The Low Point of the Keynote

John Gruber hits the nail on the head in his WWDC wrapup piece.

It’s not the control, it’s the secrecy — that there clearly exist rules which are not written. The latest batch: “widget” apps for the iPad and iPhone. The written rules state that you must stick to the Cocoa Touch APIs and WebKit. So several developers created apps that let you display multiple simultaneous “widgets” on screen at once. Sort of like Mac OS X’s Dashboard, and sort of like multitasking, but using nothing more than WebKit — HTML, JavaScript, and CSS.
There’s nothing in the developer agreement guidelines to suggest these apps wouldn’t be allowed. But, they’re not. And the problem is that the developers who made these apps only found out after they had created the apps and submitted them to the store. Obviously Apple can’t write guidelines that cover scenarios it hasn’t foreseen; but once something new comes up, their policies to handle it should be documented publicly.

It’s worth pointing out that Multitaskers is actually 100% written in Cocoa, which is considered even more native and even more “kosher” than the web languages. We made that decision consciously as part of our pursuit to comply with every written guideline, which is the only thing a developer can do. We do take issue with one part of Gruber’s piece, that being the idea that Apple couldn’t account for this scenario. Dashboard-style apps and functionality were being openly discussed in a wide variety of outlets from the moment the iPad was announced, and had been available for sale for iPhone for more than a year prior to the unjustified decision to pull and obstruct the release of widget-style apps. One sentence in either the Human Interface Guidelines or the Developer Agreement documents would have been enough to keep us– and, we’re sure, many of our competitive colleagues– from beginning production on apps like Multitaskers in the first place.