The first week of classes will cover which types of applications will not be accepted into the App Store. It will be a week full of baloney and nebulous instruction. And the final catchall type will be "any application that we decide for any frivolous reason not to accept".
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Official Apple iPhone Developer University Program, Stanford Participates
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Universities aren't what they used to be (get off my lawn etc.)
At uni, if I'm interested in computing, I want to study general principles of computer science and engineering. I want to be able to create and analyse algorithms, to grasp the fundamentals of compiler and operating system design, to receive a broad grasp of various programming styles, to gain a useful understanding of computer hardware, to read the historical background from Leibniz to Lovelace to Turing.
Why oh why would I waste my time learning about specific platforms/APIs? In the words of the venerable Goodness Gracious Me, I can do that at home for nothing.
I guess I'm from the school that doesn't regard an undergraduate (or taught postgraduate) course as preparation for a job, but as preparation of the mind.
At uni, if I'm interested in computing, I want to study general principles of computer science and engineering. I want to be able to create and analyse algorithms, to grasp the fundamentals of compiler and operating system design, to receive a broad grasp of various programming styles, to gain a useful understanding of computer hardware, to read the historical background from Leibniz to Lovelace to Turing.
Why oh why would I waste my time learning about specific platforms/APIs? In the words of the venerable Goodness Gracious Me, I can do that at home for nothing.
I guess I'm from the school that doesn't regard an undergraduate (or taught postgraduate) course as preparation for a job, but as preparation of the mind.
I nearly crapped when I read this during class. If this was offered at Stony Brook, I would be among the first to register.
Required classes vs non-required.
Serious classes vs. fun classes.
My school, a very small private school with a small (but good) CS program, has the regular classes with the introduction classes stating that they aren't going to teach you C++, they are going to teach you how to think.
However during our fun Jan term, one month classes, they give crash courses in Java, C#, and some fun CE style classes. A similar thing for the iPhone would be fun, engaging, and UNDOUBTEDLY would make you a better programmer.
Thinking about, innovating for, and dealing with a multi touch interface, if that is your interest, has very few platforms that are available for programming. I'm not sure how Stanford is doing their students a disservice by offering this.
Those monkeys must have really bad aim. All these days of throwing darts and only six apps rejected...
Of course, there are more rejected due to bugs, but some consumers don't like buggy software for some reason, so I guess the fault for those lie with the monkeys writing the apps.
I find general theory fun and coping with engineering gotchas irritating, but each to his own
.It might be fun, and practice is indeed likely to improve your ability, but it seems odd to me to actually pursue a class in a run-of-the-mill commercial platform; it's the kind of thing I'd expect a student to investigate anyway in his spare time. There is very much the message that once you're familiar with a particular paradigm, you should be able to grasp a specific incarnation over the proverbial weekend.
I recall the push in the late '90s by Sun to get UK unis teaching Java courses, then MS doing the same with dotNet; Apple's obviously doing the same. Then there'd be tie-ins with employers wanting people proficient in those languages. This is vocational training, not undergraduate education. There's nothing wrong with wanting vocational training, but it's little to do with the classical notion of a university.
I guess I am looking at it partly from the PoV of the ever-underfunded British university which would not introduce such things as e.g. an evening course but as a regular credit course with high popularity to the detriment of the toughies.
Acknowledged, it can be introduced in the context of some general discipline - the iPhone is an interesting case study in UI design, as you suggest. To take other examples, I recall a crash course in Maple as part of advanced mathematical methods; a quick intro to Java was given before concurrency theory and distributed systems.
This is clearly unfair competition
It looks to me like Apple is trying to use their NDA to create and monopolize an educational market for themselves. All publishing companies out there are afraid to publish a book about the SDK for fear of being sued under the NDA. It certainly doesn't look like the NDA will be lifted any time soon. As long as they can prevent companies like O'Reilly and Addison-Wesley from publishing educational SDK books, they can channel all educational needs through their program. Without books, this program is sure to be a great success. If books that have already been written could go to print, this wouldn't be nearly as successful. To be honest, I hope O'Reilly, Addison-Wesley, and all the other publishers with SDK books pending sue Apple over this.
It looks to me like Apple is trying to use their NDA to create and monopolize an educational market for themselves. All publishing companies out there are afraid to publish a book about the SDK for fear of being sued under the NDA. It certainly doesn't look like the NDA will be lifted any time soon. As long as they can prevent companies like O'Reilly and Addison-Wesley from publishing educational SDK books, they can channel all educational needs through their program. Without books, this program is sure to be a great success. If books that have already been written could go to print, this wouldn't be nearly as successful. To be honest, I hope O'Reilly, Addison-Wesley, and all the other publishers with SDK books pending sue Apple over this.
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The Big Nerd Ranch offers an iPhone class for those of us not near a participating college.
Not to mention learning to develop for the iPhone means also learning Objective-C and Cocoa. Handy if you want to write your own apps. for OS X.
The Big Nerd Ranch offers an iPhone class for those of us not near a participating college.
Not to mention learning to develop for the iPhone means also learning Objective-C and Cocoa. Handy if you want to write your own apps. for OS X.
I don't see that Apple is making any big money off of this. But they are proselytizing their technology and that can have rebound effects. It's like the way that Unix gained such a presence in the corporate world. Back in the early days when Unix was developed by AT&T, they provided a very cheap source license to universities for research purposes. Soon CS graduates who had been introduced to the advantages of Unix as a development platform moved to corporations and lobbied for them to shell out the full source license fee. Much of our current OS technology, including OS X, was the eventual result.
This is GREAT NEWS!!! The only problem is that Stanford is the first (Go Cal!). Hopefully my school (the better of the two) will become involved in this program as well.
The publishers don't want to antagonize the cult master. He'll toss them a few scraps for how to guides and they'll be grateful for what they are allowed to publish.
Job Classes (Cocoa/iPhone/ObjC) vs. Research Classes (Grad school, unemployment later Government work)
Do I even need to say anything?
I was typing on my iPhone. Blame the typos on Apple's auto-correct. In fact, I had a conversation yesterday with about six of my friends that all have iPhones, and we are all getting pretty upset with how Apple's auto-spelling-corrections are changing what we want to say to stuff that doesn't even make sense! It is counter-productive!
I agree 100%. A school's CS program should teach CS fundamentals so that a student that finishes the program will be able to adapt to working with any platform.Veri said:
But then,
A lot of students that finish Apple's program will be incredibly disappointed if/when their app is not approved by the store
All that hard work to get turned down.
This news irritates me a little because I think it's dumb for a university to teach a platform that is so unusually controlled. Pretty much everyone knows that Apple holds an unclear acceptance policy for their app store and I wonder why any serious developer would ever consider investing thousands of dollars of time and research into an app that might be denied/taken off the AppStore at Apple's whim.
I"m surprised the nobody has mentioned that the directory app will get rejected because it duplicates the functionality of the contacts list, and the Stanford maps app will get rejected because it duplicates Google maps
Google Maps doesn't manage the AppStore. iTunes does and I won't even waste time commenting on the directory app that targets their Database across campus systems, via their Web Services apps.
ethical quandary for Stanford
Universities are founded on the principle of free flow of information. This program obviously requires some sort of contractual agreement that instructors will share information only with registered students, not the general public. If I were the instructor I would consider it unethical to sign such an agreement. But I'm sure this wouldn't be the first time that Stanford has sacrificed ethics for the sake of prestige and competition.
Universities are founded on the principle of free flow of information. This program obviously requires some sort of contractual agreement that instructors will share information only with registered students, not the general public. If I were the instructor I would consider it unethical to sign such an agreement. But I'm sure this wouldn't be the first time that Stanford has sacrificed ethics for the sake of prestige and competition.