Do you have an iPhone 3G or 3GS?
Do you like scavenger hunts, visual puzzles, realspace gaming, or geocaching?
Do you like to take pictures with your iPhone and know visually interesting landmarks around your area?
If you answered YES to all of these questions, you may be the kind of user we are looking for to beta test our next iPhone app, now in development. Add your name to the list while there are slots still open. We’d like to have beta testers in as many major cities/metro areas as possible.
All active beta testers will be given a free copy of the app when it is released. We do expect beta testers to provide reliability feedback and useability critique.
Please send us your name, email address, and location with a note that you’d like to be added to the list here: http://www.juggleware.com/contact.php
As you all know by now,, Apple banned our Bush countdown timer for being political: lightly satirizing an almost universally despised leader was in the word of Steve Jobs, potentially offensive to half his customers. That smacked of censorship to us, but at least we figured this would also be applied to all sides equally. We were wrong, as app after app of pro-conservative, right-wing propaganda gets into the App Store.
Here’s the latest, an app for worshippers of one of the most divisive presidents before Bush, Ronald Reagan.
According to a post on Credo Mobile’s Facebook feed:
When Apple banned an iPhone app counting down the days until Bush was out of office, Steve Jobs said “I think this app will be offensive to roughly half our customers.” (Clearly, Steve hadn’t seen W’s approval #s). How does Apple justify this hagiography of Ronald Reagan? We think THAT is offensive.
If you didn’t catch it already, our latest iPhone app, Pocket Troll, is now available in the App Store. And we’re making it free for one week.
App Store link
More on Pocket Troll: juggleware.com
For developers who are keeping count, it took 10 days for Apple to approve it, which is not bad.
Pocket Troll 1.0
For more info, go here: http://www.juggleware.com/iphone/pocket_troll/
So close, just waiting on a little animation from a certain animator. Here is a hint, if you don’t already know.
Jason Grigsby wrote an excellent article on Cloud Four about the significance of Apple’s rejection of Freedom Time that anyone who is interested in Apple’s App Store policies, or corporations and censorship should take a look at.
Thanks Jason, I am glad that someone gets the real issue, and I won’t even take issue with “simple, stupid”:
Can you imagine political discourse of any significance that doesn’t include demeaning or attacking political figures? Like it or not, that’s part of the exchange of ideas that form a democracy. This policy essentially bans any editorial cartoons—cartoons that have been part of America’s history since its inception…. Freedom of speech is easy to defend when the speech is popular, but the real test comes when you have to defend unpopular speech or things that you don’t agree with. In Fall 2008, George Bush had the worst approval ratings since Nixon. At a time in which we had one of the most unpopular Presidents in American history, Apple didn’t have the courage to approve a simple, stupid application like Freedom Time. What is the likelihood that Apple would approve a truly controversial and unpopular application during a time when popular opinion makes it difficult to stand up for what’s right?
Can you imagine political discourse of any significance that doesn’t include demeaning or attacking political figures? Like it or not, that’s part of the exchange of ideas that form a democracy.
This policy essentially bans any editorial cartoons—cartoons that have been part of America’s history since its inception….
Freedom of speech is easy to defend when the speech is popular, but the real test comes when you have to defend unpopular speech or things that you don’t agree with.
In Fall 2008, George Bush had the worst approval ratings since Nixon. At a time in which we had one of the most unpopular Presidents in American history, Apple didn’t have the courage to approve a simple, stupid application like Freedom Time.
What is the likelihood that Apple would approve a truly controversial and unpopular application during a time when popular opinion makes it difficult to stand up for what’s right?
At Juggleware, we specialize in making lemons (or a Ramos Gin Fizz) out of lemonade. Although our first app was rejected, denying us untold millions and a yacht in the Bahamas, it’s time to pull ourselves up by our puppet strings and do a little monkey dance.
Thanks in particular goes to the random internet troll who sent us hate mail (something along the lines of “go back into the hole you crawled out of for taking an unwarranted swipe at my hero George W Bush”) for providing the inspiration.
Details to follow. Just waiting on some clever line art animation by my good friend David Rhoden.
I just saw that Apple has put on its home page now has a public response to justify its App Store policies.
http://www.apple.com/hotnews/apple-answers-fcc-questions/
Of course the FCC is primarily interested in its rejection of big, important apps like Google Voice, and not indie developer apps, so Apple was able to gloss over its political censorship of apps like Freedom Time (See section 5, above), and not even include any rejected political content app in its list of “representative applications.”
To me, rejecting an app for speech reasons is much worse than for technological competition reasons, but maybe that’s because I am someone who cares about the first Amendment, something that has been shoved to the back of the bus while greasing the wheels of the free market machine.
Thanks to Brad at Bent Media for pointing me to this excellent essay by Joe Hewitt demanding the end of the App Store approval process as we know it.
Well, I’ve given up on trying anything too humorous for the App Store— if you have to finish your idea BEFORE it’s approved, what’s the point?
But that hasn’t stopped others from trying ideas that are beyond the pale, and some that are so truly tasteless, that our little attempted joke at the expense of the outgoing president of the US seems really sterile by comparison.
I’m sure you’ve all heard about the “Baby Shaker” app controversy. It got the press scrambling to look at Apple’s app approval stories once more and, after months of assuming the whole thing had been relegated to its proper place as a footnote in the appendix of the Apple history books, I got contacted by ABC News and the Wall Street Journal over Apple’s rejection of Freedom Time.
All very exciting, I suppose, except that the reporters never seem to get the gist of what I was trying to say, which was this:
If Apple makes itself the gatekeeper, it is actually causing itself the problems it’s trying to avoid. By rejecting an app that makes fun of Bush, but accepting one that lets you kill babies, it implies that it disapproves of one and approves of the other. If someone had made this application for Windows, Mac OS X, or any other desktop system, no one would accuse Microsoft, Apple or Linux for not building an OS that prevents Baby Shaker applications from being installed. Apple made both a whole lot more work and a whole lot more controversy for itself by insisting on manually gatekeeping for every single app that goes in the store.
It’s a new year and a new era!
Juggleware’s debut iPhone app, Freedom Time, as many of you so cleverly noticed, was an application with a time-specific usage. Funny, it just happened to coincide with the inauguration of President Obama.
For those of you who were lucky enough to get the banned iPhone app, or even bothered to look at the Flash version on the site, you’ll see that the time began to move forward at the precise instant* of the swearing in of President Obama at the inauguration, and the text end of an error changed to time to clear some brush!
So it’s a kind of forced obsolescence, but it’s still functional for those who wish to count the days, hours, minutes and seconds since the Bush regime, it’s still working. And in all humility, we were the first to pat ourselves on the back for the nifty symbolism of time moving forward from that moment on.
We’re not giving away any more copies of the app however. We’re moving onward and upward!
In that respect, we hope to have some nifty games for the iPhone in 2009. Keep checking back for news on the latest.
* actually, the precise scheduled moment; he was sworn in a few minutes late and the clock actually ran out during Yo Yo Ma’s cello introduction.
