• Quick, Dirty, Cheap API in symfony - Mark NG had a little article up on how to build a quick API on top of existing controllers. Very handy indeed
• Simon Maddox's Upcoming-to-Flickr script (using Fire Eagle) - I think the title says it all.
• Portable contact lists and the case against XFN - Messina has a nice article up about the over complexity of XFN and suggests promoting a simpler subset of Contact List Portability instead.
• Lawrence Lessig's Final Lecture on Free Culture, January 31st 2008, Stanford University - Professor Lawrence Lessig's final lecture on free culture. Very interesting and very encompassing of all he has been talking about all these years.
• Fire Eagle Launches - I am a bit late but this video of Tom Coates presenting FireEagle is definitely worth watching if you wonder what FireEagle is.
• Video Presentation: A Software Platform History of Apple, NeXT, Microsoft, and into the Future. — RoughlyDrafted Magazine - Daniel Eran Dilger had an interesting talk in Dallas on the history and future of Apple. The video quality is a bit like our Geek Dinner videos, but still worth watching.

This post was originally posted to FourStarters.com on the 12th of March 2008

I was talking and thinking about the recently released Apple iPhone SDK today, and realized that while I like the major idea of a controlled application platform I did have my doubts about some of the more intricate details. Selling an application for your price through the Apple controlled store sounds like solid business model for both Apple and developers, but quickly shows an contrast with how developers really build a community around their products.

Uniform Price Model

As far as I can understand, Apple let’s you set your own price, which at first sounds very cool, but is eventually very limiting in real life. Inherently this model will force anyone into a uniform price plan, which isn’t the same uniform price plan that is set in the iTunes music store where every song is either £0.79 or £0.99, but it does force every developer to stick to the same price for every customer. This poses an intricate problem for developers that might want to perform some kind of price discrimination.
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