about the 1.0.2 update is that Apple didn’t try to prevent the hacks that are out there [...] one would have assumed that Apple would have done *something* in this release as a sort of “shot across the bow” but they didn’t, which bodes well for a future, more open platform.

— Russell Beattie # 22nd August 2007, 10:08 pm

I heard that Foxconn—the place that makes the iPods and iPhones—consumes 3,000 pigs a day.

— Bunnie Huang # 14th July 2007, 12:59 pm

Once people see that a pretty good phone can be a pretty good mobile computer, they won’t settle for less anymore; and mobile networks will be pried open.

— Ed Felten # 29th June 2007, 4:58 pm

Mac OS X and OS X are not the same thing, although they are most certainly siblings. The days of lazily referring to “Mac OS X” as “OS X” are now over.

— John Gruber # 12th January 2007, 10:29 am

Apple doesn’t give a damn. Steve Jobs doesn’t build platforms, except by accident. He doesn’t care about your thriving metropolis. All you independent Mac developers: you’re all sharecroppers, and your rent just went up. Way up.

— Mark Pilgrim # 12th January 2007, 9:51 am