Apple – Page 3

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Apple open sources their Java implementation

First Apple deprecated their Java implementation. Now they’ve released it as open source:

Oracle and Apple today announced the OpenJDK project for Mac OS X. Apple will contribute most of the key components, tools and technology required for a Java SE 7 implementation on Mac OS X, including a 32-bit and 64-bit HotSpot-based Java virtual machine, class libraries, a networking stack and the foundation for a new graphical client. OpenJDK will make Apple’s Java technology available to open source developers so they can access and contribute to the effort.

The question that remains for me is whether Apple will continue to contribute code to OpenJDK. (Hopefully they will.)

This, combined with the fact that Apple is no longer going to ship Flash on OS X, seems to signal that Apple isn’t interested in being responsible for shipping updates for other people’s runtimes any more. You can certainly run Java or Flash on your Mac if you like, but the vendor is responsible for making sure that your runtime is patched and secure.

Marco Arment on the Mac App Store

October 29, 2010 / Rafe / 0 Comments

Marco Arment makes the point that the Mac App Store is for developers who aren’t already developing Mac apps. This was the point I was trying to get at the other day when I said:

I can see a future where a sizable percentage of Mac users only use applications that they installed through the Mac App Store.

There are a lot of people who buy Macs, go to the Apple Store and take some classes, and never bother to install anything on their Mac that wasn’t there when they bought it. Maybe they buy a productivity application so they can do word processing, and that’s it.

The App Store is a way to deliver applications to those people, and like Marco, I think it’s going to be very successful in that regard. Anyway, go read his post, The Mac App Store isn’t for today’s Mac developers.

Only Java developers use Java desktop applications

October 25, 2010 / Rafe / 4 Comments

Chris Adamson talks about the strange fact that the number one use of Java desktop applications is to run tools used to create Java server applications:

We know the big use for AWT and Swing, and it’s a terrible irony: measured by app launches or time spent in an app, the top AWT/Swing apps are surely NetBeans and IntelliJ, IDEs used for creating… other Java applications! The same can be said of the SWT toolkit, which powers the Eclipse IDE and not much else. This is what makes this white elephant so difficult to dispose of: all the value of modern-day Java is writing for the server, but nearly all the Java developers are using the desktop stuff to do so, making them the target market (and really the only market) for Desktop Java. If there were other viable Java applications on the desktop, used by everyday end-users, Apple couldn’t afford to risk going without Java. There aren’t, and it can.

This is sort of a weird result of how Java evolved. The original idea behind Java is that it would be a replacement for platform-native GUI toolkits, but of course that didn’t work out particularly well. However, it did make it easy for Java developers to write their tools in Java, and those tools wound up being write once, run anywhere.

That, in turn, contributed to the resurgence of the Mac. If you were a Java developer who used Eclipse, it was very very easy to move from Windows to the Mac. When it became obvious that using the Unix-based OS X was a better deal for Java developers than using Windows, you could just get a Mac, download Eclipse or whatever Java IDE you enjoy, check out your source, and get started.

Adamson’s prediction is that you soon won’t be able to run your favorite Java IDE on a Mac, but I don’t think he’s correct. At least I hope not. The strong negative reaction we’re seeing from the Java community is, for the most part, an expression of this worry. They don’t want to have to choose between their favorite tools and their favorite operating system, especially when they don’t have to right now.

The future of Java on the Mac platform

October 22, 2010 / Rafe / 14 Comments

Yesterday, I talked about what we might be able to infer from Apple’s decision to deprecate Java and prohibit Java applications from the Mac App Store in terms of the future of the Mac as an open platform. Today, I want to round up some links about the future of the Mac as a Java development platform and as a platform for developers.

Nobody is exactly sure what to make of the deprecation of Apple’s port of the Java Development Kit for the Mac, but a lot of people are rather stressed about it, as you can see from several threads at Hacker News. I am a Java developer and I do all of my work on a Mac. Losing the ability to continue to work in this manner would be a hit to my productivity.

First, Apple announced that the version of the JDK that they maintain is deprecated. A Java developer who is a Mac user emailed Steve Jobs what Apple’s future plans are for Java on OS X. Jobs responded that Oracle maintains the Java released for other platforms, that Apple’s Java release is always behind the latest Oracle (formerly Sun) release, and that keeping Java up to date for OS X is their job. Java creator James Gosling takes issue with Jobs on a number of points, noting that many companies do maintain Java for their platforms, and that Apple in the past chose to maintain the port for a variety of reasons. Former Sun open source evangelist Simon Phipps explains why it would be difficult for Oracle to take over maintenance of the OS X JDK.

Matt Drance says this is the end of Java as a development platform for Macs. The one community that really cares about this is Java developers who use Macs. Here’s his prognosis:

A lot of Java professionals use Macs for development, even if they deploy somewhere else. What will they do? If they’re using Eclipse, I think they’ll be OK. It shouldn’t take long to shim SWT on top of an OpenJDK port, and IBM has shown a lot of initiative over the years. Other “pure Java” IDEs, like JetBrains’ (superior, in my opinion) IDEA, depend on a working AWT, and therefore have some more thinking to do.

And finally, Tim Bray, on Twitter:

Unclench, everyone. There are millions of Java devs, all their tools are in Java, they like Macs, one way or another it’ll be there.

I don’t know what the future of Java on the Mac is, but I think it’s foolish for Apple to turn its back on hosting development environments that they don’t fully control. One of the factors that brought Apple back into relevance as a computer maker was the fact that Apple provided a friendly version of Unix that Web developers could use to get their work done. A few years ago switching from Windows to Mac became a no brainer if you were developing apps that would eventually be deployed on Unix servers. That led to a lot of Macs being sold, not only to those developers but also to the people those developers influence.

Furthermore, I believe that the presence of Macs on the desks of millions of software developers who were doing Java work, or PHP work, or Ruby on Rails work contributed in a big way to the growth of iPhone development. There are huge advantages associated with being the platform of choice for developers. Apple should be very careful before it fritters away those advantages.

Is the Mac becoming a closed platform?

October 21, 2010 / Rafe / 16 Comments

The big question everyone is asking is whether the Mac App Store is a step toward the closing of the Mac platform, making it a walled garden like iOS where you can only install applications by way of the App Store. This was the big worry when the iPad was originally released — is the closed model the future of personal computing? Migrating the App Store model to the Mac platform isn’t very comforting to those of us who like to be able to install and run any software we like on our computers.

Today the App Store Review Guidelines have been leaked, answering one of my big questions, which is whether Apple is going to exercise control over which Mac applications can be distributed via the store. The answer is yes, they will.

The next question is whether Apple is moving toward the App Store being the only way to distribute Mac applications and the only way to install them. I think the answer that is that Apple is not headed in that direction. Here’s one reason why:

Apps that use deprecated or optionally installed technologies (e.g., Java, Rosetta) will be rejected

Apple is stating flat out that Java applications will not be allowed in the app store. This is important because developers in general, and Java developers in particular, make up a substantial part of the market for Apple computers. Many people migrated to the Mac specifically because it was a nice place to set up a full Web development environment that mirrors what you might use in production — you can install Eclipse (or your favorite Java IDE), Tomcat, MySQL, and Apache and get work done. It doesn’t seem like you’ll be able to install any of those applications in the App Store.

So the question is, will Apple turn its back on developers who use OS X completely? That seems highly unlikely to me.

My sense is that we’re going to see people using App Store apps and traditionally installed apps side by side for a long time. The review requirements make it clear that users will be unable to install the kinds of applications they need for many kinds of work by way of the App Store, so the Mac will need to remain an open platform in order to accommodate those users.

Oddly enough, this gives me some hope for future opening of the iOS platform. The Mac platform is going to be an experiment in running App Store-style managed applications alongside applications that require open access to the operating system to install. If the combination works out very well, it seems like Apple may decide to further open iOS.

I can see a future where a sizable percentage of Mac users only use applications that they installed through the Mac App Store. But I don’t see a future where the Mac App Store becomes the only way to distribute OS X applications. Apple is foreclosing that possibility itself with its review policy.

The hidden costs of Apple’s app store

July 28, 2010 / Rafe / 0 Comments

Derek Powazek talks about the burden that the app store approval process puts on iOS developers:

Apple’s App Store was a constant source of stress in the development process. Every time another story of Apple randomly booting an app from the store came out, the whole team quaked. The idea that we could do all this work and then Apple could deny the app, or even keep it in limbo forever, made us second- or third-guess every design decision. “Will this pixel hurt our chances of getting accepted?”

Consumer Reports on the iPhone antenna issue

July 12, 2010 / Rafe / 0 Comments

Consumer Reports cannot recommend the iPhone 4 due to the antenna issue:

It’s official. Consumer Reports’ engineers have just completed testing the iPhone 4, and have confirmed that there is a problem with its reception. When your finger or hand touches a spot on the phone’s lower left side—an easy thing, especially for lefties—the signal can significantly degrade enough to cause you to lose your connection altogether if you’re in an area with a weak signal. Due to this problem, we can’t recommend the iPhone 4.

We reached this conclusion after testing all three of our iPhone 4s (purchased at three separate retailers in the New York area) in the controlled environment of CU’s radio frequency (RF) isolation chamber. In this room, which is impervious to outside radio signals, our test engineers connected the phones to our base-station emulator, a device that simulates carrier cell towers (see video: IPhone 4 Design Defect Confirmed). We also tested several other AT&T phones the same way, including the iPhone 3G S and the Palm Pre. None of those phones had the signal-loss problems of the iPhone 4.

Aside from that, it’s their highest scoring app phone. Apple’s claim that the problem is the signal strength indicator isn’t going to cut it.

How Android is like Windows

June 3, 2010 / Rafe / 8 Comments

I’ve been saying for some time that in the smart phone market, Google is Microsoft and Apple is, well, Apple. Apple was never going to be the dominant player in this market in terms of market share, simply because they only have one or two phone models at any given time, are only on one carrier in the US, and won’t license the operating system to any other handset makers. They want to sell enough high margin products that people love to be extremely profitable, and are very successful with that strategy.

Google, on the other hand, gives Android away to anyone who wants to put it on their handset, and have been rewarded with rapid growth. But I don’t think that Android’s user experience will ever match the iPhone’s. For one thing, because Android is used on so many different kinds of hardware, it will be difficult to achieve the level of integration that Apple has with the iPhone. And for another, the carriers and handset makers are guaranteed to make the Android worse, just as the PC makers have consistently made Windows worse over the years.

This is from Eric Burke’s review of the HTC EVO:

Android makes vendor customizations possible and this phone demonstrates just how poorly that can be done.

He has a list of examples. That’s just not something you have to settle for when the iPhone is out there.

Google and Apple, let’s do this

May 20, 2010 / Rafe / 3 Comments

I’ve been following Google’s announcements from Google I/O with interest. Google announced version 2.2 of Android and a new set-top box, GoogleTV. The main takeaway from today’s events is that the competition between Apple and Google is heating up.

I think all of this is fantastic. Google and Apple both build great stuff, espouse completely different philosophies, and are scary in different ways. And they’re going to be fighting tooth and nail in a number of still unclaimed markets for every dollar of profit that’s available. There is no underdog here. Both operate from positions of strength and both have huge war chests they can bring to bear. Apple has $41.7 billion in cash. Google has $26.5 billion in cash. Microsoft wants to be a player in these markets as well, and they have $39.7 billion as well. So they have plenty of money to hire developers, build data centers, and buy up companies that look interesting. Nobody has market leverage of the kind Microsoft did in the desktop computing market during the browser wars of the nineties.

So right now we’re looking at a contest where the main weapons are quality of experience and openness. It’s going to be fun, and the competition is going to be incredibly beneficial to users.

Apple goes beyond what’s necessary

April 20, 2010 / Rafe / 0 Comments

Marco Arment discusses the rumored 960×640 display in the forthcoming iPhone, and argues that the tradeoffs involved with including the display probably aren’t worth it. Here’s his conclusion:

I’m sure I’ll fall in love with the high-density iPhone display as soon as I see it. But on paper, I’m still unconvinced that it’s necessary.

If I had to pick one aspect of Apple’s strategy that has led to its great success over the past decade, it has been the company’s unwillingness to stop at what is necessary. It’s why I still love Apple’s products, even though the company irritates me a lot of the time.

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