Good point. Consumer washing machines certainly don't seem to have much utility to me, but for shared appliances, something like what you suggested might make sense.
Maintenance and updates for machines and software could also be handled by a contract with the building (which isn't really desirable for consumer products).
I absolutely agreed that writing high quality, maintainable tests is hard (in fact, I say so in the article). My point is really that the way testing is discussed, particularly in the Ruby community, makes testing seem more complicated than it is, and I think puts some people off.
I'm not sure this point really gets through. The way the article read to me was "Testing is simple and easy (1)"
1: small print - writing good tests is hard
I could likewise argue that "writing code is simple and easy, but writing good code is hard", but this statement has little value in itself. It seems more an argument against using complex testing frameworks and going for simpler syntax. As a fan of Nose, I absolutely agree.
This is definitely the big issue with iOS music apps. There is a lot of potential there, but unfortunately, doing anything serious is no fun at the moment, because you can't beat having proper hardware to control the real world interfaces apps try to emulate.
I've got a fair few synths for the iPad which I use with a akai 25-key controller, but even with that, knob-twiddling is really fiddly when trying to get sounds.
Would be good to see more apps trying to play to the touch interface's strengths. Figure from Propellerhead is a good example of something with a more thoughtful UI. A good Kaoss-pad like sampler/effect manipulator could also be really cool.
I'm having high hopes of getting Leap Motion [1] developer device and playing with something a lot more hardware-ish (even though it's still waving in the air), within iOS.
