Sigh… I fail to understand why people are so quick to defend Apple for being paranoid, greedy pigs.
John Gruber over at Daring Fireball recently posted about Miguel de Icaza’s post on MonoTouch and how Migel has some good points. John then goes on to very nicely point out how they both have good points… Best that you read about it yourself as I’ll only summarize a few key points – Middleware and Section 3.3.1.
Migel argues that MonoTouch is not a cross-platform tool, and that it is really a compiler for the iPhone OS. John points this out as a valid point. John then goes on to point out Apple’s paranoia and fear of third party middleware:
MonoTouch is not in the same boat as Flash’s iPhone compiler, as it’s not a cross-platform framework. It’s a lighter shade of gray, if you will. But it’s still a layer of middleware between developers and Apple’s own APIs. Yes, MonoTouch is keeping up to date with Apple’s native APIs today, but what happens three, four, five years from now if MonoTouch stops keeping up and hundreds (or thousands) of popular iPhone OS apps are dependent upon it? That’s the scenario Apple wants to avoid.
He also points out Apple has previous experience with Metrowerks:
One such “painful experience”, from Apple’s perspective, would be Metrowerks’s PowerPlant framework… *snip* …Apple’s perspective is reasonable too — they have suffered in the past when popular developer tools and frameworks have been out of their control. At this moment, Apple has the clout to forbid these “third party layers of software between the platform and the developer” by fiat. If they waited until actual compatibility problems arise in the future, it might be too late — at that point, if the incompatible middleware systems are popular enough, the clout will reside with the collective third-party developers relying upon the middleware, not with Apple. Apple can ban them by fiat now; they can’t ban them by fiat in a future where they’re in widespread use.
Well, guess what? There are already third party tools with wide deployment on the iPhone, and that’s why people are angry. Apple let people invest time and money in lots of third party tools, and now Apple is pulling the plug AFTER THE FACT. It torpedoes a lot of people. It kills a lot of products and businesses. It’s a bait and switch as far as everyone is concerned. If Apple wanted to close it off at the outset, it would have been a different story.
John points out that Apple put a lot of money and effort into helping Metrowerks developers:
Apple expended significant time, money, and effort trying to support PowerPlant developers and bring them forward to where Apple wanted to take the platform.
I seriously doubt this. It’s quite frankly just apologetic bullshit. Sure, they might have put some money and effort into it, but obviously it was nothing more than a token effort and Apple in all honestly just didn’t give a shit about those developers.
Now how the Hell do I get off saying that? Well, take Microsoft. They’ve been providing legacy support in their operating systems for years. They’ve given developers the “heads up” on things well in advance, and guess what? It works. If you develop for Microsoft, your chances of being fucked in the ass like Apple developers get fucked is much smaller. Why? Because Microsoft is a platform company, and they get it. Apple is not. Apple is a fashion accessory company.
If Microsoft can do it, and as every Apple fanboy knows, Microsoft is total shit that just copies everything Apple does and never innovates or does anything worthwhile… Then why the fuck can’t Apple? And how the fuck did Microsoft manage to do it if all they do is copy Apple? 
Moving on…
Development tools… Hmmm… Why do developers want to use tools other than Apple’s tools? Could it possibly be that Apple development tools aren’t the answer to life, the universe, and everything? Could it be that the word of Steve Jobs God has been ignored by evil sinners?
Xcode is so far removed from any other development tool, and just a miserable POS IDE to learn. Objective-C is also a miserable language. It looks like somebody made C a fuck of a lot messier and harder to read. Why wouldn’t anyone want the eyesore that Xcode and Objective-C are?
Simple. They’re painful to use. Apple tools are just not fun. That’s why people want to use other tools. Some people care more about productivity and getting things done than they care about “how” it gets done.
Of course there will be people that love Xcode. That’s ok. There are people that love programming in assembler too. That’s ok as well. But dictating tools makes you a dictator.
Using Xcode is not a silver bullet to creating good software. A quick look at the iTunes Store will reveal that it is full of complete shit software. Programs where all you do it press a red button are neither innovative nor are they interesting nor are they “high-quality”. There is a lot more to creating good software than an IDE. The best IDE won’t help a shitty developer write awesome code, but a shitty IDE sure as Hell will be a major stumbling block for an awesome developer to write awesome software if it lets him do it at all.
The whole bullshit about not using the latest APIs is complete hogwash. That is a pure lie. A feature complete language will allow you to do the same things as another feature complete language provided that the OS does not block that functionality, e.g. blocking network connectivity. In a worst case scenario, an older version of a third party IDE could use a component to access new APIs. If you can do it in Objective-C, you can do it in C, C++, C#, Java, Delphi, assembler, or any one of a million other languages. It’s only a matter of how difficult it is to do in any given language. e.g. It’s a lot harder to do most things in assembler or C than in C++ or Java.
A lot of this stems from Apple being a secretive company that just cannot manage to communicate properly:
The Metrowerks developers who created PowerPlant couldn’t have foreseen Carbon and Mac OS X, let alone foresee Cocoa, and the Mac developers who decided to use PowerPlant weren’t spurning any sort of “No, this is what you should be doing” advice from Apple.
Wouldn’t that illustrate that Apple is creating its own problems by not communicating with its developer community? Microsoft announces the end-of-support for its operating systems years in advance. I can only assume that Apple isn’t that organized if they can’t manage it as well.
Oh… But it’s Apple, and they do everything right, and nothing wrong, and Microsoft is just fucking up when they communicate with their developer community and that’s why Windows has viruses and crashes and herpes and… Yeah. Right.
Why do so many programmers use Visual Studio? Because it fucking rocks. It’s easy to use, fast to use, and powerful beyond anything else out there. Very few IDEs come close to the power in Visual Studio.
Delphi is still popular, and for good reason. But you don’t see Microsoft banning Delphi programmers from using it.
Why do so many people love C#? Well, if you’re coming from Java, it’s simple to learn. If you’re programming in C or C++, it’s also very easy to learn. C# is an intuitive, easy language. It took me zero time to learn it. But there is more to life than C# or Delphi or Mono, and there’s certainly a lot more to life than Xcode.
No, John. Sorry. You are far too gullible forgiving. Apple is just being lazy and greedy and trying to cloak their laziness and greed in cleverly worded sophistry and illusion.
Please people. Just call a spade a fucking shovel!
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Posted by Ryan 
