iPhone - page 449

An iPhone application developer has upped the ante on criticism of Apple’s App Store approval policies with apprejections.com, a website devoted to collating “all the known examples of rejected Apps.”

Adam Martin, CEO of UK-based Red Glasses, makers of three iPhone apps (and a software development start-up with a curiously thin web presence), created the site earlier this month to document and share all known examples of “what is actually rejected” from the App Store — and he pulls no punches in his critique of Apple’s process for deciding which apps and updates make it onto the iTunes App Store.

“Apple has a secret, undocumented, unquestionable, random process for deciding which applications to “allow” onto the deck,” claims Martin on the site. Ironically, his own BrainGame Summation (iTunes link) app had an update rejected this week for using a common workaround to bugs in the official Apple APIs; the worrkaround previously appeared to pose no approval problems but has apprently been the basis for several recent rejections.

“Apple point-blank refuses to document the criteria – or even to discuss the matter on anything except a case-by-case basis,” Martin writes, though he does allow that “in most cases, rejections [are] perfectly reasonable, and/or Apple had officially warned developers “don’t do this; we won’t allow it”.

But the site does take App Store gatekeepers to task for being, among other things, “unskilled staff [who] are given a technical tool (the secret static-analyer) [sic] which they don’t understand – but trust 100%, [causing them to] reject apps that haven’t done anything wrong, but which the tool (incorrectly) flags.”

Martin acknowledges that the fledgling site has only just gotten started, but writes that he’s “been following reports on app-rejection for over a year,” and aims to catalog everything unusual and unfair about the mysterious process for joining the 100,000 (and growing) iPhone apps available now on iTunes.

It’s now gone from “easy” to “tricky” to avoid having your App rejected by Apple, according to Martin.

4iThumbs is a $14.95 overlay for the iPhone screen that provides tactile feedback when using the on-screen keyboard. It has little bumpers placed right above the virtual keys that provides the feedback.

If you previously owned a Blackberry, typing on an iPhone might be a pain for you. Even though the on-screen keyboard is pretty responsive, it lacks the tactile feedback that you get on devices like BlackBerry Storm 2 etc. Now with 4iThumbs, you can fill that gap. The company boasts that the typing experience should become much better within just hours of use. As an extra feature, it also acts like an anti-glare screen protector.

However, it doesn’t look like an ergonomic option. The overlay is required just while typing and becomes a hindrance when doing other stuff like playing games. Thankfully it’s removable but taking it off and putting back on every single time is even worse. Also, carrying an extra screen every time in the pocket isn’t something that people like.

Currently, it’s the only option if you are looking for a way to have tactile feedback from your iPhone keyboard. Even though their commercial depicts just the portrait version, a landscape version is also available.

via Engadget

Tired of all the ringtones the iPhone comes with, and can’t stomach loading a Kenny Chesney tone onto your phone? Here’s your salvation: The ringtone upstarts at San Francisco-based iRingPro are tossing out free goodies for Thanksgiving — namely, a free, tri-pack sampler of their sangfroid-inducing ringtones.

We ran a post in August pointing out what makes these quieter, more civilized tones so cool.

The sampler includes one ringtone from each of their three theme packs: Zen, Tek and Origin. The last is my personal favorite of the three, as the complete tone is split into three pieces and plays progressively with each ring.

The theme packs are $9.95 for anywhere from 22 to 31 ringtones. The free sampler is, well, free.

AppShopper has the full list of iPhone/iPt Apps on sale for Thanksgiving.
Highlights include:

Terminator Salvation : The official game — $0.99 (normally $4.99) App Store Link
Brothers In Arms Hour of Heroes — $0.99 (normally $4.99) App Store Link
The Sims 3 — $4.99 (normally $6.99) App Store Link
SimCity — $2.99 (normally $4.99) App Store Link
Trivial Pursuit — $2.99 (normally $4.99) App Store Link
Wolfenstein RPG — $1.99 (normally $2.99) App Store Link
Command & Conquer Red Alert — $6.99 (normally $9.99) App Store Link
Star Trek — $0.99 (normally $1.99) App Store Link
CoPilot Live North America — $19.99 (normally $34.99) App Store Link
Scrabble — $2.99 (normally $4.99) App Store Link
Tetris — $2.99 (normally $4.99) App Store Link
Shoppee — Free (normally $2.99) App Store Link

It’s dangerous and illegal, but I like listening to music when I’m riding my bicycle. Nothing like a bit of techno to get the blood pumping on a foggy morning. Trouble is, sound-isolating earbuds — the ones you jam deep in your ear canals — can get you killed. They sound great, but they block that firetruck running a red light with sirens blazing.

Altec Lansing’s Backbeat 906 Bluetooth headphones, which have great sound quality, don’t isolate you from the environment, and best of all, have no wires. Paired with an iPhone, they can be used for music and phone calls, even on the bike.

It’s vey liberating. Once you go wireless, it’s hard to go back.

Here’s the Top 5 Secrets for making a killer website to showcase your iPhone app, courtesy of the WebDesignerWall blog.

“To compete with thousands of iPhone apps in the App Store, having a good app icon is not enough. A nicely designed website for the app is very important. A beautiful website helps to drive traffic in and also makes your app stand out from the crowd.”

Here’s the list:

• One Page — Your app’s site should be one page. No more, no less.
• iPhone Image — Use an image of an iPhone running the app as the main design element. Drop shadow or reflection optional.
• Apple App Store Badge — The download button should be Apple’s App Store badge. Easy to spot and instantly recognizable.
• Animated Screenshots — All sites show screenshots of their app, but animated screens show it in action.
• Display Pricing — It’s frustrating for prospective customers to not know the price up front.

Link.

More Thanksgiving iPhone app sale action.

At 8:00am ET tomorrow, the CoPilot Live turn-by-turn GPS navigation app will go on sale for $19.99. The app is normally $35 and has got generally good reviews. Gizmodo calls it the best cheap GPS app (it has some quirks, but what do you expect for $35? I mean $20?).
The app features pretty 3-D maps, text-to-voice directions and monthly map updates. Maps are stored locally on the iPhone/iPt (weighing in at about ~1.3GB), which means no blackouts in the boonies.

The sale lasts all weekend. The app is fully functional, the company says, and there’s no additional fees for updated maps.

App website.
iTunes link.

The iLingual app is clever translation software that speaks foreign phrases with video of your mouth saying the words. Launch the app, snap a picture of your mouth (or someone else’s) and hold the iPhone in front of your mouth. The software animates your mouth to make it look like you’re actually talking French (or German and Arabic). Well, sorta.

Either way, it’s a lot of fun and it’s free (sponsored by the Emirates airline). Great way to break the ice with the locals, who always appreciate tourists trying to speak the language. Watch the app being tested in Paris in the video above.

• iLingual French.
• iLingual German.
• iLingual Arabic.

Via 9to5Mac and Gizmodo.

George Dearing‘s three-year-old son got his hands on dad’s iPhone and – oops – found himself staring at the App Store. While it was still logged in to dad’s iTunes account.

It’s not just HDTVs that are on sale this Black Friday. Lots of iPhone developers are dropping prices for the holidays also.

App Cubby, for example, maker of the popular Gas Cubby app for tracking gas mileage, is dropping the cost of its apps by 30 percent through the Thanksgiving holiday. Several other developers have also temporarily dropped prices, including DOOM Resurrection and BeejiveIM.

A good way to track apps on sale is to check App Shopper’s “prices” view. There’s a lot of crap, but to spot the good stuff, keep an eye on an app’s icon. A good icon generally means a good app. A good icon

Here are some links for apps on sale:

• Gas Cubby — iTunes — AppShopper
• Trip Cubby — iTunes — AppShopper
• Health Cubby — iTunes — AppShopper
• DOOM Resurrection $2.99 — iTunes — AppShopper
• BeejiveIM $6.99 — iTunes — AppShopper
• Tipulator $0.99 — iTunes — AppShopper
• Mathemagics: Mental Math Tricks $0.99 — iTunes — AppShopper

Please let us know if you see other good ones we should highlight.

If an iPhone with Ocarina makes sweet music, how about three iPhones?
That may be the thinking behind a trio of iPhones (the third is peeking out from under the back — for some thumb action, maybe?) mounted to a laser-cut body found at the Maker meet-up in Japan.

No reports on what comes out when you blow into the mouthpiece, but the idea is sounds good, though perhaps not good enough to justify the three-device cost.

Via Make

Maybe you’re a budding musician working at a nightclub and don’t know what to do with all the misplaced iPhones left behind. Or maybe you’re just brilliant and a wee bit inebriated.

Either way, we figure this is how you might be spending your time (uh, just don’t forget to activate “Airplane Mode” on ALL the phones). And unlike other hey,-watch-me-turn-a-phone-into-a-musical-instrument performances, this one doesn’t seem quite so much like a peek into Bizarro World.

Next up: Chef Ramsey hosts a Hell’s Kitchen episode where the only cooking utensils are iPhones.

“You know, if you saute scallops on a non-stick iPhone screen, they won’t stick. That’s why it’s called fucking non-stiiiiiiiick!”

Ninja Assassin the movie is an anticipated Hollywood swords and sandals epic from James McTeigue, director of V for Vendetta, with a story from J. Michael Straczynski, the creator of Babylon 5 and the only Spider-Man comic in which Dr. Doom cries (though the artist allegedly came up with that last bit).

It’s also now an iPhone game, and a quite nicely produced one, at that. It might, in fact, be the bloodiest game to ever come to the platform, if that’s your thing. Seriously — you get measured on the number of successful decapitations per level.

This is what you’re about to ask: Is Star Wars: Trench Run so good that it’ll have you wondering how magically your iPhone becomes an X-wing fighter? Answer: No. It’s better — it’s actually so good, you’ll be trying to figure out why your X-wing looks suspiciously like an iPhone.

New on the App Store is Voices from the clever folk at Tap Tap Tap. You can guess what it does.

There are iPhone-controlled cars and beds — now one company plans to integrate iPhones/iPods in its wheelchairs for a new kind of accessibility.

Dynamic Controls developed a system to connect an iPhone or iPod Touch to the wheelchair system via Bluetooth; it mounts on an adjustable arm and has a recharger, too.

In addition to music and all the other stuff you can do with an iPod/iPhone that might come in handy — compass reading, maps — it has an app that can be used for some controls on the chair, showing chair information in real time, including speed, and a diagnostics feature for when things go awry.

“We recognized the iPhone has revolutionized the way people communicate and saw the opportunity to develop this solution for wheelchair users, taking full advantage of Apple’s ‘Works with iPod / Made for iPhone’ developer program,” Charlotte Walshe, CEO of Dynamic Controls, said in a press release.

Lee Kwok, a wheel chair user in Christchurch, New Zealand was also quoted in the presser, saying says he thinks it will be fantastic to be able to buy an off-the-shelf product that has so many features for powered wheelchair users: “Having access to mainstream technology via a wheelchair is a huge advantage.”
The new feature is expected to launch in April, 2010.

‘Tis the season: Italian magazines are chock full of ads for this sleek iPod dock and bedside lamp called “Diva.”

Designed by Dante Donegani and Giovanni Lauda for Italian firm Rotaliana, it’s an LED light and music system whose polycarbonate, anodized aluminum curves are all in the right places.

Clutter phobes will appreciate the retractable docking station and arm for the light.  The docking station, suitable for iPods and iPhones, has four 6-watt speakers, plus an FM radio and USB socket if you’d rather play music from a flash drive. The whole shebang can be commanded via an infrared remote control. She comes in black, gray or white.

At €360 euro (circa $535) one would have to offer molto proof of saintly behavior to Santa for this one.

They’re calling it the first “iPhone reality show,” and it was likely inevitable; with TV saturated by the likes of The Apprentice and Biggest Loser, the genre of reality show had to find a new home somewhere.

So for one week, from December 6-12, Italian-based Command Guru will stream all the shenanigans that result when a bunch of iPhone app developers stop being polite and start getting real.

Contestants will assemble from all over the world with the goal of developing a free, open source social-networking iPhone app, from idea to final product at the iTunes App Store. The contest will also let developers from around the world can chime in at any time to help, which should prove interesting.

More pre-contest excitement can be found on the contest’s Twitter feed, where Command Guru says it’s giving away one iPhone 3GS per week till the contest begins.

From the press release:

“There are over 100,000 Apps and millions of users who do not have any idea of how they are developed,” said Alessio Zito Rossi, founder and CEO of Command Guru srl. “The stork doesn’t deliver iPhone Apps! We will show the world how they are really born – live and streaming!”

Russell Davies does lots of things that are interesting, including, um, Interesting and Newspaper Club and a bunch of other stuff, but the other week he did a talk at the Playful event in London, culminating in this fabulous mock-up of an augmented reality game using an iPhone.

The idea is genius: you start playing the game with one tap, and after that you don’t have to look at the device at all. You walk around with your earphones in, and it alerts you with sounds when there’s stuff to interact with. This video explains it better:

SAP from russelldavies on Vimeo.

Uh, oh. Looks like there’s trouble in Android land. The rapid growth of Google’s smartphone OS is causing developers conniptions as they struggle to support multiple versions of the OS and different hardware configurations. With more than a dozen Android phones on the market, all the different configurations are leading to serious platform fragmentation, Wired.com reports:

“A slew of problems have made managing Android apps a “nightmare,” they say, including three versions of the OS (Android 1.5, 1.6 and 2.0), custom firmware on many phones, and hardware differences between different models.”

For users, it means buggy apps that sometimes won’t work on their hardware at all. One developer tells Wired.com that instead of concentrating on adding new features, he spends all his time making sure his apps work on all the different hardware and software configurations.

Looks like Google might be wandering into Microsoft territory. Microsoft had exactly the same problem with it’s now-discontinued “Plays For Sure” music-player platform, which became known as “Plays For Shit” because of the difficulty supporting multiple hardware and software configurations.

Just goes to show that there’s distinct advantages over owning both the hardware and the software, like Apple. Apple has released just three different hardware versions of the iPhone, and does a pretty good job of making sure most iPhone owners are running the latest software. In addition, the tightly-controlled App Store ensures a high-level of software compatibility. Even Android developers say its a good idea, according to Wired.com:

For developers, Apple’s autocratic ways may be frustrating, but they can pay off.

“Apple maintains an iron grip on what they do and there’s an advantage to that,” says Kelly Schrock, owner of Fognl, which has three apps on the Android market. “IPhone developers don’t have to worry about fragmentation and creating apps for the iPhone is much easier.”

Threadless, the online tshirt company best known for its community-designed apparel, is expanding into iPhone cases.

Threadless has teamed up with Griffin, the long-time maker of fine Apple accessories, to offer a pair of iPhone cases designed by members of its community.

The two limited-edition cases — Clouds within the Thunder by Joe Van Wetering; and Birds of a Feather by Ross Zietz — are both available now at Apple Stores for $34.99.

No word though on whether Threadless is going to open up iPhone case design to the masses. I’ve put in a call to Griffin PR to find out, and will update here.

I’ve often suspected the staff at Cult of Mac of being significantly more attractive than bloggers at sites that don’t care how attractive their bloggers are. And now I can prove it.

Eighteen-year-old English entrepreneur Ed Nash has come up with a 99-cent iPhone app that claims to use Fibonacci’s golden ratio to scientifically determine whether or not a face is aesthetically pleasing. Just snap a photo of the hapless subject, adjust the anchor points, hit the button and viola, instant decision.

Fit or Fugly’s App Store page suggests you use it “to break the ice at dinner parties.” Sure. But we’re going to suggest “the ice” isn’t the only thing that’ll get broken when your iPhone decides the girl sitting next to you is “fugly.”

We recently wrote about JBMJBM, LLC — a one-man app factory with 87 approved ones so far — on the eBay block for  $100,000.

Top-selling titles include Friday Night Lights, iSpy Game, iReferee, Pet Peeves (a social network for griping pictured above), iSexyRef2, Pro Rodeo Fan, Sit Up Counter and Shake 2 Count.

CoM had a quick word with owner Brice Milliorn about the sale, what’s next for him and how he sees the future of apps.

CoM: Was JBMJBM sold?

BM: No, I have not sold company or apps yet.  I am in talks with one guy about buying me out via stock, but it doesn’t look promising.

CoM: What plans to you have to sell it now?

BM: No plans to sell again, just going to continue doing what I am doing and do more freelance work as well.

CoM: What changes would you like to see in Apple’s app store?

BM: I don’t have a problem with Apple, you follow their guidelines you get things approved, simple as that.  The few items that I have had issue with them, they called explained, I fixed and it got approved.  I even wrote the number down and called the guy back a few times when I was having issues and within a few hours it was fixed.

CoM: Where do you think the future of app development is headed?

BM: I think the future of the iPhone is opening it up to Verizon.  That will be another huge influx of potential app buyers and I look forward to this happening.

I also believe all this hype on the Droid and all those other handsets that will ultimately never get to the level of the iPhone.  The only company to match the iPhone and better it is Apple itself.

I’m always wondering how many Onion vodcasts I’ll get though while waiting in line at the DMV before before my iPhone’s battery shuts down and leaves me staring at the back of the bald guy’s head in front of me.

Not only will Battery Gauge tell me that, say the folks over at Tap Mode, but it’ll also crunch the numbers and give you an idea of how long I have remaining for any of the other myriad activities the iPhone is good for, like audio playback, connecting to the Internet and yammering on the phone. It’ll also reveal how much standby time is left.

Battery Gauge figures all this out by monitoring your iPhone use, and apparently needs to watch you through just one single charge-cycle.

Not bad for a buck. Also works with the iPod Touch.

We’ve written before in this space about Apple’s unique status as a Muse to creative people. In fact, the initial impulse for this post was a search for striking pieces of art created on the iPhone.

Those are out there, too, in droves — and we’ll be featuring them soon in another gallery post.

Today, however, we bring you something we didn’t quite expect to find: a series of art pieces that shed a bit of perspective on the dark side of Apple.