Slashdot reports that VLC has been pulled from the App Store. Inevitably, the article is followed by lots of comments about Apple being some kind of Evil Big Brother, utterly ignoring the fact that it was pulled due to VLC developer Rémi Denis-Courmont being a bit of a dick about a perceived clash between the GNU General Public License and the App Store terms of use.

Still, I’m not terribly sad. All iOS devices lack the storage for loads of on-board video and VLC was a bit iffy anyway. If you’ve a PC or Mac lurking about the place, I instead highly recommend grabbing a copy of Air Video (£1.79, App Store) or StreamToMe (£1.79, App Store), both of which enable live-to-iOS-device streaming and conversion of files accessible to your computer. It’s a bit annoying leaving a computer on, but these apps offer a hugely flexible system, and they also (assuming you have the right leads) provide a simple way to get content from a drive connected to your Mac or PC to your TV, just by using an iOS device.

I’m personally also hoping that 2011 will bring full AirPlay support for third-party apps, enabling converted content to be fired wirelessly to an Apple TV, or, if Jobs decides that’s the Worst Idea Ever, for the apps to be used as a remote to control the same app running on another device. AirPlay’s great, but it gets old wandering across the room and finding a fiddly virtual button to pause a movie when the dog decides he needs a wee.

A dev chum noted that Angry Birds is becoming the new Tetris, not in terms of being a classic piece of game design (Angry Birds is fine, but a cute semi-random take on ancient Apple II game Artillery welded to some physics-based destruction is a far cry from Alexey Pajitnov’s beautifully elegant endless puzzle game), but in how it’s being ported to every platform under the sun (along with becoming a set of plush toys, a board game, an animated movie and, presumably soon, designer toilet paper and an automated dog-walker).

The funny thing is, while what love I had for Angry Birds has waned through a combination of massive overexposure, the discovery of better, similar iOS games (hello, Castle Smasher!), and the fiddly and overprecise nature of many of the game’s later levels, I found myself enjoying it more on the Mac (where it’s already topping the Mac App Store charts).

The differences are very slight but nonetheless important. First, the reset control is always on-screen, making it far quicker to reset a level. Since Angry Birds is largely reliant on semi-random flinging of annoyed avians and often requires many attempts to complete a level, this makes progress quicker and repeat plays less irritating. Secondly, the addition of a cursor and mouse control on a large monitor actually improves the game. I’m surprised I think this, because I initially thought the game was well-suited to iOS. However, the visual cursor makes it easy to repeat a shot or make subtle tweaks to a previous aim, compared to trying to remember where you had your finger on a glass screen. I’d sooner see every version of Angry Birds provide a ‘ghost’ marker regarding where your previous shot was taken from, but the pointer on the Mac release is a decent half-way house.

TechRadar reviews the Samsung Galaxy Player 50. I’ve long been amazed that while companies are clamouring to rip off the iPhone (and, more recently, the iPad), none have really taken on the iPod touch. And yet Apple’s iPhone-without-the-phone is a breakout hit, especially with kids, where it’s often replacing a DS or PSP, or with people happy with a simpler mobile phone but eager to embrace mobile apps.

So, given that Apple hugely rips off the entire world when it comes to pricing, surely Android wins through, right? Spoiler: TechRadar thinks the Samsung Galaxy Player 50 is utter shit.

The review notes that you get some extras over Apple’s device, notably a microSD card slot and built-in GPS; also, it’s £40 less than the equivalent iPod touch. But, like so many others competing against Apple, Samsung’s tried ticking off checkboxes on a specs sheet rather than polishing what really matters to the majority of consumers. For example, the screen boasts a miserly 240 x 400 pixels (pathetic compared to the Retina display on the Apple device and similar screens on Android phones), lacks a front-facing camera and also cannot record video in HD.

Amazingly, TechRadar found things got worse when they started using it:

It spends the majority of its time crashed when you try to launch apps, or even when you just wake it from the lock screen. It’s unusable in the sense that you are completely unable to use it.

Quite how such a device managed to score 1.5/5 is beyond me, but with other reviewers having similar problems, something is becoming clear: Apple isn’t entirely the Apple of old. Its kit isn’t cheap by any means, but it’s more aggressively priced than you’d think. This is perhaps the real reason why we’ve not seen dozens of iPod touch clones, and also why most of the incoming Android slates that aren’t total garbage are as pricey—or even more expensive than—Apple’s iPad.

Call me naïve (“You’re naïve” – World), but I thought the age of the rabid Apple fan was on the decline, possibly replaced by a new brand of crazy army: Love Android Or Die. And then I wrote Mac App Store UI is so hideous that it makes me want to kick a swan, which spread fairly wide and attracted the loving gaze of those who feel the need to coddle Steve Jobs in cotton wool.

What’s interesting is the lack of balance in many of the comments, despite balance existing in what I wrote. While I laid into the UI of the Mac App Store (which I think is a perfectly justifiable thing to do, given that it’s awful) and the lack of UI care in general at Apple since the days of brushed metal, I also said the process of buying apps “seems flawless” and that “Apple’s also done some extremely aggressive pricing on its own products, which is great to see and should encourage more people to buy rather than copy software”.

The measured, calm response from a surprising influx of commenters included gems such as “You’re a fucking idiot and a shitty designer”, and my personal favourite:

You people wouldn’t know good design if it turned into a swan and kicked you back in the balls. Apple has hit another HOME RUN with the mac app store and you people just don’t get it.

I’m sometimes guilty of rushing to the defence of Apple, but I certainly don’t believe the company is above criticism, even in its best products. The iPhone 4 is an amazing piece of hardware. It’s convergence that truly works, with a perfect screen, great camera, decent videocamera, and so much functionality that if you took it back to the 1990s and showed it to someone, their head would probably explode. But the glass back is an odd decision, the antennae break placement has caused problems for many users, and proximity bugs mean that while the iPhone 4 is generally a fantastic handheld device, it can be a shitty phone that cuts off calls.

Had everyone just kissed Steve Jobs’s balls, Apple would have gone away smug and happy. But they didn’t. Instead, Apple got (admittedly over the top) criticism, and I bet the majority of flaws in the iPhone 4 will be gone in the iPhone 5. That device in turn will likely have its own exciting new flaws, which people will criticise, and that will be dealt with for the iPhone 6, and so on.

The same is true for all other Apple products. Many perceived holes in iOS were fixed in iOS 4.x, and Steve Jobs said that many of the changes were due to user feedback. Updates to iPhoto were driven in part by user demand and criticism. And so with the Mac App Store, it makes perfect sense to complain and criticise when you see something that doesn’t work as you’d like it to.

Clearly, I and others who hate the UI might be in the minority. If that’s the case, our wishes will vanish into the ether. But maybe users will love the weirdo toolbar but complain that prices are indistinct on the entry pages, and perhaps enough criticisms along those lines will tip the balance at Cupertino. Regardless, constructive criticism is one of the things that helps Apple improve its products, and many Apple fans (and fans of other companies) need to realise that critique is not the same as attack; instead, it’s often helpful, beneficial and useful.

Tim Morgan has similar thoughts to me about the Mac App Store, adding that the back/forward buttons don’t stand out (unlike in Safari), meaning many users will consider them greyed out, and the login sheet has irksome wording and poorly considered design elements:

Firstly, “Billing Info” is a noun and button names should generally be verbs or verbal phrases. (What am I doing with my billing info when I click this?) Worse in my mind, however, is the “Forgot?” hyperlink. I’ve been seeing hyperlinks (or faux-hyperlinks) pop up in applications here and there and I’ve never been a huge fan of it in desktop applications. Much like on the Web, these hyperlinks come in different colors, sizes, and styles; here in the App Store it’s just blue text (not even underlined!) that could easily be mistaken for a plain static text element (especially by the colorblind).

Morgan also dismantles the new Twitter 2.0 app’s UI, exploring its many odd decisions and trying to decide if it’s good that devs are experimenting or whether they should conform to standards. John Gruber also offers an excellent take.