Check out this blog entry on Designweenie if you are a Mac user that uses OmniGraffle to design mySQL databases.
One important note: you will need to run AppleScript Editor in 32-bit mode if you are using Snow Leopard (Mac OS X 10.6). Check the 32 bit box in the Get Info box of the application.
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.
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, it’s not acceptable to poke gentle fun at a politician, and it’s not acceptable to make an app that helps people promote health care reform.
But it is perfectly all right to make an app that spreads the “talking points” (a nice phrase for propaganda) generated by a handful of cable TV news hosts, Washington columnists, and think-tank lobbyists.
Sounds like crazy talk, yes? See this story in the Atlantic.
Here’s an excerpt:
America’s political civil war has hit the iPhone… The First Shot over the Liberal Bow has been fired!… Be armed with the Conservative Talking Points iPhone App as your powerful arsenal to debate those emotional and ill-prepared liberals… conduct this war on ignorance and liberal idiocy.
This is practically an incitement to violence, especially compared to the light-hearted harmless mocking of President Bush that was in our app. Steve Jobs dismissed our iPhone app as possibly alienating “half” of his customer base and said “what’s the point?” I have to ask if our Mickey Mouse cartoon of Bush was incindiary, what’s the point of this app that derides people while referring to an ideological “civil war” using violence as its only metaphor?
Furthermore, a screen shot from the Atlantic page shows an article on Fascism, trying to paint the current administration as fascist. This is the worst kind of right-wing propaganda that redefines the terms to their opposite. Another screen shot says:
Help us defeat the liberal fascists attempting to take over America!
To date this is perhaps the best example to date of Apple’s myopic App Store policies. What are we to think, that Apple only approves “politically charged” apps associated with extreme right-wing causes? Has Ann Coulter infiltrated Cupertino? Is Steve Jobs staying up late watching Glenn Beck? It’s really, really hard to imagine a universe in which Apple allows this kind of evil crap through, but not something as harmless as Freedom Time.
I have never seen a more obvious case of bias in my life.
App Store Fail. Once again.
[Edit: I just added more detail describing the content of the App.]
Kudos to Apple for resigning from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. I’ve been critical of Apple in this blog and I want to make sure I also give them the thumbs up when they do something right. Global warming is real, and doing something about it now is no longer up for debate.
I’ll be honest, I didn’t even realize that the Chamber of Commerce was a business lobby and not a federal agency. Must have been asleep that day in civics class.
Apparently Adobe has developed a way to make iPhone apps with Flash—apparently without Apple’s consent or help. It will be interesting to see what Apple does with this; clearly they didn’t want Flash movies (SWF files) running in the iPhone’s Safari browser, and while this has been annoying at times, there is also a part of me that is glad someone said no to Adobe for once. However, I also think Apple needs to open up in a lot of ways.
Jeff LaMarche’s blog is the best place to reach more about the issues.
As a longtime Adobe user —my primary expertise was once Macromedia Director, which became an Adobe product when Adobe acquired Macromedia—I use Flash to mock-up ideas and experiment and I can say that it takes five times longer (or more) to develop a basic app like the one I am working on now in XCode than it would in Flash.
However, now that I have put a lot of blood and tears into learning Objective C and the iPhone development environment, it would almost be too easy to do it in Flash…
Even more shame-worthy behavior from Apple. I thought it was being mean to politicians that Apple didn’t like—apparently now, it’s being “politically charged?” What the hell are Apple’s standards here? Whoops, I just said “hell,” which in the iPhone’s Disney-like dictionary, gets auto-corrected to “heal” or “hello.”
Here’s the link: http://lambdajive.wordpress.com/2009/09/26/isinglepayer-iphone-app-censored-by-apple/
So close, just waiting on a little animation from a certain animator. Here is a hint, if you don’t already know.
After all the hype and excitement about Mac OS X 10.6 (“Snow Leopard”), I am not sure if I am seeing any benefits and have had two immediate problems after upgrading:
1) my TIme Machine backups stopped working. I am using firewire drive mounted as a network drive, not the officially supported Time Capsule. After much struggling, I was able to get this to work by sharing mounting the drive as an SMB (Windows “Samba”) share instead of using the AFP (Apple File Sharing Protocol) that had previously worked for me.
2) My trusty 12 year old HP LaserJet 5MP printer stopped working. It turns out that Snow Leopard kills off the legacy AppleShare. Wish I’d known that! Tried to get it working as an IP printer to no avail, but I should be able to use it via the old computer (running Tiger still) that I am using as the fileserver. So far, even that isn’t working though….
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?
