Here We Go.

Strap in cats and catettes, this is going to be a bumpy ride.  Apparently Apple has made their first round picks for the iPhone devel­oper pro­gram.  Note, this only applies to devel­op­ers receiv­ing the cer­tifi­cates that they need to install and test their soft­ware on phys­i­cal iPhones.  Anyone read­ing more into the deci­sions (such as who will even­tu­ally be let into the iPhone AppStore) is full of more bull­shit than a con­sti­pated Angus. 

Against all odds, and seri­ously here I’m fuck­ing shocked, the first story on this to hit my feed-reader was from iLounge with this gob-smackingly non–hyper­bolic story.  I mean, what the deuce iLounge; what sort of chumps are you, post­ing the actual email con­tents and not wildly spec­u­lat­ing?  Are you try­ing to put me out of the bitch-slapping busi­ness?  For con­trast, here is the head­line from TUAW “iPhone devel­oper rejec­tion let­ter mass mail­ing”  Rejection you say!  Well fuck Apple, I can’t believe that they would be so cruel.  El jeffe must be cack­ling with joy at the thought of all those dis­ap­pointed devel­op­ers.  Or, wait, let’s see that the actual fuck­ing “rejec­tion” let­ter (which iLounge was good enough to quote, but TUAW couldn’t be arsed to) says:

Dear Registered iPhone Developer, Thank you for express­ing inter­est in the iPhone Developer Program. We have received your enroll­ment request. As this time, the iPhone Developer Program is avail­able to a lim­ited num­ber of devel­op­ers and we plan to expand dur­ing the beta period. We will con­tact you again regard­ing your enroll­ment sta­tus at the appro­pri­ate time. Thank you for applying.

Wait, what?  That doesn’t sound like a rejec­tion.  That sounds like, “holy fuck 100,000 peo­ple just applied for a cert to install beta soft­ware, devel­oped with a beta SDK, on pro­duc­tion hard­ware that con­nects to our rev­enue gen­er­at­ing pro­duc­tion cell net­work.  Perhaps we bet­ter dole these things out a bit slowly.”

To all my iPhone devel­op­ing friends out there.  I know get­ting “rejected” sucks.  If I were a devel­oper I’d be froth­ing over to get my apps on real hard­ware.  I “feel your pain.”  But to all the chumps in the blo­gok­lein­bot­tle: tone down the fuck­ing rhetoric a bit.  The iPhone dev pro­gram has existed for a whole fuck­ing week, and is an entirely new model for Apple.  There are going to be bumps along the way.  Screaming like Chicken Little every time we hit one only rein­forces why you will never be respected as jour­nal­ists.  But then again, it gives me loads of mate­r­ial.  So, on sec­ond though, screech away.