iPad

[Matthew Gillen]

On 04/12/2010 08:32 PM, Mark J Dulcey wrote:
> Personally I won't go as far as Martin's position of wanting to make the 
> iPad illegal. But I won't be buying one, and won't recommend buying one 
> to anybody; I'm simply not interested in owning a computer where 
> somebody has veto power over the applications I can run. If a comparable 
> but more open product comes along, such as the Android slates that 
> people have been demonstrating -- and, importantly, offers comparable 3G 
> pricing, especially if it involves a carrier other than AT&T (another 
> discussion, if we want to have that one we should take it to another 
> thread) -- I could recommend that.

Amen.  I'm a programmer by trade, and half (more?) the fun of owning such a
device would be lost if I couldn't develop for it.

Martin: don't worry, and don't go writing legislation (it's always worst way
to solve a problem ;-) ).  Apple's model won't allow it to gain world
domination.  They do tend to get a bigger share of the pie than others who
try to control the ecosystem around their products (because of good design,
good timing, and striking important 3rd-party deals like the ones that
allowed them to open the iTunes store).  But their model is inherently
self-limiting,

What actually gives me hope is that most of the non-trivial, non-game
applications seem to be essentially device-appropriate interfaces to
existing web-services.  So there isn't anything content-wise that you
couldn't get another way (with a free/open solution).  See comment earlier
in the thread about Apple being a user-experience company.

As long as the most popular apps (Facebook, Twitter?) depend on open
standards like DNS, http, etc, then I don't care what they do or how shiny
they make it.  It also gives me hope that when Apple tried to use
non-standard formats to enforce lock-in with their apps (iTunes) and
devices, it just provided an opening for another player to come in (there
was not, and still isn't to my knowledge, any way to buy from the iTunes
Store in linux --> Amazon w/linux support).

Matt