Erica Sadun: Nostradumbass

January 12th, 2010, by The Angry Drunk

Supposedly Erica Sadun is some sort of high poten­tate of the iPhone devel­op­ment com­mu­nity, which I guess explains why pub­li­ca­tions like The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) go to her for com­men­tary. But, given the fact that she has the log­i­cal skills of a young-earth cre­ation­ist, they should really stop. Case in point: an arti­cle posted today on TUAW titled App Store approvals and the tablet: why it mat­ters. That’s right kid­dies, it’s another arti­cle about unicorns.

Erica starts out with an observation:

When iTunes Connect returned after its Christmas break, devel­op­ers noticed that things had changed quite a bit on the App Store approval front. Applications that had for­merly taken ten to four­teen days to work through review were now get­ting processed in a cou­ple of days or less. The upshot? Happier devel­op­ers, bet­ter bug releases for users, and a health­ier App Store ecosystem.

Good so far, this is fac­tual and draws a con­clu­sion that fol­lows log­i­cally from the premise. The rail-jumping begins imme­di­ately after:

There’s another con­se­quence of the new, speed­ier approvals: the tablet. With the device due to ship March/April (late Q1, early Q2), and no announced 4.0 SDK, devel­op­ers were left won­der­ing how they’d have the time to bring their soft­ware up to date.

Whuuuuuut? This is the point that, were this a trailer for a Wayans Brothers movie, we’d play the phono­graph nee­dle scrap­ing over the record sound. How in Satan’s name do you go from the observed fact that Apple has tight­ened up the approvals process to the “fact” that there is a) an actual tablet prod­uct, b) it will have a March/April ship date and c) that it will run any vari­ant of the iPhone OS, let alone the equally myth­i­cal 4.0 ver­sion. Seriously Erica, with prog­nos­ti­ca­tory pow­ers like that, you should give up iPhone devel­op­ment and just play the fuck­ing lottery.

3 comments - (Comments closed)
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  • bkhar­mony

    She is the num­ber one rea­son I quit read­ing TUAW.

  • Hamranhansenhansen

    Right now there are many indie (and even cor­po­rate) pub­lish­ers of music, movies, books and mag­a­zines that would love the same deal that iPhone devel­op­ers get, where you make your work to a spec and send it to Apple and they sell it and you get 70% back on every sale. And Apple doesn’t even demand exclu­siv­ity like Amazon does. So I have no patience for any whin­ing about how put upon app devel­op­ers are. Even the approvals have shown them­selves to be worth­while because Android Market has served up mal­ware, which is ironic given that Google bans web­sites from its Search index by the hun­dreds of thou­sands. So they ban a web­site that tries to get your bank­ing infor­ma­tion by phish­ing, but an Android app that does that is OK. That is the oppo­site of user expec­ta­tions. Apple has the only C-based mobile SDK, the only suc­cess­ful App Store, a bajil­lion apps sold, and from what you read online you would think Apple has been send­ing goons around to devel­op­ers’ houses instead of send­ing out monthly checks.

  • http://www.highndrye.com/ Drye

    I’m amazed that peo­ple like this don’t get vir­tu­ally bitch slapped or bet­ter yet, bitch slapped at work for spread­ing this non­sense.

    By the way, can we ask her when 7.0 SDK and the new hand-held tablet super computer/microwave oven is being released? I’m sure the devel­op­ers are left won­der­ing how long they have until then.