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In two short sentences you've managed insult the developer for doing some good work and making something people want,and insult users by suggesting that can't u

In two short sentences you've managed insult the developer for doing some good work and making something people want,and insult users by suggesting that can't understand what an app is. Negging seems to be big in the iPhone developer community.

raganwald 17y ago
Look, I wrote a Rails plugin that rewrites your code, placing it in a new location, and hooks the class loader so it finds the new files instead of the old ones. I'm very proud of my work. But. It's a hack. That makes it useful for me and my projects, but it isn't a product. It has too many dependencies on things that weren't intended to be hooked the way I hook them. It broke when Ruby 1.9 was released. It broke when Rails 3 was released. Hacks are always fragile, it's their nature. The description I read talked about an app on the desktop side that pretends to be an iPhone so it can sync with iTunes. That is absolutely, positively a hack, and one that got Palm into hot water with Apple's lawyers. It sounds like it's very fragile and could easily break accidentally with an iTunes update. Now really, honestly, this is Hacker News. I mean no disrespect to anyone when I characterize their work as being a hack. But the point of my commentis that I can't see Apple wanting a hack on their platform. Now as to users: HN readers are not a representative sample of iPhone users. Apple goes way out of its way to make simple things that just work. Their market for iPhone is the group of people that don't want to consult a huge list of what works and what breaks when they release an update. Apple especially don't want to dig themselves into the hole Microsoft created by working so hard on backwards compatibility for Windows. Apps like this are a backwards compatibility nightmare. Right now Apple can do anything they want with the iPhone to iTunes synchronization API by updating both apps simultaneously. Approving this app would end that flexibility.

raganwald 17y ago

Look, I wrote a Rails plugin that rewrites your code, placing it in a new location, and hooks the class loader so it finds the new files instead of the old ones. I'm very proud of my work. But. It's a hack. That makes it useful for me and my projects, but it isn't a product. It has too many dependencies on things that weren't intended to be hooked the way I hook them. It broke when Ruby 1.9 was released. It broke when Rails 3 was released. Hacks are always fragile, it's their nature. The description I read talked about an app on the desktop side that pretends to be an iPhone so it can sync with iTunes. That is absolutely, positively a hack, and one that got Palm into hot water with Apple's lawyers. It sounds like it's very fragile and could easily break accidentally with an iTunes update. Now really, honestly, this is Hacker News. I mean no disrespect to anyone when I characterize their work as being a hack. But the point of my commentis that I can't see Apple wanting a hack on their platform. Now as to users: HN readers are not a representative sample of iPhone users. Apple goes way out of its way to make simple things that just work. Their market for iPhone is the group of people that don't want to consult a huge list of what works and what breaks when they release an update. Apple especially don't want to dig themselves into the hole Microsoft created by working so hard on backwards compatibility for Windows. Apps like this are a backwards compatibility nightmare. Right now Apple can do anything they want with the iPhone to iTunes synchronization API by updating both apps simultaneously. Approving this app would end that flexibility.