Trust

By now, I think we’re all just repeating the same points, but Marco Arment has a well-written post on the bait-and-switch:

The root cause for so much of the subscription ruckus, I think, isn’t that 30% number — it’s that Apple pulled the rug out from under some major apps after the fact. And unlike nearly every App Store rule change in the past, this is a major change that developers couldn’t have been reasonably expected to anticipate, and it’s not based in any practical need for the health of the Store or the platform (malware, abuse, etc.).

(Though I’d quibble with the “nearly every” part.) Remember that this “major change” is what Apple’s spokesperson claimed was not actually a change.

And Jim Dovey runs the numbers on his business:

Switching from what I had before to Apple’s 30% fee has taken me from a $90’000 profit to a loss of over $2 million. And if I make more sales, it doesn’t help—only my net loss increases.

The Return of NetNewsWire Lite

Brent Simmons follows the Apple pattern of putting the new stuff in the low-end product first. He’s also posted a Flickr set showing the evolution of the interface.

iTunes 10.2

Kirk McElhearn:

Gone are the dismal, Soviet-inspired silver-gray icons for the different preference panes, at least for some of them. The General and Advanced icons are still gray, as they generally are in other programs, and the Playback icon is still silvery — imitating the silver sheen of the Play button in iTunes’ controls. But the four other icons are blue, green, yellow and black. When iTunes 10 was released, one of the big interface complaints was this loss of color, and Apple seems to have done an about-face here.

I’d like to see the color icons return to the sidebar, too.