There has been some growing dissent amongst the Apple ranks over the past few months. Starting with the delay the Leopard, then the lack of anything worthwhile new in Leopard at WWDC combined with the bullcrap Jobs spewed about web apps being a “great” way of developing for the iPhone. Now add to this list the iPhone 1.1.1 update and the iPod touch.

Apple is setting itself up for a fall. How do I know? Because IBM experienced one and Microsoft has experienced one and Apple is starting to act no differently to how IBM and Microsoft did. In other words they’re getting exceedingly arrogant. Having no competition leads to you thinking you are invulnerable and you can do whatever you want. Then a small company that has been in the shadows will come and steal your thunder.

Apple needs to fail, it needs a reality check to show that it isn’t always right. It looks like it could be heading that way, but I hope the current iPhone flops in Europe (honestly, £900 for a phone for 18 months?). I hope that it helps Apple realise that they need to listen to users more. I know I’m beating a dead horse but Apple needs to open up the iPhone to 3rd party apps. Not web apps, real native apps. Amazon also needs to gain serious market share with their online music store. We have finally found someone who can out-Apple Apple. Sure people will still be buying iPods but if they can lose market share with iTunes then it’s helping them come back down to earth.

Apple has always been able to do what is needed with the Mac, because they have always been the under dog. Yes they have made mistakes, but over the past 10 years they’ve done very little that has been seriously damaging for them. I was thinking that Apple was able to avoid becoming too arrogant with the iPod. After all, they have been making the best MP3 players out there even while they’ve been ahead of the rest of the pack by an order of magnitude. They could throw out something that was similar to the Zune and people would buy it, but they haven’t.

The iPhone has the potential to be Apple’s biggest achievement to date, the holy grail of digital electronics both geeks and regular people have been waiting for. Unfortunately recent success is getting to Apple’s head and I honestly believe they need to fail now and fail hard in order to succeed in the long run. Otherwise we could be looking at the holy trinity of tech companies that had it and blew it, does Steve Jobs really want to be grouped together with IBM and Microsoft in that way?

Apple actually had things going for them before the iPhone 1.1.1 update. The iPhone was a pretty decent phone and when jailbroken you could add an array of pretty cool 3rd party applications to it. If it was left in this state, or maybe finally fully supported, nothing would be wrong. Unfortunately it seems that the use of 3rd party apps has been deemed not within Steve Jobs’ terms of acceptable use of his products and so must be terminated.

But there is the argument that this is a phone and so it needs a relatively controlled environment for application development, which fair enough, is just about a valid argument. But then you get to the iPod touch. Why are there no applications allowed on the iPod touch? It’s fully capable. It’s not like there’s a phone carrier to worry about. Yes I’m still going to get one without the apps, because what’s there by default is worth the £200, but the apps would make it a bargain.

So the problem really boils down to this. Why the hell is Apple using an extremely powerful desktop OS with extremely powerful APIs on a device where they are severely limited? Yes you have a lot of work done for them that they don’t need to re-write, but why take something that can do so much more and lock it down so that it’s a mere shadow of it’s fully capable self. At the moment OS X is merely a toy when it comes to the iPhone or the iPod and the only way to see it fully shine is on a Mac, which is a shame because Apple has a chance to show a much wider audience what a good piece of technology their most valuable asset really is.

Also See: Apple’s Growing Arrogance - Reinvented Blog

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Nothing much to report this week. I’ve had about 30 minutes tops of free time between running around like a headless chicken, being tired from running around like a headless chicken and sleep and I’ve invested that in Code Collector Pro 1.0.2 (which should be out on Tuesday). Luckily I’ve got a relatively quiet weekend so I’ll be hard at work on Minim 1.2.

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Not really M Cubed related as such and a bit late, but for those of you out there who have large collections of links to store I suggest checking out WebnoteHappy which was updated to version 1.3 a few weeks ago. It integrates with various browsers and other applications and has various cool new features such as growl support, a quick webnote hotkey and the ability to change the font size of the whole UI. And if you take a look in the credits you’ll see that some of this version was produced by yours truly. So go buy now and support your local indie dev!

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You may be wandering what happened to week 4. Did it get abducted by aliens? Did it get attacked by a shark? Did it spontaneously combust? Nope, something way more exciting…. nothing happened. I’ve moved back to Sheffield for the start of the new university year about 2 weeks ago. When I moved in I had no internet and my iMac was scheduled to go in for repair. There’s something about losing your primary machine for a week and having to walk half a mile to get internet access that causes you to be unproductive…

That said stuff has happened this past week. I managed to finish off and polish the search bar, which now has a cool little slide down animation when you start to search. The GarageBand import is also almost complete. Other than that Minim has been on hold while I work on an update to Code Collector Pro that I was planning to do last week.

So I said that I could give a better estimate for when Minim 1.2 will be out last time I posted, and I said that things would be on track if I had most of the major stuff done by last Friday. Obviously that hasn’t happened. It’s looking more and more likely that a beta version will go out mid-late October with the final version out early-mid November. That is of course assuming that University doesn’t get in the way any more.

That’s really all for this week. Hopefully next week I’ll have more to report on and have the bulk of 1.2 finished, unfortunately life often has different plans.

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