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.

• Banned by Apple: 9 iPhone App Rejects – ABC News (page 5)
• Apple’s Gatekeeper Role Draws Scrutiny – WSJ.com

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.

Steve Jobs might think that counting down the last days of Bush’s grip on authority (and loose grip on reality) might be too controversial to allow in the Apple iPhone world, but today Bush actually said that he did a good job responding to Hurricane Katrina.

Yes we all know the guy refuses to take blame in any case, shifting reality to suit his power politics; but I thought he’d at least be smart enough to shut up about it now the gig’s been up.

The whole world knows his famous phrase “Heckuva Job, Brownie,” that he was cutting birthday cake with John McCain and only days later blessed the skies with Air Force One as he looked down upon the mess caused by the failures of the federal levee system. The Coast Guard did their best, as did local volunteers and others who drove to New Orleans, but Bush couldn’t get a single bottle of water distributed in a week, and people were on roofs for 5 DAYS or longer.

If you think Katrina wasn’t enough (you don’t live in New Orleans), here’s another 127 reasons why.