5 ms·

Inverting the Golden Cage, or a Gift to the Barbarian Hordes at Apple’s Gates.

22 points by fogus 17y ago

deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
mcav 17y ago
With enough time, money, and energy, we could do a lot of things. This will never happen.
- stcredzero 17y ago
  Why not? This wouldn't be any more or less difficult than any other cross platform framework.
  - wmf 17y ago
    Think of it as a cross platform framework where the spec is controlled by your enemy.
    - stcredzero 17y ago
      They're limited in what they can do if they want to maintain backwards compatibility.
glhaynes 17y ago
"nor would it be especially difficult given several months of an enthusiastic Common Lisp programmer or two" Hah!
- hernan7 17y ago
  I guess it depends on your definition of "several".
drewcrawford 17y ago
Well to start with, there are patent problems. IANAL, but I presume Apple's thought long and hard about this. Then you have the licensing issues. To get the documentation, you need to clickwrap through the license that says you can't clone it. So it's not even like cleanroom engineering, where it's possible to legally document some assembly code you bought in a box. Then there's the real problem--Apple's SDKs are really quite good, all things considered. Cloning them would be very hard. There is some serious, complicated stuff going on under the hood, especially to make it performant. To say that a couple of clever Lisp hackers can clone it is to say that Apple could have built the API with a couple of clever hackers to begin with. It's to say that Jobs is stupid for having hundreds of people work on it.
- stcredzero 17y ago
  What makes you think that hundreds of people are working in the SDK? I suspect the core frameworks are really only being worked on by small groups. If one targeted a specific kind of application, let's say 2D gaming, then the amount of functionality is well within the size of what one or two talented hackers can do. After all, they wouldn't have to write an SDK. All they have to do is to write an Objective-C parser and target another 2D game SDK on another platform.
  - drewcrawford 17y ago
    Let's say on average, 2D games only use 20% of the APIs. Problem: Every 2D game uses a different 20%.
    - stcredzero 17y ago
      I don't see it. How do you explain something like PyGlet?
Avshalom 17y ago
>For this reason, Adobe (or anyone else who stands to profit from Apple’s demise) ought to seriously consider funding such a project. How would getting the entire mobile developer world to code to Apple's API's lead to Apple's demise?
- ovi256 17y ago
  Well, if you saw a killer app on an iPhone, you could run it on your non-iPhone smartphone with this approach. Thus no need to buy an iPhone yourself.
- asciilifeform 17y ago
  Death by DOJ. Possibly.
efsavage 17y ago
And what's to stop Apple from changing things up again? The most insidious problem with these walled gardens/lock-in environments is that you don't know what's coming next. I got out of MSFT development when I saw that they basically said "all that stuff you learned and invested in, we've decided to break it, but you can pay us for the next version and do it all over again!" The VB/VBA programs I wrote back then are long gone. The C/Perl/Java programs I wrote against standards still work fine. Sure I might have to make some tweaks if I want to catch up to the latest version, and some day Oracle will do something stupid to Java and we'll be stuck with the previous version, but I won't concede retroactive control over my investment to another company's marketing department.
ynniv 17y ago
Where by "the doom of the Golden Cage as we know it", we actually mean "a thriving AppStore market"? As far as we can tell, Apple just wants apps to run well on the iPhone and iPad. If you want to machine translate your CocoaTouch app into something else, then Apple has in a way won: the conversation is about how you can port your awesome CocoaTouch app on to some other, lesser platform. That's all Steve really wants anyway - look at iTunes/Safari for Windows. As an added bonus, such a translation framework would finally fill the gap that GNUstep [http://gnustep.org/ http://gnustep.org/] never did. You might start with Cocotron [http://cocotron.org/ http://cocotron.org/], which is a small subset of what the author describes.
easp 17y ago
This is just silly. I expect Apple would hate it, but not because it would spell their quick demise. For one thing, even if such a thing were available today, the iPhone/iPad would almost certainly be the best platform for apps developed for, well, the iPhone/iPad platform. Yes, more developers might port their existing iApp to Android, etc, but if its viable for them, then its also viable for people who creating new apps who might have bet it all on Android if they didn't have an easy way to hedge with the iPhone too. If this idea were real, and it caught on, the bigger issue for Apple is that developers might be slower to adopt new features of the platform. Right now, if Apple releases a new OS feature, they can put it on new devices and move the installed base to it pretty quickly, which means developers have incentive to take advantage of the new functionality. If those developers depend on a translation layer to reach a significant portion of their audience, then they have less incentive to move quickly, because the translation layer needs to be updated, and that could take a while if the underlying platform doesn't provide the required functionality yet. Not that I think it would ever get that far. It's a lot of work already, and its going to be magnified by the fact that both iPhoneOS and Android are evolving quickly. Even if this hypothetical were real, its going to be lagging the capabilities of both platforms which means that its only really attractive for apps that don't get much benefit from the new capabilities. Look at WINE. It's been under development for over a decade. I think its impressive that it is as useful as it is, but when it comes down to it, its still pretty niche.

22 points by fogus 17y ago

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]

mcav 17y ago

With enough time, money, and energy, we could do a lot of things. This will never happen.

stcredzero 17y ago
Why not? This wouldn't be any more or less difficult than any other cross platform framework.
- wmf 17y ago
  Think of it as a cross platform framework where the spec is controlled by your enemy.
  - stcredzero 17y ago
    They're limited in what they can do if they want to maintain backwards compatibility.

glhaynes 17y ago

"nor would it be especially difficult given several months of an enthusiastic Common Lisp programmer or two" Hah!

hernan7 17y ago
I guess it depends on your definition of "several".

drewcrawford 17y ago

Well to start with, there are patent problems. IANAL, but I presume Apple's thought long and hard about this. Then you have the licensing issues. To get the documentation, you need to clickwrap through the license that says you can't clone it. So it's not even like cleanroom engineering, where it's possible to legally document some assembly code you bought in a box. Then there's the real problem--Apple's SDKs are really quite good, all things considered. Cloning them would be very hard. There is some serious, complicated stuff going on under the hood, especially to make it performant. To say that a couple of clever Lisp hackers can clone it is to say that Apple could have built the API with a couple of clever hackers to begin with. It's to say that Jobs is stupid for having hundreds of people work on it.

stcredzero 17y ago
What makes you think that hundreds of people are working in the SDK? I suspect the core frameworks are really only being worked on by small groups. If one targeted a specific kind of application, let's say 2D gaming, then the amount of functionality is well within the size of what one or two talented hackers can do. After all, they wouldn't have to write an SDK. All they have to do is to write an Objective-C parser and target another 2D game SDK on another platform.
- drewcrawford 17y ago
  Let's say on average, 2D games only use 20% of the APIs. Problem: Every 2D game uses a different 20%.
  - stcredzero 17y ago
    I don't see it. How do you explain something like PyGlet?

Avshalom 17y ago

>For this reason, Adobe (or anyone else who stands to profit from Apple’s demise) ought to seriously consider funding such a project. How would getting the entire mobile developer world to code to Apple's API's lead to Apple's demise?

ovi256 17y ago
Well, if you saw a killer app on an iPhone, you could run it on your non-iPhone smartphone with this approach. Thus no need to buy an iPhone yourself.
asciilifeform 17y ago
Death by DOJ. Possibly.

efsavage 17y ago

And what's to stop Apple from changing things up again? The most insidious problem with these walled gardens/lock-in environments is that you don't know what's coming next. I got out of MSFT development when I saw that they basically said "all that stuff you learned and invested in, we've decided to break it, but you can pay us for the next version and do it all over again!" The VB/VBA programs I wrote back then are long gone. The C/Perl/Java programs I wrote against standards still work fine. Sure I might have to make some tweaks if I want to catch up to the latest version, and some day Oracle will do something stupid to Java and we'll be stuck with the previous version, but I won't concede retroactive control over my investment to another company's marketing department.

ynniv 17y ago

Where by "the doom of the Golden Cage as we know it", we actually mean "a thriving AppStore market"? As far as we can tell, Apple just wants apps to run well on the iPhone and iPad. If you want to machine translate your CocoaTouch app into something else, then Apple has in a way won: the conversation is about how you can port your awesome CocoaTouch app on to some other, lesser platform. That's all Steve really wants anyway - look at iTunes/Safari for Windows. As an added bonus, such a translation framework would finally fill the gap that GNUstep [http://gnustep.org/ http://gnustep.org/] never did. You might start with Cocotron [http://cocotron.org/ http://cocotron.org/], which is a small subset of what the author describes.

easp 17y ago

This is just silly. I expect Apple would hate it, but not because it would spell their quick demise. For one thing, even if such a thing were available today, the iPhone/iPad would almost certainly be the best platform for apps developed for, well, the iPhone/iPad platform. Yes, more developers might port their existing iApp to Android, etc, but if its viable for them, then its also viable for people who creating new apps who might have bet it all on Android if they didn't have an easy way to hedge with the iPhone too. If this idea were real, and it caught on, the bigger issue for Apple is that developers might be slower to adopt new features of the platform. Right now, if Apple releases a new OS feature, they can put it on new devices and move the installed base to it pretty quickly, which means developers have incentive to take advantage of the new functionality. If those developers depend on a translation layer to reach a significant portion of their audience, then they have less incentive to move quickly, because the translation layer needs to be updated, and that could take a while if the underlying platform doesn't provide the required functionality yet. Not that I think it would ever get that far. It's a lot of work already, and its going to be magnified by the fact that both iPhoneOS and Android are evolving quickly. Even if this hypothetical were real, its going to be lagging the capabilities of both platforms which means that its only really attractive for apps that don't get much benefit from the new capabilities. Look at WINE. It's been under development for over a decade. I think its impressive that it is as useful as it is, but when it comes down to it, its still pretty niche.