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Over the past few days, Cult of Mac has closely followed Apple’s divisive decision to remove “overtly sexual” apps from the App Store. Some apps caught in the purge (such as videogame Daisy Mae and swimwear retailer Simply Beach) have been reinstated and others have not (notably iWobble). Although some welcome Apple’s puritanical stance, others (including this writer) claim Apple is being hypocritical in allowing Playboy and Sports Illustrated’s swimsuit issue to remain on the App Store, despite similar (and, in some cases, even less “overtly sexual”) apps being banned.

A developer writes to us and says this might all be academic soon: “Looks like Apple are adding a category called Explicit to the App Store,” he says, providing the following grab:

The developer adds: “It’s available for selection when adding a new app to iTunesConnect although I can’t see any sign of it in the actual App Store yet.”

Update: We’ve since been contacted by two sources that claim the category is gone. However, the information we posted earlier was independently verified by a number of other sources, some of which supplied other images, for example: Macworld, Recombu, 9to5Mac and MacRumors. Either Apple removed the category after it got widely reported after we broke the story or it’s only visible to some developers.

Update 2: The developer who originally contacted us says: “I can confirm that the category has been removed from iTunesConnect. Not sure what Apple was doing!”. Gizmodo corroborates this, quoting a developer who spoke directly to an Apple rep, who said that while the company is considering an explicit category “it’s not going to happen anytime soon”. Then again, knowing Apple’s back-and-forth approach on this subject over the past few days, it may well show up over the weekend. Make up your mind, guys.

Apple has quietly reinstated a shopping app from a beachwear retailer that sells bikinis.

As previously reported, Apple pulled the app by Simply Beach, an online beachwear retailer, as part of its great sexy apps purge over the weekend. Among other things, the Simply Beach app sold bikinis.

On Friday, Simply Beach received an email from Apple about the decision to remove any overtly sexual content from the store and that included the Simply Beach application.

“The email also made mention to numerous complaints they had received from customers regarding ‘this type of content’ and implied it was these complaints which had led to the changes,” says the app’s developer, Andrew Long. He added that Simply Beach thought this was a hoax.

A few hours ago, the Simply Beach app was again available on the App Store. Neither Long nor Simply Beach received any communication whatsoever from Apple, Long said in an email.

The same thing seems to have happened with Daisy Mae’s Alien Buffet, a 12+  rated game that was pulled presumably because it features a female lead character in short shorts. Like Simply Beach, the game is quietly back on the App Store. Again, there has been no communication from Apple.

It’s pretty clear that Apple’s doing damage limitation here, reinstating the high-profile apps, although iWobble is still banned.

Let’s face it: crushing disobedient flesh into a Dolce & Gabbana corset dress is easier than getting into one of their runway shows.

So the dynamic fashion duo has decided use the iPhone to broadcast 2011 women’s winter looks at two shows during fashion week in Milan. You can follow them with your iPhone here or, if you don’t have an iPhone try your buffering luck with Facebook, too.

iPhone fashionista followers won’t get that neck nasty cramp caused by gazing upward from first-row seats like D&G darlings J-Lo or Victoria Beckham, but you may have to get up early or sneak a peek at work.

Complaints from women are behind Apple’s recent purge of sex-themed apps, Phil Schiller told the New York Times.

Philip W. Schiller, head of worldwide product marketing at Apple, said in an interview that over the last few weeks a small number of developers had been submitting “an increasing number of apps containing very objectionable content.”

“It came to the point where we were getting customer complaints from women who found the content getting too degrading and objectionable, as well as parents who were upset with what their kids were able to see,” Mr. Schiller said.

Aerial footage of Apple’s massive data center in rural North Carolina clearly show how large the $1 billion complex is.

Shot recently by a local realtor, the footage shows a massive facility the size of a shopping mall.

Experts note that Apple’s data center will be among the largest in the world, rivaling centers run by internet giants like Microsoft and Google. The unusual size of the data center suggests that Apple is investing heavily in cloud computing. At 500-000 square feet, the facility is five-times the size of Apple’s West Coast center in Newark, Calif.

Apple has said little about the complex, except that it’ll be its east coast data hub.

The aerial footage after the jump:

UPDATE (23 February): The Simply Beach developer just emailed us to say that “Apple appear to have quietly reinstated the Simply Beach app this evening”. He notes that neither he nor his customer received any communication whatsoever from Apple.

Our recent articles on Apple’s decision to ban “overtly sexual apps” have caused plenty of arguments in the comments. Some (including your correspondent) think Apple’s being ridiculous, overbearing and taking a dangerous path in initiating a blanket ban on even extremely mild content, such as images of women (or, er, men) in bikinis. Others claim Apple should be applauded, and they can’t wait to see the back of apps with sexual content, no matter how mild.

However, Apple’s stance hasn’t only affected the likes of iWobble, as Andrew Long of software development company Exploding Phone explains: “One of our customers has fallen foul of Apple’s new puritan crusade—the crazy thing is, the customer is an online beachwear retailer, Simply Beach, that happens to sell bikinis via an online store and the accompanying iPhone app that we developed for the company.”

Andrew notes that Apple removed the app without warning. On Friday, Simply Beach received an email from Apple about the decision to remove any overtly sexual content from the store and that included the Simply Beach application. “The email also made mention to numerous complaints they had received from customers regarding ‘this type of content’ and implied it was these complaints which had led to the changes,” says Andrew, adding that his customer initially thought this was a hoax.

“Personally speaking, I think the decision is ludicrous, but to be honest not much that Apple does surprises me any more,” says Andrew, stressing that his views don’t necessarily reflect those of his customer. “As an iPhone developer you have to be prepared for the goalposts to shift unendingly and be as dynamic as you can in changing to meet the new way of life.” However, in this case, Andrew thinks it’s clear the content is not ‘overtly sexual’: “Apple has clearly been overzealous and inconsistent in trying to rid the App Store of ‘bikini blight’. It makes a mockery of the rating system, too, which is surely there to ensure that questionable content doesn’t get into the wrong hands.”

To add insult to injury, Andrew notes that his customer sells some of its goods through an Amazon feed, which is still available through the Amazon iPhone app. “And I’m sure if you searched that app for more fruity items, you’d find many images available which are much worse by the average person’s moral compass.”

At the time of writing, Apple hasn’t responded to our request for a comment. We also note that there’s not a total bikini ban—you can still get the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, perhaps because Apple didn’t want to piss off Time magazine? (Hat tip: Nicole.)

What you are looking at is a screenshot of the contents of the iPhone OS 3.2 SDK, and those circled files? Look at their names. That’s just About as clear an indication as there can be that a forthcoming iPhone, the iPad or both will be able to make video calls.

That’s not all. 9to5Mac has also dug up some references in some of iPad’s telephony applications of imbedded video chat strings.

Nicole reported on Friday that sexy apps have been pulled from the App Store, and I followed up over the weekend with Apple Censorship Reaches New Level of Stupid: Daisy Mae Pulled (FNAR!), a story about Robotron-style shooter Daisy Mae being removed because—horrors!—it has shocking content such as innuendo and a women in a pair of short shorts.

According to the developer of Wobble (which Apple seemingly considers an utterly filthy, disgusting and horrible app that enables you to add wobbly bits to any iPhone picture, which therefore has the potential to bring down civilisation as we know it, and not—as you might have thought—a little bit of harmless fun), prudes the world over will be delighted by the finer details of Apple’s stance.

After speaking with Apple, Wobble’s creator reveals that he spoke to Apple and was told what is now banned:

1. No images of women in bikinis (Ice skating tights are not OK either)

2. No images of men in bikinis! (I didn’t ask about Ice Skating tights for men)

3. No skin (he seriously said this) (I asked if a Burqa was OK, and the Apple guy got angry)

4. No silhouettes that indicate that Wobble can be used for wobbling boobs (yes – I am serious, we have to remove the silhouette in [the Wobble pics shown above])

5. No sexual connotations or innuendo: boobs, babes, booty, sex – all banned

6. Nothing that can be sexually arousing!! (I doubt many people could get aroused with the pic above but those puritanical guys at Apple must get off on pretty mundane things to find Wobble “overtly sexual!)

7. No apps will be approved that in any way imply sexual content (not sure how Playboy is still in the store, but …)

This explains why Daisy Mae got the boot—even if you ignore the ‘bikini’ rules, it would have breached rules 5 and 7. In other words, even innuendo is too strong for Apple when it comes to sex. We’d best set fire to Duke Nukem, GTA, The Sims, and a whole bunch of other games, then, including Vancouver 2010.

What this doesn’t explain is how Playboy’s so far escaped the ban, nor why Apple’s doing this in the first place. The App Store has a ratings system in place. Sure, it’s somewhat broken, but it’s at least there. There’s no reason why Apple can’t just enforce a 17+ rule for apps of this type and get on with things as usual.

What seems more likely is that Apple is using the claim that many people (who, frankly, need to get a life) have complained about ‘sexy’ apps (which, presumably, includes ones that aren’t actually sexy in the sense that normal people would use the word) to create a ‘safe’ (read: sanitised) environment for advertisers and education. In the former space, it’s clear advertisers—particularly in the USA—are often against being aligned with sexual content, no matter how mild. In education, there have already been cases where schools have ditched plans to provide students with Apple handhelds, due to them enabling access to smut. That said, with parental controls in every device and App Store ratings, Apple’s current decision seems absurd in the extreme, not least because the app that provides the fastest access to sex, sexual content, bikinis, innuendo, anything arousing, and implications of sexual content is Apple’s own Safari.

This one puts the “cult” back in “cult of mac:”  someone is auctioning off a broken piece of glass from Apple’s Fifth Avenue store on eBay.  It’s a step from the retail locale’s elegant glass staircase, to be precise.

“They replaced it with a new one after a customer dropped a Snapple bottle on it and cracked it. I picked it up before it could be thrown out over a year ago, figuring it’s a collectible.

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UPDATE: The gentleman in the video above is Daniel Eran Dilger, author of the Roughly Drafted blog referenced in the post below. I regret any confusion my failure to identify him may have caused. – Lonnie Lazar

Don’t just take Steve Jobs’ word for it. Full-time Flash developer Morgan Adams articulates good reasons why Flash should never come to Apple’s iPad and anyone interested in the Apple-Adobe conflict on the matter of Flash would do well to pay attention to his commentary.

Adams, an interactive content developer, wrote to the Roughly Drafted blog to explain in terms more measured than those used by Mr. Jobs with editors of the Wall Street Journal last week why Flash won’t ever work well on any mobile touchscreen platform:

It’s not because of slow mobile performance, battery drain or crashes. It’s because of the hover or mouseover problem.

Many (if not most) current Flash games, menus, and even video players require a visible mouse pointer. They are coded to rely on the difference between hovering over something (mouseover) vs. actually clicking. This distinction is not rare. It’s pervasive, fundamental to interactive design, and vital to the basic use of Flash content. New Flash content designed just for touchscreens can be done, but people want existing Flash sites to work. All of them—not just some here and there—and in a usable manner. That’s impossible no matter what.

Adams goes on to detail several fundamental incompatibilities between touchscreen operating systems and Flash content on the web, showing why current Flash content can never work well on a touchscreen platform.

In addition, workable alternatives exist for delivering the video content many wrongly believe is unobtainable without Flash, according to Adams:

imagine my embarrassment as a Flash developer when my own animated site wouldn’t work on the newfangled iPhone! So I sat down and made new animations using WebKit’s CSS animation abilities. Now desktop users still see Flash at adamsi.com, but iPhone users see animations too. It can be done.

UPDATE: Daisy Mae has returned to the App Store. It is unclear what if any changes have been made to the game. The game is currently rated 12+.

Nicole posted on the 19th that Apple is pulling ‘sexy’ apps, due to deciding that it’s operating out of a fictional puritanical Victorian utopia, rather than the USA. While Apple’s making the case by saying it doesn’t want porn on the iPhone, it’s now decided that ironic cartoon smut within a videogame is also a step too far. Yes, Touch Arcade reports that IUGO’s Daisy Mae has been unceremoniously pulled from the App Store, because—SHOCK!—it features a sassy cartoon woman with a penchant for short shorts as the lead character. Seriously.

***SARCASM WARNING!*** You know, Apple should really deal with this by coming up with some kind of system on the App Store for rating content, so you know whether an app is suitable for someone of a certain age. That would deal with games like this that you don’t want to warp fragile little minds (even though they almost certainly wouldn’t, because any kid with an iPhone who wants to look at boobs just needs to use APPLE’S OWN SAFARI)! ***END OF SARCASM WARNING!***

So, iPhone developers, the message is clear: don’t have any women in your apps unless they’re covered in some kind of burqa-style clothing, otherwise Steve and Tim and Phil will kill it until it’s dead (with virtual knives, guns, bombs and death-rays, all of which are fine, unless they are associated with any kind of vaguely risque clothing that’s within forty feet). And don’t even think of a game startting Jessica Rabbit, unless you turn her into an actual rabbit.

Apple’s policy on what constitutes content too risqué for the iTunes store vacillates more than one of those iBoob apps.

Case in point:  developer Jon Atherton says he received a letter that Apple pulled his wildly popular Wobble iBoobs app because Apple “decided to remove any overtly sexual content from the App Store” following customer complaints.

Now we’re really confused. Many of the apps that wiggled, jiggled or writhed past Apple censors in our last iSmut app story have been pulled (Bikini Ispector, Peek-a-Babe, Crazy Eights with Hooters Girls). But if they’ve put a firm hand on iJiggles, there’s plenty of exposed flesh still available on iTunes.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9LQNNv7MFLE

Lots of folks have proposed at Apple stores or even had Apple-inspired wedding cakes, but do you love Apple enough to say iDo there?

This might be the first couple to get hitched at an Apple retail without permission, flash-mob style, by a celebrant dressed like Steve Jobs who pronounced the solemn vows from an iPhone. The news was first tweeted by an Apple employee of New York’s Fifth Avenue store.

Steve Jobs unloaded on Flash during a meeting with Wall Street Journal executives last week, according to Gawker.

Jobs met with editors of the Journal to show them the new iPad. The Journal make widespread use of Flash on its website for video, infographics, etc., and editors raised concerns about the absence of Adobe’s plug-in.

According to Gawker: “Jobs was brazen in his dismissal of Flash, people familiar with the meeting tell us. He repeated what he said at an Apple Town Hall recently, that Flash crashes Macs and is buggy.”

Esquire magazine has a marvelous profile of film critic Roger Ebert, who has lost his lower jaw and voice box after several years of cancer treatments.

Having lost the ability to speak, Ebert is pouring himself into writing instead.

His astonishing online journal runs to more than 500,000 words on topics as disparate as his life, the afterlife (none-he’s atheist), alcoholism, travel, books, and friends, living and dead.

To communicate in everyday life, Ebert uses text-to-speech on his MacBook Pro, Stephen Hawking-style.

This is the sort of apocalyptically messy work room that any man can be proud of, but Flickr user Grant ups the ante for Mac fans because of the deliriously implausible and achingly retro home server housed within.

What you are looking at are three old school Power Macs : a 9600/200MP “Kansas” running Webstar 4 and RumpusFTP, an 8500/120 “Nitro” running MacHTTP and a Dual 450MHz “Mystic” with 1GB of RAM and a 30GB hard drive running OS X 10.4.11.

Those are pretty rad, but even better is what’s not in the shot: his Apple Newton web server.

Grant, we salute you. That’s just some amazing mileage you’re getting out of a garage of old-but-still-in-their-prime Power Macs.

[via MAKE]

Swede and Apple enthusiast Anders Norman saw his every possession melted and charred in a cataclysmic home conflagration that gutted his entire apartment.

The only item left standing? His aluminum iMac: dirty, singed, partly melted, but still cheerily humming along.

“Toy Story 3” director Lee Unkrich gave something for his seat mate to gawk at as he sat at 36,000 feet editing the latest animated tale of plaything adventures.

With not a second to waste — the release date is June 18, 2010 —  Unkrich worked on a MacBook Pro, with what looks like shortcut color codes for Avid Media Composer.  (Crane as I might, all I ever see are Excel spreadsheets. Need to get upgraded from Economy more often, perhaps.)

Apple products often feature in Pixar movies (perhaps in a nod to history?), the trailer for Toy Story 3 already has a nice bit of iProduct placement.

SAN FRANCISCO, MACWORLD 2010 — The guys at Topaz Labs thought business would be slow at the first Macworld without Apple, so they packed only 250 CDs of their software.

They sold out in the first few hours of the first day.

Worried it was just an opening-day rush, and that day two would be dead, they had just 250 more overnighted to their hotel. But those too quickly sold.

“It’s been awesome. I’m exhausted,” laughed Ivan Randall of Topaz Labs. “It’s been a great show.”

Almost all the vendors we talked to told the same story: Macworld 2010 has definitely been worth the money. Many had low expectations, but turnout has been great and business is brisk.

SAN FRANCISCO, MACWORLD 2010 — Programmer Bill Atkinson, one of the lead authors of the original Mac system, says the iPad will be a big success — and that you have to play with it to understand the magic of the multitouch interface.

“This guy is going to be a real winner,” he said, holding up a model he’d made for himself to visualize how his PhotoCard app would look on the device. Atkinson took part in Guy Kawasaki’s Friday morning keynote presentation.

“Once you get it in your hands and play with it you don’t want to set it down,” he continued. “I think Apple’s got a hit on their hands here.”

Atkinson said he’d played with an iPad for a couple of hours. It’s not a laptop and its not an iPhone, he said, but an entirely new, third device. The magic is in using your fingers to directly manipulate elements onscreen.

Returning to using a mouse is like using a remote control, he said — clumsy and awkward.

Our own lovely modern-day Beatrice, Miss Nicole Martinelli, made passing reference to the latest fad to grip South Korean iPhone owners earlier today, but just in case you missed it: they’re using a particular brand of snack sausage as iPhone styluses so they don’t need to remove their gloves in the winter.

The snack sausages, made by South Korea’s own CJ Corportation, are electrostatically compatible with the iPhone’s touchscreen…. and it’s apparently a useful enough solution to cause sausage sales to surge.

True, some might get squeamish at the thought of carrying around a cigarillo of unwrapped meat in their pockets at all times… but I think this is brilliant. On the other hand, this is perhaps the first practical way to merge both my Slim Jim and Apple hardware fetishes. Kudos, Korea!

Tech writer Leo Laporte didn’t quite buy the story that South Korean iPhone owners adopt snack-sausage stylus sticks to use their devices with gloves on in winter.

In the time-honored tradition of investigative journalism, he decided to check it out for himself. He didn’t happen to have a meat stick handy, so he tried an appropriately stylus-shaped cheese stick instead. (For the record, it was “chilly” and string cheese).

Cult of Mac reader Jason Guest got fed up with waiting for Apple’s latest device to hit stores, and so he made his own tablet—the iFelt.

UPDATE: See interview with iMussolini dev below.

Controversial iMussolini app was yanked from the Italian iTunes store a week ago, not for ongoing protests but for possible copyright violations of material from Italian state archives Istituto Luce.

The grim jawline of Il Duce has been reinstated in the iTunes store — now iMussolini, a mobile compendium of fascism, features  speeches,  a video selection (with a disclaimer), plus a section on fascist architecture and songs from his 20-year heyday.

It costs more than the previous version €1.59 (was €0.79. ) It’s also available in the US iTunes store for $1.99, in Italian only.

Cult of Mac asked developer Luigi Marino on how the app made a comeback.
Cult of Mac: So the copyright-contested video segments are still in the iMussolini app?
Luigi Marino: Yes. The videos are still there, my lawyer evaluated them in terms of copyright violation and advised me to keep them but add a disclaimer.

CoM: What does the disclaimer say?

LM: It says that the video footage is property of Istituto Luce. It also says that in no way does the app intend to praise fascism but is just a vehicle for recounting historical events.

CoM: What made you decide to put the app back in the store?

LM: I also made a few other new additions to the content in the meantime, too.

CoM: What do you think about the Holocaust suvivors’ protests of the app?

LM: I’m sorry to hear about the protests, I don’t think they understand what the app is really about. I hope they may take a closer look at the content and change their minds.

Earlier today, I was reading Infoworld’s article, The iPad questions Apple won’t answer. The first question they listed was “Can you save and transfer documents to the iPad?”, and their assumed answer was “No”; they suggested that the only way to do this would be to open a document from an email message.

I read that and I knew it wasn’t the case. I knew I’d seen something that suggested to me that the iPad has on-board storage for documents. It was something I’d seen somewhere before, and for a moment I couldn’t think where. Then I remembered.

It was here:

This is at 1:04 in Apple’s official iPad announcement event.