Some perverted unfiltered online content. No wait, it's the Apple website! And in an app that enables access to unfiltered content, but doesn't have to worry about review copies and 17+ ratings: Safari. Because Apple's hypocritical like that.
Apple recently announced that 1.5 billion apps have been downloaded from the App Store. With the dodgy approvals process alienating developers, you’d sometimes think Apple reckons it got where it did alone, without the people actually making the apps. Now, the company’s gone one step further, cleverly shooting itself in the foot (and developers in the face), thereby trying everything it can think of to screw up its lead and give the competition a sporting chance.
After all, surely Apple wouldn’t be quite so stupid as to ban all promo codes for 17+ rated apps? But that’s the story on TUAW, punching in the gut an already broken system (given that Apple has yet to provide non-US App Store account holders with an official means of redeeming promo codes). (See also: Q & A: How Sex Game Apps Get Approved By Apple)
You might think “so what?”, since, clearly, the only things rated 17+ would be dodgy ‘porn’ apps, right? Well, no. As we reported, Eucalyptus—an eReader for Project Gutenberg content—was saddled with a 17+ rating recently, due to it supposedly allowing ‘unfiltered internet content’. (In practise, Apple was seemingly miffed at the app enabling access to the text from Kamasutra, despite, say, Safari enabling access to hard-core pornography websites.) This means the 17+ rating is likely to affect some or all updates for all web-oriented software—Twitter clients, web browsers, IM clients, Flickr clients, eBook readers, RSS readers and so on.
Promo codes don’t generally affect the public. Although they’re sometimes given away by developers, they’re usually used by writers and journalists as review copies. Without promo codes, 17+ apps run the risk of not getting mainstream coverage, meaning they’re far less likely to ‘break through’ and become a sales success. (Contrary to what you might think, most publications don’t in fact have a ‘budget’ for writers to buy software, and many outlets enforce a policy of strictly not paying for review copies. When you’re reviewing hundreds of apps, those dollarpoundeuros stack up pretty fast.)
Here’s hoping Apple has a change of heart, because the App Store already has enough problems, without Apple making things worse, not only for developers and reviewers, but for users (who won’t find out about great new 17+ apps) and themselves (since sales will be lower).
Are you a Gmail person? With more than one @gmail.com account? Thought so. How many times have you thought how much you like Gmail but felt frustrated by one aspect or another of the limits (mostly time and productivity-oriented) imposed by working with email in a web browser?
Yup. Well, guess what? There’s an app for that.
Mailplane brings Gmail to your Mac desktop and unleashes power and productivity you’ve only wished for in Google’s excellent mail product.
We’re only just now checking Mailplane out, but with support for:
# Drag and drop attachments
# Multiple Gmail accounts
# New mail notifications
# Easy screenshot sending
# Gmail shortcuts
# Integration with OmniFocus,
our first impressions are that Mailplane is well worth giving a more extensive test drive. It’s got a 30 day free trial and we’ll be giving you our more extensive review in about a month.
If you check Mailplane out, be sure to let us know what you think about it in comments.
Let the Good Times Roll? The Love Dice App on iTunes
After our story on peek-a-boo apps, sexy content OK’d by Apple despite the smut ban, a reader wrote in to say we missed a whole genre: sex game apps.
(You can read a Q&A about how sex games get approved with James Miller of Trichotomy Media about their Naughty Loaded Dice app here).
Sexy dice are full-contact party games that — much like the real-world equivalent — are intended to boost lagging passion or tease friendships beyond platonic lines.
While the premise is as old as spin-the-bottle, the apps are feather caress away from violating Apple’s policy about “no inappropriate content” apps for sale on iTunes.
Surprisingly, of the half-dozen sexy dice apps available, some are deemed suitable for ages 9 and above for “infrequent/mild/mature/suggestive themes,” others are rated 17+ for “frequent/intense/mature suggestive themes.”
Naughty LOADED Dice is a sex dice game, one of the “foreplay” apps that nudged past Apple censors (see our round-up here). There are half a dozen similar sex games available on iTunes, but Naughty LOADED Dice may be the only one to exploit iPhone technology for sexual content — allowing users to secretly control the roll of the dice.
The game (whose title excludes the word “loaded” after download) has a secret menu that allows him or her to select their preferred combination. When playtime comes, the user can play normally with his partner, or press a secret hidden “button” to activate a fixed roll of the dice. The ruse makes use of the iPhone touchscreen, which allows developers to create buttons on screen that are invisible.
Despite rumors that Apple censors would nix the app — in part for its menu trickery — it was approved for sale in the iTunes store July 3.
Cult of Mac spoke to James Miller, Director of Marketing for Trichotomy Media, about the murky process of getting the app approved, Apple’s ambiguous stance on promo codes for +17 apps and why his company’s next apps won’t be for adult audiences.
CoM: What was your experience in getting your app approved? JM: Getting Naughty LOADED Dice approved wasn’t the trial by fire that it seems other apps with “racy” material had, but it sure seemed to have something fishy to it. I read that other developers who submit apps with very simple functionality get their apps approved in a few business days, a week at most.
Ours has very simple, self-contained functionality and it took more than a month (to get approval). I had already talked to my PR contacts about how we submitted our application, expecting it either to have taken only a week or just get rejected outright for the content.
Full interview and pic of the app’s secret screen after the jump.
UPDATE 2: Edge Lite’s now also gone. Some stores report Edge still available, but it’s certainly not on the US or UK stores. I guess Killer Edge Racing had better watch out, given that Langdell’s website has a Flash movie for the game Racers (which we suspect will never see the light of day).
UPDATE: At the time of writing, Edge Lite remains on the App Store, carrying an irony stick. So either someone missed the lite version or it really is all about the money. Which would be a huge shock, obviously.
We yesterday reported on the feud between Mobigame, makers of excellent iPhone game Edge, and EDGE Games, a company owned by Tim Langdell, who seemingly claims ownership over the word ‘edge’ in relation to any kind of gaming.
Edge by Mobigame - now no longer available from your local App Store
As stated yesterday, this ongoing battle has raged since April, and although compromises have apparently been suggested by both sides (indeed, Mobigames offered to rename their game Edgy, but Langdell then almost immediately registered that trademark himself), no agreement has been reached. More absurdly, Langdell contests that Edge wilfully ripped off ancient EDGE 8-bit videogame Bobby Bearing (and named it Edge to suggest the name of Langdell’s ‘famous’ trademark!), despite that game being a clone of Marble Madness and Edge playing almost nothing like Bobby Bearing.
Sadly, Edge is now again gone from the App Store, seemingly removed without warning (unlike the first time round, when Mobigame temporarily pulled the game voluntarily, in the hope of coming to a satisfactory agreement with Langdell).
Mobigame’s David Papazian told Cult of Mac: “We did not pull it. We don’t know exactly why it has been pulled [and] we don’t know if the game will come back. Maybe it will in some territories, but it does not depend on us. We are as surprised as many people, I think.”
“Making Edge took nearly two years of our lives, We hope the happy few who played it had a great time. We don’t know what to do now, and we cannot believe this is really happening. But we will probably have to fight since we strongly believe the law is on our side.”
Pre users will have to stay with version 8.2 to sync with iTunes
UPDATE: the original headline and a reference to “wireless” syncing in this article have been changed to correct a misunderstanding on the author’s part.
Apple has confirmed that Palm Pre will no longer be able to sync with iTunes versions beginning with the latest update, killing a sales feature that Palm had long relied upon in billing its phone as a major competitor to the iPhone.
“iTunes 8.2.1 is a free software update that provides a number of important bug fixes,” said Apple spokeswoman Natalie Kerris, in a BusinessWeek report Wednesday. “It also disables devices falsely pretending to be iPods, including the Palm Pre,” she continued, adding, “As we’ve said before, newer versions of Apple’s iTunes software may no longer provide syncing functionality with unsupported digital media players.”
For a device roundly touted as iPhone’s most worthy competition in the smartphone market, Palm’s Pre has not made many waves since being released on June 6 by Sprint, and remains hampered by an online app store with very little product.
There is some disagreement among analysts about how well the Pre has been received so far by the market, with some crowing that expectations have been more than met, while others say not so fast.
While the news of iTunes’ Pre lockout is no surprise, and Palm could still easily craft workaround allowing Pre users to sync with newer versions of iTunes, including using third party solutions to do the job, the lockout news is further evidence that Apple is not about to let up the pressure on a company now run by some of its former employees.
As flash memory and solid state drives steadily become the storage media of choice for portable electronic devices, Apple’s iPod Classic – the device widely credited with kickstarting the company’s rise from the ashes of the John Scully era – may not survive to celebrate its 10th birthday in 2011.
1.8 inch hard disk drives manufactured by Samsung and Toshiba, the last two manufacturers standing in a once-robust market for small, high-capacity spinning disk drives, sit languishing in the supply channel, according to a report at Ars Technica, and industry trends do not bode well for the future of Apple’s signature gadget.
When Apple launched the first iPod in 2001, the hard disk was the only vehicle capable of storing large amounts of data flexibly at reasonable cost. Since then, however, advances in Flash memory and SSD technology have made those two storage options the industry standard for everything from netbooks to iPhones and the entire line of Apple’s portable music players, with only the Classic continuing to rely on the 1.8″ HDD.
The trend toward Flash memory and SSD technology has been building for at least the last couple of years, with Apple having been ahead of the curve when the company introduced its Flash memory-based iPod nano in 2005.
SSDs typically offer higher performance–often much higher performance–than hard-disk drives and are more durable since they have no moving parts. While the larger question of where the technology is headed remains somewhat in debate, in large part over concerns about data’s long-term reliability in SSD storage media and Flash memory’s eventual degradation related to writing, erasing and re-writing its memory blocks, the fate of the 1.8 inch HDD seems dire.
The industry’s current disdain for small-form HDD products, and Apple’s apparent design trajectory for its mobile PMPs and handset devices, suggest the time has come to prepare farewells for the iPod Classic.
It's Bobby Bearing, an 'isometric' arcade game from 1986!
Sort-of-UPDATE 3: And for anyone wondering whether the games featured in this post really do use true isometric projection, Adam Banks discusses this in a blog post.
UPDATE: I spoke to David Papazian of Mobigame, who told us that during discussions with Langdell, with the aim of settling amicably, Langdell not only proposed conditions unacceptable to Mobigame, but also stated the company had set out to copy one of EDGE’s most popular titles, Bobby Bearing. When Mobigame mentioned Marble Madness, Langdell even claimed his 1986 effort was actually completed before 1984’s Marble Madness and that Atari’s game is the clone. (I myself interviewed Marble Madness creator Mark Cerny a year or so back, and given the nature of how that game came to be—it actually started life as a mini-golf game—I find it hugely unlikely that this could be the case, even when you don’t take into account the two or more years between the games’ release dates.)
During investigative conversations between Mobigame and Bobby Bearing’s creators, questions have been raised as to rights ownership, with the game’s creators claiming they own the rights, not EDGE Games; furthermore, they do not consider Bobby Bearing and Edge similar games, which, having played both, I entirely agree with. Even on a superficial basis, there’s little similarity, bar the viewpoint.
Compromise was almost reached in May with Mobigames saying they’d rename their game Edgy in some territories, but discussions broke down, culminating in Langdell registering that trademark himself in the USA. Here’s hoping the ‘macho posturing’ doesn’t lead to Edge being removed from the store again. The $4.99 effort is one of the finest titles we’ve played this month. [Edge App Store link]
Oh, how we all love you, Tim Langdell. You sit there on the IGDA (International Game Developers Association) board, and boast about your 30 years of experience in the gaming industry. And yet you seemingly spend your life suing the crap out of anyone with the audacity to use the word ‘edge’ in gaming, due to trademark ownership relating to your videogame company, EDGE Games.
For this reason, Mobigame’s Edge was pulled from the App Store in May (it’s now returned), and Langdell now has his sights set on console game Edge of Twilight (no, we’re not kidding, sadly). Unfortunately, he’s also not quite done with the Edge iPhone game.
On Twitter, Mobigame reported “Tim Langdell is threatening us again… is this love?”, and a report on FingerGaming notes that Mobigame’s David Papazien says Langdell’s now not only affirming his rights to the Edge trademark, but claiming Edge ripped off an ancient EDGE game, Bobby Bearing. Sorry for the italics, but this statement actually make me nearly choke on my cup of tea.
I’m somewhat oldish, and I remember playing Bobby Bearing. (I also remember paying ten quid for the cassette version and discovering that the idiots at EDGE had shipped it entirely without sound—thanks, Tim!) In fact, here’s a screen grab, taken from C64 gaming website Lemon64:
On the face of it, you might, if you hadn’t actually played the games, argue that Langdell has a point. Both games use an axonometric projection viewpoint, commonly referred to as ‘isometric’ in the games industry. Also, both have you controlling a small geometric character around a blocky, retro-oriented videogame world where you can move reasonably freely in several directions.
But wait! I’m sure I’ve seen something like this before somewhere…
Hey, kids! It's Atari's Marble Madness, from 1984!
Oh, look! A game with an axonometric projection viewpoint, where you control a small geometric character around a blocky, retro-oriented videogame world where you can move reasonably freely in several directions! From 1984! Plus, when you actually play Edge, you realise how little it has in common with Bobby Bearing (and, indeed, Marble Madness) anyway…
Having done some digging, it wouldn’t entirely shock us to discover that Langdell’s aggression and, well, ‘jerkness’ are in part down to Bobby Bearing Remix for iPod touch being on its way. But with Edge already being available and great, the fab Marble Madness due soon for Apple portables (and Atari’s iPod touch games being rather good) and Bobby Bearing these days being slightly less fun than being repeatedly punched in the face by someone wearing an extra-large boxing glove stuffed with a brick, we’d suggest, Tim, that you put your energy into actually making your old, tired IP into a decent game, rather than suing the perceived competition. And here’s another free tip: just try suing Atari over Marble Madness. (No, really, please do, because it’d be really funny and we’d love to see you try.)
Here’s a neat little iPhone app for all you typography nerds: Typography Manual is a pocket reference book for everything you could wish to remember about fonts and typefaces.
Better still, it’s more than a reference book. It’s a toolbox as well, with a font size calculator, em calculator, conversion tables for switching inches and millimetres into points and picas, and a list of HTML character codes. If none of those things mean a thing to you, don’t buy Typography Manual. But if they do, you might find it hard to resist. It’s only five bucks.
My favorite review is the last one on the testimonials page: “One of only a handful of programs I’ve seen on the iPhone that hyphenate properly.” (And yes, I know I’m using straight quote marks there. I know, I know.)
The MacBook Air is thin, sexy machine, but you wouldn’t want one smashed into your chest during a car accident.
That’s what happened to this MacBook Air above. It was sitting in a man’s lap when the airbag went off and crushed it into his chest, bending the lid like a Taco. Amazingly, the computer still works, but it left a MacBook-shaped mark on the man’s chest. The man is lucky — the MacBook Air is thin enough to slice through bread and human flesh (see the pix after the jump).
“He does have a bruise that matches the leading edge of the MacBook Air,” says Dana Stibolt, president of MacMedics, the Maryland repair shop that’s attempting to fix the machine.
Stibolt says the man had the MacBook Air open in his lap as he sat in the passenger seat. When the car was involved in a serious smash, the airbag deployed and “pushed the top edge of the MacBook Air (where the camera is) into him, and then kept pushing from the bottom of the hinge area effectively crushing it on his chest,” says Stibolt. Ouch!
The picture on the screen – which looks like a black-and-white mountain — is the pattern of the broken LCD.
Stibolt is hoping to replace the screen — the rest of the computer seems to work fine. More at MacMedics.
Apple has disabled AT&T tethering in the latest iPhone beta released to developers on Tuesday.
The iPhone OS 3.1 beta 2 disables a popular tethering hack for the AT&T network. The hack works on iPhone 3.0, even though AT&T does yet officially support it.
The hack enables data tethering (and sometimes MMS) by altering the iPhone’s IPCC carrier files. It’s easily enabled by visiting sites like BenM.at using mobile Safari on the iPhone.
AT&T has promised tethering later this year, but has yet to release details. The company is expected to be enabled in late summer and cost about $15 extra.
And these children that you spit on
As they try to change their worlds
Are immune to your consultations
They’re quite aware of what they’re going through. – David Bowie
One day, people may point to an article published Monday at PCMag.com (perhaps the preeminent Windows-foucused tech magazine around) by long-time Apple-baiting columnist John C. Dvorak, as a signal for the storming of Microsoft’s figurative Bastille.
“If I was going to buy a new laptop this minute, a MacBook Pro is probably what I’d get,” are words almost no tech watcher of the past 20 years would ever figure to come from Dvorak, the smart, engaging veteran columnist who has taken over the years a nearly perverse glee in stirring up the bee hive of Apple loyalists in tech journalism.
But that’s exactly what Dvorak had to say after seeing first-hand “all these whiz-bang features” of his son’s brand-new MacBook Pro that, he said, “make me realize that I have fallen behind.”
But don’t go thinking Dvorak has fully consumed the kool-aid or that his enmity for Apple will abate completely anytime soon. The real reason he’s kindly disposed to an Apple product at this point, aside from “that hard aluminum unibody that makes the thing feel like a rock,” is a piece of software his son required, DEVONthink, which organizes and sorts PDF files into manageable database blocks – and has no Windows-based counterpart. “It’s about as close to a killer Apple app as anything I’ve seen since VisiCalc in the late ’70s,” he gushed.
Of course no Dvorak piece would be complete without a pointed jab at something Apple, and he dutifully reported his son’s experience at the Apple Store as something akin to “a car dealership in the ’70s, with layers of various salespeople, each trying to screw you.”
“I actually think that the Apple Stores are barriers to sales, and people only buy Macs because the machines have clearly moved ahead in genuine usefulness,” he wrote, saying, “overall, it’s a pathetic indictment of the entire PC scene.”
Well, perhaps it’s a reach to tar the entire PC scene with the same brush, but clearly change is in the air and more and more people such as Dvorak’s kid are coming around to just how far Apple machines have moved ahead.
It’s at least a bright sign that someone like Dvorak has finally noticed.
Here’s a quick follow-up to my last Camino screencast. In this short video, I’ll show you how to get a little more control over your windows and tabs while using Camino.
More screencasts are forthcoming. Got a topic you’d like to see covered? If I know something about them, I’ll be happy to explore your suggested topics. Give me a shout in the comments.
If you’re looking for an interesting portal into the iTunes App Store’s 65,000+ titles with as little risk as possible, www.appgiveaway.com may be a resource worth checking out.
The website, which launched this spring and is gaining traffic steadily, posts descriptions of 5 – 8 apps per day in different categories (games, entertainment, utilities, business, etc.) and gives promo codes away randomly to users who register and indicate their interest in particular apps.
The site was originally conceived as a marketing vehicle for app developers, with the enticement for iPhone and iPod Touch users who like the idea of possibly getting a paid app for free.
“We seek out developers and they also find us,” said Al Lijee, an AppGiveAway spokesman, adding, “Developers have been kind and posted us in forums and are linking back to us from their websites.”
Posted apps currently get between 40 – 70 people registering for promo giveaways, Lijee told Cult of Mac, and the site gives away around 30 codes for each app it features.
“A man contacted the police complaining that a tan American Eagle bag which contained “a Mac laptop and several novels” had been stolen from inside the Crescent Lounge. The man was extremely inebriated and had been thrown out of the bar after cursing at patrons performing karaoke. Police and staff could not find the bag.”
What it is: Daisy Disk is Mac utility software that, sadly works only on machines running OS 10.5 and later, because it’s the kind of thing that could make you want to investigate your hard disk daily.
Why it’s cool: The interface is just plain awesome. Daisy Disk scans any mounted disk and displays it on a beautiful sunburst map, where segments mean files and folders, and are displayed proportionally to their sizes.
The map is easy to read and navigate and lets you quickly preview any file and reveal it in Finder to delete.
It’s essentially like running the Mac’s built-in disk utility on your volume, but where’s the fun in that?
Where to get it: Download a free 15 day trial version or buy it outright for $19.95 from the secure online Daisy Disk store.
Macs continue to live on, long after they’re on the scrap heap –Â these vintage Apple logo earrings or pin are made by a woman whose family runs an electronic scrap business.
She plucked little plastic Apple logos (like the ones decorating the front of the 128K, though other Apple products had the rainbow logo, too) from devices bound for the dump.
This isn’t the first time we’ve run across ways to adorn yourself with Macs — including silver power button cuff links or earrings or, similarly pricey rings and pendants from keyboards — the ones above go for a modest price of $13.99 (earrings) or $8.99 (pin).
What’s the verdict: geek chic or unwearable e-waste?
Download the free Barnes and Noble App (iTunes link) for iPhone or iPod Touch and for a limited time you can get a free Tall iced or hot coffee at any Barnes and Noble cafe, just by showing your device running the app to a cafe server.
Nothing like a heartwarming story of triumph despite abuse: Wired.com scribe Charlie Sorrel chucked his 2G iPod Nano into the washing machine along with his fuggy gym clothes and socks. Oops!
Waterlogged and not responding to the touch of its frantic owner, instead of going for CPR Sorrel opted to follow reader advice and let the drenched device dry out.
A few days later? Well, it’s now responding to its owner, despite the fact he was all thumbs when it came to taking care of it.
My own negligence once led to waiting anxiously while a two-person rescue team pulled my second-gen device from under Milan’s metro tracks (where it fell as I was running to catch a train) — one reset and it kept on ticking for a few years, as if the fall had never happened.
With new rumors about the much anticipated Apple tablet hitting Monday, it seems fair to ask how one is supposed to decode the storms of speculation that have long whirled around the company and its products.
Some thrive on rumor and innuendo about Apple – the largely well-regarded Macrumors attracts over 6 million unique visitors per month, AppleInsider nearly a million – and with Apple’s penchant for absolute secrecy over its design department and product development it’s no surprise whispers and baseless fantasy comprise much of what passes for “news” about Apple.
If Apple really is coming out with a tablet in October, or AT&T really is going to open tethering to the US iPhone market in September (a persistent rumor AT&T continues to deny with respect to both price and timing), does it benefit anyone to know about it now? And if it turns out there is (again) no tablet, or that tethering comes tomorrow for free (you wish), how does that affect the way one is supposed to receive the next rumored news item about what they’re up to in Cupertino?
These questions are one small aspect of the larger debate about the ways news and journalism are changing in the Internet age. Traditional news organizations have been cutting resources for true investigative journalism for years, in favor of selling ads and eyeballs with cheap sensationalism, in part because it often seems that’s what the public wants, but also because it’s easier to publish a rumor than it is to get at the truth or to take time to think about and craft a well-reasoned opinion piece.
Monday’s rumor about the Apple tablet originated with a report at the China Times, which is no tabloid sheet, and appears to be based on information about companies high up in the Apple supply chain that a respectable news organization would be able to source and confirm before printing as news. Do standards of journalistic ethics prevail at major news organizations in Asia? Have budgets for investigative journalism survived the impulse to feed the public’s insatiable desire for knowing what the future holds?
The answer to such questions holds the key to understanding how to receive a report about what Apple has up its sleeve. What you believe comes down to whatever you can know for yourself and who you can trust to tell you the truth. Ultimately, no one really knows until the lights come up at the next Apple “event” – and, after all, anticipation is more intoxicating than feeling you already know what’s coming.
