Where the heck were you when the page was blank?
Paul Butterworth
Please read the whole piece attached by Lucas Rockwell at 37Signals, and take heart.
Best email I’ve received in a while.
Apple's App Store Turnabout
I wrote my full thoughts on Apple’s recent App Store policy changes over on the MegatonApps blog. Let me know what you think, agree, disagree, or have questions you’d like me to answer!
Apple’s App Store Director Sells His Own Fart Apps
This is an absolute disgrace.
Phillip Shoemaker, director of applications technology at Apple, who runs the App Store process, sells iPhone apps in the App Store under the company name Gray Noodle. (UPDATE: Shoemaker updated and deleted some of his social networking profiles when informed of Wired.com’s story. See bottom of the post for more details and archived pages.) Titles include a fart app called Animal Farts (above, left and middle), a urination simulator called iWiz (above, right) and a refrigerator-magnet app called Medical Poetry.
Source: Wired
Thanks for making Multitaskers the #17 OVERALL grossing app. In Kenya.
(buy a copy here)
Source: i49.tinypic.com
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Multitaskers Gets Approved
Today was a breakthrough in our process with Apple. After resubmitting on June 19th the same version that we originally created to meet Apple’s requests on April 19th, 2010, Multitaskers was approved earlier this afternoon. It should be available worldwide on iTunes by tomorrow, and when it goes on sale, you’ll be able to click here to purchase a copy. While this is obviously progress, and while we can now offer users a useful toolkit of simple functions missing from the iPad’s suite of system apps, we hope that in the future we can release Multitaskers in its originally intended form. The approved version of Multitaskers is only allowed to show one function at a time, rather than being able to display and move many around the screen at once in order to create a personalized work environment. We still believe that our original vision would better serve iPad users across the world, but that in the meantime, something is better than nothing. We’d like to thank the many friends, colleagues, partners and clients that have stood by us while this story has unfolded around us. Although it’s taken a while, we’re proud to finally bring our first iPad app to the world. Despite this bumpy start, we know that great things are to come, and look forward to bringing our vision for quality app experiences to users across the world.
Source: megatonapps.com
Source: Engadget
Gruber: The Low Point of the Keynote
John Gruber hits the nail on the head in his WWDC wrapup piece. It’s worth pointing out that Multitaskers is actually 100% written in Cocoa, which is considered even more native and even more “kosher” than the web languages. We made that decision consciously as part of our pursuit to comply with every written guideline, which is the only thing a developer can do. We do take issue with one part of Gruber’s piece, that being the idea that Apple couldn’t account for this scenario. Dashboard-style apps and functionality were being openly discussed in a wide variety of outlets from the moment the iPad was announced, and had been available for sale for iPhone for more than a year prior to the unjustified decision to pull and obstruct the release of widget-style apps. One sentence in either the Human Interface Guidelines or the Developer Agreement documents would have been enough to keep us– and, we’re sure, many of our competitive colleagues– from beginning production on apps like Multitaskers in the first place.
It’s not the control, it’s the secrecy — that there clearly exist rules which are not written. The latest batch: “widget” apps for the iPad and iPhone. The written rules state that you must stick to the Cocoa Touch APIs and WebKit. So several developers created apps that let you display multiple simultaneous “widgets” on screen at once. Sort of like Mac OS X’s Dashboard, and sort of like multitasking, but using nothing more than WebKit — HTML, JavaScript, and CSS.
There’s nothing in the developer agreement guidelines to suggest these apps wouldn’t be allowed. But, they’re not. And the problem is that the developers who made these apps only found out after they had created the apps and submitted them to the store. Obviously Apple can’t write guidelines that cover scenarios it hasn’t foreseen; but once something new comes up, their policies to handle it should be documented publicly.
Source: daringfireball.net
Apple Kicking Google Out of iWorld
I think Battelle is on the money here, and it’s sad.
I think this is shortsighted and wrong. I also think it’s classic Apple. It’s a re run of the Us vs. The World mentality that forced the Mac into a corner back in the late 1980s. This time, Google plays the role of Microsoft, but it really doesn’t matter. Apple won’t let anyone play in their iWorld who might pose a competitive threat. This is all we need now - a major platform war, with marketers and developers having to pick sides, cost of development, ad serving, analytics, and marketing services at least tripled (one process for Android, one for iPhone/Pad/Touch, one for Microsoft or Palm/HP or…. ). That’s not what the web is about. It’s disheartening.
Source: battellemedia.com
Our Story - The Multitaskers Saga: MegatonApps
To keep updated on the Multitaskers saga as it continues to enfold, check out the special section of the Megaton website dedicated to providing you with up-to-the-minute information.
Source: megatonapps.com
We basically have no choice but to hire this guy to make ads for Megaton’s app in the future.
Source: youtube.com
In this video feature, we talk about what designing quality iPhone experiences means
by illustrating the issues with the recently-released Caesar’s Palace iPhone app and giving viewers an inside look at how MegatonApps designed a concept for CityCenter Las Vegas with these topics in mind.
iPhone System Apps Not on iPad
No one but no one is happier about this than me. Namasté, friends. I honor the place where your money and my hard work meet.
Ends up that just blowing up iPhone apps to fill the iPad screen looks and feels weird, even if you use higher-resolution graphics so that nothing looks pixelated. So they were scrapped by you-know-who. Perhaps they’ll appear on the iPad in some re-imagined form this summer with OS 4.0, but when the iPad ships next month, there won’t be versions of these apps. At least that’s the story I’ve heard from a few well-informed little birdies. (There is, alas, no secret “widget” mode for iPad in OS 3.2, either.)
Source: daringfireball.net
