iPhone devs offered cash to code for the Zune HD?
By Joshua Topolsky 
posted Aug 14th 2009 10:10AM
posted Aug 14th 2009 10:10AM
[Via The iPhone Blog]
posted Aug 14th 2009 10:10AM
"Satisfied" iPhone 3GS owners
Of 200 iPhone 3GS users polled in August, 2009, 99 percent termed themselves "satisfied," with 82 percent saying they were "very satisfied."
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I'd "kill" for that code...
Hey iPhonerulez,
check this out:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Db7pKjUrNXQ&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Fgizmodo.com%2F&feature=player_embedded#t=88
It's kinda stupid but I hope it brings some level of distress to you.
No iphonerulez, the same game will be better on the zune because of a little thing called tegra.
Ethan Chatman - could you be anymore of a lame? your only engadget posts are the same text copied and replied 3x to any zune related thread.
I suggest you go find the highest bridge in your area and take a dive. Thank you very much.
Ethan Chapel:
Oh no, not this shit again. Most of it doesn't even apply. It's copied from the Pre thread.
I would suicide if I lost that code. Wait...
Steve Ballmer is doing what he does best. Bribe people to use his search engine, and now bribe people to develop app for his two years behind music player. Why not change the company name to MicroBribe! :)
Nokia should do this, too.
They don't have a monopoly to provide them with the cash.
yes...what monopoly does MS have on the portable media player market?
Nokia have huge amounts of cash. What they don't have is the interest of developers who produce polished, intuitive and attractive applications.
I wouldn't be so sure about that. Currently they are just preparing for the Qt and new UI switch on Symbian (Maemo too), after that porting even desktop Qt apps for Symbian should be much easier than now. Avkon is rather painful for developers, Direct UI+Orbit looks like it's completely opposite.
I wonder why they didn't put nHD screen in this Zune HD. Even my soon technically 4 years old Nokia N80 (well, okay, it's a phone but still) has higher pixel count (416x352) than Zune HD and the screen is only 2.1 inches. There's simply no need for higher res screen on and non-touch screen phone.
Microsoft should tweak WinMo to be more like this.
I don't understand why Nokia doesn't have the interest. They currently have over 38% market share in the hand held market.
Because all the good apps were written for S60 years ago.
There's no point in Nokia or Microsoft pushing for this. Cocoa Touch makes everyone else's API look ridiculously complex and difficult, and a developer's investment — in learning time and hardware cost — isn't worth the relatively small gain in sales. By the numbers, if your business is making iPhone apps, branching out to other platforms would be a waste of your resources.
What's really hard to understand is why Microsoft would want iPhone developers at all. Every diehard Windows Mobile user is always badmouthing about how crappy and useless ALL the iPhone's 65,000 apps and games are (although I doubt if they've downloaded very many apps). Does it make any sense that those developers would be able to develop better games on the Zune HD which is merely an iPod Touch clone? The developers would basically just be moving the same code and apps over do the Zune HD device. What benefit will that do Microsoft if the haughty WinMo/Zune users don't even like the apps to begin with? Where are all the past developers that were coding for the WinMo platform, anyway? Isn't the Zune OS based on WinMo?
When Ballmer was ranting about developers, developers, wasn't he gathering thousands of developers for Microsoft's various platforms at the time? Why is all this begging, "We desperately need iPhone developers, now" after he assured his loyal sweat-sipping followers that the iPhone platform was going to be a failure of massive proportions? Ballmer and his cohorts have always trash-talked the iPhone and Touch platform as being a lost cause and now they're trying to duplicate it with even the same developers. This is freaking absurd.
I find "a bucket of money" hard to believe for a twitter client.
Considering Twitter apps are a dime a dozen, a "bucket of money" should buy a whole lot of Twitter apps.
I also find it a bit hard to believe that an MS employee would contact a dev with that sort of language. Surely they would be more formal about it?
Yea this sounds really fishy. Twitter apps are not that complicated and in house Microsoft Developer could probably code one in their sleep.
Remember, this is what the developer is describing the offer as, not what either Microsoft or Mr. Gruber are (probably).
The "quotes" in this article are quoting their source not the original microsoft approach (if it even happened).
Twitter clients have become the canonical demo for any new Microsoft framework. I've seen their devs throw together a Twitter client in Silverlight in 10 minutes with a handful of lines of code. Complete BS, I wouldn't buy this at all. What's next, a truckload of cash for a Flickr app?
This is a 100% true story, a guy emailed me out of the blue, who was contacted by Apple to write a Hello world app for the iPhone, for (his words) "a truckload of money". He refused the offer, though. I think Engadget should write about this man's story.
maybe he mean a bucket of Zimbabwe $ as they are 63,554 z$ to the US$? That should about fill a single regular bucket I think
@L
"Well, since Daring Fireball is like Mactard central, I would take this whole report with a mountain of salt.."
Agreed. Another shot fired in the propaganda war.
I just can't want for this guy to be sued by Microsoft for lible and/or slander and ordered to make a public retraction and all royalties from his applications to be seized. Especially considering it was a published article by the man himself.
libel*
Agreed. Besides, MS lawyers would never allow the use of the phrase "bucket of money" when negotiating deals.
Plus, there are several WPF based twitter clients that look and work great. It would be easier to port those over to the ZuneHD than a ipod one.
"Agreed. Besides, MS lawyers would never allow the use of the phrase "bucket of money" when negotiating deals."
It goes down like this:
Step 1: MS promises money, and then asks to see the source of the app to make sure it meets their "Q/A" standards before they actually pay for it. "Oops, sorry fella, your app just doesn't cut the mustard, but thanks for playing".
Step 2: Three months later MS releases a screwed-up version based on the cribbed source.
Step 3: When he complains, the MS lawyers dare the poor SOB developer to sue them.
besides, Microsoft probably is more the type of company that uses checks.
A bucket of money? ARE WE IN THE MEDIEVAL PERIOD OR WHAT??
The goal would not be to buy a twitter client per se, but to buy the ability to advertise that a notable iPhone app developer now develops for the Zune.
see kids? fanboyism makes you lose money in addition to make you look like assholes
Judging from your comment, you are the kid.
Really? You think "fanboyism" is the reason why the offer was declined? Not something reasonable like the developer didn't want to maintain code for 2 different platforms? Oh well...
Yeah, because maintaining code for 2 whole different platforms is way too much hassle for "a bucket of money".
Dude, this guys got so many women to juggle that he couldn't possibly have time for keeping up coding two platforms. That or he has too much money to count.
@Doax
I know man I coded a fart application for the iPhone and I have atleast 12 women giving me a lapdance 24/7. Makes coding for another platform difficult with all the sweaty ass jiggling infront of me.
Well if any of you knew 1/2 a speck of craps worth of anything, you would know that maintaining a .net app for a Windows CE platform is so far from the fun and ease of maintaining an xcode based obj-c app that i wouldnt blame him. No way would i want to subject myself to CE and .net when i could do just fine with less headaches on just about ANY other platform.
@Tsing Tao: As a Software Engineer, I can say with 100% confidence that you're wrong. .NET is one of the easiest and most powerful frameworks to use out there. But given your past comment history I'm not completely surprised that you would bash something so illogically.
@Tsing Tao
I agree with Mark, you obviously have never even written or for that fact seen any real programming languages if your going to make a remark like that.
@Tsing Tao
As somebody who has written apps currently selling on the app store (and not simple iFart apps either) and has written code for some very large applications currently sitting on store shelves for both the Mac and Windows platforms using languages such as Objective-C, .NET, C/C++, Java, and even assembly, I think I am qualified to say Objective-C programming is the biggest POS ever forced upon the programming world.
Objective-C is a derranged tangled mess. Rather than using a standard language (such as C++), they decided to go off on their own (during the Next years) and threw two languages together (Smalltalk and C) to come up with an inconsistent monstrosity. Apple themselves seem to be pulling back from Obj-C with Carbon APIs, where rather than forcing people to use the crap NS classes (ooops, interface, sorry) they are advancing creating Carbon with is all C based. Why not create all their APIs using Obj-C if it were such a great language?
Let me add one more thing, if Microsoft threw a "bucketload" of money at me I would port my apps from iPhone/iTouch today. But they don't need to do that, I will be porting it to .NET anyway.
Sounds good. Pink is coming :-)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhHwnrlZRus
Pink on September 9 ? http://www.mobiletechworld.com/2009/08/11/microsoft-project-pink-to-be-unvieled-on-september-9/
Classic Microsoft.
They bought developers for the xbox360.
They will do the same for the zune/winmo.
Who cares? The xbox is now the best video game system there is. The wii is...well no explanation needed and the PS3 is just way overpriced.
The zune hd, though yet to be proven the best, is showing to be a serious competitor in the mp3 market. As long as the consumer benefits and doesn't get raped on expensive hardware, accessories, and content for their device, it's a win-win.
It's not working.. Throw more money at it!
So?
They aren't forcing anyone to do it. They are offering compensation for work. What a bunch of bastards.
I'm just puzzled as to why this guy turned down real money in this economy.