It’s less about my current employment than it is about my line of work in general. We IT folks have created a hell of complexity, procedures and protocols for ourselves, and nobody who’s honest will tell you – or believe you when you say it – that this is still “interesting, challenging, fascinating, cool, great or even remotely awesome”. Most of it simply is robotic work.

My current bosses both have a technical background and I’m pretty sure there is a reason why the started their own company and why both of them no longer do technical work themselves. IT provides the food on our tables, but I don’t think that we need to fool ourselves about it.

The most fascinating thing about my current job probably is that I get to communicate with a couple of objects that are 36,000 kilometers away from me. It certainly has a Sci-Fi movie aspect that’s cool, I give you that. But that doesn’t help me a lot when Microsoft’s latest operating system abomination fires unintelligible error messages or when a Linux-based Firewall behaves weird or in an undocumented manner. When I was 13 years old, stuff like that looked like magic. Now, at 40, it just looks like somebody once again didn’t do his job properly and steals my lifetime.

Now about the economy… You know what? The economy is shitty since I’ve joined the workforce. The economy ALWAYS was THE excuse to not give me a proper salary. It just doesn’t scare me anymore. The economy has always sucked and it won’t ever improve — at least not for us John Does of the system. Because, as you know very well, while they are telling us that the economy makes it impossible to pay proper wages, they always manage to increase their own profits.

I’m employed and I’m good at my job. So really, I’m not frightened. There’s no reason why I should post bullshit on my own website.

About hobbies without a computer… I’ve got two of them, each on four paws: Gustav and Ryka. And walking with a 43.5kg dog every day is a good substitute for a spa, believe me.

But it’s difficult to find other hobbies nowadays that don’t involve computers. Heck, the last book that I’ve read – “Pirate Latitudes” by Michael Crichton, which was very enjoyable and a bit like Pirates of the Caribbean without all the special effects – was an Amazon Kindle edition and I actually read it on my iPhone. I’m really thinking about either buying an iPad or the new Kindle to move my entire library into the digital realm. I love the feel of real books, but I HATE moving them. The Kindle concept really solves a lot of those problems, and the shopping experience is also great. You choose a book, click the purchase button and a couple of seconds later the book is there. I really love it!

By the way, it’s not only my bosses who understand the importance of beer in the frig when needed. Just like the regular BBQ, it’s an essential part of our ‘corporate culture’.

And I think as long as there are beers and steaks in the fridge, not everything is lost!

Please see my Dilbert email that will arrive in a bit.

Dude, you are not alone. Every job gets boring by no later than 7 years. Might I kindly suggest that in this economy – you DO NOT put in writing on the Internet any negative comments about your employment. Because unemployment is far worse – a total nightmare!

Aside from that I think you need a vacation without any computers with you and might I kindly suggest a new hobby that does not involve computers. Honest. Leave work at work. It is like being a chef but going home to cook all the time. You will burnout in no time flat.

Personally, I have gotten to the point where I can’t stand a computer once I leave work and I am not even an IT guy. Sitting in front of a TV all day sucks. Please see my email.

Go to one of those great German spas and celebrate life in the German countryside. Be glad you don’t commute an hour each way each day and don’t work somewhere where the managers act like high school kids in their dealings with employees. At least your boss understands the importance of beer in the frig when needed.

Well, dictating what tools a developer has to use to do his job does not guarantee good software and certainly does not prevent bad software either. If Apple were serious about software quality, I think more than 200,000 apps would “magically” disappear from the AppStore over night. Most of the stuff there is buggy crap, and we all know it (where we equals iPod Touch, iPad and iPhone users). If Apple were serious about quality, they would do some quality monitoring during their approval process – so far they’ve mostly been concentrating on censoring naked flesh and stuff that could be politically incorrect from their little Disney world.

> So we’re basically talking about 150 of 200′000 apps in the App Store.

It’s not just about the fistful of Flash apps. If you follow the discussions on the Mono and Unity forums and blogs, you know that they are also affected by this EULA change – and many games on the AppStore have actually been written with Unity’s iPhone edition.

Actually, it’s not even about the programming languages at all. It’s about control and about Apple keeping unwanted competition out. When Microsoft did such things, they were deemed illegal. Now with Apple doing the same stuff it’s all of a sudden okay? Why? Because there is Android?

Yes, I know that everybody believes that Microsoft once had a monopoly. But no, nobody was ever forced to buy a Microsoft product. You always could have bought a Mac. Or a computer from Sun Microsystems. Or a PC with Unix on it. So there have always been viable alternatives to Microsoft products. Except for the sheer volume, I don’t see much of a difference.

It’s just strange that everybody is talking about an illegal Microsoft monopoly, but that for most of the same people it’s okay when Apple lets nobody else play on their turf.

Apple is using the very same business practices nowadays that Microsoft has been using in its powerful days. I really don’t see a difference here, and Apple should receive the same penalties for that that Microsoft received.

> JavaScript is directly mentioned in the Agreement as being allowed. At least read the damn thing before copy-pasting it into your blog!

Thank you for the advice, but maybe you should have done the same thing yourself:

“Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine.”

JavaScript is ONLY mentioned in the context of WebKit — and that’s their web browser engine. You are NOT allowed to use ANY scripting whatsoever in an application, and that includes games (which usually rely heavily on scripting). End of story.

> I doubt that it’s any better on the C# side.

Well, Mono C# can be compiled to full native code, and that is what MonoTouch actually does. MonoTouch also uses the NATIVE Cocoa Touch UI elements. So technically, this is what Apple have been blabbering about when they were talking about quality. However, since Apple clearly dictates the use of the programming language, you simply cannot use C# for an app that you want to sell via the AppStore. That is if Apple really sticks to this ridiculous license restriction, which I somehow doubt they will.

> I won’t get much into the other parts of your post, Apple dumping the Mac, yeah, that makes a whole lot of sense. They surely would invest that much time, just to run Xcode. I thing they would just release the iPhone SDK for Windows, if the didn’t want to support the Mac any more.

No, they would never port Xcode to Windows, because they would be losing control over their environment. However, the Mac is becoming obsolete, as much as the Apple II and the LISA became obsolete when the first Mac was released. Apple is now in the business of selling mobile gadgets and digital content (through iTunes). Computers are de facto just an afterthought, and we you look at how slow Apple is at releasing new computers, especially in their “Pro” desktop class, it is rather obvious that they are NOT putting much effort anymore into their computer products. Also, there is an old quote from Steve Jobs from the time when he was not at Apple:

“If I were running Apple, I would milk the Macintosh for all it’s worth — and get busy on the next great thing. The PC wars are over. Done. Microsoft won a long time ago.”
– Fortune, Feb. 19, 1996

He is doing EXACTLY that now.

But maybe the Mac won’t simply disappear. It’ll probably transform into an iOS-based device and my guess is that Xcode will only be available for paying developers. Just give the iPad a few more iterations and we will see what’s happening.

Apple was never about an open computing experience. Everything they do is about restrictions. They do not empower their users, they cut options and say that it’s about the end user experience. Maybe it is. From a user perspective, I prefer my iMac and my iPhone over all competing products. But when I look at it from a wider angle, Apple have become the Big Brother from their very own “1984″ ad.

We will sooner or later see how this turns out. And should Steve Jobs retire one of those days, all the bets are off anyway. Maybe for the better (e.g. OS X for standard PCs), maybe for the worse.

At the moment, all I can say is that I like using some of Apple’s products, but that their corporate policies totally suck because they remind me of a totalitarian country.

You’re not making much sense here. I myself can’t fully understand why Apple introduced this restriction, but maybe they just hate bad software, let me explain.

First of all, even Adobe themselves admit [0] that there are only 150 apps build with Adobe AIR. Then, MonoTouch announced iOS 4 support and reports that Apps using MonoTouch are still being approved by Apple [1]. Unity is using it’s scripting components only for scripting purposes, i.e. the Scripts do not link against the iPhone frameworks, so it doesn’t even fall into the category mentioned by the iPhone Developer Agreement.

So we’re basically talking about 150 of 200′000 apps in the App Store.

Then, when you’re talking about the language support of competing platforms, you’re giving C# and JavaScript as examples. I can’t talk about C# as I’ve never written a single line of code in C#. I’ve been told, that from a language stand point, It’s comparable to Java. More on that later. JavaScript is directly mentioned in the Agreement as being allowed. At least read the damn thing before copy-pasting it into your blog!

The Android platform isn’t as portable as you might thing. Only the Java language is supported but none of Java’s SDKs. Not even Java ME. So your Java application either runs on Android _or_ on Sun’s JVM.

What I _do_ know about both Java and C# is, that none have compilers that compile to native code. (Except gjc, but based on the performance of the code it generates, I can’t take that for more than an interesting experiment.) So interoperability with existing C libraries is hard, If you’ve ever worked with JNI, you know what I mean. I doubt that it’s any better on the C# side.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to sound supportive for low-level languages like C, but If you’re working in a performance-critical environment like a battery-powered underpowered mobile phone, chances are your working with C.

Objective-C builds on top of C, so a fair understanding of C is required, but in my opinion, any developer benefits form knowing more than one single category of programming languages. But I think you have to be more specific in what you think makes C# or JavaScript more modern or easier to learn than Objective-C.

Of all the Applications I’ve tested that ran either inside Adobe AIR on my iPod or inside the JVM on Android, none of them came near a well written Objective-C UIKit application in terms of responsivenes and performance. Let alone the fact that many of the hardware and software features Apple introduces on it’s devies can’t be used from inside these scripting environments because of the impossibility of including native code in e.g. an Adobe AIR application [2]. Maybe apple doesn’t like if developrs limit themselves, and with that, their device, to the capabilities to the weakest platform supported by such a framework. Anyway.

I won’t get much into the other parts of your post, Apple dumping the Mac, yeah, that makes a whole lot of sense. They surely would invest that much time, just to run Xcode. I thing they would just release the iPhone SDK for Windows, if the didn’t want to support the Mac any more.

[0]: http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Applications_for_iPhone:Developer_FAQ
[1]: http://www.mono-project.com/newstouch/archive/2010/Apr-19.html
[2]: comment by ‘raganwald’ on http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1250946

Michael

PS: If you’re going to write a reply to my comment, I’d be interested in reading it. You’ll probably have to send me a link per mail, as I’ll probably miss it otherwise.

So far I haven’t been able to get snow leopard (10.6) to work on any machine, including my XPS m1530. I always get the gray screens of death when attempting the installer, regardless of different bootloaders I have available. I hope this is the trick. Thanks so much!

It’s an awesome machine. From the feel, I’d say it is at least as powerful as my Quad Core Mac Pro was/is. But this machine is quiet! Those Quad Core iMacs are masterpieces of engineering, and they’re pushing today’s technology to the limit of what’s currently doable.
One not so nice evidence for this are the rather high failure rates of those boxes – the Internet was full of problem reports of those high end iMacs, from Airport issues to screen errors.
I’m also affected, actually: According to OS X and the Mac’s diagnostic software, my computer does not have an Airport card built in. Although, as we all know, all Intel iMacs come with one. So I’ll have to contact Apple support for this one, too.
Other than that, this machine truly is amazing and beautiful. I know that you’ll love it.

Al the best,
El Winni