We sometimes complain about government limitations on our freedom. We sometimes complain about misuse at the hands of big corporations.
But there’s just nothing like both of them conspiring together. Read all you can about PROTECT-IP and SOPA and then call your representatives.
Tumblr is a good place to start.
What’s the scariest communication a developer can receive from Apple?
From: App Review
Subject: Python Math: Application Submission FeedbackHello Terry,
My name is Cathy and I’m writing on behalf of the App Review Team at Apple.
I would like to talk to you about your app.
At your earliest convenience, can you please give me a phone number where you can be reached?
It’s bad news, as I suspected.
An audit of Python Math, my most successful app, shows that it violates developer agreement paragraph 2.7 because it allows users to download and execute software from the internet. I don’t know why this was overlooked in the review process. The description of each new capability was very clear as I incrementally added them. But sloppiness of their review process is no defense.
I must remove iTunes file sharing and any other method for transferring scripts from outside the app. The Apple rep told me that the only acceptable scripts are those that the user types into the app. That’s nice for learning a little bit of Python, but makes the app unusable as a real tool.
Is it worth spending any more time on a scripting app into which the user cannot easily transfer scripts?
This is a potentially very serious usability problem with iOS 5. Read Marco Arment‘s blog about the change in how iOS 5 handles the Caches directory.
Personally, I always leave at least 1G free on my 16G iPhone. That seems mandatory now. How do we get the word out to all iOS users until Apple fixes this problem? Or perhaps Apple doesn’t think this situation is likely to result in the kind of disappearing files that Arment fears.
In commenting on the iPhone 4S launch, John Gruber of Daring Fireball and Horace Dediu of Asymco hit the proverbial nail on the head.
Dediu correctly identifies the real market for the new iPhone 4S. Hint: it’s not the media who were underwhelmed by the announcement.
Gruber wonders what more you could have wanted in an “iPhone 5.”
A million of us agreed and pre-ordered an iPhone 4S on October 7, myself included.
We can’t stand the truth and Ron Schiller was fired from NPR because of it. He said, “Frankly, it is very clear that we would be better off in the long run without federal funding.”
It is a violation of our God-given, constitutionally protected, right to free speech that one form of speech, NPR, is favored over another, say Fox News.
Surely anyone who recoils at funding a particular church, the Baptist Church for example, will also object to favoring one source of news and information over others.
I appeal to my Congressman, Brian Higgins, to honor his responsibility to defend the US Constitution by defunding NPR.
The 5-year old Dell died with a struggle. It was getting “thermal events” up until the end. We tore it open. The inside was mercifully clean of dust. We had stopped at Best Buy to pick up a can of compressed air on the way to my sister-in-law’s house. Amazingly, the compressed air wasn’t needed. I complimented her on keeping a very neat house.
There appeared to be no way to resurrect it. Or, perhaps it would be more accurate to say that a new laptop appealed to my sister-in-law more than the potential cost of handing it over from amateurs to professionals with professional fees.
She is a typical non-geek computer user. She thinks that the favorites stored in IE are actually in her Yahoo home page. She wouldn’t be able to tell a Word from an Excel document. Hopefully, that is the future of most computer users and we can soon all forget this esoteric, geeky stuff about printer drivers and Office vs Google Docs, etc, ad naseum.
iTunes music, crossword puzzle programs, favorites, cookies, and a few documents. That’s all we had to rescue from the hard drive. Let’s make it really easy for her, we thought. Let’s hook her disk into one of our computers, boot from it, run the Microsoft Settings and Transfer Wizard, and we’re done. But no. Microsoft detected an activation error and wouldn’t let us log into her account.
OK, Microsoft. You win. I don’t want to fight your activation battles anymore. We had already ordered her a Windows 7 Lenovo laptop for less than $500. That is the last PC I’m buying or recommending. It’s Apple MacBooks, Mac Minis and iPads for all my friends and relatives from now on.
Ina Ruwa Free Weather v1.2 is now in the app store. It has been upgraded to support fast app switching when using iOS 4. Advertising comes from Apple’s iAd network in place of AdMob’s ad network.
Ina Ruwa Premium Weather is also now available in the app store. It provides the following additional features:
Because of my concern for the viability of MonoTouch for App Store apps, I’ve rewritten Ina Ruwa in Objective-C. That’s why there’s been no updates for so long.
Ina Ruwa has been renamed “Ina Ruwa Free Weather” and has been upgraded to support fast app switching when using iOS 4. Advertising will come from Apple’s iAd network in place of AdMob’s ad network.
Coming soon is a paid version, “Ina Ruwa Premium Weather.” As submitted to Apple, the premium app provides the following additional features:
I’ve lots more features planned for the paid version, but I wanted to get something out there ASAP. If you have a special request, please let me know.
Both the free and premium versions were submitted to Apple for review yesterday.
Joe Konrath is running an experiment concerning ebook piracy. Read “Steal This Ebook” on his blog.
I first heard of Joe Konrath from Mike Masnick’s article on Techdirt. Konrath has written extensively about dealing with ebook piracy here, here and here. Now he’s putting his livelihood on the line.
Not having had a chance yet to read any of his books, I can’t yet recommend them. But I like his attitude and moxy. I purchased the Amazon Kindle edition for my iPhone and downloaded the zip file as well. When you buy a book on Amazon, you’re really only renting it for as long as Amazon doesn’t erase it and continues to support the platform. So I appreciate the zip file.
A $1.99 rented book is cheaper than a rented iTunes movie of which I often partake for those long sleepless red-eye flights. A good book is always better than a mediocre movie.
I wonder if the Netflix model would work with ebooks.
Many bits have been spilled on the alleged changes to section 3.3.1 of Apple’s iPhone developer agreement. John Gruber broke the story on Daring Fireball. Hundreds of articles, from sources as disparate as bloggers and the BBC, have written about it.
My personal plan for reacting to the alleged changes in 3.3.1 in the absence of any further information regarding MonoTouch is as follows.
Step 1: Complete the free version of Ina Ruwa with MonoTouch. Postpone paid app enhancements and other MonoTouch app development.
Step 2: Evaluate porting Ina Ruwa to Objective-C. To that end, I’ve purchased and received Jeff Lamarche‘s iPhone dev books: Beginning iPhone 3 Development: Exploring the iPhone SDK
Step 3: Download Android SDK; evaluate porting Ina Ruwa to Java, not MonoDroid.
Step 4: Make C# vs Obj-C vs abandon iPhone platform decision.
I hope this gets resolved positively in MT’s favor before I get to step 4 because I much prefer C#/MT/MD to Obj-C/Xcode. Presently, I’m not optimistic that is going to happen.
