It's simple. Writing apps for blackberry and symbian is expensive, and developing for them is non trivial.

Developing apps for android and the iphone is simple.

Just as an example, try to figure out how to set up a development environment and produce a simple application on all 4 platforms.

By the time you are finished on Android, you will make it to the store to buy the macbook for developing on iphone.

By the time you are done on iphone, you *may* probably will have j2ME installed, won't have a working virtual device, and will still be trying to figure out which CSR jars you need installed.

Maybe if Symbian or Blackberry were to create a simple to set up dev environment, there would be more developers.

That's a problem with the law, not Google. The rights holder for the first Tetris game issued a DMCA take down notice. Google has no choice under the law to do anything other then take down the apps, or else it will be liable for infringement. The people with Tetris apps have no money. Google does. It would be idiotic for Google to open itself to an expensive lawsuit especially given that anyone impacted can indeed go fight this in court with the rights holder.

That the law here is broken is not Google's fault.

Because most consumers are oblivious to the consequences of buying into proprietary standards until it negatively impacts them. My wife loved her apple products until she had to get a windows laptop for reasons that are unimportant to the thread. When she found that apple gave you no way to pull your music back off your ipod she realized what the consequences of playing in a walled garden were. (I've since fixed this for her, but still). The average consumer assumes that these products don't come with insidious forms of lock in, and only notice when it hurts them. Our problem is that, we can see and predict this future because we understand the ecosystem, but like Cassandra, no one will listen to our prophecies, presuming it's just some dumb nerd turf war.

The point is that you can't actually predict what will violate the terms in the future, because apple changes the terms and shuts down whole lines of business overnight. Approval isn't the only problem. Losing your already build income stream because apple arbitrarily changes the rules and thus makes your app be in violation of rules that didn't exist at the time of development.

Clearly large businesses who are using the app store effectively as advertisement for their otherwise offline product are a different patter. Progressive Insurance doesn't depend on the income of their app to put food on the table. But setting yourself up so that your income depends on a set of rules that constantly change and make your application a violator of those rules post hoc seems reckless to me.

If you are fine with the risk that you can have income one day, and lose the entire income stream the next because apple has arbitrarily decided that your products are now not pretty enough for their environment (or whatever reason), more power to you. I just hope no one else depends on you having income.

Are you seriously calling people who criticize the iPhone a crowd mindset? This against the vast array of apple fanbois who refuse to accept any criticism at all about their platform?

You want real criticism?

The inability to replace the default apps with apps that fit your needs better then apple's default apps. Have bad eyesight? You can't replace the keyboard with another one. Loath itunes and want a good music player? Can't, banned. Want to have an app run in the background to monitor something? Nope. (No, OS 4.0 doesn't solve that. It's not multitasking, it's a series of daemons running that you can hand off specific tasks to, not the ability to run you application in the background).

That any apple defender can accuse people who criticize the iPhone of groupthink needs to serious hold up a mirror. The apple faithful are referred to as a cult for a reason.

You forget, Apple has:

A) Banned any advertising network other then it's own from doing any analytics of any kind. This drastically lowers the effectiveness (and thus the value) of any ads google can deliver. If google can't target an ad based on any information coming from the phone, they have lost all of their vast analytical value.

B) Google most certainly did not implement their turn by turn in Objective C. Since apple has banned implementing any app in any non apple language and then cross compiling, Google would have to reimplement the entire thing from scratch.

Considering the above, is it any surprise?

A) Google has been developing Android for years. They purchased the company who initially developed Android before the release of the first iPhone. Apple got it's panties in a knot when google finally released it.

B) Maps is definitely not developed in C, C++ and Objective C, so getting the code to run on an iphone would violate their approval policies.

C) No sane development shop should be developing on the iPhone platform anyway. When an arbitrary and capricious bureaucracy can kill your income stream at a whim and has been shown to do so on a regular and increasingly common basis, the level of risk there is unreasonable. Releasing an iPhone app is a solid reason for your company's stock to go /down/, as it shows that the management team is reckless with a company's resources.

D) It always galls me that iPhone users seem to have some sort of feeling of entitlement towards getting everything they want. Google doesn't do /free/ turn by turn for your OS and that makes them evil? Get over yourselves. You are not entitled to google making anything for free for you.

Google not making a free app that many companies sell for hundreds of dollars on an OS that explicitly bans them from reusing their code developed by a business that has been shown to be highly hostile to them may be the dumbest reason I've ever see floated for them having violated "don't be evil".

As a former Vonage employee, watching HTC step away from a treasure trove of patents that can be used to defend itself against Apple frankly scares the crap out of me. I really like my HTC phone and I really like Android, and Apple seems bent on destroying it all through the court system instead of facing some real competition in the market.

I've been there when companies dogpile on to try and kill you with legal means. It very nearly took out Vonage, I really hope it doesn't kill Android as well.

A palm purchase for the patents seems to me to be a very sound legal shot across Apple's bow. It would be nice to get those former iPhone gone WebOS engineers working on Android....

The entire UNIX operating system is an IDE. Almost every element of the design of UNIX is based around being able to make developing software easier and more productive. Just like the end user tools, the difference between the UNIX design and other designs is that you have lots of small, tight tools that are good at a limited number of things, and scripts or applications to tie those tools together. Tools from vim to grep to gdb to glade are all single purpose tools that are pretty darn bullet proof.

I'll take VIM + the command line (or EMACS) over Visual Studio any day. (or Eclipse, or QT Creator)

Simplicity is hard. Programming the Unix way requires a person to focus on radical simplicity. The benefits are huge. It's a lot easier to debug a 200 line program that takes data in on stdin and dumps it to stdout then it is to debug a class that you can only instantiate with your AbstractFactoryFactory.

The mistake that younger developers make is seeing complexity as hard, and representing mad skillz.

When you have a complex problem that you need to solve, it's /easy/ to make a complex mess with awesome hacks that only you can figure out. It's *hard* to solve that complex problem by building simple programs that even the most junior programmers can easily read, interpret and debug. IMHO, complicated designs are a sign of inexperience, not '1337ness'.

This is patently false. Under the settlement, any book for whom the rights holder can be established, said rights holder has the right to pull the book from the google book search for whatever retarded reason they have justified this to themselves. The only 'special' right google has is to redistribute works for which the rights holder cannot be found.

This is in practice a very small percentage of the works, as the rights holders are actively being sought out by the author's guild.

The idea that works that have intellectual value should be kept away from the public because it has become functionally impossible to find the person who has the rights is a blatant violation of the copyright clause, which states:

"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."

How does keeping something secret from the public when a work has been abandoned promote the progress of the useful arts?

What they did wrong was try to make books more available to individuals, and easy to search. The people crying over this are upset because they feel that their product being more available, easier to find and easier to buy clearly represents a copyright infringement.

Scanning the world's libraries and making the material available is clearly quite possibly one of the most individually empowering acts in history, as it will put far more *good* information into the hands of everyone. This is unacceptable because this is an industry based on artificial scarcity.

As for the exclusivity issue, why is it Google's job to negotiate rights for everyone else? Clearly this is creating a template, and any other business that wants to go through the monumental task of scanning millions of works should have no problem securing the same deal. This is just a smoke screen put up by people who don't want the mass of humanity to have good access to the materials in teh best libraries in the world.

Publishers and most authors *hate* libraries. They *hate* the idea that a book can be read by more then one person, and they *hate* people sharing the ideas from works without paying for the privledge of the knowledge. This is an industry that has been activly hostile to the first sale doctrine, and that has been positivly drooling at the idea that they can sell books to people covered in thick layers of DRM so that they can end the library loophole.

I'm positivly shocked to see most of slashdot actively siding with a group of people who are today celebrating the scuttling of a deal that would make books far more available to the world, and did so for their own anti-intellectual, anti-consumer, pro-drm reasons.

My 2c, this review is entirely the norm for the rails community.

This is a community of 'developers' who spend (so far as I can tell) the vast majority of their time coming up with names (rails, merb, cucumber, etc) and writing blog posts (yes, I get the irony of pointing at *his* blog) about how badass they think are, while writing trivial libraries and using that to trumpet how 1337 they they think they are. Both this review and likely this book should be passed up, along with the rails community as a whole.

*Clue*, when looking for a development community, look for a group of people who spend time *coding* at their conventions instead of a development community who spends the vast majority of their time grandstanding about how awesome they thing they are.