JonathanRentzsch
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Breaking: C4 indie developer conference discontinued
C4, Jonathan 'Wolf' Rentzsch's independent Mac developers conference, is no more. First held in 2006, C4 offered a highly intense way for developers to share technology know-how with each other. It provided a bottom-up approach to improving Apple platforms from developers all the way back to Apple. In an impassioned blog post, Rentzsch has explained his reasons for shuttering C4. He writes that Apple's insistence on top-down control over its platforms (presumably more the iPhone OS than the Mac) crushes innovation and makes developers overly reliant on Apple for moving technology forward. Rentzsch explained, "By itself Section 3.3.1 wasn't enough to cause me to quit C4. I've weathered Apple lying to me and their never-ending series of autocratic App Store shenanigans." His link on 'lying to me' references the now-infamous Steve Jobs assertion that a rogue iPhone app could bring down Cingular's network. The lack of community outrage to the 3.3.1 dictate (the portion of the iPhone OS 4.0 developer agreement that forbids third-party toolkits for app development) pushed him past the edge. "With resistance to Section 3.3.1 so scattershot and meek, it's become clear that I haven't made the impact I wanted with C4. It's also clear my interests and the Apple programming community's interests are farther apart than I had hoped." C4 will be greatly missed. Responses to the conference's termination include this note from NetNewsWire dev Brent Simmons.
Backup not all it's cracked up to be?
I don't rely on .Mac's Backup, but I tinker with it from time to time. It's never seemed to be the killer app to fit all my needs, but others in the Mac web who are more passionate and knowledgeable about backup software seem to be quite upset with it. In particular, Jonathan 'Wolf' Rentzsch, Michael McCracken and Erik Barzeski more or less echo the same opinion: Backup needs help, and a lot of it.All three of these notable Mac personalities have penned horror stories and useful overviews of what is so wrong with the little .Mac app that (someday) could, and I found them with a recent Apple kbase article John Gruber linked concerning a silly restriction of working with Backup 3 files.After reading through these, I think I might leave my Backup tinkering as just that, and rely more on ChronoSync since it does machine syncing in addition to straight backup. Though the fact that I haven't seen ChronoSync written up as good or bad in any of the recent reviews makes me curious. Has anyone heard anything?
