Friday, April 16, 2010

Apple Removes Scratch from App Store

I'm having trouble feeling any sympathy for the Scratch community over the news that Scratch has been removed from the App Store for iPhone/iPad, considering their own lack of good faith and transparency in licensing, particularly for a publicly funded educational project.

This certainly is an excellent example of why Apple's mobile devices aren't appropriate for schools. As a potential consumer, I don't really care. I didn't, for example, worry about whether or not my Wii would run Scratch before I bought it; I'm not concerned that I can't install it on my cable box. But there should be a huge difference between the requirements for educational and consumer computing.

Also, I find this kind of amusing from the perspective of Mark Guzdial's concerns about usability and open source software. Certainly Scratch does not respect Apple's UI design of the iPhone/iPad, and maintaining high standards of usability and consistency across apps is one of the main reasons to exclude alternate methods of writing apps for the iPhone/iPad.

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