I've got an iPhone. And you know, I like the idea of reading comics on it. The serialization of Jeff Smith's Bone (six issues so far) ported over to the iPhone has me buying this story for the fourth time just to have it in the cool portable format.
But there's clearly a lot of progress that needs to be made before this medium makes any challenges at all to print. Witness the Star Trek Archives: Best of Peter David comic by iVerse Media, being sold on the iTunes Store. It presents, in iPhone format, one of those clever and pretty fun PAD DC Trek issues set between the movies.
Why, the whole thing's only 99¢. That's a lot of fun for less'n a buck. Sign me up for that...it oughta be the perfect way to view the adventures of Middle-Aged Kirk, Freshly-Resurrected Spock, Still-Crusty McCoy, and "the rest."
Except it isn't. Because the program crashes on screen 102.
Not that has stopped iVerse Media from selling the program. No, it's still available with a caveat emptor: "But it, but it doesn't work. We sent the fix into Apple, it's not our fault they haven't posted it yet!"
To be fair, iPhone apps receive free upgrades when a new version comes out. But heck guys, how hard is it to test-drive your own product—and how un-stringent (astringent?) must the iStore testing procedures for vetting a program be? Why, I bet Reed Richards could make an iPhone comic work first time out! He's one of the most brilliant scientific minds in the multiverse, and after all, this ain't rocket science.
Um. Nevermind.
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3 comments:
Reminds me of an old David Letterman joke - he's talking about the declining requirements to work for NASA, and the punch line is,
"You don't need to be a rocket scientist...to be a rocket scientist"
"But heck guys, how hard is it to test-drive your own product—and how un-stringent (astringent?) must the iStore testing precudures for vetting a program be?"
Actually, since you ask, this has been a major complaint in the iPhone development community and one much discussed on developer mailing lists and the like. At first, Apple didn't provide any way for developers to have their iPhone apps tested by beta test users before they got released to the general public.
(More detail than most people may want to know: If you're developing a program for a Mac or a PC, you can e-mail it to a select group of testers who you trust to put it through its paces on a variety of machines and find any bugs. But Apple had it set up so people can't just send one another iPhone apps -- you can only install Apple-authorized stuff, and you can only install it from the iPhone app store. That's to keep evil and illicit and unauthorized stuff from being circulated and keep everything under the firm hand of Steve Jobs. But it also meant there was no way test copies could be circulated for testing to catch problems like this before release.)
In response to endless complaints from dissatisfied developers, Apple is slowly changing this and adding ways for them to have at least some limited prerelease testing. They haven't really got it all ironed out yet, so we still see ridiculous situations like this one. The developers find it even more outrageous to have to write a note like that than everyone else does to read it.
Interesting, RAB! Thanks for filling me in. (And for not pointing out I misspelled 'procedures.'!)
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