The Nanny Apple: Living at the whim of Apple

I have been a Mac user for over 10 years, but I am becoming increasingly disillusioned with Apple. I still have little problem with the Mac, but in the mobile space Apple seem to be increasingly over-controlling. In the UK we refer to the Government as the Nanny State when we think it is telling us what to do when we think it shouldn’t, so I now increasingly think of Apple as the Nanny Apple.

The main  story since the OS 4.0 launch last week has been the change in  the SDK that prevents developers using many third party tools to develop for the iPhone/iPod Touch. Only applications pure of development will be allowed to enter the App Store. This just seems to be Apple shooting themselves in the foot. My day job is mainly writing code in .Net. If my company wanted to write an iPhone App, say to access our back end systems, the obvious choice for us is MonoTouch, which allows coding of iPhones Apps using .Net, which is where our skill base is. If we had to use XCode and the official App route, it would take us a lot longer to get there, and we might not bother. It also makes s great deal of sense to me what Adobe have done allowing ActionScript projects to be packaged as iPhone Apps, allowing the same code base effectively to run on different platforms, but this may now not be allowed.

While on the subject of Adobe, Apple’s obsession against Flash is not helping. They may be touting HTML 5, but support for this is still really in its infancy. I ran the HTML5Test site on IE8 at work out of curiosity today, and it didn’t score much, about 20 out of 160 I think. My Mac Safari and Firefox score 113 and 101 respectively. Whether Apple likes it or not, a majority of users still use Internet Explorer, so it is too soon in my opinion to be moving to HTML 5, as you will have to provide an alternative to the majority of your users.

I really hope Apple see some sense over this, as they are only harming their future ultimately. I complained before about the amount of control over the iPad by Apple, and I will not be getting one mainly because it does not allow me to do what I would want to do with it (not that I can do for another 6 weeks anyway). Apple are now insisting that Apps in the App Store with the word Pad in them be renamed, even if they existed before the iPad was even announced. At least they allowed Opera Mini, which seems to be doing very well so perhaps there is some hope, though I don’t have much at the moment.

No AAC, I’ll stick to iTunes, Thanks

I am not somebody who shops around particularly, but I always used to for CDs. I remember when I was in London once seeing an album at HMV Oxford Street for £15.00, and then going round the corner to Selectadisc in Berwick Street and buying it for £11.50. I worked with somebody once who would have paid the £15.00 rather than having to go down ‘back streets’,  but I always preferred the savings, which were always at least £1 per CD. With the CD, what I was buying was exactly the same thing at a cheaper price.

Nowadays, I buy all my music from iTunes and £11.50 seems a lot as I am paying £7.99 for most albums. I continue to buy  exclusively from iTunes, as they are the only store in the UK that sells AAC. Other stores, such as Amazon and 7Digital insist on selling MP3s. Now, I know that AAC is associated with Apple and iPods, but none of the As in it are Apple. It stands for Advanced Audio Coding and was designed as a successor to MP3.

Basically MP3 is not as good as AAC, whether I notice the difference is another matter, but if I am paying the same price, as generally seems to be the case, I am not getting the same thing, like I was with CDs. I have over 700 albums and as far as I remember, two albums are MP3s. One the band had made available for free, and the other was ‘In Rainbows’ by Radiohead, which I paid less for than I would have for AAC. I would be perfectly happy to buy music from stores other than iTunes, but even when there was DRM on AAC, I preferred to buy music in AAC format rather than buy MP3.

The iPod is the most popular music player and iTunes is the most popular store. Most ‘MP3′ players will now play AAC, as it means they can now play tracks bought from iTunes, as will many phones. The MP3 touters talk about supporting all devices, but that’s a bit like arguing in the 1980s that you shouldn’t support these new fangled CD players as everyone has cassette players. Ok, so its not quite the same, but there is some comparison. MP3 was approved in 1991, when Acorn, Atari, MSX and Commodore were still making computers and when Windows computers were still 16-bit on Windows 3.0.

Now perhaps most people are buying their downloads from iTunes solely because it is well integrated with the iTunes application. But I suspect at least some are like me and would shop around if the downloads were equivalent. I buy 3o-40 albums per year from iTunes. If anyone else other than iTunes wants some of that business, they need to start selling AAC

The reach of Google

We have been having some strange network problems at work, which is blocking certain websites, notably Google. Very odd really, as the site can be pinged and the route traced but no browser can get there.

Anyway, Regardless of the cause of this, it does make you realise Google’s reach. I was using Yahoo this afternoon, which itself was a bit strange as I am so used to Google. However, even using this, a lot of the sites wouldn’t load as they tried to link to Google analytics and got stuck. I guess we’d better hope Google never have a major outage!