At aroud 6 am, two of the Infurious team hit the streets with thirty T-shirts bearing the MURDERDROME logo, based on the tattoo of the anti-hero Brett Heller from the MURDERDROME comic. They were given out, along with some of PJ’s comic, PREVIOUSLY, to anyone waiting outside the soon-to-be-opened Apple Store in Belfast. The night before, crack commandoes from Mac-Sys Ltd, the Apple Authorised Service Provider, had descended on the short queue with hot coffee and biscuits to make sure the queuers would survive until morning.
Some people were even interviewed by the BBC wearing the ultra-cool MURDERDROME OFFICIAL MERCHANDISE (M.O.M.). How cool is that?
On top of that, we spoke directly to Apple on Friday about the reviewing results for Apps. There is no appeal process. I think Apple has been caught on the hop here – they are genuinely proud and also genuinely surprised not only at the number of apps being downloaded (and the revenues) but also the breadth, quality and facility of the applications they are seeing. And, like all things, there’s going to be teething problems. I said to the nice man at Apple:
“Apple needs to be seen as the honest broker in the App Store if it is to continue to attract the top level of developers. And, at the moment, decisions have been made which question that position.”
Even now I don’t think Apple realises how big this is going to get. I think they have begun to realise that there’s a lot of low hanging fruit but I don’t think they realise what motivated and enthusiastic developers will shoehorn into this little device. I mean they put NeXTStep on a Phone.
The iPhone may be limited by 128 MB RAM and 8 GB or so of storage but when you consider the most powerful NeXT machine used a 68040 processor, up to 64 MB RA and a 340 MB hard drive, the iPhone is simply a lot better in terms of hardware. And when you consider the applications they built upon NeXT? The sky is the limit!