Starman’s Blog

iPhone dev status: denied….for now?

March 15, 2008 – 4:12 pm

Dear Registered iPhone Developer,

Thank you for expressing interest in the iPhone Developer Program. We have received your enrollment request. As this time, the iPhone Developer Program is available to a limited number of developers and we plan to expand during the beta period. We will contact you again regarding your enrollment status at the appropriate time.

Thank you for applying.

Best regards,iPhone Developer Program

This makes me worried. Apple is not telling me whether or not I’m in the running to get selected. Also, they’re teasing me with this “free” SDK which allows me to waste time writing this app which may or may not be allowed to be on Apple’s iPhone store in June.

It’s discouraging. Yes, I completely understand that Apple’s overwhelmed with requests, but there should be some deciding factors in the selection:

Apple developer status Apple should give priority to those who are in, or were in the Apple developer program. At minimum, this costs $500 a year.

Past development work If you’ve written apps in the past, or in my case, since 1989, and Apple has recognized you as they did with several of my apps, they should let those people in first.

My biggest concern is not being able to get my app ready the day the iPhone app store is opened. As everyone knows, the internet is full of good ideas, and even though the first person to do something isn’t necessarily the best out there, it does give a serious advantage to that developer.

Apple is not communicating to the people that signed up if in fact they’ll be able to get their apps on the store in June, and that deflates my enthusiasm for the project.

Am I worrying about nothing? We won’t know until June, but in the meantime, I wish Apple would be more forthcoming about how they’re making selections.

EDIT: Soon after I wrote this post, I found this article on arstechnica.com:

Apple to iPhone App Store applicants: Just hang tight

This sentence sums up exactly what I conveyed in this post:

“Still, a letter like this complicates the decision to begin or continue developing an iPhone application.”

Posted in Development, Mac Stuff | 2 Comments »

Am iWasting my time writing iPhone apps?

March 13, 2008 – 11:03 am

A week ago, Apple introduced the iPhone SDK to us mere mortals. It was a wonderful gesture by Apple to allow us to write apps for one of the best phones ever made. However, the SDK’s limitations and other issues are killing my enthusiasm for developing for it.

The $99 entry fee doesn’t bother me. I understand why Apple’s charging that much for it. You need a digital signature so that malicious code can be traced back to the owner, and technical support from Apple was never free. Also, Apple will be hosting the app for you.

The problems come with what the SDK is incapable of doing. You can’t interface with the dock connector, you can’t record audio, and you can’t record video. This is a serious detriment to what I wanted to develop, and I’m sure there are many people working on social networking apps such as seesmic and qik that are pretty ticked off about this as well. If you wanted to post audio to utterz, you have to use the dial-in method, but you still can’t post video. There’s also no GSM on the iPhone which makes geotagging impossible.

One other issue that bothers me is that when the phone rings, your app has to quit right then and there. Now, what if I don’t want to answer the phone? Granted, I don’t expect the iPhone to be running mission critical apps, but the user should decide if they want to answer the phone or not.

There’s one last issue that’s been gnawing at me. I signed up to be an iPhone developer a week ago. I have this app that I’ve been writing for Mac OS X using Cocoa which will port very easily to the iPhone. However, I haven’t heard back from Apple yet. Now, let’s say you’re an independent developer and want to write some freeware apps for the phone. You get all excited to write for it, you hunker down and start coding like a madman, and what if Apple thumbs their nose at you and says “sorry, you haven’t been selected”? So far, I don’t know anyone that’s been selected, but I’ll bet there are a lot of people out there that are expecting to be. This would be a serious slap in the face to the developer community and really needs to be addressed very soon. Apple needs to start sending out developer approvals 10 minutes ago.

Still, I feel bad for the developers that Apple refuses to make the iPhone more social media capable. Maybe iPhone 2.0 with 3G will be what we always wanted, but in the meantime, I’ll have to use my Nokia N95 for social media.

As for the iPhone vs. the N95, that’s a different post.

Posted in Development, Mac Stuff, Geek Stuff | 9 Comments »

Second Skin trailer is up

January 29, 2008 – 9:36 am

Back in March of 2007, Ren and I were filmed for the documentary “Second Skin”. It’s been along time, but the guys at Pure West Docs finally got the trailer together. It looks better than I expected it to, and I can’t wait to see it.

It follows the lives of seven gamers, and how MMORPGs have affected their lives.

I have no idea how much of the cut we made, or if we’re in it at all, but I think that if the film is as good as I think it will be, all gamers should watch it.

Get the trailer here.

Posted in Podcast, Movies and Video, MMOs | 4 Comments »

Forget the paperless office!

January 23, 2008 – 12:50 pm

I finally figured out why I hate reading documents on a screen. I knew I hated it before but couldn’t quite put my finger on the reason. It’s the quality of the text. When you read a document on screen, the text quality is compromised. On paper, the text is much easier to read. I was printing out the new 402-page Apple Human Interface Guidelines and thought “do I really need to print this?”. I printed a few pages and found that reading it on paper was much better for me than reading it on a good LCD monitor.

Posted in Geek Stuff | 1 Comment »

For love of Entourage

January 23, 2008 – 12:45 am

I love Entourage. For those of you that don’t know what it is, it’s the Mac version of Outlook. I love the app to death, and I’ve used it for years. The problem is that it’s starting to show its age, even though it’s been rock solid for me, even when using the old PPC version on my Intel Mac.

However, Microsoft recently announced their new Office 2008 Suite for Mac OS X. Since I bought Office 2004 back in, well, 2004, I used Word a handful of times, Excel maybe twice, and Powerpoint a total of zero times, if you don’t include the time I accidentally launched it by double-clicking on the wrong icon.

That leaves me in a tough spot. Do I drop the dough and buy the Office 2008 upgrade, continue to use the solid, but old Entourage 2004, or just abandon Entourage altogether and go with Apple’s Mail which comes with Mac OS X?

Microsoft’s biggest mistake right now is not having a trial version out there for people like me that are on the fence. I really don’t want to spend $230 when I know I’m only going to use Entourage. Microsoft should take a cue from Adobe - split up their apps. Adobe sells all their Creative Suite apps separately. I’ve bought Photoshop since version 6 and never buy or use any of the other apps. I don’t need them. Why can’t I just buy Entourage? Microsoft should realize that Mac users aren’t the same as Windows users, and Entourage would probably sell well on its own.

So, if anyone from Microsoft is reading this, think about unbundling Entourage and just sell it separately. Please?

Posted in Mac Stuff | No Comments »

Sorry, you can’t watch that in HD

January 16, 2008 – 9:30 am

Yesterday, Apple announced that it will have HD movies for rent. What they didn’t tell you directly was that you needed an Apple TV in order to watch the HD rentals. They made it sound like you could watch the HD rentals on your computer through iTunes, but that’s not the case. Buried deep in the Software Update, I found this:


"Rent and download your favorite movies with iTunes on your computer or directly to your living room on Apple TV. Enjoy rented movies in sizes up to 720p HD with surround sound on your Apple TV and sizes up to DVD-quality on your computer. Transfer your rented movies from iTunes to your iPod or iPhone and enjoy them on the go.


So what they don’t tell you up front is that you can’t watch the HD rentals with iTunes. What I’d like to know is: why the hell not? I have a Mac Pro capable of running HD content, especially the lower quality 720p which is what these HD rentals are formatted in, and I have a Macbook Pro which I can hook up to my home theater system using DVI and optical audio. So can someone tell me why Apple chose not to allow iTunes users to watch HD rentals? I’m not buying an Apple TV when I have a Macbook Pro that’s already perfect for the job.

Posted in Movies and Video, Mac Stuff | No Comments »

Who do we belong to?

January 11, 2008 – 12:11 pm

A few months ago I was working on a blog post about data security which I never got around to finishing. This issue with Robert Scoble rekindled that.

I’ll sum it up for those of you that don’t know: Robert was using a Facebook app to scrape data from Facebook so that he can use it in his own database. Apparently this is against the Facebook Terms of Service since Facebook doesn’t have an export system for your contacts. Worse, Facebook shows your friends’ email address as as unclickable image rather than a string of text you can copy and paste.

So Robert gets in trouble for using this Facebook app. He gets banned from Facebook and they reinstate him after a day.

In the wake of all this, I’ve listened to both sides of the conversation from people that agree with what Robert did and people that don’t, but a serious question rises from all of this: who owns us?

If I give my contact information to my friend Bill from college via Facebook, am I allowing him to only contact me through Facebook? That seems kind of silly, don’t you think? I mean, I’ve known the guy for almost 20 years. If I wanted his contact info without going through Facebook I could call him up. However, we did join up in Facebook and that’s where this little story makes a serious turn.

Let’s say I want to pull Bill’s info off of Facebook and into Outlook (or the Mac equivalent: Entourage). This way I can have it in my iPhone or Address Book. Who knows if Facebook will be down at a time when I need to contact someone, or if I’ll have web access to get the information I need. Unfortunately, there’s no way to do that. I can’t even copy and paste his email address into Outlook because his email is displayed as an image.

So this brings up a few interesting points. First, it seems like Facebook wants a monopoly on your data. They don’t let you export it, and they ban you if they find you data scraping. Second, the inability to show people’s email address as text is a way to discourage people from copy and pasting that text into another app like Outlook, or another service like Gmail. They could claim that they’re preventing spam, but in the light of recent events, I’m not so sure. Spammers are a notorious bunch, they’ll use OCR to convert the image to text if they have to so I believe Facebook did this to prevent casual copying of the data. Under normal circumstances, you can’t get someone’s email address by default unless you added them as a friend anyway.

So after all that, who owns the data? If I give Bill the right to have my contact information, why is Facebook preventing him from copying it for his own use? If I write down Bill’s contact info or type it into Outlook manually, have I just broken Facebook’s Terms of Service? If I really wanted to argue the point, I could say that the data came onto my computer screen at home.

Personally, I think that any data I put on the net through any service for friends, family, and acquaintances, should be completely controlled by me if you subscribe to the notion that I put the data there for those people to have in the first place.

I also believe that this recent blunder by Facebook is opening the door for someone to create a better service. We’ll have to wait and see what it is. I just hope it has vowels in the name.

Posted in Geek Stuff, Blog | No Comments »

What I learned in 2007

January 3, 2008 – 1:04 pm

I have to say, 2007 was a crappy year for me. Here’s a list of things I learned.

1) Family > everything.

2) Never go into business with someone you’ve known for less than three months. That’ll give you enough time to see the happy/sad/sober/drunk/depressed side of them, and see how they treat you. Usually, drunk + depressed is a bad mix.

3) If someone has a blog in which they openly bash others, chances are you’ll be next. Even if they swear you won’t be.

4) A drastic change may be the best thing you ever do.

5) If you ever have a feeling in the back of your head that someone may be a bit “off”, be wary. It’s your subconscious screaming at you.

6) This is going to sound cliché, but if you have a goal, finish it.

7) Time management.

8 ) If you don’t like someone, move on. Real friends shouldn’t treat you like shit.

9) Re-read your emails before sending.

10) There may be a perfectly good explanation.

11) There are people out there that don’t think “internet people” are real, therefore, they treat them differently than real people because they don’t have to deal with the real-world consequences.

12) You might be wrong.

13) It’ll be there in the morning.

14) The world is getting smaller. Be excellent to each other. You never know who you might bump into at the next trade show.

15) If you don’t have time to use it, don’t buy it.

16) Do absolutely, everything you can to not get financially screwed by someone.

17) Don’t take your frustrations out on others.

18) People that are perpetually angry make bad friends.

For 2008:

1) It’s not worth “trying to see the good in people”. If someone’s 90% prick, the other 10% isn’t worth having around.

2) Time management.

3) Still working on that goal. Getting closer.

4) Be excellent to each other.

5) Family > everything

Posted in Geek Stuff, Blog, General | No Comments »

Leopard file sharing warning

October 30, 2007 – 1:58 pm

There are times when I need to access files from home. With Leopard’s new Back to my Mac, I’m finally able to do screen sharing and file sharing. However, there are security concerns I have with it.

By default, the first sharable folder is your public folder. Apple then adds three entries into the list of users that have access to it: you, with read and write access, and “Unknown” and “Everyone” with read-only access. You can remove “Unknown” and change the access for “Everyone” to “No Access”. That’s fine.

However, there’s an entire drive I wanted to share that only I had access to. So I added the drive, deleted “Unknown”, but when it came to removing access for “Everyone”, this is what I got:

That’s right. I can’t set it to “No Access”! I tried it using Guest access under Apple File Protocol and sure enough, I had full read-only access to my private data.This is completely unacceptable. Sure, I can get around it with file permissions, but that’s not the point. Apple put this in place with drop-down menus so that I have full, easy control over who sees what. Disallowing “No Access” to a shared folder is wrong, and Apple needs to fix this ASAP.

The solution? You need to do a “Get Info” on the drive. Then you get this dialog:

You click the lock to unlock the dialog, change the preferences there, close the Get Info dialog and then you’ll get this in the Sharing dialog:

Now everything is good.

I’m still worried that most user’s will either not notice this, or not know how to fix the problem. Worse, Apple gives a false sense of the ability to change this setting in the Sharing dialog by offering a drop-down menu for options the user can’t set from there.

Posted in Security, Mac Stuff | No Comments »

Leopard, Day Four

October 29, 2007 – 2:55 pm

I haven’t posted a lot in the last few days about Leopard since I’ve had a rather busy weekend at home. Here’s a recap:

Windows

I used BootCamp to install Windows on a dedicated 120GB Maxtor hard drive. Installation went well, except that it takes a long time for my Mac Pro to think about what it needs to do when it boots into Windows. It just hangs there with a white screen for 30-45 seconds before booting into Windows itself. I don’t remember that from beta.

It wouldn’t install the drivers for my iSight. The iSight worked fine in beta so I don’t know what the problem is here. I tried installing the drivers several different ways, and each time Windows said it didn’t have any drivers for that hardware.

Other than that, Windows runs fine on my Mac Pro.

Back to my Mac

This morning I left my Mac on at home in hopes of accessing it from my Mac at work. After verifying that my Mac at home was set up correctly, I went to see if it showed up on my Leopard machine at work. It didn’t. I tried several different networking tricks by accessing my router at home, but nothing did the trick. My mistake was not running a VNC server on my Mac at home to change anything there, or to use of of the suggestions of logging out and back into .Mac on the machine so I’ll have to report back on this tomorrow.

Overall, other than the need to boot into Tiger to run the firmware update, I haven’t had any trouble with Leopard at all. Renata and I will be recording episode 51 tomorrow so I’ll report back on how well recording went with Leopard and the 10.4.10 audio drivers from M-Audio.

Update: I created this post using Safari on Leopard and I’m still having editing issues. Carriage returns in Wordpress, which should be converted to <p /> , are being ignored. I’m going to have to deal with this somehow. For now I have to use Firefox.

Posted in Mac Stuff | 3 Comments »