Moving on

[Joe Hewitt]

Two years ago I jumped headfirst into the iPhone ecosystem, investing
my entire career in Apple's devices, their operating system, and their
SDK. After witnessing the way Apple treats its developer community, I
no longer feel that 100% is the correct percentage of my career to
have invested in their platform.

So I've decided to move on to a new project at Facebook which is not
iPhone-related, and handed off responsibility for the Facebook iPhone
app to another engineer. Facebook will continue to develop and
maintain Three20, as it is the backbone of our iPhone app. We're also
looking into transferring Three20 ownership to the Facebook company
Github account so I'm not a bottleneck for the project.

This is a good time to reflect back on things I could have done better
with Three20. My desire to share as much code as possible has turned
the project into a grab bag of random components without a clear
vision. Each time I wrote some potentially reusable code for the
Facebook iPhone app, I added it to Three20 without considering where
it fit in the big picture. At worst, this leads to situations like
Apple rejecting apps because of some debugging code I left in, and at
best it leads to a framework in which developers who only use 20% of
the code must deal with complexities they shouldn't need to
understand. If I were to start again, I would probably break Three20
up into multiple projects. TTStyle, at the very least, should be off
on its own. The categories should probably be moved out of the global
headers so they don't pollute everyone's namespaces. Many of the half-
baked views and controllers should be removed until they can be
stabilized. And of course, documentation is sorely needed. Facebook
will continue to devote resources to Three20, and so I have hope that
these improvements will be made. If not, it's open source, and as
I've learned with past projects (Firebug and iUI), it doesn't take
long for new project leaders to come along and pick up where I left
off.

Thanks to everyone who has contributed and become a part of the
Three20 community.

- Joe

[Kevin Elliott]

Really sorry to see you go Joe, but I do understand. Most of us are just as frustrated with Apple. I look forward to seeing the great stuff you'll put out in other areas in the future.

-Kevin

--
Kevin Elliott

Mused in the Apple iTunes App Store

[Adam Jack]

Thanks for all you contributed.

regards,

Adam

--

Share Wildlife: http://wildobs.com

Wildlife iPhone/iPod Touch Applications: http://wildobs.com/about/iphone

[Justin Searls]

Congratulations, Joe!

I agree heartily with your sentiments. Having an application rejected
for an arbitrary reason was tough, but seeing Apple start issuing
carte blanche rejections of Three20 projects was truly dismaying.

I plan to continue to work with Three20, build on it (with projects
like TTResource), and patch my fork as needed to keep up with Apple's
OS updates. I'm also happy to continue supporting others and
responding to their questions here, privately, and on StackOverflow.

Because of your news, I'll anticipate and look for opportunities to
better document Three20. Like you indicated, hopefully Facebook (or
some other white knight) will ride in and split the project into more
cohesive modules.

Good luck in your next endeavor!

Thanks,

Justin

[Edward Benson]

Joe,

Thank you for all of your contributions to this project. It has
provided an excellent start to "the missing library" that Apple forgot
to ship.

With regards to Facebook, open source, and continued development on
Three20, do you think there is any way we could organize a community
IRC chat with you and the new maintainer to discuss the trajectory of
Three20 and brainstorm ways in which we as a community could organize
ourselves?

Regards, and best wishes on your new project,
Ted

--
Edward Benson
http://people.csail.mit.edu/eob/

[Mike Cohen]

Thanks for all of your work on Three20.

[David Morford]

Thanks Joe. Your efforts hit the sweet spot for many experienced Cocoa developers.

Many thanks and bright futures,
David

[Meiwin Fu]

Thanks for sharing Three20, it's great contribution to iPhone
development arena.

Best luck for your new project!

Sent from my iPhone

[Gabor]

Thanks for all your hard work on this Joe!

Gabor

[Matt Vague]

Joe you've made my life a lot easier, thanks buddy

[Matt Vague]

And that was NOT meant to sound sarcastic

[Imthiaz Rafiq]

Thanks for sharing Three20, it's great contribution to iPhone developer community.

imthiaz rafiq hm
http://imthi.com
Joan Crawford  - "I, Joan Crawford, I believe in the dollar. Everything I earn, I spend."

[Eelco Lempsink]

Joe,

Good luck with your future endeavors, you'll be missed here ;)

--
Regards,

Eelco Lempsink

[Sascha Konietzke]

Thanks for all your efforts Joe. Three20 is a great project, it really
is THE missing library for the iPhone, the part that Apple forgot to
ship. It was hard to understand at first and documentation was
missing, but I learned a lot about good coding just by studying the
source code.

Good luck for your future projects.

Sascha

[Felipe Navarro V.]

Thanks Joe for all.... But as a new Apple-developer, I can't avoid
to think about your decision.

--
Felipe Navarro V.
fnav...@gmail.com - felipe....@unibo.it
DEIS - Universita' di Bologna

[TylerWeir]

Thanks for everything you've done Joe.

Best of luck with your future endeavours.

Tyler

On Nov 11, 6:27 pm, Joe Hewitt <joehew...@gmail.com> wrote:

[Seventoes]

Thanks for all you've done Joe, Three20 made my programming life a
little better. Apple needs other prominent developers to follow your
example to give them the motivation to fix their stuff...

On Nov 11, 6:27 pm, Joe Hewitt <joehew...@gmail.com> wrote:

[Roberto Inetti]

Thanks Joe and best of luck!!

[winter]

Excellent work done by Joe without this we will never deliver the
project we are working on.

With that said we need to sit-down and brainstorm what we can do to
get three20 into a more automatic mode - my another vision is to have
a similar library for Android under similar API/fashion.

[Alec Flett]

On Fri, Nov 13, 2009 at 12:55 AM, winter <yellow...@gmail.com> wrote:

Excellent work done by Joe without this we will never deliver the
project we are working on.

With that said we need to sit-down and brainstorm what we can do to
get three20 into a more automatic mode - my another vision is to have
a similar library for Android under similar API/fashion.

+1

As an aside, knowing very little about android, what are options for ObjectiveC programmers? Anyone done any research?  I'm a python guy myself, but there are definitely features of the TT* APIs that I'd love to see replicated elsewhere... 

Alec

[uprise78]

It would be a beast of a project to port three20 to android. I would
love to see it though.

On Nov 13, 9:21 am, Alec Flett <al...@flett.org> wrote:

[Neal]

Good luck in your future projects, and thanks for making Three20 an
open source project.
As a newbie iPhone developer this project has been of tremendous value
to me.

Neal