If you thought you could handle the iPad because there will be apps that truly customize the interface, I laugh in your general direction. No, wait, Steve Jobs does. I’m reminded of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, in which that lady keeps adding rules and pronouncements to the wall, hemming in the Hogwarts population bit by bit, and punishing transgressors with a magic quill. Apple doesn’t have a magic quill (yet… iPain?), but it does get to veto apps for a growing number of semi-obscure reasons, and the latest one is “apps that create their own desktops.”
Apparently apps were expanding the UI a bit too much, resulting in a whole dangerous new world where things weren’t aligned on the Apple grid, and non-canon fonts were displaying things in foreign corners of the screen. The horror! The news comes by way of one Australian developer whose photo frame app, MyFrame, was rejected for being too desktop-y, presumably because it allowed you to add a sticky and see social media updates in non-Apple ways.
Apple doesn’t want widgets or widget-esque apps either now — which is too bad, since as far as I’m concerned, the whole damn thing should have been designed around widgets to begin with. I’m telling you: as soon as these restrictions reach critical mass, customers are going to blow up, and (I swear I just made this up) once you go hack, you never go back.
Ironically, the same developer wrote a defense of Apple’s iron-fisted content management tactics just a month ago. It seems his sympathies may have shifted somewhat over the last few weeks.
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