Bruno Kerouanton

Back in 1995,

I bought an Apple Newton MessagePad 100 as I was still in the development field, and that my goal was to develop some applications on it. Since the beginning I’ve always been fond of PDAs and small devices as I’ve started learning programming on a Casio PB80 a long time ago, and then never ceased buying new handhelds for fun and programming. Until now, I’ve programmed on several Casio devices (Basic), HP48 (RPN and Saturn assembler), Atari Portfolio (C and 8088 assembler), Psion 3 then 5 (OPL), and now PocketPC 2002 (eMbedded visual C)…

My adventures with the MessagePad 100 were interesting. At that time, I also had some knowledge on Mac programming as I had bought Spectre GCR – a Mac emulator – on my Atari Mega ST and had started looking around with ResEdit and the inner workings of System7 by reading the Inside Macintosh books. I didn’t spend too much time coding for the Mac, but I liked the concept and that was the reason I felt motivated with programming the Newton, which was a really cool and futurist device at that time.

Unfortunately, I discovered that Apple already had some licensing terms for developers that weren’t cool, and I quicky stopped dreaming about developing on Newton. I still was a student and didn’t own a software development company, so was not considered as a professional developer. For Apple, that didn’t change anything : if I wanted to develop on Newton I would have to buy expensive SDKs, a real Mac, and sign different documents including a NDA. That could be suitable for a company aiming to sell their software, but as I wanted to develop for fun and no profit, it was simply unconceiveable. So I left the Newton development scene as quickly as I had entered it, having developed… nothing but spent a lot of time and money in travels to Paris, learning documentation and so on.

Disgusted by Apple’s behavior against developers, I just said myself I wouldn’t touch anymore Apple development as it was too closed.

Now, in 2008…

Thirteen years later, after 2 iPods (a shuffle 1st Gen that was stolen and a 20Gb 2ndGen that duals boot with Linux), I now own an iPod Touch. And although I find it cool I really don’t want to invest time on it. Nor on the iPhone, because I rediscovered with it the bad feelings I had when I had the Newton.

When you buy an iPod Touch or an iPhone, you don’t really own it… You are just granted a right to use it. Everything on it is proprietary and closed. Apple has a total control of what applications are good for you and what should be the next update containing.

When I see that users have to create petition websites to ask Apple for basic features such as an option to disable autocorrection, I’m feeling angry. For example I would like a simple feature such as disabling auto-rotation and I am not the only one, but as Apple controls evers single feature (unless you jailbreak it, which I don’t want to spend time on) it’s probably worthless to hope for it unless someone sets up another petition. Is that normal ? I guess not…

When I read that developers have to sign NDA agreements with Apple to get the SDK, and that Apple can remove applications from the Apple Store if they feel that they do not like them for any reason, I’m even more angry. (Update : it seems that Apple finally resigned asking for those Non Disclosure Agreements, it was a silly decision, they made the right step, but I’m still sure they’ll refuse to add some interesting applications on the Apple Store, or let users to everything they want with their iPod)

When iPod touch users have to pay for firmware updates, that upsets me.

When I install iTunes on my PC, and I see that the upgrade tries to install more and more unsollicited applications without noticing me (like MobileMe on the latest version), that’s not cool either.

All those reasons are enough for me to tell that I’m not willing to buy an iPhone. The HTC Diamond Touch Pro is a real alternative for the iPhone, and I would be able to continue using it as I want – and not as Apple wants me to use it.

Ah, last things about the iPhone, that are more optimistic :

• O’Reilly has just published a book that seems interesting : iPhone forensics .
• The last version of IDA Pro features an iPhone debugger…

Only time will tell us what will happen with the iPhone/ipod Touch, but for the moment I’m happy with my PocketPC, and I miss my Psion 5mx that was really cool (at least Symbian – which is the evolution of the Psion 5 Epoc32 operating system – is still widely used on mobiles, that’s a consolation).