AppStore Takes a Bathroom Break
4:58 pm, December 14th, 2008, Lonnie Lazar
Seems like the big news over the past few days at the AppStore tends mostly to the questionably mature, if not downright asinine.
First, the re-emergence of Pull My Finger, an ingenious application that produces the sound of flatulence, generated over 200 stories in the Apple web-osphere yesterday. After initially rejecting the app as something with no discernible utility, Apple has reportedly sorted out how to handle this particular genre of application, according to Pull My Finger’s developer.
Then there there was the implication of either uncertainty or perhaps some discrimination with respect to apps intended for “mature audiences,” with developers of apps rated 17+ finding they cannot – as of this writing – issue promotional codes that other app developers were recently given to enable easier review and testing. Apple has described the restriction as a “minor glitch” that should be resolved shortly, according to a report at iLounge.
Finally, also on Saturday, the application Poo Price made its debut. Poo Price counts time while you’re doing your business on the toilet at work — and tells you how much money you made during that time “working” based on your salary. What price good humor, eh?
The interesting thing about Poo Price, though, is that it may be an example of an app that works in the background, in violation of the SDK’s prohibition on such functionality, according to a piece at Venture Beat.
Amid recent concern that Apple may have given Google preferential treatment in approving the search giant’s voice search application for sale in the AppStore, and discussion over SDK restrictions that appear to be keeping Flash off the iPhone in any meaningful way, concern over how Poo Price keeps its timer going even when the user switches out of it while, say, checking email in the restroom, may not be the most pressing thing on many people’s agenda.
As MG Siegler writes for Venture Beat, Poo Price “is probably just another crude app in the new, racy App Store.”
Posted by Lonnie Lazar in News, Software, iPhone | Comment on this article
Regarding keeping the timing running in the BG — it’s simple. There is no timer running. When you turn the timer on and exit the program, the program writes the current time into its preferences file, and makes a note that the timer is on. Next time you open the app it sees that the timer was on, and finds the time difference since the stored time.
goosesensor, on December 14th, 2008 at 6:37 pm