Chrome Browser for Mac Beta Confirmed for December, Chrome OS Next Week?

Hints earlier this week regarding the release of an official beta version of Google's Chrome browser for Mac have been confirmed. TechCrunch contacted received the news yesterday from a Google spokesperson, who stood by earlier reports that the Mac ...

Review: Orbital for iPhone

Orbital is a fun retro puzzle game with simple controls and a devilish concept.

Negotiate Your Hotel Deals on the iPhone

At the end of October, a Priceline application was released for the iPhone and the reviews are finally in, it is a slam dunk. As soon as this app hit the market it quickly became one of the most downloaded travel apps available and after using it, we can see why. Instead of having [...]

iPhone Now Offers Home Security

Having a security system in the home is a must, but it does not do the user very much good when they are not home and something happens. The house could be getting broken into and the system could be wailing away, but the robbers are in and out before anything happens. The phone rings [...]

Vimeo Adds H.264, Getting iPhone Friendlier

Add Vimeo to the list of YouTube, Ustream, and Stickam — sites and services making H.264 versions of their content available for iPhone and other mobile platforms either via the web or via apps.

We won’t beat that drum too loudly right now, but H.264, and the new video tags in standards-based HTML5 are where we truly hope the web is headed. No reason a service that prides itself on quality shouldn’t get there first.

It’s only staff picks for now, but we hope they keep going and get the whole catalog done. There’s nothing we’d like better than to be able to embed Vimeo on this site without readers — justifiably — complaining that it’s not iPhone compatible.

[via Android Central]

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

Vimeo Adds H.264, Getting iPhone Friendlier

App Store devs get “edge”-y as a reaction to trademark threats

Filed under: Gaming, Software, Developer, iPhone, App Store

App Store developers can be a rebellious kind -- we've already covered the story of a company shooting their price up to $40 just to show their customers how much they could be charging, and now, in response to an overly defensive trademark owner, developers on the store are putting the word "Edge" in their titles. Even high profile releases like the sequel to Eliss and the popular Canabalt are becoming Edgeliss and Canabedge. Critter Crunch becomes Critter Edge on their main page, and so on.

The story starts with a guy named Tim Langdell, who started a company a while back named Edge Games. Since he founded that company, he has mercilessly gone after any other game company who dares to use the word "edge" in their title, claiming that he has the trademark to any and all "edge"-related gaming. He's gone after EA's Mirror's Edge and a few other titles, but the App Store has been a prime target, where he simply contacts Apple, claims the app is in violation of his trademarks, and gets apps pulled without a problem. The latest target is a title called Killer Edge Racing by a company named PuzzleKings, and reportedly Langdell has gone so far as to trademark that name, despite the fact that the game using it has been around for years.

Hence the indie game developers' "edge-volution." They aren't actually renaming their games in the store, just showing off solidarity with other developers against what they see as Langdell's wrongdoing, and getting the word out about his actions against "edge" on the App Store.

App Store devs get "edge"-y as a reaction to trademark threats originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Fri, 13 Nov 2009 08:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

App Store devs get "edge"-y as a reaction to trademark threats originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Fri, 13 Nov 2009 08:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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After 3 Months, 3 Rejections, Airfoil Speakers Touch Ships, Developers Leave iPhone

After submitting a minor .1 bug fix for Airfoil Speakers Touch 1.0.1 [Free - iTunes link] for iPhone and iPod touch, longtime Mac developers Rogue Amoeba waited for what they assumed would be a routine App Store review. Three and a half months, three rejections, and the unsuccessful intervention of a champion at Apple, the app is finally in the store, but the developer has decided the process is too odorous to continue with the iPhone platform.

Don’t stop us just because you’ve heard this before over and over again.

The issue this time was Rogue Amoeba discovering the type of Mac and exact application that was being used as audio source, and displaying the corresponding Mac OS X-provided image of the machine and icon for the app.

Though standard — intended — behavior on the Mac, Apple’s App Store policy branded this a trademark violation and they requested it be changed. Rogue Amoeba assumed the request was erroneous and tried resubmitting, tried escalating via email, even had a champion inside Apple try help get it through. In the end, the App Store policy was an immovable object, and Rogue Amoeba had to remove the Mac and app icon images. Airfoil Speakers Touch 1.0.1 was then approved and placed in the app store.

(And during the whole process, Airfoil Speakers Touch 1.0, buggy as it was, and using the exact same artwork Apple had issue with in 1.0.1 was left untouched in the App Store for users to download and use).

In the future, we hope that developers will be allowed to ship software without needing Apple’s approval at all, the same way we do on Mac OS X. We hope the App Store will get better, review times will be shorter, reviews will be more intelligent, and that we can all focus on making great software. Right now, however, the platform is a mess.

The chorus of disenchanted developers is growing and we’re adding our voices as well. Rogue Amoeba no longer has any plans for additional iPhone applications, and updates to our existing iPhone applications will likely be rare. The iPhone platform had great promise, but that promise is not enough, so we’re focusing on the Mac.

Add our voice to the chorus: fix. this. More after the break…

While many of these developers point to Apple acting as App Store gatekeeper as the issue, we’d submit right now the actual issue is Apple continuing to act as a capricious, illogical, unpredictable, often stupefying gatekeeper.

Curating a store is just a business model. It may well cost them developers philosophically opposed to the idea, even incredibly talented ones like Facebook’s Joe Hewitt, but every decision has an opportunity cost. Choosing to curate a store, even one growing so fast it has 2 billion downloads and 100,000 apps, and continuing to suffer from poor communications, overzealous legal oversight, unclear guidelines, and the crap shoot that seems ultimately at the core of any given app getting approved on any given day… it just doesn’t work.

Getting rid of the gatekeeper might treat the symptom but is it the cure? Apple legal could just as easily issue a DMCA demand notice for an app using artwork they felt was a trademark violation, and have it taken down — even under Google’s more open, publish-first, investigate-if-flagged App Market system. The problem is Apple shouldn’t think using that artwork is a problem on the iPhone if it isn’t on the Mac. That, and the dozens of other so-obvious-it-hurts-our-brains-issues, are what needs to be fixed, and what are driving developers to question the platform.

Like Palm, Apple could allow developers to skip review entirely, leave them off the storefront, but give them a direct download link to market and distribute on their own. That wouldn’t fix this issue. They could extend Ad-Hoc to infinity so there’d be no update notification or over-the-air (re)downloads, but developers could make binaries available themselves and users could drag and drop them into iTunes to install, along with beefy warning flags for “unapproved apps”. They could create those $999+ “pro” developer accounts, along with dedicated App Store point-of-contact and accelerated review process (levels of partnership program exist on many other platforms and in many other businesses).

Or Apple could just spend some of that 35 billion on hiring a legion of reviewers (rather than just 40ish), training them to the standards of Apple Retail, creating a second team dedicated to communicating with developers, and third team focused solely on whatever tiny percentage of cases, like the one above, spiral out of control.

Yes, Apple is making incremental improvements like email escalation and better review status messages, but every step forward always seems to be met with an equal and opposing step back.

2 billion downloads, 100,000 apps — Apple touts the growth and size of the App Store in press releases, they need to start respecting that size in practice. Observably respecting. It shouldn’t take a champion inside Apple. It shouldn’t take emails from Apple Marketing SVP, Phil Schiller. It shouldn’t take an open letter from Steve Jobs. (Though it might help restore some developer confidence at this point). It should just work, and Apple needs to invest whatever they need to invest at this point to make it work.

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

After 3 Months, 3 Rejections, Airfoil Speakers Touch Ships, Developers Leave iPhone

NASA turns iPhone into chemical sensor, can an App Store rejection be far away?

People have been trying to turn cellphones into medical and atmospheric scanners for some time now, but when it's NASA stepping up to the plate with a little device to monitor trace amounts of chemicals in the air, it's hard to not start thinking we might finally have a use for all those tricorder ringtones. Developed by a team of researchers at the Ames Research Center led by Jing Li, the device is a small chip that plugs into the bottom of an iPhone and uses 16 nanosensors to detect the concentration of gasses like ammonia, chlorine, and methane. To what purpose exactly this device will serve and why the relatively closed iPhone was chosen as a development platform are mysteries we're simply not capable of answering. Damn it, man, we're bloggers not scientists!

[Via Gizmodo]

Filed under: Cellphones, Science

NASA turns iPhone into chemical sensor, can an App Store rejection be far away? originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 13 Nov 2009 07:36:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Jailbreaking your iPhone: The pros and cons

Suppose you’re interested in a relatively simple jailbreak to experience third-party apps on your iPhone. This has some definite advantages, but some cautions to consider as well.

PhoneSuit Primo adds extra juice, minimal bulk to your iPhone / iPod

Filed under: Cellphones, Portable Audio

PhoneSuit Primo adds extra juice, minimal bulk to your iPhone / iPod originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 13 Nov 2009 03:56:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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