Apple Outsider

Industry News, Exploits and Hacks from a former Apple Insider

Software

Analytics and Unannounced Products

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Video excerpts of last night’s D8 interview with Steve Jobs have been trickling out at a steady pace. (An unofficial transcript from John Paczkowski is here.) A number of the excerpts are worth watching, including this exchange on how the latest SDK terms and conditions affect analytics packages.  In the video, Jobs expresses his displeasure with analytics packages that transmit usage information without the user’s permission—especially when the transmitted information identifies unreleased Apple products and prototypes.

The conversation immediately reminded me of this cheesy sales pitch last summer from Pinch Media boasting about discovery of a not-yet-released iPod touch through their analytics reporting. This sort of thing never goes over very well in Cupertino. Tonight’s interview seems to confirm that the new restrictions on analytics are as much about Apple’s privacy as ours.

Ironically (or not), Pinch last December merged with Flurry, the company that Jobs explicitly names in the D8 interview.

I agree with the audience member who asked the question: analytics are invaluable to developers who care about the user experience of their applications. They can find out how often a given feature is used (or cancelled, or given up on) and use that information to improve the area in question. They can de-emphasize features that are less popular, and make the more popular tasks easier to get to. It’s a wealth of information that traditional surveys or feedback mechanisms will never match. The challenge, as Jobs notes, is ensuring these packages don’t cross the line of transmitting sensitive information about the user or their device. It shouldn’t be too difficult to find that common ground.

Features Don’t Matter Anymore

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Wonderful piece on “the Age of User Experience” by Andreas Pfeiffer. Even more wonderful that it’s from January 2006. So much has changed since then, and yet these words ring just as true.

I’ve firmly believed that over the last six years or so, the average consumer has begun to appreciate user experience far more than in the past. They may not care about color palettes or gradients or animations, but they are increasingly recognizing and rejecting poor usability. Price, of course, remains an equalizer: if an otherwise poor product is cheap enough, many consumers are still willing to endure it.

If you work in software, you owe it to yourself to read this. Better yet, print it out and hang it above your workstation. (Evan Doll)

Cocoa, Flash, and Safari

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A great deal has already been said about Section 3.3.1 of the latest iPhone SDK Terms and Conditions, and the apparent standoff between Apple and Adobe over the Flash platform. Adobe has launched an aggressive PR campaign last week in support of their position. Both companies continue to argue over who is more “open.”

Michel Fortin recently proposed open sourcing any tools or runtimes on the unfavorable side of 3.3.1, as a means of reducing the “threat” of external control. John Gruber correctly points out that corporate ownership is irrelevant to the issue. In many ways, open sourcing these intermediary libraries would be worse: with Flash, Apple at least knows who to call when the roof collapses.

A much more interesting question is: why does Apple continue to promote HTML5? Doesn’t an open standard with a glacial committee process produce the same problems? Won’t web apps take Apple’s control away?

First, it’s important to restate what’s been said in a few places: this whole saga is much more about Apple’s ability to control its own destiny than it is about revenge, cynicism, or pride. Apple nearly died in the 1990s. It was so far gone that it took money from Microsoft and had to pray that second-class ports of Internet Explorer would keep the Mac relevant in an increasingly online world.

Apple is not going to let anything like that happen again. The iPad launch clearly demonstrated that iPhone OS is the future of the business. The software that runs on it is a huge piece of that future, and right now that software is powered by Cocoa Touch. If the Cocoa Touch app empire crumbles before a next-generation replacement is ready, the next best thing is an open standard. The alternative is that someone else’s proprietary technology wins—either on Apple’s platform, or worse, on another hardware platform entirely. An open web is a safe, neutral fallback.

Yes, HTML5 is an open standard. Yes, the W3C process can be frustrating. But Apple is a W3C member, and more importantly, it has a product in Safari / WebKit that not only tracks the standard, but drives it. WebKit has been a leader in modern web technology adoption for years. Apple happily gives its improvements back to the public WebKit branch, because leading is the next best thing after owning.

The problem, of course, is that the web is only a standard on paper. Thanks to quirks and implementation details, every web browser is a platform of its own. This introduces the same exposure as any other external runtime. Apple, then, is doing everything it can to limit the list of Cocoa Touch replacements to:

  1. A newer native Apple framework
  2. Safari

That’s right: Safari. Not HTML5. Not even WebKit. Safari. The latest 3.3.1 fallout has provided additional insight to the third party browser issue: if the web does supplant the dominance of native apps, and the most popular browser on iPhone OS comes from a third party, then Apple has completely lost its independence once again.

Apple spent nearly a decade trying to unshackle the Mac from Internet Explorer. It will not hand over iPhone OS so easily.