CS and the City

Transmission has been a favourite BitTorrent client of mine for a long time. Its compact design, complete feature set and small memory footprint are much preferred over the bulky Azureus. Unfortunately, somewhere after v0.7, it lost its high-performance ways and I had to switch back to Azureus just to get my downloads to work. I’m happy to report that it’s back, better than ever post-v1.0 (Now at v1.10).

I recommend any Mac owner check it out for their BitTorrent needs. It’s now also available on Linux/*BSD so I suspect they can experience the same joy

When Apple announced their SDK for the iPhone, I immediately got caught up on Apple’s insistence that all applications must be distributed through their App Store, not only because developers have to pay $99 a year to put any application (free or not) on the store, or that Apple gets a 30% cut of any profits made, but also that they get veto power on any and all application.

Apple says this is for your own good. It allows them to protect you from any malicious applications. Of course, they can also block any SIM unlock programs. They got a little fascist with their “No Porn” declaration, and they left the door open to turn away any “unforeseen” application that doesn’t meet their high standards.

Turns out Music apps fall in that category. iPodNN reports that Music functions are off-limits to iPhone SDK developers. This means that I can’t use anything but iTunes to listen to my tunes, even if I’m not satisfied with the client (I’m not BTW), I can’t use anything but the iTunes Wireless store, even if Amazon wanted to open their store to the platform too, and I can’t use any interesting musical support applications like Last.fm to track my usage. That’s a whole lot of can’ts for something that’s supposed to revolutionize the platform.

I’m looking forward to the day when I can replace my iPhone with something Android-based and not feel like I’m being herded for my own good by Apple.