No. It's primarily a way for registered iOS developers to send beta builds to their testers' devices wirelessly. The usual process required syncing via itunes.
I'm not sure if I misunderstood your comment. But as far as I know most iOS users install apps using the app store built into the device. It's really not much different, if not more polished than the cydia store.
I think the real reason for the popularity of cydia is that 1) it has a user friendly UI 2) you can get apps on it that will not make it to the app store and 3) some people are just too cheap to pay for some apps and use it to pirate them
Not sure, but it could be device specific. My one off alarm that I just set the other day did not work. The one that my wife set worked. Same OS versions but she has a 3GS and I have the iPhone 4.
My theory on why apps are priced too low is that it's because of the expectations set by the prices of the initial apps on the store. The first apps on the app store were priced really low and this set the trend that continues today. A lot of the initial developers can afford to price them really low because a good number of those apps were novelty apps that took very little time to develop.
So now even developers who do take the time to develop polished apps will still need to take into account the expectations of users for their app's pricing.
It's been this way for years for most other countries. But the invite method does work and I got my first gmail address via that. However for my other gmail address, I just gave them my mobile number and typed in the verification code I received via sms.
I read somewhere that Chris Anderson was quoted as saying that the caption for this talk should be that "Bill gates releases more bugs into the world".
Code reuse cuts the development time and brings down the defect rate. So it should be a good thing. Quite the opposite approach taken by the Mozilla guys. Those guys alsmost built their own everything (rendering engine, foundation classes, etc). There are a lot of open source libs there also, but i guess google wanted to focus on the minimal UI design and the per process architecture.
Also, consider when the original codebases were written. There was nothing to borrow when Netscape/Mozilla first took a crack at it, in many of these cases.
The hard parts of writing a web browser are the rendering engine, the javascript engine, the transport layer and security code. The rest, comparatively, is trivial and there are cross-platform OSS libs for all of those.
etal got it right though -- Mozilla began as an OSS project in 1998, long before many of those libs were available.
Let me add that again, this goes to show that depending on a vendor for an important technology in your startup can actually be risky. Using open standards are always the way to go.
Well, no. Certainly not "always". You're absolutely right about the big risk, but sometimes the reward is worth the risk. Selling Photoshop plugins means being dependent on Adobe's decisions, but that doesn't mean you should go into business selling Gimp plugins instead.
What you have to do is keep the risk firmly in mind, and hedge it. Pay your insurance premiums.
If we are to believe the article, then the solution is to avoid comparing yourself to others. Try not to make it your goal to have what they have. Our goals should be more self driven.
