Broken Record
One of the nicer ebook readers Eucalyptus is being rejected because it’s connected to the internet for content and one could manually search for and download The Kama Sutra.
I suspect that no-one at Apple knows how genuinely torturous the app store approval process is for developers personally after a rejection. When they hold the key to the only distribution pipe for something you’ve spent a lot of your time on - in my case a year - something you’re hoping could provide you with a livelihood - and polite email enquiries are not replied to - not even with an autoresponder, it is extremely frustrating.
I am so sick of this stuf. It scares the hell out of me that app signing and approval might leak onto the desktop. God I hope Pre and Android are good and force Apple to open up a bit. This is so lame.
Posted on: May 21, 2009 – 1:24 PM | Comments (0)
Postage is sexy
Grats to the guys at RogueSheep for their release of Postage.
Postage for the iPhone allows you to easily create beautiful electronic postcards from your photos and send them by email to your friends and family. Whether you are traveling, celebrating a holiday, announcing an important life-event or just having fun with your photos, Postage allows you to keep in touch while you are on the go.
You have to watch the screencast. The application is extremely polished and looks very sexy. It inspires me to do better with my own UIs.
Posted on: May 14, 2009 – 10:44 PM | Comments (1)
Super Cocoa Week is upon Philadelphia!
Between the Cocoa Programming Foundations Workshop that we (ie: Philly Cocoa Heads) are running this and next Saturday, all of the meetings and planning days preparing for the class, and our monthly Cocoa Heads meeting on Wednesday this week shall be proclaimed as Super Cocoa Week.
Posted on: May 7, 2009 – 12:40 AM | Comments (0)
Clipstart 1.0
Congratulations to Manton Reece of Wii Transfer and Core Intuition fame for the release of his new app, Clipstart.
Clipstart complements your photo application to give you a place that is designed for home movies. Import your movies, tag, search, and upload with one click to Flickr and Vimeo. You can even quickly upload a trimmed portion of a movie without needing to save a new copy.
To get familiar quick I recommend checking out the screencast.
When you do install it, it will search your hard disk for movies. For me the oldest movie files it found were the dancing baby and 3D Homer. Man I remember those from my first computer.
Posted on: May 4, 2009 – 4:14 PM | Comments (0)
iPhone apps can’t require desktop apps?
On Friday, May 1st, I called Apple Developer Technical Support to find out what was going on with the review process, and to see if my earlier comments had been received. They then told me the shocking news that writing an iPhone app that requires a desktop “companion” app was prohibited.
I say this is shocking since I have seen many, many other apps in the store that require a companion app (including Apple’s own Keynote Remote). When I mentioned this to the support person, he said that Apple could not comment on that. When I asked to speak to whoever approves or denies the applications, he told me to send an email to the same team which hadn’t responded to me in a week.
I have to be honest, while I want to start work on an iPhone version of ProfitTrain, stories like this scare the hell out of me. Particularly since you can’t get your app approved until you’ve spent months working on it.
In other news, Trent Reznor’s own iPhone app was rejected for some vague reference to his song “The Downward Spiral.” Not the song, a reference to the song. WTF.
Please Apple, fix this approval system!
Posted on: May 4, 2009 – 1:54 PM | Comments (2)
Multiplex hits 1.0!
Congratulations to David Martorana and the rest of the guys at IndyHallLabs for their 1.0 release of Multiplex.
Mutiplex is an application that helps your organize your ripped DVDs in a very visual way.
If you are a local developer be sure to stop down to Philly Cocoa Heads May meeting to see David demo some of the WebKit <-> Cocoa stuff they use in Multiplex to achieve those very custom views.
Posted on: May 1, 2009 – 11:45 AM | Comments (0)
Z
Every time I need to peak into a Core Data sqlite file I’m constantly tormented by all the Z prefixes.
ZAPPDATA
ZINVOICE
ZSERVICE
Zthe Zzs. Zthey zare zall zi zthink zabout.
I hope there is some cool story behind it all. Like there was once a developer on the core data team before its launch in 10.4. He was a vibrant young developer by the name of Zed. Tragically his head a splode when he was told they were going to ship without a migration tool. He died. They named the tables in his honor.
In other news have you ever noticed how all the iTunes urls have MZStore in them? Yeah that was me. I wrote the original iTunes Store prototype. Well that’s what I tell people anyways. Then again I am a shallow, shallow man who demands attention and will lie to get it.
Posted on: April 29, 2009 – 8:24 PM | Comments (1)
HIG Violations
This toolbar will get your iPhone app rejected from the store. It’s a HIG violation, because the middle icon too closely resembles Apple’s standard history/recents icon (seen in Apple’s Phone application, for example).
Or at least that’s what they told me.
This is Tom’s work around:
This was his wife’s suggestion:
LOL.
In all seriousness I think the new version looks better anyways but wow, I didn’t know Apple’s was being this picky in the approval process.
Posted on: April 24, 2009 – 3:22 PM | Comments (2)
Capo 1.0
Congratulations to Chris Liscio for the release of his new application Capo.
What is Capo?
Capo is a musician’s best friend. It lets you slow down your favorite songs, so you can hear the notes and learn how they are played.
I’ve played around with it during the beta. The app is polished; has a slick UI and great keyboard shortcuts, making it easy to use while holding your guitar (or other instrument).
Posted on: April 21, 2009 – 4:54 PM | Comments (0)
Another App Store waiting game story
Apple is creating an ecosystem of the kind of customers I don’t want. With the ridiculous approval process leaving bugfixes to take over a week to show up, with prices being driven down to nothing by farting apps… it just feels hostile to me. While I have plenty of great customers who have been raving about the app, all it takes is one little issue and it all comes crashing down.
Really sad story here. I feel for the guy. I’ve been burnt by serious bugs in release versions of my apps. Having to wait to distribute the fixed version would have killed me.
Compound this by fact that we can’t reply to reviews and things get really messy.
Posted on: April 21, 2009 – 2:11 PM | Comments (1)
Hi. My name is 