
Palm’s amazingly user-hostile sign-up process - mikecane
http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2011/02/palms_amazingly.html
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gawker
Registration for the developer account to upload free, open-source
applications somehow required me to have a Paypal account and a transaction of
0 charged to me.

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gcr
Registering for Apple's developer account to upload free, open-source
applications to my iphone for testing somehow required me to have a credit
card and a transaction of $99 charged to me every year.

And yet people don't seem to complain about that. Go figure.

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danilocampos
$100 is a great bozo filter, and Apple does the right thing by letting you
fiddle with the SDK to your heart's content before paying anything.

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generalk
$100 is clearly _not_ a great bozo filter, as evidenced by the ream of
poor/useless apps in the store.

Also, Apple is _not_ doing the right thing. I bought a phone from them, I have
it connected to my computer, and I have the development kit, but running _my_
software on _my_ phone requires me to pay them money.

~~~
tomjen3
Funny, as a HTC user, I don't have that problem.

But lets be serious for a moment here - you knew perfectly well that was the
requirement when you brought the phone.

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generalk
Actually, I didn't. I bought a first-gen iPhone before the App Store was a
reality. Now I use a Nexus One and don't suffer from these shenanigans.

No need for snark.

~~~
tomjen3
Ok, so you brought it when you couldn't add programs to it _at all_?

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jhancock
When I signed up last year for a WebOS developer account, I was shocked at how
much I had to go through. This included giving my company info, EIN, and a
declaration of if I was developing for open or closed source apps.

All I wanted was to download the SDK and experiment. Palm should have saved
all the corporate declarations for when I actually want to publish an app.

That said, this frustration is the opposite of the experience using the Pre,
which I find very well done.

~~~
kj12345
They have a history of this too. I remember trying to sign up for Palm Pilot
development, and the form demanded a "DIRECT phone number", I think with the
word "DIRECT" actually in caps. They need to understand that developers and
customers are supposed to be sizing up Palm at this point in the process and
not vice versa.

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Bud
This is really amusing in light of the recent wailing and gnashing of teeth on
Hacker News at the horrific requirement by Apple that folks plug in their new
iPods or iPhones to a computer to get things setup. That setup process looks
like even more of a breeze after reading about Palm's.

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runjake
This part would've bugged me too. That is, if I weren't already bugged by
Palm^WHP's habit of pre-announcing products 6-18 months too early, accompanied
by the virtual abandonment of currently released technologies -- everything
from capable devices not getting 2.0 despite promises, to not fixing bugs in
current OS versions with the explanation "fixed in $webos_ver++!".

Great product, poor marketing (premature announcements: shut up and ship!
weird commercials that target god knows what demographic), poor management.

In the likely event WebOS fails, it won't be the technology or UX that failed
it, it will be the employees around it _.

_ Some WebOS engineers are great (Josh M., etc)

