Letter to Steve Jobs

While I appreciate his letter, I think he needs to realize that quality of apps is an incidental reason.<p>As John Gruber stated, the real reason behind the band is to prevent someone from establishing cross platform development tools that will trivialize the choice between getting an iphone and another phone/OS.

Disclaimer -- I am not an iPhone developer, why? Two reasons: 1.) I don't own a Mac and 2.) I don't know objective-c.<p>Even though I can't build iPhone applications, to me this ban makes sense for the following reasons:<p>1.) Limits the total number of applications. Apple knows that the "100,000+ apps" is just marketing. How many unit conversion applications do you need or does Apple want clogging up their approval process.<p>2.) Reduces the velocity of the application submissions. Having a more controlled ecosystem means that everything isn't done at once. This is core to Apples strategy. Roll things out in phases; build features that people want over time. Cut&#38;Paste, Multi-tasking...<p>3.) Forces people develop iPhone applications on Mac hardware.<p>4.) The more layers between you and the developers building the applications increases compatibility issues, which are out of your control.<p>5.) The more layers between you and the developers building the applications decreases the speed at which applications can take advantage of new features. Apple releases a new api now any developer using a 3rd party framework needs to wait for that framework to support the new API. This impacts the significance of the new feature.

This is a good example of approaching the subject like a non-idealogue that people can take seriously. The Salem remark was probably a bit much but at least it's near the end. Ending with a jab is always very tempting.

In general it is transition time in business world. I doubt that future ventures will be able to “successfully” act in a similar way.<p>The only reason Apple is welcomed/accepted to do so by many (developers <i>and</i> users) is the excellence in their execution. Apple is not an “open” company - it never has been.<p><i>Especially</i> as a developer one should have understood from the beginning that using their tools might possibly be somewhat of a Faustian bargain.<p>Sometimes I myself feel quite guilty for having chosen this path (trying to become an iPhone/iPad indie) but then I remember myself that the benevolence of this “dictator” is not really targeted at me as a developer but the users.<p>I admire that approach and that is why I am not sure if users will really benefit from these particular kind of policies/politics. I was planning to partially use iPhone WAX not only because I really like Lua (and it’s highly embeddable scripting capabilities) but because of productivity reasons as a one-man team. In spite of introducing additional layers of abstraction I think it wouldn’t have significantly impacted performance (Lua is <i>fast</i>).<p>I never cared about Flash nor any Adobe tools though and I am still among the ones who don’t care that much if they have to use C/ObjC because I like to use that set of technology but I see myself for the first time to become more than a little wary.

I doubt that section 3.1.1 means that you can't embed Lua anymore. People have been doing this for a long time, specially in games, and Apple has never seen that as a problem.<p>This is all about using C# and Flash to create complete apps.

I've seen it stated a few times that "EA uses Lua on the iPhone" - but my googling hasn't revealed any evidence to support this. Does anyone have a cite for this?

I think the extension of the ban can result in a pretty big deal. I think the bigger issue is that now, Lua itself seems to be entirely banned for use in any app for the iPhone OS product family, even if the app itself is written in Obj/C/++ and just using the Lua engine for internal stuff - a perfect example would be Lua's popular use for "scripting" NPC actions and game events in f.e. World of Warcraft and many, many other online games; World of Warcraft is not written in Lua, it's written in C/++, but uses Lua as a component for "internal" stuff. By this new decision, all apps building on similar functionality would be rejected.<p>I still maintain my stance regarding the main culprit in this debate, being that Flash should be set fire to and urinated on for the shitty product it is, but I definitely feel that the collateral Apple is causing here is a potentially much larger problem than the Flash problem they solved by the ban.

A letter to "a letter to Steve Jobs" letters<p>Yeah new policy sucks, Steve won't change it even if you send thousand of letters, sometime he might bother to answer, but it'll be the same thing.<p>Although if he answers, that's great, because then you can publish it again and HN can be flooded with more "letters to Steve" and "Apple stole my teddy bear" stories.

Odds that Steve Jobs will read or care one whit about this letter: 0% (with a margin of error of ±0%)

This is probably the only open letter that'll get a reply...<p>... saying you and your apps are banned.

For crying out loud people... The sun's still shining, the beer's still cold, in some parts of the world people are still dying due to lack of clean drinking water, to go short... in the big scheme of things; Apple's recent decision DOES NOT MEAN A DAMN THING. Get some perspective, perhaps cry like a baby for 30 minutes or so and get on with your life... You'll be OK!

SERIOUSLY people, stop all the freaking letter to steve jobs post.. It's really overdone and doesn't get you much other than this response, sorry I just had to, go ahead and down vote me.