Bikinis Mysteriously Disappear

It’s all in the news headlines again now — Apple is removing content from the App Store.  This time instead of my picture of a knife, Slasher, it’s “sexually-suggestive” apps.  I’d write a lot more on the subject, but I think my earlier posts accurately describe how I feel about it all.

Frankly I’m a bit surprised the apps were approved in the first place.  I remember the very first drafts of the App Store agreement explicitly disallowed sexual content.  But I’m sure some developers didn’t read it, or read it and didn’t care, and tried to put their mature content up there anyway… and then by some stroke of luck either Apple changed their policy, or chose to not enforce the rule.  Apps showing skin are bound to sell and sell very well, so it’s no surprise that once the door was opened the flood began.

And now the developers are in the same boat I was when Slasher got pulled.  I empathize with them.  It took me many months of unanswered emails and a couple of telephone calls that I thought went nowhere to get my app back online.  I doubt Apple is going to reverse course on this one, as the number of apps being pulled is way too large.  (But Apple has surprised me before countless times — they may do so again.  You never know.  But don’t hold your breath.)

In summary:  Apple should not be a censor based on content.  They have parental controls on the device.  Use those instead.  People also have filters in their own actions:  if someone does not want a sex app on their phone, simply do not download it.  Problem solved.  Next.  Move along…

Dates

Although the Macintosh Address Book Dates project is temporarily on hold for Mac OS 10.6 due to Apple bugs in the Address Book application, the corresponding iPhone and iPod Touch functionality in the Dates app is alive and well.  Dates v1.4 of is now available in the App Store and it works very well.  Some of the new functionality in the latest version:

• Revised to take advantage of OS 3.0
• The filtered list of only-contacts-with-dates now allows searching
• The filtered list of contacts has better localization for its right-hand side index
• App launch time is improved when the address book has many contacts
• It is no longer possible to navigate to an empty “Groups” tab if there aren’t any address book groups
• Operates in both portrait and landscape orientations

Address Book Dates & Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard)

Back when I started Artsiness there was no iPhone. I had the simple ambition just to publish a few of my side Macintosh projects. When the iPhone arrived, I started playing around a bit with it, and before I knew it, it was the sole focus of my time. I originally thought the phone would be a side-side project to the Mac. It is quite remarkable that the phone commands the majority of my time, and the Mac is the side-side project. But I digress.......

Now that Mac OS X 10.6 is here, I went back to update my Mac projects to ensure they worked properly. All Druthers needed was a simple recompile (and a few internal type changes) to be compatible. Address Book Dates, however, has been a different story entirely.

It turns out that Address Book has some bugs. I filed bug reports with Apple of course, but alas, they were not fixed for the final 10.6 build. What this means is that I’m now stuck in a situation with no satisfying resolution. My options are:

A) Simply finish up the Address Book Dates changes and publish them with known bad bugs

or

B) Do not put out Address Book Dates for 10.6 until Apple fixes their bugs

I’ve chosen to go with option B. The bugs are extremely bad. (For example with Birthdays, the Address Book does not tell me the real birthday date so all calculations are completely wrong.) About the only good thing I see is that the existing Address Book Dates product does not work at all in 10.6, so if you do have old plug-ins lying around, they will not give you bad results either.

In the past, Apple has traditionally come out with an update relatively quickly after the initial OS release. Hopefully my bugs will be addressed promptly and I can then have Address Book Dates on 10.6. Until then, if you have an iPhone or iPod Touch, you can use Dates to keep up with birthdays and anniversaries and such.

Meteorology v2.0

At long last, Meteorology v2.0 has been approved on the App Store. Apple has been bragging recently about how after an App submission, it takes “only 14 days” for most to be approved. What they don’t say is that if an app is rejected, it takes yet another 14 days, so as a developer you’ve pretty much lost an entire month worth of sales. (That’s if you’re lucky and it isn’t rejected a second or third time...)

Meteorology v2.0 was rejected only once, so for that I guess I was lucky. And the rejection was for a nit-pick item—I’m glad I fixed it, of course, but for something so minor I would have rather had the App on sale and then fixed it with an immediate (ok, not immediate, it would take two weeks for approval) update.

Back to Meteorology, in case you missed the first version: Meteorology displays comprehensive animated weather radar maps from the NOAA National Weather Service (www.weather.gov).

Stickum

In a major step forward, OS 3.0 gives the iPhone and iPod Touch the ability to copy and paste. With Stickum installed, it is easy to make lists of frequently used copy and paste items. With a simple tap, instantly copy an item from the Favorites list and it is ready to paste into any other app.

Stickum shows the contents and structure of the current pasteboard, as well as saved favorite items, and allows for editing of the information as well. It is a breeze to change the content of copied text, add a new image from the photo library, or even modify a copied URL.

Slasher is back!

Hooray!

I just received a call from Apple. Slasher is now available again on the App Store. It took a few months of unanswered emails and a couple phone calls to finally be heard. Frankly, I’d almost given up. But now it’s back!

App Pirates

As I feared, piracy is fairly rampant with iPhone/iPod Touch apps. Last night I received an email for Artsiness technical support requesting help with my well-received port of Mystery House. I put in a bit of code to detect when the App is being played illegally. I let the game play regularly for a few turns, then it nefariously ends prematurely with a note prodding the user to actually purchase the game. The user clearly ran into that situation and wrote to ask why it happens. Perhaps I should have made the end-game notice a little more obvious. But either way, I find it interesting that someone will both take the game without paying for it and try to get support from the author.

It provides me some satisfaction that the piracy-detection code is doing its job. It looks like I will be adding that in to all future products.