To be honest I’ve seen this tactic before where vendors lock you into a given platform. And realistically Apple is already there in a sense. They limit your ability to distribute iOS applications and limit what you can include in their store. Anyone expecting Apple to behave any differently in this particular situation is delusional.

Fundamentally you need to think about what iBooks Author really is providing: it’s a typesetting tool. It’s not targeted towards print like InDesign or Quark, it’s a tool designed to highlight the capabilities of the iPad platform. But essentially it is a typesetting tool in a world where you’re not limited to static content but can build interactive content. And at the moment no other tool really exists to provide this functionality because the platform really hasn’t existed yet. But that doesn’t mean someone can’t make a tool that does do all of this just like when the iPhone was first released the smart phone market didn’t quite have what the iPhone offered. There were products that had portions of the system: many platforms had installable apps, many platforms had web browsers, a few platforms had large screens for input and many had phone and data capabilities. None of them quite had everything that the iPhone offered which is what made it successful.

Now what is being missed here is that effectively the results of what you typeset in iBooks Author is limited in where you can sell it. What Apple suggest is that you can develop your content in another tool such as either Pages or Word and then finalise your typesetting in iBooks Author. You can obviously produce your content entirely within iBooks Author but you don’t necessarily have to do this.

However at the end of the day it is this strange sense of entitlement, this sense of how dare Apple seek to limit what you could potentially do with a bit of software they have given away for free. This reminds me of people lamenting that you couldn’t write iOS apps on Windows and that Apple should port it.

At the end of the day it is their ecosystem, if you don’t like it then leave. Certainly this isn’t the first time Apple have taken draconian steps to limit freedom and it likely won’t be the last. It also reminds us that we need to read these agreements we agree to on the sides of the Apple Mac App Store. All of the Apple developed apps I’ve seen on their store have all had an accompanying “App License Agreement” so I wasn’t surprised to see this one.

Audacity in putting the terms there perhaps, however it is hardly unprecedented. Perhaps the audacity is the expectation that a for-profit company known for their tendency for draconian restrictions on their software and platforms would behave any differently when creating a new free tool to create content aimed towards their platform. What is really more surprising that they didn’t create an entirely new proprietary format…they just added some stuff to an existing one (not quite as evil but certainly up there).

In my many searches for a Mac OS X Lion compatible driver, I managed to find the following from mobile provider “3″ in UK. The link, http://ask3.three.co.uk/mbbdocs/drivers/apple_drivers.html, contains a link to “dongle drivers” for “Huawei dongles” that work for Mac OS X Lion (10.7). Sounds like a winner!

So I download the zip file and it extracts out to leave me with a “3Connect Installer”. Not quite what I want however all is not lost. You see applications on Mac OS X are actually folders in disguise commonly referred to as either “bundles” or “packages”. So right click on the “3Connect Installer” and select “Show Package Contents”. This opens up a view with only “Contents” listed, foiled? Don’t worry, double click into that directory and then into the “Resources” directory. Here we find a “mobilemanager.mpkg” file. Now “mpkg” is a package which means it has more goodies in it.

So we right click on this and select “Show Package Contents” again. We’ve got our “Contents” folder and inside that we want to go to the “Packages” folder. In there two packages exist: “mobile_manager_application.pkg” and “huawei_universal_425_05.pkg”. Now if you’re like me, everything is setup already – you just need the driver. So I skipped the mobile manager application and just double clicked on the “huawei_universal_425_05.pkg” file and installed it.

After installing the Huawei Universal package, the next time I plugged in my Huawei E160 into my Mac it was detected and worked perfectly fine.

So if you’ve just upgraded to Lion and are trying to work out how to get your Huawei modem working properly with it, those instructions worked for me and I’m using it to write this post.

Everyone pans Apple for this as their option. There is very little blog posts that appear to defend and support Apple in their stance of not having a native SDK and only providing a web “SDK”. Almost every bit of out spoken opinion out there seemed to point negativity towards the direction that Apple had taken. To be fair the initial release of the iPhone and it’s integration is primitive compared to what we have today with items like launcher integration being unavailable initially. However if you spend some time to review what Steve Jobs actually says it becomes more interesting. He states “we have been trying to come up with a solution to expand the capabilities of iPhone by letting developers write great apps for it and yet keep the iPhone reliable and secure”. It is this phrase that informs the future direction of the app store.

In 2008 Apple releases at first a beta in March with the announcement of the App Store with the first hint of “approval” for application. At WWDC2008 later in the year it’s finally released and the App Store is scheduled for it’s release in September of that year. In line with what Steve has said back in 2007, the App Store approval process and some rather strict guidelines for what they will accept. While some of the guidelines are arbitrary and awkward, they do appear to have successfully managed to limit the amount of malware and devious applications that have managed to make their way onto end user devices unlike Google’s Android Marketplace. Amazon with their App Store for Android have similar approval guidelines as well which seems to support Apple’s approach in part.

Since then Apple have increased their restrictions and adding requirements such as requiring in app purchases to at least be available via Apple’s own mechanism. Depending on what happens with the Lodsys case, it may turn out to be a case where you either use the supplied API or you have to deal with the patent issues.

However it appears that the Financial Times aren’t interested in trying to fight Apple at their App Store limitations and have gone back to 2007 and have developed a web app. It utilises local storage to make things faster on the device and it features a lot polish.

But for all of the noise generated about how evil Apple is, the Financial Times are the first group I have seen to actually put their money where their mouth is and released a HTML5 application that looms really good as the number of devices with Android on them explode, I am surprised that more people aren’t realising that web apps are the future of mobile development unless you war to loco yourself inside of apples iCloud. Web based applications also have the ability to target Android without requiring a rewrite and also any other platform that ships a decent web browser (e.g. WebOS or perhaps Windows Phone 7).

With over 300 different smart phone devices out there with a wide range of functionality, display sizes and resolutions. With native applications needing to target iOS, Android, WebOS, Playbook and Windows Phone 7 each with different code that is a significant development burden. With Windows 8 looking like it will implement HTML powered web apps then increasingly it is looming like HTML is not a bad place to put some skill development or professional development.

Perhaps it is back to Apple’s original much derided original direction – even if it was because their native SDK wasn’t available at the launch time of the first iPhone. It was even announced today that iOS5 will bring Nitro JavaScript, one of the speed ups to make web pages in Safari load faster, to the “homepage” apps of which the new Financial Times web app is now one. This means that with iOS5, the Financial Times will run even faster again.

But it begs the question, why would Apple make a mechanism that competes directly with their App Store run even faster?

So Apple lately have been doing a lot nifty stuff. They’ve released the iPad, their tablet PC. In the announcement the other day they said they’d sold 450,000 of the devices. To be honest that is impressive. That is a lot of tablet PC’s sold, probably a significant portion of the market now are Apple after a week. They also announced iPhone OS 4.0 which has some curious things.

The first change with it isn’t technical but legal. They’ve changed the Terms of Service section 3.3.1 from:

3.3.1 — Applications may only use Documented APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any private APIs.

To:

3.3.1 — Applications may only use Documented APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any private APIs. Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine, and only code written in C, C++, and Objective-C may compile and directly link against the Documented APIs (e.g., Applications that link to Documented APIs through an intermediary translation or compatibility layer or tool are prohibited).

So basically if you’re not writing Objective-C, C, C++ or JS (HTML5/CSS/etc) then you’re not welcome. Bye bye CS5′s funky Flash Export to iPhone App feature. I’m not going to comment on this in general however Apple have consistently said those four languages are it. Using or developing tools to get around it was seriously tempting fate given all of the announcements Apple made. I’m not surprised, I’m not sure if it is a good or a bad thing (Flash shares a special loathing in my heart) but given Adobe have lately made their Flash player on Mac a piece of crap and not improvement (don’t get me started on Linux support), I can see where Apple have come from. Some argue that there way it handles it’s fast switching blah blah won’t work with quasi emulated apps because it doesn’t know data structures blah sounds to me like crap. The observation that Adobe’s write once run anywhere CS5 deployment could mean that Apple’s extra features aren’t supported until Adobe deem it to be included is a problem. That would mean any cool features would be unavailable to a portion of the developer community potentially never. It would potentially give Adobe control over the platform in a way Apple may not like. At the end of the day Apple is a public company and what makes them a profit is why they are there, so this is where their decision takes them. And whilst many claim Apple owe Adobe for their heritage, it is clear that recently Adobe haven’t been supplying a good experience for Mac users of their software anyway. Titanium keeps being included in the list of tools that might be excluded but I’m not entirely sure, it is certainly a border case.

The other interesting feature they added is multitasking. But nowhere do I see that people are understanding that it isn’t multitasking, it is just services. Apple aren’t giving people the ability to run what they want in the background, they’re offering services that will handle what they need for them. Other comments like the platform can’t support true multitasking and Apple’s design is flawed have come up in a few places which miss the point of the services. Apple doesn’t want your trashy code chewing memory and CPU, potentially going rogue and killing the users battery like it can on other platforms. That is unfriendly. The iPhone OS runs a system more than capable of multitasking it is just Apple prohibiting access to do so. The services they’ve got seem to meet the criteria and also permit reasonable flexibility. Will it be enough? Perhaps, but it is a start. They’ve got seven services: background audio (Pandora), VoIP (Sykep), background location (anything that watches your location), push notifications (yawn), local notifications (think alarm clock), task completion (the closest to true multitasking, example is a photo upload takes a while) and fast app switching (my old Palm worked like this in some respects). I think these will work well and solve a number of needs on the device and bring it up.

The other features announced included folders (better categorisation really) which reminds me in part of how stacks works as well. The next was improvements to mail for a unified inbox. Apple Mail on the desktop has this and I’m not a fan of it (I use the per mailbox inbox). Other Mail enhancements included threading and opening attachments in other apps. The last useful feature is the multiple Exchange account functionality, this will mean I can use Google’s Sync toy with my work’s Exchange account whilst still retaining some other identities I have. I have things sort of working but it could be better. Their book app is also coming to the iPhone which is more than predictable.

From the enterprise front they’ve beefed up support. Some of it already sounded familiar but the wireless app distribution is going to be useful for work (the current method involves connecting it to a desktop and loading the apps manually or App Store, this is a third option). Game Center seems interesting and a bit late to the game but better late than never as they say. They’ve also got an advertising framework built in. Not sure how this is going to play out but we will see. Hopefully they won’t nuke the third party advertising frameworks but I don’t see them as making that mistake, a regulator would surely snap them for that. Including it in the framework will probably mean the demise of most alternatives and they’re doing it in a way that can be relative unobtrusive compared to how it is handled now. Time will tell.

All in all there are some things that people don’t like (TOS Change) but I can see the Apple progressing slowly and improving. They’ve got a head start over every other platform and it appears that only Google have been able to come close to match them. Microsoft have pulled out all stops with Windows Phone 7 to create something that looks cool but they’ve almost left it too late, those burnt by Windows Mobile are perhaps wary of the next operating system. The Apple ad with the PC going “Trust me” over the ages rings true. My iPhone will miss out on a lot of the cooler stuff with services because of it’s age which is annoying but life. How application developers will handle this will also be interesting.

Of course now the iPad is out, maybe they will update a whole heap of other things.

But if you look at an old Gizmodo article you’ll see that Apple have been cheeky for a long time now, even suggesting two years before Vista’s release date that Tiger was it. Funnily enough by the time that Microsoft got around to releasing Vista for retail in early 2007, Apple had already released Tiger in April 2005 and was on its way to Leopard already releasing a beta of it at WWDC2006 and a feature complete edition for WWDC2007, releasing later in 2007. Apple haven’t stopped there and are already releasing betas of Snow Leopard at WWDC2008 with new and interesting features, some of which copied themselves and some interesting approaches at doing things as well as interoperability features including primitive Exchange support.

And now we’re seeing Microsoft push forward their plans for “Windows 7″ which from all accounts appears to internally think that its Windows 6.1 (you can Google for comments on the general confusion on which Microsoft appears to determine that this is version “7″ of their product as well as people doing the maths and not finding ’7′ as the number). With any luck we’ll see Snow Leopard and Windows 7 come out at around the same time and we can do a comparison between the two without much difficulty.