I've been reading lately how Steve Jobs touts the huge number of high quality apps in the AppStore as proof of what a great job they're doing. And, in the next sentence, he mentions how IMPORTANT it is to make sure all the development environments support the very latest API's. This is his excuse for kicking out the likes of Flash and RunRev's own iPhone development environments.
So, I took an extremely quick look in the first couple pages of apps at the AppStore on my iPad and this is what I've found:
For a buck, this app apparently lets you calculate pi to whatever length you would like. I'm hoping the developer isn't counting on retiring any time soon– or even eating out.
And for 2 bucks, you can actually iPing someone on your iWhatever (isn't PING free on Mac and Windows?). I guess you pay extra for the, um, err, fancy interface.
This is better, it's a free clock, but still counts toward the target of 1 billion apps in the AppStore. It does an amazingly clean and clear job of… displaying the current time in any colors you like, as long as they are black letters on a white background.
Keeping with the clock theme, this one shows the time in two places at once– all for 3 bucks. Speaking of time, I suspect it would take all of 3 minutes to create this App using the now disallowed RunRev or Flash development tools. And what a beautiful interface it is!
And then for another $2 you can have your own iPad app which animates a plaid colored fan. I'm not kidding– all these apps found on the first few pages of the AppStore!
And then there's my personal favorite called, "Your cat,what age?" (sic), which as far as I can tell calculates how old your cat is based upon knowing what day it was born. It's a steal at a buck.
While this all seems fun and cute, the fact is any of these and others like them can be created using any tools (including a web browser), so why the big high mighty from Jobs? It's clear there are literally tens of thousands of extremely low quality apps available for sale at the AppStore– all programmed by Apple's own blessed XCode tools. Someday, when Android owns the market for decent apps by professional developers, just maybe Steve Jobs will get a clue.
I couldn’t agree more w/you about this Chipp.
I’m starting to wonder if I’ve been duped all these years thinking Steve Jobs was “one of the good guys.”
Now the Justice Dept. and EU equivalent are climbing all over his ass. I hope they take a bite.
Flash and the iPhone….Flash and the iPod are positively made for each other.