Posts Tagged "AppStore"
Jobs’ Reasoning for Rejecting Political iPhone app
(This isn’t really a new story, but I didn’t see it get much coverage despite arguably being one of the more interesting iPhone app rejection stories – so I’m bringing it up now a week or two later)
“Freedomtime” is basically a countdown app that lets users track George W. Bush’s last days in office. It’s obviously designed to poke fun at the current US administration, but isn’t really overly offensive in my opinion.
The application was rejected by Apple, so the developer wrote Steve an email. Steve responded personally (in keeping with the semi-new communication strategy Apple has been making use of) with the following statement:
Even though my personal political leanings are democratic, I think this app will be offensive to roughly half our customers. What’s the point?
Steve
It’s an interesting response for several reasons. First off he voluntarily reveals his personal political leanings. Whilst it’s hardly a secret that Jobs is a supporter of the democrats (Al Gore is on Apple’s board and public records of political donations are easy to find) you don’t often hear CEO’s admit it in public for PR reasons.
In fact, Jobs actually spells out those reasons: Personal political preferences are not often brought up out of fear of alienating customers. But “personal” is the key word here – if Steve is deciding not to let his own political leanings sway him into approving the app for political reasons, shouldn’t it follow that an app also shouldn’t be rejected for purely political reasons?
By Apple’s standards, it would seem this app is objectionable, whilst the Barack Obama campaign app isn’t. I’d agree with that assessment as I’d wager most people would. But where do you draw the line? Does this mean that political apps are okay, as long as they don’t poke fun? Who makes the distinction between objectionable and non-objectionable political content?
Removing Apps for business considerations (Netshare, Podcaster) is one thing, but I think Apple is really skating on thin ice by rejecting apps solely by their content – political or otherwise.
(Screenshot and quote from the developers blog)
First look: WordPress for iPhone
This is my first post using the new WordPress application for iPhone.
Overall I must admit I’m quite impressed! The app downloaded all of my existing posts easily and whilst there aren’t any comment, design or page management features, it’s ideal for posting a quick update whilst on the go.
You can easily add images from your photo roll or new pics taken with the
iPhone’s camera to new or existing posts – something which I imagine will appeal to a lot of bloggers. Minor gripe: there doesn’t seem to be a way to specify where the images should appear in the text.
There are also no formatting controls, something obviously made difficult by the lack of drag selection on the iPhone. I could imagine that could overcome by support for markdown-style formatting.
But for a 1.0 product I think WordPress have done a stellar job.
Apple Push Notification Service: Bad news for indie devs?
So Apple took the wraps off of the iPhone 3G and the latest 2.0 firmware yesterday. But what I found particularly interesting was Scott Forstall’s brief explanation of how Apple is going to tackle the issue of background applications.
Basically Apple will rely on a data connection to their “Push Notification” servers to send messages to 3rd party applications with information that would normally be displayed by an app running in the background. For example: If you were to receive a new chat message whilst your IM client isn’t running, the IM service servers would notify Apple’s Push Notification servers, which would in turn send a message to the iPhone to add a “1″ icon to your IM apps home screen icon.
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