> an experience Apple users have had with the couple decades of various levels of cross-platform development that Microsoft has done.
I'm not sure that proves your point here. Microsoft has had a Mac development team since the very first Macintosh. They write native software that is not a port of the Windows versions. In the past, IE for the Mac actually had more features (and was more standards compliant) than the Windows version. All this proves is that, yes, native apps can be crap. Which is exactly why this rule is entirely pointless. It's the not the development tool that matters, it's the developer.
> single handedly make me appreciate the fact that Apple is dictating that people write dedicated, high quality applications, directly for the iPhoneOS, rather than trying to do some crufty translation to that platform.
They're also eliminating any other tool or language which can also be written directly for the iPhone OS. Something like MonoTouch uses the iPhone API directly, it just happens to allow developers to use C# instead of Objective-C. No translation necessary.
Even Adobe Flash apps being recompiled for the iPhone isn't a big deal. A high quality Flash game like Bejeweled, for example, is going work great on the iPhone if Adobe did their job right. That is an opportunity for you to have apps you wouldn't otherwise have and it's not wasting programmer resources rewriting it to achieve the same result for nothing.
Rule 3.3.1 does not mandate high quality applications. If you want that, make Apple use their approval process for that instead of their own selfish interests. This rule does nothing to give you want you want.
"Microsoft has had a Mac development team since the very first Macintosh. They write native software that is not a port of the Windows versions."
Minor nit: these two statements are true separately, but misleading together. Many of MS's early Mac programs were written to a bytecoded abstraction layer. The results were distinctly non-Mac-like, which is why MS eventually switched to fully native apps.
IIRC, this was true from the very beginning, while Jobs was still in charge the first time. Here's an anecdote from Andy Hertzfeld that mentions the abstraction layer in passing:
I'm not sure that proves your point here. Microsoft has had a Mac development team since the very first Macintosh. They write native software that is not a port of the Windows versions. In the past, IE for the Mac actually had more features (and was more standards compliant) than the Windows version. All this proves is that, yes, native apps can be crap. Which is exactly why this rule is entirely pointless. It's the not the development tool that matters, it's the developer.
> single handedly make me appreciate the fact that Apple is dictating that people write dedicated, high quality applications, directly for the iPhoneOS, rather than trying to do some crufty translation to that platform.
They're also eliminating any other tool or language which can also be written directly for the iPhone OS. Something like MonoTouch uses the iPhone API directly, it just happens to allow developers to use C# instead of Objective-C. No translation necessary.
Even Adobe Flash apps being recompiled for the iPhone isn't a big deal. A high quality Flash game like Bejeweled, for example, is going work great on the iPhone if Adobe did their job right. That is an opportunity for you to have apps you wouldn't otherwise have and it's not wasting programmer resources rewriting it to achieve the same result for nothing.
Rule 3.3.1 does not mandate high quality applications. If you want that, make Apple use their approval process for that instead of their own selfish interests. This rule does nothing to give you want you want.