In yet another App Store obliteration, Wi-Fi detection apps have been pulled from the App Store without exception. The word from Apple is that these apps, the type that actively scan for wireless networks, use “private frameworks” to locate hotspots, which is a violation of Apple’s terms of use.

“We received a very unfortunate email today from Apple stating that WiFi Where has been removed from sale on the App Store for using private frameworks to access wireless information,” said one developer. Apple declined to say more about the removal.

I think it’s odd that Apple would start to rigorously enforce rules without explanation when so many applications continue to slip through the cracks. The most obvious example is the “titillating content” Apple barred not so long ago, though exceptions were made for both Playboy and Sports Illustrated. As The Register points out, it could be Apple is attempting to streamline everything for the iPad launch, that perhaps the tools to make these apps work won’t be available on the tablet. Even then, why all the secrecy? Why not just say, “we don’t want people exploiting certain parts of our devices for personal use.”

You don’t have to be an iPhone developer to make a bunch of money from mobile applications. Take Edward Kim’s Car Locator. The free version of the app has been downloaded 70,000 times, while nearly 7,000 have picked up the paid version. Total revenue? How bout $13,000 a month.

Sure, it’s not the millions you’ve heard about in the App Store, but Kim has just one among a couple hundred “top” applications that are likely grossing at least as much as his if not more. The app had always done well, but it really took off when it was added to the featured list on the Android Marketplace. “it was netting an average of about $80 – $100/day,” Kim wrote on his blog, “until it became a featured app on the Marketplace. Since then, sales have been phenomenal, netting an average of $435/day, with a one day record of $772 on Valentine’s Day.”

Almost $800 for something that probably didn’t take all that long to code? Why do I write again?

Source: Eddie Kim

If you want to show your Jersey Shore pride, you’re going to have a little trouble turning your iPhone into a Duck Phone. Nick Bonatsakis at Atlantia Software developed an app that would do it but he got rejected. The reason? Something Apple calls “minimal user functionality.”

Now I could be wrong, but I seem to remember the App Store as a place crowded with fart apps and other useless crap. So Duck Phone only makes your phone quack like a duck. Would people download it? Of course they would. Try telling that to the App Review Team. Here’s their note:

“Dear Atlantia Software LLC,

We’ve reviewed your application DuckPhone and we have determined that this application contains minimal user functionality and will not be appropriate for the App Store.

If you would like to share it with friends and family, we recommend you review the Ad Hoc method on the Distribution tab of the iPhone Developer Portal for details on distributing this application among a small group of people of your choosing or if you believe that you can add additional user functionality to DuckPhone we encourage you to do so and resubmit it for review.

Sincerely,

iPhone App Review Team”

Ouch. Fart app developers beware. You just might get pulled.

Source: CrunchGear

Shortly after Apple pulled most of the sexual content from the App Store, developers noticed a new category under the app submission software. It seemed like the perfect solution to the offensive content problem. Just give those apps the explicit label and all will be fine, right? Right, but not yet.

One developer, upon noticing the category’s sudden and mysterious disappearance, called Apple to get the scoop. He says he was told, “it’s not going to happen anytime soon.” It’s a shame, really, because it would solve so many issues with the App Store. Giving explicit apps their own home means the people that don’t want to see them don’t have to, and the rest of the world can enjoy mobile smut. It also relieves Apple of the burden of censorship, no longer requiring a definition of what is appropriate or how much money you’re required to have to publish the inappropriate stuff anyway.

Even if this thing goes live, do you really think Apple is going to let anything more than a side-boob show up in any application other than Safari? No way. If we know anything about Jobs it’s that he likes Apple to have the corner on the porn market.

Source: Cult of Mac

This weekend Apple made a sweeping change to its application guidelines, banning any material that could be deemed titillating. Well, not exactly any material, but certainly that of smaller developers. In another sweeping decision that’s rife with ambiguity, Apple has denied and pulled applications from small-name developers whose content was deemed too sexy for the App Store. How do you define too sexy? Pretty much anything that involves showing some skin.

As I mentioned, though, there are exceptions. Sports Illustrated still has its Swimsuit app available and Playboy will reportedly be allowed to keep its content live. This is a surefire way to piss off a lot of people. Some four days after the ban, Phil Schiller finally talked to the New York Times about the bans. “It came to the point where we were getting customer complaints from women who found the content getting too degrading and objectionable, as well as parents who were upset with what their kids were able to see,” he said.

Wait, isn’t that why you guys implemented parental controls? And what of the objectionable material warnings? And what about the fact that anyone wanting to see boobs can still use Safari to get to every porn site on the web? As with previous app decisions, this one reeks of whimsy. Oh, did I ask why Sports Illustrated models and Playmates are somehow less offensive to those women and parents than the girls in the “Beautiful Boobs” app? I bet it’s because they aren’t just the fantasized digital mockups of women with bodies all airbrushed and touched up. These are real women, appearing in real magazines, sticking it to the misogynistic majority by using their vast intelligence to make money with the bodies that have been so objectified in the past. That must be it.

Since the announcement of the iPad, the geek world has been up in arms about Flash. When people aren’t bitching about why the tablet doesn’t have Flash support, they’re giving Apple the once over for including Flash in its marketing materials. There is at least one person outside Apple that doesn’t think Flash is right for the iPad and get this – he’s a Flash developer.

Morgan Adams is a full-time Flash developer who says he’d love to create content for the iPad, but it doesn’t make sense. His main argument focuses on one of the most widely used features in Flash: mouseover. So much of Flash content is controlled and manipulated based on the difference between a click and a mouseover that it just wouldn’t translate to a tablet. The other options for tablet users – gestures, complex clicking, multiple versions of the same site – are either a step backwards or require a lot more programming. Everyone cites video as a major issue for Flash, but video content is easily handled on the iPhone and will only get easier with HTML5.

Be sure to check Adams’ full comments at Roughly Drafted.

If you’ve ever tried to download a podcast or a lot of applications, you know how frustrating that 10MB 3G cap can be on the iPhone. For those who don’t know, any time you try to download something larger than 10MB over a 3G connection, you get a message asking you to connect to a Wi-Fi network before you continue with the download. Along with the changes Apple made to iPhone policies this week, it also doubled the download cap, from 10MB to 20MB.

The change was most likely to accommodate the difference in file size between iPhone and iPad applications. It is nice, though, to be able to pick up some shorter podcasts and whatnot on the go, even if my This American Life downloads tend to be a bit bigger.

The change is effective immediately – I was able to pick up a 15MB app no problem this morning.

Amazon is starting to see the writing on the wall, it seems. There isn’t a compelling reason for people to buy a Kindle anymore. Other ereaders offer the same price on books with more features and the latest wave of tablet PCs make the hardware look obsolete. So what does Bezos do? He releases a Kindle app for yet another piece of hardware: the Blackberry.

Amazon recently opened the floodgates with Kindle support for the iPhone, iPod Touch, and Windows machines. Today we get Blackberry support and the company says it’s headed for Macs and iPads next. If that doesn’t sound like admitted defeat, I don’t know what does. It’s funny too, considering the publisher problems Amazon has had since the iPad announcement.

“Since the launch of our popular Kindle for iPhone app last year, customers have been asking us to bring a similar experience to the BlackBerry, and we are thrilled to make it available today,” said Amazon’s Kindle VP, Ian Freed. There is at least one difference between the two; the Blackberry version doesn’t support creating annotations from within the app.

Official Site

Google made another acquisition this week, this time in the form of Aardvark. Aardvark is an answer service that relies primarily on crowd sourcing to get the job done. It can be a fun way to kill some time, especially if you’ve got it on your iPhone, but people tend to ask fairly vague questions that can be difficult to answer.

Aardvark is joining the Google Labs line of products but will continue to function as normal. That’s a bit of a shift for Google. Acquisitions usually have a hold put on new memberships or even go through a period of service outage before being re-released under the Google name. Really the only change is that Aardvark will be getting some Googlers in addition to its current staff.

The best news in it all is that changes to the Aardvark service will come a lot faster now that it’s in Google’s hands.

Source: Google

I was a little alarmed when I opened my Google Reader and found eight new followers. Nearly everyone I know has used Gmail for years, and I’ve had a few followers since Google rolled out more social networking features, but eight in two days? Madness.

When I opened Google Buzz I understood. The service creates a profile for you and automatically follows the people you have conversed with in the past. Thankfully, it’s transparent enough that I realized what I was doing and cancelled a few follows that I just don’t want. It’s strange, though, since your followed profiles can be viewed publicly unless you mess with your privacy settings. Not a bad thing, unless you have particularly jealous friends/roommates/significant others.

Just remember to dig through whatever Buzz automatically sets up for you. It could save you a lot of “and who the hell is she” arguments down the road.

If you live in any major metropolitan area, you’re probably familiar with OpenTable. The restaurant reservation service seated its millionth reservation this past October, a year since the iPhone application launched. The company has since branched out to other smartphone platforms and seated another million restaurant-goers – quite a feat for four and a half months.

The news came alongside an earnings report, which showed $19.2 million in revenue for Q4 2009. Those are some damn fine numbers for an internet startup. The company is about more than just reservations, though. It also offers management software to restaurants for a monthly subscription. The company increased its number of participating restaurants by 17% this past year and estimates it has helped generate more than $100 million in sales for the restaurant it serves.

Wolfram Alpha recently released an update for its overpriced iPhone app. The update includes some new keyboards, graphics, and tables. The one thing it didn’t improve on was the price. The app still runs $50, back up from the $19.99 it cost during the holidays.

It’s not that the app blows everything else out of the water. An app called BarMax runs a full thousand dollars. But BarMax isn’t available on the web. Wolfram Alpha is. All of it. They removed the iPhone-optimized version of the site some time ago, presumably to encourage sales for the app. You can still get everything out of Wolfram Alpha, though, if you just visit the website on your phone. The only thing you’re missing is screen specific formatting.

If you really need that kind of formatting and have $50 laying around, maybe this is for you. Personally, I’ll keep my Wolfram calculations on my laptop.

Source: TechCrunch

In November of last year Apple released a new iTunes feature called iTunes Preview. The service allowed users to preview the music available in the iTunes store without launching or even installing the iTunes software. It was a nice move, long overdue, and it’s now been extended to include iPhone apps.

Basically, any time you click an iTunes link for an app, your browser will redirect to a page that contains the standard iTunes information. You get screenshots from the application along with reviews, pricing, descriptions and ratings. From there you can click to view the app in iTunes and go through your standard download process.

I’m just glad I can’t be fooled into clicking those damn links anymore. It was so infuriating to be on a site and accidentally hit a link on my touchpad only to have iTunes blow up and start loading the app store.

Few things entice me more than a glass of small batch bourbon. Over the past several decades, the list of quality craft whiskeys has grown exponentially, yielding a market place that can be as confusing as it is rewarding. F. Paul Pacult wants to help you navigate the sea of options and blends with an iPhone app called iWhiskey from Jolt OS.

This app is definitely the best resource I’ve found on whiskey for the iPhone. It opens on a “shelf” of whiskey bottles with options for American, Canadian, Irish, single malt Scotch, blended Scotch, and whiskeys from other parts of the world for browsing. There’s a search function if you’re looking for a particular brand and a feature that allows you to save some favorites to your own “My Barrel” section.

Each individual whiskey has a feature page, complete with tasting and bouquet information and a picture of the bottle so you can more easily locate your preference at your bar or the liquor store. There are quite a few with missing pictures, something I’d assume will be updated in the future. The app also features a selection of cocktails made with various whiskeys. The list is small, but again, easy to update.

The app only has two drawbacks. First, it needs a home button. The front screen is so pretty, but there’s just no way to get back to it without closing the app and reopening. The second problem is the price. It’s tough to say whether $10.99 is really worth this kind of information on a phone with web access. Pacult’s reviews are top-notch, and it is a one-stop shop for more than 600 whiskey reviews, but I think you’ll likely only see this on a very serious whiskey lover’s phone.

iTunes Link

A few weeks ago I was in a crisis. I had an 11-hour drive in front of me and for some reason I missed a week of my This American Life podcast. It took a good bit of scouring, but I finally found a place to download it (no, it wasn’t available on iTunes any longer). Well no more!

My favorite radio show (and many others’ as the podcast rankings prove) finally has its own iPhone app, replete with on demand access to any episode of the show. You can stream for free or download any episode for the usual $.99. The app itself will run you $2.99.

If you haven’t listened to TAL, you need to. It’s just that simple. There are some truly incredible stories on the show, and often some very informative ones as well. They did a show about the sub-prime mortgage crisis that simply blew my mind. For my money, there’s not really a better way to spend a long drive.

One of the biggest complaints about the iPad, and even the iPhone, is the lack of Flash support. It’s something Apple’s been reluctant to add because of the potential for a security breach on either device. In order to be considered truly excellent browsing devices, though, I think Apple needs to find a way to make Flash work for both devices.

For now, though, Adobe is willing to take up the cause. It announced a product for developers at the end of last year that would easily convert Flash apps into something the iPhone can use. The company now says it will offer the same support for the iPad.

Here’s an excerpt from the official platform blog:

“We announced the Packager for iPhone at MAX 2009 which will allow Flash developers to create native iPhone applications and will be available in the upcoming version of Flash Pro CS5. This technology enables developers to create applications for the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad (though applications will not initially take direct advantage of iPad’s new screen resolution). It is our intent to make it possible for Flash developers to build applications that can take advantage of the increased screen size and resolution of the iPad.”

It’s a decent workaround, but definitely not a fix. By this method you’ll have access to the cool Flash apps available on platforms like Android, but it’s not like you’ll be watching Hulu on your iPad (unless they release a special app). Stay tuned on this one – it’s going to be a hot topic over the course of the year.

With all the hype surrounding Apple’s latest announcement, you may have forgotten that the State of the Union address is next Wednesday night. What better way to celebrate both events than by watching the President on your iPhone!

This White House app streams live video content to your iPhone, beginning with the State of the Union next week. Other than that, it’s pretty much a dressed up version of whitehouse.gov, replete with pictures and news feeds about everything related to the executive branch. Topic of the moment? Haiti, of course.

Which are you more excited about? Hearing more about unemployment or dreaming of owning that Apple tablet?

I hope you’re ready to feel underaccomplished and unsympathetic for your age. An 11 year-old boy named Cameron finished coding iSketch, a drawing app for the iPhone, this past December. Sales have reportedly been good, but instead of stocking up on Nerf guns and Lego mansions, Cameron is donating a large portion of his profits to the Mattel Children’s Hospital UCLA where he received care for an undisclosed medical problem.

Cameron’s father wrote the following letter to CrunchGear:

My son Cameron is 11 years old and, last year, he had a medical problem that prevented him from participating in the physical activities he otherwise enjoys. (He is nearly fully recovered.) During that time, Cameron became interested in computers, and he began to read anything he could get his hands on. He watched Stanford University professors on iTunes, scoured the web for articles on programming and taught himself several different programming languages. (Neither my wife nor I have any idea how to program.) Cameron began to focus on the iPhone and iPod touch devices as the “apps” offered for sale for use on those devices seemed really cool to him. He began to work on a few different apps. After completing some summer camps on programming and continuing to read and learn, Cameron finalized an app, which he calls iSketch, and submit it to Apple. The app, which is a painting/drawing program, was approved by Apple for sale on its App Store in December. (He has since updated it several times..)

Inspired by the care he received at Santa Monica-UCLA Medical Center and Orthopaedic Hospital, Cameron has dedicated a substantial portion of the proceeds from his sales to purchase entertainment and electronic items for Mattel Children’s Hospital UCLA’s Child Life/Child Development programs in Westwood and Santa Monica so that pre-teens and teens will have additional age-appropriate options available to them during their Hospital stays. Cameron’s sales so far have been good, but he hopes to accelerate them so that he can donate even more to the Hospital.

Thank you, Cameron, for that healthy dose of what-are-you-doing-with-your-life-itis. If you want to feel marginally decent about yourself, you can get Cameron’s app for just $.99.

Remember that app called “I Am Rich,” the one that served no purpose other than making the developer a couple grand if people actually bought it. Apple pulled the app for the fear that a glut of such products would appear, polluting the App Store with useless junk. And yet, we still have fart apps.

Well there’s a new super-expensive app on the market, and it actually might be worth something. The app is called BarMax and it’s a preparatory tool for would be lawyers headed toward the bar exam. So why a grand? Well, the prep classes often cost as much as $4,000, so a 75% discount isn’t such a bad deal.

The coolest part of the app, in my non-litigating mind, is the audio lectures. The app itself is over a gig, which puts all sorts of papers on your phone, but you also get a huge selection of lectures to listen to. Good stuff.

iTunes Link