Unter "Deutsche Webdesigner umgehen den App Store" versucht Merlin Scholz mit äußerst fragwürdigen Mitteln und wenig Sachverstand aus nichts eine Sensation zu erschaffen.
Sein Artikel versucht die Leser glauben zu machen, dass zwei deutsche Webdesigner erstmals eine neue Technologie dazu benutzt haben, Apple's App Store zu umgehen um ihre Inhalte direkt an den Leser zu bekommen und damit Apple Sorgen machen würden.
Mit Verlaub, Herr Scholz, aber das ist Bullshit!
Kurzer Faktencheck
1. "…machen Apple Sorgen"
Gleich im Aufmacher wird behauptet, die Studenten machen Apple damit sorgen. Wodurch untermauert dieser Qualitätsjournalist diese Aussage? Damit:
Und natürlich fragt man sich, was der Pressesprecher von Apple gegen Kitesurfen und Sushi hat, dass er „Welt Online“ sagt: „Das kommentieren wir nicht.“
Was genau Herr Scholz den Pressesprecher hierzu gefragt hat, bleibt hier außen vor. Warum auch sollte Apple irgendein HTML-Magazin kommentieren? Ich behaupte mal, da fehlt Georg Albrecht (Pressesprecher Apple Deutschland) einfach die Zeit. Herr Scholz hätte also ebenso gut auch unseren Regierungssprecher fragen können, welcher ebenfalls nicht kommentiert hätte. Das hätte dann immerhin eine umso reißerische Headline hervorgebracht: "Deutsche Webdesigner machen Kanzlerin Sorgen".
2. "…umgehen App Store mit HTML5"
Die weitere Basis des Artikels ist dann die steile Theorie, dass HTML5 ein neuer Weg ist, Applikationen zu vertreiben und dabei Apple's App Store zu umgehen. Das ist faktisch einfach nicht korrekt und entspricht in etwa der Aussage "Deutsche Bauern umgehen den Sport-Einzelhandel mit Vertrieb auf Wochenmärkten".
Der App Store ist eine Plattform um native iOS Applikationen zu vertreiben. Die Plattform übernimmt hier für die Entwickler den kompletten Vertrieb, die Abrechnung und Auszahlung der Einnahmen und berechnet für die Leistungen dann eine Provision.
Das im Artikel angesprochene Magazin ist keine native Applikation, sondern mehr oder weniger nur eine Webseite, die in der Auszeichnungssprache HTML (in der Version 5) geschrieben ist. Es umgeht daher den App Store nicht. Es brauch ihn einfach nicht.
HTML war auf iOS Geräten schon immer frei und ohne jegliche Kontrolle seitens Apple zugänglich. HTML und JavaScript waren sogar ursprünglich der einzige Weg "Programme" für das iPhone zu schreiben. Lange bevor es überhaupt einen nativen SDK oder gar App Store gab. Das ist also alles nicht neu. Ich habe auch starke Zweifel, dass "Aside" die erste Web-App ist, die mit HTML5 in Deutschland entwickelt wurde (ich habe bereits seit Monaten eine eigene Lotto Web App in der Schublade).
Tatsache ist, dass man mit HTML5 und JavaScript heute Anwendungen erstellen kann, die nativen Programmen sehr nahe kommen können. Aside nutzt diese Möglichkeiten allerdings bei Weitem nicht aus, ist auf meinem iPad äußerst langsam und beschränkt sich darauf ein Icon auf dem Homescreen zu installieren. Den Unterschied zu manchen nativen Apps kann man deutlich sehen, wenn man mal das Netzwerk des iPad abschaltet, dann sieht das Aside Magazin nämlich so aus:
Ein Magazin also, das nur gelesen werden kann, wenn man online ist (also z.B. nicht im Flugzeug), was im Übrigen keine Limitierung von HTML5 ist, welches offline Daten unterstützen würde.
Fazit:
Dass Aside Apple Sorgen macht, halte ich schlicht für erfunden und was uns der Artikel als "neu" verkaufen will ist ein alter Hut. Web Apps wurden von Apple seit es das iPhone gibt aktiv unterstützt.
Once again, Twitter.com is in maintenance-mode. Hopefully -- as usually -- for the win.
There's one thing i realized which really puzzles me. It is the way, they serve their temporary maintenance page (pictured in parts in the screenshot to the left).
This time (i haven't checked this during any of their downtimes before), they publish their temporary page in an extremely stupid way:
Twitter is serving a 404 status for every URL on twitter.com. The page you see during maintenance is a customized 404 "Not Found" error page. The 404 HTTP status means, that the url you tried to access doesn't exist and you should never use this url again, as it is bogus. This is not very clever. Now you can argue how important a proper google-index for twitter.com is, but even if you'd not care about google (and any other search engine) throwing every twitter-page out of it's index due to the 404 the crawler gets with every request, it still is wrong. HTTP statuses are there for a reason and serving a 404 during maintenance is not what the 404 status was meant to be used for.
The proper way to handle this would be to do a temporary redirect by serving a 307 or, even better, simply serve the maintenance page with a 503 status, which is the perfect fit for a maintenance. HTTP Status 503 stands for "Service Unavailable" which is exactly what is happening during a maintenance break.
Serving a 503 would deal with search engines nicely and clients like Twitterrific could also nicely parse it and inform the user correctly. For instance hahlo.com is momentarily just serving black frames, making their users believe something is wrong with hahlo. Pockettweets on my iPhone also confuses the user as Mobile Safari is simply alerting the user about too many redirects.
Hopefully someone from twitter will read this and not make the same mistake again in the future.
So there you have it. An iPhone sans phone. iPod touch. Surely nice it is, with WiFi and all, but why it is not offered with a 160GB HardDisk (size or energy constraints?) and Bluetooth so you can surf the web and write emails on the couch comfortably using a keyboard, is bejond me.
Wouldn't this be a natural fit? Why would i trade in my 40GB generation X iPod for a 16GB touchpod and loose half of my multimedia library?
So here's hoping for iPod touch 1.1 with harddisk, bluetooth and reduced price ;-)
PS: watching the Stevenote, it makes me really, really sad to watch grown up people (older than 40) freak out over a ringtones feature. What has the world come to?
A colleague just received a realy funny Spam Mail out of China. Watch the first paragraph very closely:
Dear Sir and Madam,
It is my horror to know you and send you the picture of new 12MP Digital
Camera.
As a professional supplier of Digital Camera , we have factory in China
with finishing in Taiwan .
In our company, you will get 3.0MP, 5.0MP , 6.0MP and 12MP DC with
different housings and our best service.
Kindly let me know which item you are interested in, I will offer the
detailed product information and competitive price immediately .
Contact Window in China :
Angela Liu
Uni-Brains Co.Ltd
Via William Gibson:
"How many Bush administration officials does it take to change a light bulb?
None. There’s nothing wrong with that light bulb. There is no need to change anything. We made the right decision and nothing has happened to change our minds. People who criticize this light bulb now, just because it doesn’t work anymore, supported us when we first screwed it in, and when these flip-floppers insist on saying that it is burned out, they are merely giving aid and encouragement to the Forces of Darkness.
-- John Cleese"
American Citizens: Please watch this carefully, listen to the facts and make the
It's a SEO contest and Anil wants to compete.
[Quoted from Anil Dash]
I've always had a pretty low opinion of the Search Engine Optimization industry. Though there are of course legitimate experts in the field, it seems chock full of people who are barely above spammers, and they taint the image of the whole group.
That being said, I do watch what they do from time to time, especially as they've become enchanted with the power of blogs, both from a comment-spamming perspective as well as their evny of bloggers' PageRank.
But they've been doing something interesting of late that I'm actually curious about. An affiliate network called DarkBlue and a forum called Search Guild have started SEO Challenge, a contest to see who is the first Google result for the (previously unlinked) phrase Nigritude Ultramarine. Everyone from link spammers to legitimate optimizers has popped up to enter the contest, displaying the requisite contest entry image (see below) and crossing their fingers.
I suspect, though, that those of us who've made content even when there weren't bribes involved have an advantage. For all the back-and-forth about how Google is or isn't evil, the end result of PageRank is that it's a hell of a lot more work to fake your way into being a top result than it is to just have high ranking as a fringe benefit of just being a person who loves writing. That's a good thing.
So, in order to prove that real content trumps all the shady optimization tricks that someone can figure out, and because I figure I deserve an iPod at least as much as the Star Wars Kid, I'm entering the contest. Do me a favor: Link to this post with the phrase Nigritude Ultramarine. I'd rather see a real blog win than any of the fake sites that show up on that search result right now.
[Anil Dash]Since everybody has this nowadays, here#s my visited countries map:
create your own visited country map
or write about it on the open travel guide
Update: the site generating these Map images seems to be terribly broken recently. For instance it displays a red stripe in southamerica if you enter CH (Swiss) as a visited country. Singapore takes almost all of Asia... Go figure.
Second Update: they just changed the querystring you need to pass to their server. Replaced colormap with worldmap as query sting.
And here's my Wife's:
create your own visited country map
or write about it on the open travel guide
Chuq and me are having an interesting discussion about whether an RSS-Feed of a blog should contain the full body of a post or not.
What do you think?
Full body? Excerpt? How long should the Excerpt be? Should there be 2 feeds - a full and an excerpt feed?
Personally i don't mind reading blogs in my webbrowser if there is an added value. For instance reading Zeldman's blog in a webbrowser makes sense to me because it is a very well designed site and a pleasure to my eyes. And even Zeldman is providing a "full" feed.
Other blogs (like Chuck's) are interesting to me purely because of the content. And to get hold of that "pure content", an RSS Aggregator like the brilliant NetNews Wire Pro is sufficient if not better suited for me (reading grey text on white background isn't a pleasure for my eyes) - it saves a click and an additional app.
After all, i like to read Chuck's posts, why else did i subscribe to them. So why shouldn't he provide his posts in a format i (and maybe others) prefer, given his reason for blogging is that he believes others are interested in what he has to say.
So what do you think? Comments?
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Sure it was nice of Steve to give an iSight to each of us. Damn nice piece of hardware for sure. Much appreciated!
However, calling iChatAV "revolutionary" as lots of us Mac aficionados do, is - well - biased.
Being the first WWDC with an "Enterprise" track, here's what an "Enterprise" user like me feels is missing from iChatAV:
- NetMeeting compatibility since this would also make it compatible with our professional video-conferencing system.
- One To Many Conferences, since most of the time, a conference is really involving more than 2 persons.
- Integrated whiteboard and screensharing in order to show others presentations and such.
Now all this isn't new and even exists on the Mac Today (more or less mature). For instance there is a promising looking video-conf App, which indeed is NetMeeting compatible, called ohphoneX.
Even a real interactive conferencing app incl. whiteboard and such is there. Never heard about it before i met the Developers on one of the couches at WWDC: Marratech.
To sum up: iChatAV is a nice start and i enjoy being able to chat with my Girlfriend here in Germany while attending WWDCs, but there's potential for much, much more...
[Re: Surfin' Safari]
I agree with Gruber, that clickinig on the "Bookmarks" Button should better open a new window. With the current implementation, you are often accidentially "replacing" the currently visible page (when you're not done reading but want to open an additional window through a bookmark) by a click on a bookmark.
Of course this'd add window clutter, but if you also come up with a clever "tabbed browsing" implementation - hey - it'll just be fine.
Today, over at the CommuniGate Pro List, some have expressed their need for spam:
I want spam :-) but only for one of my spamtraps. I used it quite often for usenet posting but it is seldom used by spam senders. Has anyone a good idea how to get it in spam-lists effectivly? My best idea was to use it for "please remove" queries used by spam (if the ask for any address und do not use a code in the url) but this has not help much either ...
Reading this, i really think "why on earth would someone want this?".
Spam is already polluting the net, so no one with a little brain would really want to force even more of this totally crap messages to flood our pipes. Keep in mind that spam doesn't only pollute your personal inboxes but also causes traffic which someone has to deal with (pay for), so forcing spam to your account also affects others - not only you. This doesn't make you a good netizen.
You should use a spamtrap to protect other addresses on your website or such by adding:
<a href="mailto:spamtrap@mydomain.dom"></a>
to your page source which will add a nice invisible mailto link to the spamtrap, but please don't just use it to force getting spam. If you really need some spam, i can send you my whole spambucket which currently consists of 1454 pieces of crap.
The only good reason for forcing spam to ones account would be, if someone is dealing with spam in a professional or academical sense - for instance developing anti spam tools (like Bayes filters or such).
As long as you don't do this, just be happy if you don't get much spam - jesus christ!
Jason Kottke, in a detailed article that includes screen mock-ups, wants Safari and Sherlock to be merged.
How many ways are there to say No, no, no, no -- for the love of god, no?
More...
[Daring Fireball]No, nein, no, non, bitte nicht, please, for god sake!
As we're doing quite some ebusiness with balinese
hotels, the blast really hit us. I am usually going to bali at least once a year (next trip planned for February) and know the area where it happened quite well.
It is just horrible. Bali is such a peaceful island and people there are depending on tourism which is now drastically reduced. I can imagine the consequences...
"Terrorism cannot be overcome by the use of force because it does not address the complex underlying problems. In fact, the use of force may not only fail to solve the problems, it may exacerbate them and frequently leave destruction and suffering in its wake."
The Dalai Lama
