Collateral damage: Apple yanks Scratch
MIT’s Scratch is a tool developed at the MIT Media Lab to allow young people to learn the basics of computing and programming.
That means it’s also a development environment wherein you can run interpreted code.
Which means that it can’t be on the iPad or the iPod Touch or iPhone. So Apple has yanked it from the App Store.
As the Computing Education blog points out, these restrictions are ending up by saying that you literally cannot create procedural content on these devices.
Discussion on the Scratch forums suggests that it’s because Apple wants to focus on consuming media using these devices, not producing media.  Want to be truly computing literate, where you write as well as read?  There’s no app for that.
15 Responses to “Collateral damage: Apple yanks Scratch”
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Can’t say I’m surprised.
As much as I like Apple, this code restriction thing sucks. I’ve played around with scratch a bit, and my gut feeling was it would be pretty neat on an iPad.
What I don’t know is how they’ll live with HTML5 et al on their platforms. Honestly you can do some pretty impressive things with it. There’s even a Javascript based version of Processing available. Given that, what is Apple going to do, only allow approved scripts to run in web browsers?
Here’s the link to Processing.js by the way. I’ve run a few things on my iPhone using it via Safari.
http://processingjs.org/
I know little, but from what I’ve seen? This doesn’t surprise me. I feel like Apple has cornered the market in aggressive proprietary marketing. They are good at what they do. I don’t like the very strict lazze-faire attitude they have. Plus, to develop for them, everything is there way or the highway.
It’s a shame too, because they make some really good stuff.
Man. What’s the point of apps if they don’t produce any content, anyways?
*facepalm*
Wow. You mean that Apple won’t allow people to download a free app that would allow them to then obtain further free apps which result in no revenue for Apple. And instead they’re forcing people to have to pay for all apps thereby creating a revenue stream for Apple? On a locked platform where they drop system updates over the air that may well violate the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act by removing functionality from your system (i.e. jailbreaking)? Unsurprised cat is unsurprised.
Apple say they will allow C++…if you look at Processing, also take a look at OpenFrameworks which now has a route to produce apps.
This is why in the great Corporate War – I find it easy to cast Apple as the Axis, and Google as the Allies.
Hey, no one said the Allies’ model of free-market capitalism was perfect, but it certainly allowed for greater freedoms and opportunities than the counterpart.
At the same time – I’m certainly not saying that Google doesn’t have a slightly frightening hegemony over information distribution, but I’d rather see a cyber-world governed by the principles of Google than Apple.
Thankfully, we’ll never be in an either/or scenario. I hope.
Remember Apple’s groundbreaking 1984 commercial for the Mac? Who’s Big Brother now?
This is why I will always need a real laptop. I think I might stop breathing if I don’t have access to a compiler or an interpreter, of some sort.
It’s a pity that Apple, a company that was instrumental in advancing personal computing back in the day, is now trying to kill personal computing. Sorry, appliances only, strict content control, and 30% for Steve is the future. Have a nice day!
It’s brilliant marketing is all. Apple is creating and protecting an eco-system. They are in the loop for all content creation and content is being created always on their terms. Free apps that meet their standard are free advertising material. For-pay apps are consumer content to which they take a 30% cut. Brilliant indeed.
If you allow procedural content then suddenly people can bypass the distribution model and of course they do not what that. Yes that means keeping people computer-illiterate consumers, and those who are literate are forced to comply or go elsewhere.
If the iPhone ecosystem stays a small sub-aspect of the smart phone/mobile market it’s fine. If they get near monopoly position, then suddenly this will be fodder for lots of litigation/anti-trust issues and all that.
For now it just bites the behinds of academic research and competitors who have no recourse, like Adobe.
Unfortunately Google isn’t that much better. They monetize knowing a whole lot of things about you. It’s less obvious and can blow up big time.
Symbian is dead (a dying giant), RIM is too niche and noone is really running a commercial strand of Linux that looks broadly promising. Microsoft missed the train and it’s not clear if they can make up the lost ground.
Yeah Apple is doing it all right. It’s just the question if this amount of behavior control makes sense or should even be permissible. I’m confused why Adobe hasn’t tried to sue with the argument that the script prohibitions are actually torts to hurt their contracts with their customers. But I’m sure they had that one run by their lawyers.
But yeah their hardware is very nice. And their software environment is very neat if you can live with the restrictions.
Not sure why anyone would develop a program for the store with an interpreter when the agreement you have to read to get the SDK says you can´t… Yeah collateral damage, but they could have asked first?
I kind of understand Apple… The hardware is rather limited and depends on clean and efficient coding to perform well… The iPhone OS SDK doesn´t even provide garbage collection due to the memory constraint. The interface is also rather special so you have to target it right from the start to meet the human interface guidelines, which is a requirement…
Can´t these “toys” generate JS for HTML5 instead?