There goes the argument that Podcaster was blocked to “protect Apple’s revenue stream” or whatever…Apple makes absolutely no money on the included Mail app, yet still blocked MailWrangler.

I see no discussion regardling lies about products, here.

No one’s forcing anyone to buy Apple’s products. If one doesn’t care to pay Apple’s prices, one can buy some other brand.

As for Linux: Who said anything about it? You complained about “Apple’s insistence on closed platforms, monopolies on data formats, and refusal to adopt open standards.” I pointed out how that’s simply an obsolete argument.

More importantly, consider those problems from the standpoint of someone who is much less technically savvy than yourself.

@Matt

The irony, now, is that Apple is the company pushing open standards more than others. Here’s a sample list:

MPEG-4
H.264 (part of the MPEG-4 standard)
AAC (part of the MPEG-4 standard)
MP3
OpenGL
PDF
AJAX (vs. proprietary Adobe Flash)
WebKit
WebDAV
Apache
IMAP/POP3/SMTP
Unix
GCC
Perl, Python, Ruby, PHP
X11
Intel processors
SATA hard drives
USB
802.11 Wi-Fi
Ethernet
DVI
DVD
Unicode

Apple’s hardware is standard, Apple’s Internet and web technologies are standard, and Apple’s video and audio data and file formats are standard. Apple’s mice even have multiple buttons on them now.

The argument that Apple is a more closed and proprietary company than others is obsolete.

BTW, before making an argument about what Apple should do to achieve “a wider adoption of their products,” take a look at Apple’s current marketshare growth compared to all other technology companies. I think they already have a pretty good idea of how to gain wider adoption of their products without outside help.

Well, I’m sorry, but you’re wrong. If you read 3.3.3 again, it states that “3.3.3 Without Apple’s prior written approval, an Application may not provide, unlock or enable additional features or functionality through distribution mechanisms other than the iTunes Store.”
Downloading content is not unlocking _additional_ features. The feature to read and display podcasts is built in to the original program, which would have been distributed through the App Store. It is simply downloading _content_, which is utilized by features built into the original app to play a podcast.
Some of your other arguments may be slightly more logical, but you dismiss them all as “irrelevent” because podcaster violates 3.3.3, and who am I to argue with you about your own arguments?
Bringing up history about Windows and MS Office and Microsoft is equally irrelevent to the point, which was that Apple arbitrarily decided not to permit a program which provides access to free, non Apple-affiliated (Podcasts were developed more then four years before Apple was connected with them) media through internet downloads. I’m not saying that there isn’t a clause in the SDK in which they reserve the right to disallow a program to be added to the app store, this action speaks volumes about Apple and their business practices and strategies.
The argument about apple not wanting people to be confused about syncing and their personal ratings for podcasts is equally inane. Apple shouldn’t be making decisions that will affect all the users of their device based on whether a few people who are too unfamiliar with technology will understand the difference between podcaster and iTunes. A message indicating the differences in syncing and read/unread status when you start the program probably would have sufficed, but instead the entire program is rejected because Apple is afraid that they might lose their monopoly on the distribution of free media.
As to the argument about it “duplicating” the functionality of iTunes, the Podcaster program provided added functionality in the form of on-the-go downloads of podcasts, and if Apple really cared about their customers they would have simply required a few simple changes to the Podcaster program, such as restricting downloads to when the device is connected to Wi-Fi and adding a message stating that this program is not affiliated with iTunes and cannot share data with it because of Apple’s insistence on closed platforms, monopolies on data formats, and refusal to adopt open standards which would benefit consumers and cause a wider adoption of their products.

“Real” (by which I mean serious/responsible) developers will have read the SDK contract terms and I bet they just “know” when they might be barking up the wrong tree. “Real” developers probably appreciate how difficult it is to be completely watertight in every constraint/limitation or indeed freedom of this contract. Therefore, use your developers head. If in doubt, ask Apple for guidance. Seems reasonable to me, but then I’m not a developer.

And it’s perfectly reasonable for Gruber and Dan to present their arguments. Read them and form your own opinion. I think Dan is more reasonable than Gruber for what it is worth.

John

Ben