Martin Gordon's Blog

I am now a proud member of the elite group of developers who have had applications rejected from the iPhone App Store.

The application I have been working on since a few weeks after the SDK came out is Flickup, a simple Flickr uploader. When Apple announced the July 7th deadline, I pulled an all-nighter that day to finish it up and submitted the app to Apple around 6am in order to meet the 3pm deadline for inclusion in the App Store at launch. When the App Store is launched on Thursday/Friday, my app is nowhere to be found and the status remains "In Review". I sent an email on Saturday to Apple asking why Flickup was still in review and I received a non-response three days later telling me that "In Review" means my application is being reviewed by Apple. I responded immediately clarifying my inquiry and I finally received this response yesterday:

At this time, Flickup cannot be posted to the App Store because it does not allow the user to logout or change the Flickr account that they are using.

In order for your application to be reconsidered for the App Store, please resolve this issue and upload your new binary to iTunes Connect.

This is a perfectly valid critique, and an oversight on my part, but did it really take them two weeks to tell me about it? Would they have even told me had I not emailed them about my app's status? In any case, the time it took to get a decision on Flickup gave me time to fix some bugs, and of course add the required logout functionality.

As an aside, the Flickr Authentication API's Implementation Guidelines merely states, "Users must be provided with 'logout' functionality." The API documentation does not provide any way to revoke tokens and log users out. I had to resort to directing users to their revoke permissions page instead.

In the mean time, the App Store turned one week old and gripes about the review functionality sprouted everywhere, particularly with regard to the ability for people to review an app without actually having used it. This "feature" of the App Store prompted the cheapskates out there to use reviews as a medium to complain about price. Taking this to heart, I spent some time last week preparing a demo version of Flickup that would allow people to sample the app before dropping two Washingtons on the full version. I submitted the demo version on Friday and received a decision today:

Flickup Demo cannot be posted to the App Store because it is a beta or feature-limited version. Any reference to demo or beta needs to be removed from the binary and metadata. Free or "Lite" versions are acceptable, however the application must be a fully functional app and cannot reference features that are not implemented or up-sell to the full version.

In spite of the lightning fast turnaround time, I am still just as angry about this rejection than the last one since there was no prior warning (in program agreements or otherwise) that demo versions would not be allowed. It's hard to believe that Apple isn't aware that people are crying out for demos and trials; going as far as explicitly prohibiting them (while letting all other sorts of crap through) is nothing short of infuriating.

Technorati Tags: iPhone, iPhone SDK, App Store, Apple, Flickup

Twitter is great for those fleeting thoughts one has that maybe aren't work blogging about, but are worth saving all the same. I had a bunch of these thoughts last Thursday when the iPhone App Store went live and I was testing out all sorts of applications. Here are the relevant ones:

07:24 App Store is live on my phone!
07:36 First tweet from Mobile Twitteriffic.
07:47 Replacing all my webclips with proper iPhone apps.
10:19 Exposure's "Near Me" feature is broken. What are "metres"? :-p
10:23 Is anyone else able to use the Facebook app? I'm getting a "Cannot connect at this time." error.
10:39 Protip: Do not enter your News Gator credential into NNW Touch if you haven't logged into the account in a year or so.
10:47 Now we know why Apple stopped including remotes with Macs: They'd rather you buy an iPhone and use Remote.app instead. Talk about upselling.
13:58 Shazam accurately found two songs playing at the restaurant during lunch today. Midomi did not.
14:18 It's annoying that I have to keep retyping my iTunes password almost every time I want to download something from the App Store.
18:35 Facebook app gets a big "meh" from me. Much less functionality than the webapp.
18:42 Putting on an extra polo shirt while Loopt installs.
19:22 It appears I haven't opened NNW since Feb 07. I can't give up GReader, so it looks like I'll need to come up with an On The Go feed list.

And here are some quick reviews that I posted on Ars:

AIM - This is slightly less useful until push functionality is available.

Facebook - Looks promising (at least better than using the web interface), but I can't get past the login screen ("Unable to connect at this time.") NOTE: I have been able to login and the app has less features than the mobile site. So far this is the only app I'm considering going back to the webclip.

Twitterrific - Pretty nice. Definitely beats the Twitter's mobile site. Photo integration and location updating are cool too.

Exposure - Nice, but limited on 2G. Not sure how often I'll look at Flickr on the go, but photos near me might be cool if I'm traveling.

CheckPlease - Works fine for me, but the icon is a bit dark for some reason.

NetNewsWire - I made the mistake of adding my NewsGator account after not visiting it for over a year. I'm a Google Reader guy so I'm curious to see how I'll put NNW to use.

NYTimes - Beats hitting up any mobile site, although the ads make the reading area a bit too small.

Bloomberg - Another NYT-style app. Being able track my stocks in nice, but I don't think it would replace the Stocks.app until they added a graph to it. Also, entering the number of shares using scrollers is pretty dumb.

Box Office - Looks good and the near me functionality works great.

Urban Spoon - Shaking for a random restaurant is cool, except that the first time I shook it came up with a restaurant that I hate.

Currency - Simple widget-like app. Nothing too fancy, but it's useful at time when I want to depress myself about how poorly the US Dollar is doing.

Dial Zero - This uses gethuman.com to show you how to get a human on the phone instead of dealing with automated systems. I rarely need to call tech support lines, but when I do, I'll hit up Dial Zero instead of the company's web site.

Cube Runner - One of the few free games out there. Very well tuned accelerometer handling, but not very fun. A nice tech demo, if anything.

midomi/Shazam - Both are "ID this song" apps that I haven't tried out yet. Cool and useful if it works well. NOTE: Since posting this, I've found that Shazam works infinitely better than midori, even though midori looks to have a few more features.

Remote.app - Looks just like iTunes on the iPhone except your music plays on the computer/Apple TV instead of the phone. This is really killer for Apple TV as it obviates the need to use the pretty-terrible Apple Remote. I'm hoping it lets me type into Apple TV searches as well, but even just scrolling through media will be much better on the phone than with the remote.

Fun Fact: To say that Thursday was just a tweetful day would be an understatement: I made 17 posts to Twitter out of 740 total. To put that in perspective: I've been on Twitter since early Feb 2007. That means 2.29% of my tweets came in just .2% of the time I've been on Twitter. Yowza.

Technorati Tags: Apple, iPhone, iPhone 3G, iPhone SDK, App Store

So it's about time I get back to posting here. I've been away from here for far too long, just shy of three months, longer than any other break I've taken.

My case of "noblog" wasn't isolated, however. Prolific blogger and VC Fred Wilson, had nothing blog worthy to say one day in mid-June, after finding something to write about every day for the past five years. Instead, he made a handful of posts on Twitter and Tumblr that day. As he put so bluntly, "I think its time to acknowledge that long form blogging every day may be coming to an end."

Other bloggers were also not putting as much down as they'd like. Russell Beattie, who took a year off from blogging before returning in April 2007, also found it difficult to keep up with a rigorous blogging regimen: "So I'm going to start blogging regularly again… A couple months ago, I was getting sick of blogging and decided to ratchet down the number of posts I wrote in some sort of attempt to change things up and maybe improve the quality of the blog. It didn't work."

So after an 8-post April and a 2-post May, Russell was back up to around 20 posts in June, about what he was doing prior to the two "slow" months.

Fellow Arsian Josh Bancroft not-so-recently wrote about how he wants "write more. Do more. Hack more. Learn more." In that post he writes on a topic that I've touched on a bunch of times over the years - making the transition from consumer to producer. I think Josh is way more on the producer side than I am, and his desire to move even further in that direction makes me think I could push myself a bit more in that direction as well.

That is not to say that I haven't been producing content just because I haven't been blogging. I've been twittering a whole lot more (although the number of tweets I put out fluctuates tremendously from day to day), and perhaps the number one enemy to my desire to blog is Google's "share with note" feature that they introduced in early June. Instead of linking to an interesting item here, I can just share the item and a few words to my Google Reader friends. It is much easier than preparing a post on a blog, for better or worse.

And of course there's the iPhone SDK. I've been working on a few ideas (for myself and others), one of which was finished just this morning and submitted to the App Store (more to come on that once the NDA expires).

Perhaps my hiatus was part of a more general trend towards something else (Twitter, FriendFeed, Google Reader Shared Items, etc). Even if that is the case, a personal blog feels, well, personal, and even if it doesn't provide value (or as much value as the aforementioned services) to the reader, it does provide quite a bit of value for the author, and I'll keep doing this until it ceases to do so (with month-long gaps at times, naturally).

The New Yorker has a piece on elevators, perhaps the world's most commonly used and most commonly taken-for-granted mode of transportation. It also recounted the story of a man who was stuck in an elevator for 41 hours after coming back from a smoke break (of which there's a disturbing time-lapse security video). The aftermath of the ordeal ended up costing him his job, his apartment, his money, and all contact with his friends. Remember, kids, smoking will ruin your life.

My favorite passage of the essay was the following, on elevator etiquette:

Passengers seem to know instinctively how to arrange themselves in an elevator. Two strangers will gravitate to the back corners, a third will stand by the door, at an isosceles remove, until a fourth comes in, at which point passengers three and four will spread toward the front corners, making room, in the center, for a fifth, and so on, like the dots on a die. With each additional passenger, the bodies shift, slotting into the open spaces. The goal, of course, is to maintain (but not too conspicuously) maximum distance and to counteract unwanted intimacies—a code familiar (to half the population) from the urinal bank and (to them and all the rest) from the subway. One should face front. Look up, down, or, if you must, straight ahead. Mirrors compound the unease. Generally, no one should speak a word to anyone else in an elevator. Most people make allowances for the continuation of generic small talk already under way, or, in residential buildings, for neighborly amenities. The orthodox enforcers of silence—the elevator Quakers—must suffer the moderates or the serial abusers, as they cram in exchanges about the night, the game, the weekend, or the meal.

Technorati Tags: elevators, The New Yorker, essay, smoke break

I don't want to comment on the premise of his post (which is not to say I don't agree or disagree with it), but I liked what Steve Hall had to say about Twitter:

It's pretty much guaranteed you'll interpret this as idiotic puffery but until you use Twitter, really use it for a while, you won't really understand what you're missing and you don't really have the right to comment. Seriously. Give it a try.

As the only user of Twitter at work, I get asked about the merits of it all the time. I love Twitter and find it a valuable resource for everything Steve mentions: "IM, email, mobile app, chat room, focus group, news source, a wall on which to bounce ideas, a research resource, presence indicator," but I have a hard time getting that across to people. I get told by people that Twitter pointless and a huge waste of time, but without having tried it, they really don't have a right to comment. Next time Twitter comes up in conversation, I'll respond simply with, "just give it a try."

Thanks for the advice, Steve.

Technorati Tags: Twitter, IM, chat, communication, social networks

It always infuriates me when large tech blogs have seemingly innocuous posts on how to get "free" applications or violate EULAs (like CrunchGear did back when Leopard was released by telling advising readers to split a copy of the OS to get it for half off).

It happened again yesterday when Lifehacker linked to an article instructing users on how to get the apps included in the iPod touch's $20 January update for free. Whether or not you agree with Apple's decision to charge $20 for apps that came for "free" on the iPhone, stealing the apps is wrong. If you don't feel $20 is worth it, you aren't entitled to get the apps for free. It's as simple as that.

Technorati Tags: Lifehacker, software piracy, stealing, Apple, iPhone, iPod touch

Found on Hell Yeah Bitch, "Dell Responds to the MacBook Air".

Technorati Tags: Apple, MacBook Air, commercial, funny, video

With 100,000 iPhone SDK downloads, the relative simplicity of the platform and the popularity of the iPhone, there's no doubt we'll be seeing tons of iPhone applications being released as soon as the App Store goes live. But will those apps be any good?

Brent Simmons, author of NetNewsWire, thinks we'll see a ton of to-do lists and Twitter clients. He's right: Apple has failed to provide a to-do list app for iPhone OS (or Mac OS X, for that matter) and people have complained about it since June 29, 2007. Twitter is also the love du jour of techies everywhere and an iPhone app would be much better than the web interface (look no further than Iconfactory's Twitterrific on the desktop for proof). I am personally working on an app that combines the two ;-)

Brent also thinks that the money is in the Cloud. He states that standalone iPhone apps are easy and cheap enough to write and too boring to use. The most interesting apps will be those that sync to the cloud. It's the development, maintenance and scaling of the server apps that will be expensive, and that's where he sees much of the iFund money going. Time to become an expert on NSURLConnection!

I can't help but agree. One app I'm working for will tie into a web app we've written internally - the API isn't currently there, but it will be. Blossom (as we call it) won't be the most revolutionary iPhone app out there, but it is a good testing ground for client-server iPhone apps. I've got ideas for other apps too, and the thing they have in common is that they all tie back into the Cloud. The 1st iPhone "SDK" (web apps) was far from perfect, but if it did anything, it helped developers focus their attention on where it should be - the Cloud.

Technorati Tags: iPhone, iPhone SDK, Apple, iPhone OS, Cloud, cloud computing, Cocoa Touch, development, Brent Simmons, NewsGator, NetNewsWire

The MacBook Air is selling well, Ars Technica reports, with many stores reporting stock shortages and long lead times.

As Railsdaddy David Heinemeier Hansson mentions, this probably comes as a surprise to geeks all over the blogosphere, who were largely focused on the shortcomings of the tech specs - the relatively slow processor, shortage of ports, etc, and not focusing enough on the design and feel of it. Whether it takes 20 minutes or 30 minutes to convert a movie to iPod format is largely irrelevant, what is more noticeable (and therefore more important) is the general feeling of delight (or despair) one feels when using any device. Remember the awe people experienced when flicking images back and forth on the iPhone? Similar experiences abound on the MacBook Air - the feeling of not feeling like you're carrying a laptop, the feeling of not feeling like there's a computer under your keyboard - these are the specs, emotional specs, if you will, that are causing people to buy MacBooks Air. Indeed, the MacBook Air is just another in the long list of examples that prove that Apple is destroying the competition when it comes to emotional specs.

Technorati Tags: Apple, MacBook, MacBook Air, emotional specs, tech specs, design

Xobni is an Outlook add-in that basically adds search, conversations and profiles to Outlook. When I first heard about Xobni, I was really excited to try it and was ecstatic when I got an invite a few months ago (I still have a few invites left, if anyone wants one).

That said, I'm about ready to give it up. The search, while better than Outlook's default search, is still no match for anything Google or Apple offer, and almost painful to use since while in "search mode" almost a quarter of the sidebar is covered in a completely out-of-place Yahoo web search. Conversations are also nice, but limited in usefulness due to their being restricted to the sidebar. Further, since I deal with only a limited amount of people via email, the profiles lack utility (though the auto-discovery of phone numbers is nice). To top it all off, Xobni often makes Outlook unresponsive (though responsive enough to tell me that it's not responding).

I still like the product, and despite it's flaws, I'm still using it since it's features (ever so slightly) outweigh its drawbacks, and was glad to hear that Microsoft may buy Xobni. This can only be good since proper integration into Outlook would likely fix any performance issues and enhance Xobni's feature set. As a lukeworm fan, I can only hope that Xobni continues to see improvements and a Microsoft acquisition looks to be one pretty sure way of making that happen.

Technorati Tags: Xobni, Microsoft, Microsoft Office, Outlook, email