Dani, I am pretty sure Apple does this. You just can’t develop anything the way you want and expect it to be approved because it is free and people decide to “patch” and enhance their phones.
I see we are running into a fine line though: “Guidelines”, in a strict sense, all they are doing in fact is saying “you can’t develop it like this”.
Maybe the specific example of the thread, menu options vs boolean is not ideal. Forcing the developers to always use boolean might seem too much. Maybe not. I honestly believe it goes against the very sense of what GH is and what it is useful for.
Anyways, rest assure that there are many other things that can’t and shouldn’t have such flexibility.
David himself said he dislikes them:
Do you think David does not have the right to force developers into never using menu options for GH components? Of course he has.
And maybe, if enough people complain, David ends up doing just that. But if no one ever complained, as you say, we don’t have the right to do so, David would have never known about his users having a bad GH experience because of a plug in.
If I were a developer, I would be extremely concerned about how plug ins are affecting the user experience of MY users. Suppose I do everything as perfect as I can for everyone to LOVE GH, and someone comes, releases a free plug in, with horrible icons, with components that take too long to calculate, with inputs that do not work, with no messages to know what failed, etc etc. All my work is ruined because of that.
You might think, “your work is not ruined” the user just has to uninstall said plug in.
Sure, but he had a VERY BAD experience using GH. That is the only final outcome that matters, and it was all I wanted to avoid. So, it is MY job to avoid that, not the user’s job. I should protect MY users from this kind of stuff.
But where is the limit? Someone shares a shitty plug in that frequently fails. Should we still say “thank you” just because it is free?
Someone gives you free food, you taste it and it is horrible, do you still say thanks and eat it?
If I receive a free washing machine, go through the trouble of moving it, making space for it, setting it up, installing it and try to use just to find out it does not work I will surely complain as anyone would. Moreover, if it works but cleans my clothes very poorly, I will surely complain and say “This is shit, I need to wash my clothes 3 times with this thing for them to be actually clean”. Even more, I will go to the manual to try to fix the damn thing just to find out it is in Chinese! At that point I will be looking for a hammer to the destroy that piece of junk and throw it out and curse the guy that gave it to me and made me waste all my time. Same with plug ins.
Going back to the Apple Store, it is called the Apple Store for a reason, it belongs to Apple. This means, it is Apple’s job to supervise it. You are telling me users should supervise Apple’s store instead of Apple? Why do you find it delirious that Apple supervises it’s store?
Mcneel should supervise its store too. Food4Rhino in this case. And they actually do! Because it a service by Mcneel.
So like I said, is it their job to keep that place tidy, not the user’s. Users should not go around administrating the Food4Rhino site and chasing developers around to fix their stuff, to actually offer what they claim to be offering, to create tutorials or a how-to explanation, etc. This is Mcneel’s job.
Free plug in out there, no explanation how to use it.
“Hey you, user! First say thank you, and then mail the developer to see if they are so kind to explain how to use the plug in.”
No. Mcneel should enforce at least a short “how-to” explanation on every developer.
Sure, this has allowed this kind of stuff:
Free wild animals are not good. For an animal to be free it needs to be domesticated first, if not, it will do what wild animals always do.