Programming for Apple is fun. The tools are great and it is really satisfying to see how an application slowly takes shape and is finally finished. There is only one thing that is a bit disturbing. It’s not so much programming with Apple tools, but rather programming for Apple. Why? Because of the way that Apple defines their terms of use in their iPhone development agreement. The Electronic Frontier Foundationpublished the license agreement today and revealed how Apple is treating their developers who are just programming applications. What is most striking is that Apple forbids developers to make public statements about the license agreement. In other words: you sign a contract, and you are not allowed to talk about it. It somewhat resembles the deal with the devil from Goethe’s Faust. Similar to Faust - who gives away his soul to get his wishes fulfilled - developers give away their independence in favor of the realization of their wishes. Different from Faust, though, who is conscious of what he is doing when he says:
Werd’ ich zum Augenblicke sagen:
Verweile doch! du bist so schön!
Dann magst du mich in Fesseln schlagen,
Dann will ich gern zugrunde gehn!
developers usually don’t think about the fine prints in license agreements. Why? Because reading 30 or more pages of such agreements is not really that thrilling - at least for developers. After all, these agreements are written by lawyers and, as we know from the movies, they work for the devil ;-):
So, what lessons can we developers learn from this? Maybe that we should be more careful when signing license agreements; or that we should actively support organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation whose aim is to defend civil rights (and the rights of developers).
It’s time - the winter is over… well sort of. Anyway, it’s time to do some sports. After the tremendous success of last year’s ikangai runs :-), we start the new season on March, 23rd at 8:30 AM in Augarten, Vienna. 5k in 30 Minutes. Share our enthusiasm - we running and you as well :-).
The use of the English language can be very challenging for non-native speakers (which is actually the majority of the English speaking world population). Consequently, their use of both spoken and written English is sometimes really awkward and some sentences can be incomprehensible. In my day job at university, I’ve got lots of opportunities to meet people who are (like me) non-native speakers and with which I communicate in something that vaguely resembles “English”.
As I already documented in a previous blog entry, the works of students can be a rich source of constructs of deformed or mistreated English and they are sometimes quite hard to understand. Here are some anonymous examples:
“Types: They are defined using XML-Schema. The may be used to declare complex data types. If only simple data types like strings or integers are used they are not necessary.”
- Yes, keep it simple! That makes life much easier!
“Message: A message defines messages which are exchanged. There are incoming and outgoing messages.”
- Really? Who would have thought that? What goes in on one end, comes out on the other? Mindblowing …
“Operation: An operation is an action provided by the Web Service. Its an abstract description of this action.”
- Okay… what is it really? Abstract operations of actions? Actions of abstract operations? Or both?
Apple updated the developer center and streamlined the developer subscriptions. The name has changed to member center and there is a single mac developer subscription (79€ per year) that replaces previous membership subscriptions. Developers are required to agree to new terms of use and must complete a lengthy survey.
During the weekend, we’ve finished all major programming activities for our next application which we write for volume.at. After the design was completed by our design team two weeks ago, we started the development of the actual application and step by step implemented all functionality. As usual, we learned a lot during this process and we will put this knowledge to use in the next applications and the following updates of iSENDu.
So, what does the application do? It connects to the volume.at web server and informs you about new and noteworthy events, parties or festivals. It provides several options to filter the events, which can be freely combined so that you can find your favorite events within seconds.
And the best thing is: it’s for free!
Your ikangai team
PS: The application is not yet available in the iTunes Application Store. We’ll keep you posted!
Having finally started to understand people from academia ourselves, we have now decided that it is time for ordinary people to do the same :-). We are currently in the process of writing an iPhone app for the so-called S-Cube Knowledge Model, which is a collection of definitions in the area of Web Services and Web Service related Technologies. There are - of course - some challenges for the representation of content on a small device like an iPhone, but we are very optimistic that we will master these and be able to provide a useful application with some interesting ideas concerning the user interface.
In recent years, we have witnessed what can be called a “copy and paste attitude”. What is partially to blame is obviously human laziness - or the minimax principle, if you will: to get the most with minimal effort. A prominent and currently much discussed example is the book of a german teenager who copied considerable parts of the book from an internet blogger - without citing the source. When confronted with this allegation, she stated that basically that there is no originality, but authenticity.
However, she later apologized for the copying but maintained her initial claim of originality.
Maybe this is just a precursor of more things to come. With the arrival of the internet of user generated content, we can expect to experience more cases like this in the future. As noted by Lawrence Lessig in his book, we need a culture that respects sources; if a person tries to make money from works of other people by remixing them, it should be a matter of course that the original sources also get their fair share. The same goes for software: copying and pasting source code from various Web pages without crediting the source of the work is common. The problem is to find a mechanism to share the revenue on a large scale. The Xanadu project from the late sixties tried to build something like this: a system consisting of hyperlinked documents where each linked part was available only once. There would have been no copies and it would have been possible to track every portion of a hyperlinked document to its originator. In combination with a kind of information franchise, this would have given the content creators a stream of revenue. However, the project ran into a lot of troubles and the developers never created a functional prototype.
On a related note, albeit on a different level, the Liquid Pub Project shares a similar goal: to build highly reusable and composable content for university lectures and publications.
We, from ikangai, also gave this some thought. In a nutshell, we suggest to build information communities where every member shares his or her content. If the content is used in a commercial manner, the revenue is split between the community members and the person making profit. We envision something like 20 per cent for the community and the rest for the person making the profit. However, there are considerable obstacles to overcome. For example, what to do with freeloaders that are just members without sharing anything at all? A potential approach to solve this issue could be the use of a mechanism that only splits among actively contributing community members. Well, these are merely initial thoughts and we will continue to think and blog about this very interesting topic.
One final note on the Axolotl case: it’s a somewhat bitter irony that the girl’s work is now protected by copyright law, so anyone who uses the content of the book in the same manner as the author will be sued by the publisher.
As already posted before, we are beginning a collaboration with the scientific community. Yes! We finally dare to work with the clever people :-).
Of particular interest in this regard is the S-Cube project where a dozen universities from Europe collaborate. It’s a good opportunity for us to learn from academia. One of the project’s goals is to create a kind of a specialized knowledge wiki - dubbed S-Cube Knowledge Model - that explains the terminology that is used in the project. When you want to write a scientific paper with academia people, you need to understand what these people talk about and the S-Cube Knowledge Model is certainly a good point to look for answers. By the way, do you happen to know what Architectural Knowledge is? No? A hint: it has nothing to do with houses, at least in the area of computer science, so you cannot ask your architect :-).
We tried to enter the Apple analyst business by speculating about unannounced products. Like a lot of other analysts, we got things partially right and in contrast to other analysts we are willing to state this explicitly. So, here is our reality check:
iPhone OS 4.0 beta will be introduced
Well, almost. It’s version 3.2 beta. But we got the beta part right, right :-)?
New iPod Touches will be introduced
Nope. Completely wrong :-(.
We won’t see a new version of the iPhone (later this year though)
Yesssss! We totally got this right. Well, actually it’s quite easy to speculate about things not to happen :-).
Yes! We think that a Tablet prototype will be shown (released date June)
Another hit! Well we don’t know the exact release date yet, but we are definitely close :-).
Ok, so we have 0.5 points for claim one (the beta should be worth half a point), zero points for claim 2, one point for claim 3 and 0.75 points for claim 4 (-0.25 points for the release date), which gives us a total of 2.25 points out of 4. Wow! We’d say, we made the cut for analysts :-).
Science is fun. Well sometimes, but most of the time it is just work (1% inspiration, 99% transpiration according to people from academia). We are currently planning our first collaboration with the Distributed Systems Group of Vienna Technical University. The topic of our collaboration is still a bit fuzzy, we are thinking of writing a paper on Visual Semantics to answer the question how one can organize data in a meaningful way to overcome the information overload. Or something completely different ;-).
It will be definitely a challenge and we are going to keep you posted about our progress.
Your ikangai team
[Update]
The S-Cube project already refers to our page on the project’s blog. We already climb the ivory towers of science ;-). [/Update]
