Gigaom's Carmel DeAmicis reports that brands pay Twitter to falsely appear in your following list

This isn't true. This was a bug that has already been fixed.

I'm not complaining that you aren't being charitable. I'm pointing out that you misspoke then blamed me for it. If you misspoke, then own your words and just say "whoops, I didn't mean those guys" instead of looking for somebody else to shift blame to.

I'm talking about Facebook and Google, two of the companies explicitly listed in the article. You did RTFA right? Or are you one of those tards who manufactures the least charitable interpretation of what someone says and goes to town on them with a straw man?

The title of this submission: Google and Apple. The summary: Google and Apple. The article: Adobe, Apple, Facebook, Google and Yahoo. You said "both companies". Only two companies were singled out, Google and Apple. So yeah, to a reasonable person, it looks very much like you started off talking about Google and Apple, then expanded your point by talking about Facebook, and then to the other companies. Don't call me a "tard" because you fucked up what you were saying and I interpreted it in the most reasonable manner.

They are like google

The two companies have entirely different business models. Analytics is central to Google's business model. It's barely a blip on Apple's radar, and is insignificant compared with the way they use it as a differentiator.

Sure, Apple has business lines that generate income from hardware sales

That's so understated it's downright misrepresentative. They make billions of dollars a quarter from hardware sales. Even the amount of money they could theoretically make from analytics would be a drop in the bucket compared with that, let alone any earnings they might actually have. The potential chilling effect on their real business is far more relevant than any theoretical profits there. And you mention it like "oh yeah, they make money from hardware too"? Come on.

Both company's entire business models are 100% predicated on tracking people.

What are you talking about? Apple's business model revolves around selling people hardware. They've just launched a digital payment scheme with privacy being a major differentiator. If you think that Apple's business model is "100% predicated on tracking people", you don't know the first thing about their business model.

There is simply no way these companies will ever agree to not track anyone when there is that kind of money on the line.

Apple are positioning themselves to use privacy as a selling point. Their business model is entirely different to Google's and they can make more money by going in the opposite direction.

How is he throwing them under the bus? This isn't something they contest. They have already told the court they did this, because they were contractually obliged to do so by the record labels. All he's doing is supporting their version of events.

Apple does not want you to own and store your own music/media.

Take off your Apple blinders and think about this rationally. What you are saying doesn't resemble reality in the slightest. Apple have been the world's largest music retailer for years. They have been selling DRM-free music for years. They make billions of dollars a year doing this. They are clearly very, very happy to sell you music and they make a hell of a lot of money doing what you claim they don't want to do.

The proof will be in the pudding -- I wonder how usable it will be as a day to day tool for app developers and coding houses, especially with multiple people doing check-ins and such.

It's already in wide-scale use. Most Android developers I know have been using it for a while; it surpassed Eclipse a long time ago. It was unstable, sure, but Eclipse was a pain in the arse. Android Studio was purpose-built for Android development, and it really shows.

That's not to say it's perfect - it's slow in a lot of places, and the emulator is excruciatingly slow. But it's been quite a bit better than most of the alternatives for a while now.

what's the problem with the loss of the voting franchise?

Aside from the fact that it's fundamentally incompatible with democracy, wasn't a huge part of the American revolution the idea that there should be no taxation without representation? Those felons are taxpayers, aren't they?

even in cases where the extra length clarifies what's going on, you can do the same thing in other languages, i.e. every language supports use of meaningful names.

But Objective-C is very unusual in that it interleaves method parameters with the method name. The best alternative to that is using named parameters, and hardly anybody uses those all the time, so developers end up having to memorise the arguments and their order for every method if they want to be able to read code quickly.

Can you seriously argue that concatenating a string in Objective C is elegant?

No, but it is consistent, and that's very important to readability and maintainability too. If you knew nothing about NSString, but you were familiar with the rest of Objective-C, then you could easily guess how to concatenate strings.

The only substantial way of improving on string concatenation in Objective-C would be to introduce custom operators, and that brings its own set of issues. The other alternatives sacrifice consistency.

You don't have to be a fanboy to like Objective-C. It's a great language for its age and use cases. Yes, it's verbose, but a lot of that verbosity actually aids readability and maintainability.

A computer scientist can implement any algorithm in any language.

Just because it's possible, it doesn't mean it's effective. Developers could write applications with Brainfuck or Whitespace, but they'd take far longer, have a lot more bugs, and be incredibly unhappy.

There's a lot of variation between programming languages, and it makes a big difference in how productive programmers are. Better programming languages are valuable.

Why are these companies using their own languages?

Because they saw an opportunity to provide better tools for their developers. Take a look at the bridges between Objective-C and other languages. They are pretty clumsy. Apple designed Swift with Objective-C interoperability in mind, and this means using the system libraries is easier with Swift than other languages.

Work a few years at XYZ company working on their proprietary algorithms in their ABC programming language?

Good luck getting another job.

All of the decent developers I know can make those kinds of leaps without a problem. There are always transferrable skills and there are always non-transferrable skills. Using one language doesn't lock developers into that language in the future, and using a common language doesn't avoid lock in. If iOS developers used Java, they'd still struggle with Android development at first because the majority of the knowledge you need relates to the platform, not the language. And likewise, just because iOS developers work with Objective-C, it doesn't mean they can't make the leap to Android.

They could have probably achieved the same thing by just having people use their wifi service?

The whole point of this is that you place your order before you arrive at the store. The user wouldn't normally be in range of the Wi-Fi network.

Oh stop being so overdramatic. If you don't want an application to know your location, then tap "No" when you are asked for your permission. Or simply don't install the application. Applications can't access your location without your explicit consent. Nothing nefarious is happening here.

Are you willing to let Starbucks decide how much they can peek at your location data without even knowing if/when it's happening?

iOS doesn't let you do that. It differentiates between looking up the user's location when the application is in the foreground (i.e. what this application needs to find your nearest store when preordering), and tracking the user's location when it's running in the background. The user has to explicitly grant permission to the application to do each of these things.

I'm actually working on a similar application for one of their competitors right now. Yes, we ask for the user's location. Yes, it's to find the nearest store. No we can't track you. And to be frank, it's ridiculous to think that we would care enough to do this. The people who commission these applications want to sell you coffee, not stalk you.

would you resist the temptation and never once peek at other times?

Except it's not a case of "peeking". You've actually got to build a considerable amount of infrastructure to track people. Even if they ask for and obtain the user's permission to track them in the background, that doesn't magically create servers to record this data and user interfaces to look people up. Do you expect the marketing manager to convince her bosses to drop another 100K on building this functionality because she's nosy? There has to be a business case for it to be built.

You can't realistically do iOS development without knowing Objective-C; its just no feasible since all Apples frameworks are written in it, all the open source libraries use it, and all of the stackflow answers are for it.

This isn't the case. It doesn't matter whether a framework is written in Objective-C or Swift, you can use it from either language regardless. You can write an application from start to finish in Swift without needing to know anything about Objective-C. Sure, if you do know it, then it may be easier, but not so much easier that it will outweigh trying to learn two languages at once.

you should get some formal computer science instruction if you ever expect to land a job. You have to have something on your rÃf©sumÃf©.

No, when people hire iOS developers, the first question they ask is if you have any applications in the App Store, then they want to know where you've worked, then they want to see your code, and if you haven't got anything else, then a degree is the last resort you have. Spending your time building applications and putting them on the App Store is far more effective for getting a job than spending that time getting formal education in computer science. Even when you come across the rare organisation that demands a degree, they usually don't care about what subject it was in.