Their analysis, which doesn’t account for gain in human capital and the value of lock-in (or alternatively the cost of switching), seems to posit that the App Store is bad for everyone. I could be completely misevaluating the arguments presented, but I believe that if you dig into the arguments presented significant benefits are not being accounted for.

Apple is Paid to Advertise

Apps aren’t very profitable for Apple either. According to Apple Insider, “Apple has long maintained that the App Store isn’t meant to be a profit generator, as much as a means of attracting customers to the iPhone and iPod touch.” The App Store’s gross profits amount to just 1 percent of Apple’s total gross profits.

If something is a ‘means of attracting customers’ then it is a valuable asset, a marketing tool. Even if Apple were losing money running the App Store they would still continue to operate the store because it is incredible marketing tool. The fact is that Apple is being paid to advertise the iOS platform. There is alot of time and money being pumped into advertising individual iOS applications and the more those applications are being designed and developed vendor lock-in takes place which is extremely valuable (vendor lock-in is what makes Microsoft so valuable, valuable enough that Intel just bet 7.68 billion on a more-or-less Microsoft specific technology). Many smaller companies have to choose between the iOS platform and the Android phone (it really isn’t a platform… yet) and most – in my opinion – are choosing the iPhone. Every application that is released on the App Store increases the marketing value of the App Store.

iOS Apps Keep Customers Happy

The decision to adopt a technology sometimes depends on whether or not your current hardware will support it. This is why Square Space developed an iOS app – it keeps customers happy and helps future customers more easily make the choice to using Square Space. Additionally, developing an App Store application to tie in with your product prevents a second-mover from jumping into the uncaptured market and pulling customers into a separate service which integrates with your free / paid iOS application (ex: some sort of Square Space competitor).

Experience is Valuable

Developers don’t develop open source applications such as Seashore, Sequel Pro, and Adium for profit. Open source applications are developed for the experience and for the gratification that comes with knowing you are the master of something (this video has some thought provoking ideas about the reason people spend time on tasks which do not result in a direct monetary gain). Developers are more valuable when they can bring an idea from conception to release and when they can prove their ability to quickly master new technologies. Having an iOS application published on the App Store gives concrete evidence to an employer that an employee has those skills – it is a screening device. Yes, an individual developer may not make a profit on an app they developed, but if it allows them to earn 20% over the next 5 years then there is most definitely a net gain.

The main issue I was experiencing was a mysterious 3px bottom ‘padding’ given to all img elements wrapped in an anchor tag and lined up horizontally using tds (apparently tables are still the norm for email marketing). No actual CSS padding or margin was being applied to the img or any of its container elements. I’m still not entirely sure what was causing the 3px ‘padding’ but adding style=”display:block” to each img element fixed the problem.

Enable Access for Assistive Devices

When “set value of text field” Won’t Work

How To Iterate Through Rows in a Table

Retrieve Every UI Element Available in a Window

Get a List of the Children of a UI Element

Create / Update / Connect Network Preferences VPN Services

Although since OS X 10.5 we have been given better applescript access to network preference settings, it still isn’t possible to create / update services / interfaces through applescript. With some tricky UI scripting and the help of the UI Element Inspector (or the advanced UI Browser) it is possible to create and update VPN service information. I also wrote a couple functions that allow you to check the existence of a VPN service and the connection status. You can check out the source code here. Note that although the code is VPN service specific it wouldn’t be terribly hard to modify the code for use in automating the creation of aiport, ethernet, etc services.

Take a Screenshot of a SWF

This is a bit more complex that one would expect. Because the Flash Player isn’t built using cocoa it doesn’t support alot of native applescript methods and getting a screenshot of the actual content (not containing the title bar!) of the swf is actually pretty challenging. The script will take a screenshot of only the content of the actual swf. This is useful if you have a flash app that has loadable swf components that the user should be able to preview through a thumbnail. Coupling the script with the following bash script allows you to easily generate thumbnails for all the swfs in the specified directory.

Other Applescript Code Snippets:

• Quit Application by Process Name
• XCode Build & Run
• Toggle First VPN Connection in Network Preferences
• Mark Selected Message as Replied

Helpful Applescript Articles

• Applescript for Python Programmers
• Details on Applescript Variable Types

However, I’ve still been trying to push as much work as I can out into the public realm. Here are some sides that I frequently post code / projects / findings onto:

• GitHub
• Snipplr
• Gist
• Twitter

Hopefully you will find some of the code / ideas I post on those sites useful.

As an aside, I’ve been fascinated with Twitter: there is no ‘right way’ to use Twitter. Facebook is pretty straightforward – connect and stay and in touch with others. Twitter is a generic searchable database accessible from anywhere with easy ways to create relationships between different pieces of data and connect with the larger web as a whole. I use my Twitter account mainly as a bookmarking service; I find the traditional bookmarking model to be very lacking, I’m surprised Apple / Google / Startup will reinvent the wheel. It will be interesting to see what these different massive social sites end up turning into.

When compiling a custom version of PHP with libraries such as libxml and iconv the make process results in a linking error relating to the iconv library. The problem arises because I have two versions of iconv installed – the macports version in addition to the standard installation. A linking conflict arises and to eliminate the error a linking search order change (which is detailed in my previous blog post) must be made. In addition to the makefile modification, the previous workaround for the bug also included using --with-iconv=shared,/opt/local instead of the standard --with-iconv. Either the latest PHP (5.2.11) or OS X update has caused that workaround not to function correctly, now only --with-iconv=/opt/local should be used.

I’ve posted a script that I’m now using to keep my PHP installation up to date.

I’m guessing that most of their third party developers are using .NET or Java which would explain this extreme oversight in the PHP framework. Heck, it might be resulting from some obscure PHP compilation configuration option on my local machine (although I’m doubtful that it is). For those are experiencing the same issue I’ve uploaded a patch which fixes the issue in your PHPToolkit.php file.

Other times it just makes me angry.

It seems, at least initially, that PyObjc (2.2b3, the default installation with 10.6 snow leopard) does not work with the Growl framework. You can register your application with growl fine, but if you try to push notifications to growl nothing happens.

Here is what I tried initially to post a growl notification in pyobjc:

This does not work, and for a minute I thought I was the only one experiencing this problem (all open source pyobjc projects using growl had almost identical growl notification code) until I found this commit message on github. I found an associated discussion on the growl discussion group and was disheartened that the developer resorted using a command line version of growl to post notifications. However I decided to try one last thing, and checked the className of python objects passed through the objc bridge.

Here is a table of the objc className of different string creation methods in python:

• unicode(“a string”) or u”a string”: OC_PythonUnicode
• str(“a string”) or “a string”: OC_PythonString
• r”a string”: OC_PythonString

Interestingly enough a python string (unicode, str, raw) is not ‘toll free’ bridged like CFString & NSString are. I guess this is to be expected and shouldn’t cause any problems since both OC_PythonString and OC_PythonUnicode are subclasses of NSString, the documentation even states “A Python unicode may be used anywhere a NSString is expected”. It seems that this is not always the case though. I tried one last thing before resorting to rewriting the code in objc:

And it worked. Note that the created NSString’s don’t get converted by the bridge into a OC_PythonString object, they pass through as regular NSString’s. Note that you also write the above as the more python native:

One other interesting that I found is that bridge throws a memory leak warning when running NSString.alloc().initWithString_("Notification"):

My only guess is that because initWithString is called instead of init the bridge sees it as a uninitialized object (so I would guess that this warning is falsely thown). Unfortunately the PyObjc documentation is too sparse for me to able to determine what the real cause of the error is.

Another unfortunate change with Snow Leopard was the elimination of input managers. This eliminated the convenient F-Script injection functionality that was present in F-Script anywhere. Luckily this functionality has been recreated using an automator service. Nice work!

However, the other day I came across a bug (at least, what I thought was a bug) that seemed very blaringly obvious and for a production version of a scripting bridge. When implementing the NSTableView delegate’s method tableView_toolTipForCell_rect_tableColumn_row_mouseLocation_ I was getting an error when simply returning an NSString ( TypeError: tableView:toolTipForCell:rect:tableColumn:row:mouseLocation:: Need tuple of 2 arguments as result) and for the life of me I couldn’t figure out why. Apple’s documentation states that I should return an NSString and I couldn’t find any information about a special case in pyobjc for this specific method.

I guess I did not search hard enough through the uncentralized incomplete documentation spread across the web since one of the PyObjc devs was kind enough to respond with a simple explanation:

This is not a bug, the ‘rect’ argument is a pass-by-reference argument that
can be modified, hence you have to return two values: both the return value
itself and the (possibly updated) value of rect:

return (aToolTip, aRect)

Replace:

With this:

Note the separation of the command into three separate lines, with the 2nd line having one tab character at the beginning of the string.

And here is my updated configure string command (with soap and iconv):

Another interesting note about PHP 5 is that compiling it with the readline extension (using --with-readline or --with-libedit) allows it to be a interactive scripting environment (a PHP console of sorts) just like python, ruby, or bash. Just run it from the command line with the -a option (info thanks to madmac).