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Electronic Frontier Foundation attorney Fred von Lohmann has put together asnarky analysis of Apple’s iPhone developer licensing agreement. Needless to say the agreement isn’t pretty for the developers. The EFF got their hands on the agreement through a Freedom of Information Act request after NASA signed the agreement while putting together their NASA App.

People are getting up in arms about this, but is anyone really surprised at this point? That old 1984 superbowl ad is getting more ironic with each passing year as Apple’s success allows them to pull all of their products into lockdown. Remember that this is a company that nearly ran themselves out of business in the mid ’90s due in large part to their proprietary format and had to take a hefty bailout from Microsoft to keep things going. If they’re willing to ride proprietary practices all the way to the edge of bankruptcy then what makes the Internet think that success will suddenly turn them into benevolent benefactors of everything computing?

The example of the Apple II is always brought up when people bemoan Apple’s modern closed-door policies. But the Apple II was nearly three decades and several business models removed from the Apple we know and love to hate today. Apple hardware has been in lockdown since the first Mac debuted. Show me someone who disagrees with that assertion and I’ll show you someone who has that free Apple bumper sticker that comes with every iPod and iPhone proudly affixed to their car’s back window.

When you buy an Apple product you are buying a lifestyle choice, not a piece of technology. You have to ask yourself if you’re willing to put up with a little bit of corporate crazy on their part for the convenience built into their products. I’ll freely admit that I’m willing to make this trade with iTunes and the iPhone because of the ease that iTunes offers and the large development base that the iPhone boasts.

But I bought my iPod and iPhone fully aware that Apple has been, and always shall be, just a little on the nutty side. Maybe they should start handing out pamphlets detailing their corporate history back to the mid-’80s so that no one else is taken by surprise the next time a story of an Apple lockdown burns through the geek world?

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Final Fantasies 1 and 2 are now available for download in the app store for the steep price (for iPod/iPhone, at least) of $8.99. That’s not $8.99 for a package deal either. You’re going to pay close to $20 after tax if you want to enjoy both games from the convenience of your phone.

The games are a port of the PSP versions of the game. Except that it’s more choppy on the iPhone/iPod if the reviews are any indication. And Square-Enix cut out all of the cutscenes that provided a little value-added for gamers who bought the PSP version. And the controls aren’t nearly as intuitive since they’ve had to graft a touch screen interface onto games that were originally designed for a blocky NES controller.

And you have to ask yourself a simple question: “Do I really need another port of the original Final Fantasies?” I can see some of the excitement when Final Fantasy 2 finally came to the U.S. (legally) for the first time, but at this point these games have been repackaged and re-released so many times that I wouldn’t be surprised to find there’s a version available for my toaster that utilizes revolutionary new crumb processing to generate the graphics and convection current manipulation to move the characters.

Final Fantasy has 4.5 stars so far while Final Fantasy 2 has surpassed that to sit at a solid 5 stars after a few dozen reviews apiece, but don’t let that fool you. Most of the reviews boil down to “Wow! Final Fantasy on my iPhone! I’m so desperate for anything approaching a recognizable video game at this point that I will grasp and inflate the rating of anything that comes close to replicating the experience of a real portable gaming system!”

I’m paraphrasing. Slightly. But sheer amazement that a particular game is available on a platform is not a good reason to go out and spend your hard-earned money on said game.  Don’t be that guy or girl. If you absolutely must buy Final Fantasies 1 and 2 then there are far better versions out there.

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The reaction to Steve Jobs’ iPad announcement in the social circles I run in was an overwhelming “Meh.”  Even I found the burgeoning fanboy credit that Apple had earned with the iPhone quickly burning away as I wondered what the hell they thought they were doing rolling out this product that’s really nothing more than an oversized iPod Touch or iPhone as though it was the second coming of the FSM himself.

But the more that I thought about it, the more I realized that the months of leaking information to a starving media and the flashy unveiling yesterday are exactly why the iPad is probably going to succeed despite the fact that it brings absolutely nothing new to the mobile computing market.

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I’ve been carrying a Windows Mobile Pocket PC around with me for the better part of the past six years.  I tend to be an unorganized person, and having a gadget on my person that helps to keep track of my schedule while also letting me jot down notes or write on the fly with Pocket Word has been a great help over the years.  My first was an Ipaq (this was before the iPod had become ubiquitous enough to dictate that the first i be lowercase) that ran Pocket PC 2003.  I later upgraded to a Dell Axim x51v about two years ago just as Dell was starting to get out of the portable market.

The Axim had been a workhorse over the past two years, but unfortunately it was also starting to show its age.  The most annoying bit of gradual obsolescence that cropped up was that the little guy can only connect to 802.11b wireless networks.  That was great two years ago, but in today’s world where Wireless G is the standard and Wireless N is the new hotness that’s slowly starting to take over the old hardware on the Axim just isn’t up to snuff anymore.  Couple that with an annoying wireless connection interface and a complete lack of support for the latest WPA encryption standards and you have a recipe for annoyance that keeps you from accessing most newer WiFi hotspots.

So I decided that it might be time to send the Axim out to a nice farm where it can run and play in the fields and chase rabbits all day long while I upgraded to a shiny newer model that was lighter, thinner, and better able to connect to newer wireless networks.  Only I quickly discovered that in the two years since I bought my Axim the PDA market had been all but wiped out by a new wave of smartphones.  They still carried a couple of Ipaqs that were a few years old at the Fry’s where I worked at the time, but they were clearance items that had been sitting on the shelf for a few years gathering dust.

I could see the writing on the wall for the PDA years ago when I was still in high school drooling over the Palm OS smartphones on display at the local Verizon store.  Even then I knew there would be a day in the not-so-distant-future where the PDA would be replaced by phones that offered the same functionality for the same price with the added benefit of wireless.  Even so, it’s a little sad looking back and seeing the death of a piece of hardware that I carried with me everywhere for so long.

Don’t get me wrong, though.  Smartphones are definitely the way to go if you’re interested in a PDA.  And with carriers willing to shoulder most of the cost to sign you up for a premium data plans the smartphone is usually a little cheaper at the outset than all but the lowliest Palm would cost five years ago.  I eventually settled on an iPhone and think that it does everything those old PDAs did only better and with the advent of mobile Internet, but I’ll always think back fondly to the my eBay searches for a bargain Apple Newton in the late 90s or the early Pocket PCs that kept me organized through college and grad school.

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Buddy: So Windows Mobile has an app store now.

Me: Really?  That’s cool.

Buddy: One less exclusive for your iPhone.

Me: Y’know I remember Windows Mobile had an app store back when I got my first PDA in ‘03.

Buddy: Really?

Me: Yeah, but back then we just called it the Internet.

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App: IM+

Type: Instant Messaging

Developer: SHAPE Services

Price: $9.99

Grade: 7/10

One of the first questions I had when I was considering the iPhone over a Windows Mobile device was whether or not it had support for MSN Messenger.  I wasn’t too hopeful thanks to the cold war between Apple and Microsoft heating up over the past few years, but it was an important selling point since most people I talk with have migrated to MSN.  Not surprisingly there wasn’t an app from Microsoft, but I was assured that there were third party applications that could handle MSN.

When I looked through the app store and discovered that IM+ was available on the iPhone the decision was easy.  I’d used IM+ software for years on my old Dell Axim to consolidate all of my chat programs into one convenient application and knew that they’d put out a quality product in the past from firsthand experience.

IM+ provides support for multiple messenger services.  As of this writing supported services include Skype, AIM, MSN, Twitter, Facebook, Yahoo!, Google Talk, Jabber, ICQ, and MySpace.  The ICQ support in particular was a pleasant surprise, although I doubt it will be of much use unless you’ve jailbroken your iPhone and added in a Flux Capacitor so you can talk with 1998.  When I first picked up IM+ it just had support for AIM, MSN, and ICQ, so the development team has been working hard in the past few months to make sure that all of the major messaging platforms are supported.

Signing on to various services is as simple as inputting your login information and letting the app do the rest of the work for you.  You’ll automatically sign in to all of the messenger accounts you have associated with IM+ and will stay signed on even if you leave the application.  There are options for how long you want to stay signed in as well as various sign-in status indicators that allow you to tell your friends that you’re on your phone.  IM+ also comes with a built-in autoreply function that can be enabled to send people a message letting them know you’re on your phone if they happen to send you a message while you aren’t in the application.

And there are going to be lots of times when you aren’t in the application.  Unfortunately IM+is somewhat hampered by Apple’s lack of multitasking support.  On the Windows Mobile version of IM+ a little notification would pop up on the taskbar any time I had new messages waiting for me.  With the iPhone version of IM+ you have to be in the app or set up Push notifications via e-mail to know when you have new messages.  And the Push notifications get sent to your e-mail inbox regardless of whether or not you’re in the app.

I turned the Push function off after a few days as it got annoying having my inbox spammed with every message I received during long IM conversations.  Having some sort of smart functionality that turns off the Push notifications when you’re actually in the app chatting would be a nice feature.  This problem is really more of an Apple multitasking problem than an IM+ notification problem though, so that’s only one point off for the lack of smart Push functionality.

Another minor annoyance is that autocorrect doesn’t seem to work in version 3.4 of IM+.  I’ve gotten pretty good with the software keyboard, but without autocorrect even the most accurate typer is going to find their speed decreasing drastically as small typos and switching back and forth between keyboard screens for punctuation eats up time.  Autocorrect worked fine in previous versions and this is apparently a bug that the developer is aware of and working to fix for version 3.5, but in the meantime it’s enough to knock a couple of points off the app’s final score for now.

I still think that IM+ is worth buying despite those minor annoyances.  IM+ currently goes for $9.99 on the App Store, although SHAPE has been known to have sales from time to time.  I got my copy of the software for $1.99 last year when they were trying to get some publicity.  Even at $9.99, however, I would say that IM+ is well worth the price considering the breadth of messenger services supported covered and the relative lack of bugs (the autocorrect disable notwithstanding).

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