waffle

It’s good to be back on Aluminum again.

So far: it screams. The function key layout will take some getting used to. I love separate Previous/Next/Playpause keys; I used to use fn+shift+volume down/up/mute for them.

I’m starting fresh on my setup and bringing stuff over as I need it, which will hopefully help purge about 3 years of crap.

Shawn Blanc has a good review of an almost equal machine (he sprung for the 200GB 7200 RPM hard drive, I for the 250GB 5400 RPM, both BTO options).

(As reported to Apple under Radar ID 5793259. Written to heavily stress how this hurts Apple, in order to induce that special kick-them-in-the-wallet brand of sympathy.)

Update, three days later: “This is a follow up to Bug ID# 5793259. After further investigation it has been determined that this is a known issue, which is currently being investigated by engineering. This issue has been filed in our bug database under the original Bug ID# 5788773.”

Title: App Store-only distribution makes beta testing impractical
Product: iPhone SDK
Version/Build Number: N/A
Classification: Enhancement
Reproducible?: Always

Summary:
The approach taken by Apple to limiting distribution of applications to the App Store will raise the probability of a low quality experience of iPhone applications due to difficulties in coordinating beta testing.

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Develop an iPhone application of a non-trivial size.
2. Reach the point where it is necessary to assemble a team of beta testers that can’t be assumed to all have access to the source code and/or the signing certificate.

Expected Results:
Apple provides a way for any iPhone developer to redistribute iPhone applications outside of the official App Store track, and a way for iPhone user to install these applications.

Actual Results:
Apple does not provide such ways.

Regression:
N/A.

Notes:
As any application grows in capability and features, it will become increasingly harder for anyone, including the developer, to test everything about the application. As is established, most developers will enlist the help of users to help beta test the applications. If these users are not themselves developers with valid certificates and are not shipped the source code of the applications, they may not reasonably be expected to be able to beta test the applications.

There are three alternatives a developer can take to this, and all three are bad for Apple and the developer:

1. The developer tries to do as much beta testing on her own as is possible. It is statistically likely that she will not catch all bugs that her beta testers would do, had she been able to distribute the application to them. This is bad for Apple since the final product will be of worse quality, since there will have been less effort spent on beta testing and quality assurance.

2. The developer uses the App Store as a channel to deliver the beta. While the intended beta testers will be able to download and install the beta, so will anyone else, which means that people who have not been properly advised regarding the quality of the application will be exposed to an application of significantly worse quality than the final version of the application will deliver. This, like alternative 1, will unleash a product on the App Store that is not the quality of the final product, and this is bad for Apple; however, it is also bad for the developer who won’t be able to, should she choose, conduct a closed beta program. I think Apple, of all companies, would see the value in being able to do so, even if you don’t have plenty of spare iPhones or QA resources.

3. The developer simply gives up on the application since she won’t be able to deliver a product whose quality is up to her standards. This is bad for the developer, who won’t be able to deliver a product; it is bad for Apple, who won’t be able to provide as wide of an application line-up and it is certainly bad for the user, who may be unable to find a suitable application where there otherwise would have been one available.

I can suggest a few workarounds, but the one that I think will gain most traction for Apple if it were to adopt one is to allow the use of alternate data sources for the App Store, where beta testers can just enter another repository and download their application the same way they usually do, without the developer needing to expose the lower-quality, unfinished application to the rest of the world.

The new AppleScript Language Guide is live. The previous version was, as far as I could tell, the oldest thing on Apple Developer Connection still an authoritative reference on anything - it defined the AppleScript version (1.3.4) shipping in Mac OS 8.5.1 and was last updated May 21, 1999.

There’s nothing like tirelessly working most of the weekend to implement persistent preferences for Adium message styles backed by the client-side SQL database support in HTML5 — here’s a video of how it lets you choose colors in the upcoming revision of my own message style — only to discover that since Adium’s message view loads the HTML using loadHTMLString:baseURL: instead of loading a file off of the hard disk, WebKit can’t determine the origin and correlate the origin to a set of databases to which it should allow access, so it just acts as if it’s got no such support whatsoever and the whole brilliant idea collapses like a damn house of cards since persistence doesn’t work, which degrades this into a cool but absolutely useless hack since no one in their right mind (and very few even not in their right mind) would want to redo this every time they opened a new IM session.

(Now, Safari 3.0 doesn’t have client-side database storage, so this is a purely academic exercise using nightly WebKits. Unless, of course, there would hypothetically speaking exist a new Safari 3.1 which would implement this, and I would hypothetically have downloaded it, in which case I would be able to perform this entirely without horsing around with WebKit builds. Hypothetically.)