Long story short, I’m leaving Opera Software ASA. I’ll be an employee for a while longer but with 10.51 out the door, you won’t see me around the office that much.
Now is the time to click play at the top of this post1.
I truly enjoyed my time in Opera. The people are beyond cool, I was always surrounded by geeks with an extraordinary drive to make the best product possible. Exactly type of place I like working in.
In addition, I had the opportunity to live in Norway, an amazing country filled with reserved-yet-welcoming people. If you’re ever around, wait until the second beer, that’s when Norwegians true personality appears.
I could go on and on about the great friends I’ve made and all the rest, but The Pogues said it best:
I’m sad to say I must be on my way/So buy me beer and whiskey ’cause I’m going far away/I’d like to think of me returning when I can/To the greatest little boozer and to Sally MacLennane.
Regarding what’s next, nothing official yet. There are crazy plans, and sensible ones. Some are close, yet most are far away.
Whatever the case, I’m excited. It’s a great time to be a geek, and there is no excuse for not doing something great.
The Pogues - Sally Maclennane. Official soundtrack of this post. ↩
At its core, play, and by extension video games, is learning. Call it discovery or mastery but a good game introduces new ideas (teaches), leverages existing ones (reviews) and layers them to create unique challenges (tests).
The concept and images look great, but it goes beyond that:
In addition to creating the scenario, programming and designing all the graphics I’m also composing and producing all the music.
If you don’t think coding is art, you at least need to accept that game-development is.
Over the past few months developer frustration over the App Store has increased considerably. Not because things are getting worse, but because they aren’t changing, at all. The main the problem seems to be lack of clear rules with regards to why, what, how and when iPhone applications get published in the store.
Update: (01/08/09): The FCC sent letters to Apple, AT&T and Google inquiring about Apple’s rejection of the Google Voice app. This is going get interesting.
My big concern is that the App Store is such a money-maker, that most developers will just look the other way. The whole situation gives me the feeling of businessmen during right-wing dictatorships1: It’s business as usual (99¢ fart apps) as long as you stay out of the way of the dictator (Apple). Problem is your most creative and important developers don’t tolerate this environment. The see themselves as: The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently.2
Don’t doubt for a second that these developers would put ideology over numbers and stop developing for the iPhone. That’s exactly the reason why many of them moved to the Mac from Windows in the first place.
Here’s a sampling of some of the developer comments and situations going around today:
There’s been no indication that Apple want to do anything to resolve the problems with app store policies that have been laid bare a hundred times over. There’s no indication of anything, as a matter of fact. Nothing. After a year. It’s a black hole yawning back at us.
With iPhone, Apple decides which independent applications will be allowed, and it can pull the plug on any application at any time, without explanation—as happened in July to several developers of iPhone apps. “I spent four weeks trying to get through to Apple via e-mail and phone calls, and they wouldn’t return my messages,” says Cyrus Najmabadi, developer of an iPhone application called Now Playing, an online movie-theater guide that Apple yanked in July after receiving a complaint about the program.
As with many other serious iPhone developers recently, we’ve made the hard decision to kill all but one project in progress, and stop investing any resources in creating new applications. We’ll continue to sell and fully support our existing iPhone offerings, however we’re already moving to platforms which show signs of real viability.
More important than the money is my enjoyment as a developer. I no longer enjoy building software for the iPhone because of the bureaucracy and infrastructure that surrounds it. I can build great software for the Mac without the headaches and bullshit of dealing directly with Cupertino and their AppStore.
It’s about killer apps. Not just number of apps.
The effect of developers moving to other platforms takes a long time to register. But it does happens very fast once it starts. I love my iPhone, but if Instapaper, Tweetie, 1Password and Comiczeal were to move to Android, that would be reason enough for me to switch.
Apple should know better than anybody that it’s not about how many apps you have available in your platform, it’s about how great they are. I’m pretty sure they understand this, and soon we will have another Steve Letter addressing the problems with AppStore and the planned improvements.
