(A note from Harry: Here’s a “letter to the editor” from Kevin Miller, CEO of Scotland-based RunRev. His company makes a HyperCard-like development platform; one of its investors is Mike Markkula, who funded the creation of the Apple II and later served as Apple’s CEO.)
In recent weeks, there has been much speculation about the impact and overall effect that Apple’s decision to change the rules regarding its iPhone SDK has had on the software developer community. Given the growing debate, I feel I need to outline our thoughts and observations on the matter.
Apple’s move prevents developers from using a range of software development tools, among them RunRev. We believe that Apple would benefit greatly from an iPhone/iPad only development tool that is more productive than Objective-C, JavaScript, or C++ and honors the HyperCard legacy still present on today’s Mac platform. Although we’ve made our case directly to Steve Jobs, including offering a native solution that performs perfectly and supports 100% of the device APIs, he rejected the proposal and made it clear that he has no interest in allowing revMobile on the iPhone or iPad. It seems, however, that this ban is on a case by case basis, as games developed on the Unity gaming platform are still being accepted and sold in the App Store. In this case what’s good for the goose, doesn’t necessarily apply to the gander.