Merry Christmas, tiny little media-un-savvy kids: rudolf just ran down granny!
Well, that’s the story Gizmodo reports, anyway:
Yesterday’s episode of Santa Live featured the song “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer.” Apparently, children young enough to care about Santa are also young enough to have trouble understanding the jokey song about grand-matricide. Parents complained, and Majewski, already $12,000 in debt (that’s a lot of bribed commenters!) was forced to pull the app. He remains the only one baffled by his lack of success with Santa Live.
Majewski, already controversial since the discovery he was paying for good reviews via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, is likely not having a great holiday season himself now, even absent joyous vehicular homicide carols.
Did the parents over react? Should Majewski better have known better? Or did some one just get a little revenge paying parents to complain via Mechanical Turk?
Daring Fireball’s John Gruber, in an attempt to get to the bottom of the PodcasterGate’s latest controversy, namely Apple reportedly slapping “NDA” (Non-Disclosure Agreement) on the rejection notices and discussion there off, confidentially polled developers and came to the following conclusion:
My conclusion is that as [redacted] up as this entire situation is, both with the App Store rejections for “duplication of functionality” and NDA frustrations, it does not seem as though Apple has changed its policy regarding whether rejection notices are confidential.
Indeed, some Mac (but not iPhone) developers reported all their communications from Apple, going way back, bore non-disclosure language. This latest wrinkle does indeed appear to be inconsistent legal notices from different Apple developer reps, rather than any substantive change in response to PodcasterGate.
Still, resentment levels among iPhone developers are still soaring, and due to the NDA, the public displeasure ain’t nothing compared to what’s building internally.
Seems it wasn’t a hair that broke the blogerati’s back, it was an App. Or more precisely, it was Apple’s denial of the Podcaster App that let loose the floodgates of negative internet reaction. Or even more precisely, it is the continued lack of certainty among developers as to what can and will be denied by Apple, leading many to reconsider the return on investment of hours upon hours of coding with 11th hour rejection hanging perpetually over their heads, like a virtual Sword of Damocles.
According to Read Write Web, Podcaster will be turning to Ad Hoc to distribute their App for nowwhile everyone from Daring Fireball to Roughly Drafted cover (and in some cases, recover from) the various comments and implications flinging back and forth across the blogsphere, the New York Times has decided to escalate the attention level:
I can’t see how distributing the program will hurt Apple. If anything it will make the iPhone a tad more valuable. On the other hand, treating developers capriciously is most certainly going to discourage them from spending nights and weekends working on new and useful applications that may give more people reasons to buy an iPhone.
Sure, the App Store is growing twice as fast as iTunes Music (though starting from zero is an easy way to generate an opening curve), and may well hit a billion units moved by 2009, but with Android’s open marketplace on the horizon, and Microsoft me-too’ing their way in with Skymarket, there could be alternatives. If Apple doesn’t take a page from their MobileMe fiasco playbook and rapidly standardize and clarify the rules of the game, they could lose their early lead. And that could cost them the Mobile Internet Platform dominance they so currently crave.
Don’t get us wrong. It’s Apple’s platform and they, like a Nintendo with the Wii, have the absolute right to approve or deny anything developed for their platform. But developers have the same right to stop developing for a platform they don’t think serves their best interests. And consumers have the same right to stop buying it for the same reason. As with the Blacklist push-back, that will be the ultimate officiator of this debate.
And a terse one-line email from Steve may not fix things if Apple waits too long…
It started innocently enough. Prince Mclean over at Apple Insider commented in passing:
Data transaction security in MobileMe’s web apps is based upon authenticated handling of JSON data exchanges between the self contained JavaScript client apps and Apple’s cloud, rather than the SSL web page encryption used by HTTPS. The only real web pages MobileMe exchanges with the server are the HTML, JavaScript, and CSS files that make up the application, which have no need for SSL encryption following the initial user authentication. This has caused some unnecessary panic among web users who have equated their browser’s SSL lock icon with web security. And of course, Internet email is not a secured medium anyway once it leaves your server.
If Apple applied SSL encryption in the browser, it would only slow down every data exchange without really improving security, and instead only provide pundits with a false sense of security that distracts from real security threats.
And the web went wild. Daniel Eran Dilger, took the crown off to retort them all over at Roughly Drafted:
For the record: Apple’s MobileMe desktop email can be secured via encrypted SMTP and IMAP; Apple presents details on how to ensure this is set up, as users may not have this enabled by default. Address Book and iCal sync on Mac OS X is secured automatically when it transacts with Apple’s server cloud. Windows apps use the same security when syncing their data via Outlook through iTunes for Windows. The iPhone and iPod touch also support encrypted email and all push messages are also secured via encryption.
Our take? If you’re super sensitive about your data, only ever browse via SSL over a VPN while sending with a strong PGP key, and hope no intelligence service is willing to spend serious money and assets on snooping in your general direction.
Other than that, use common sense. Don’t risk information you can’t afford getting out, and take advantage of every security feature your chosen system implements.
A few posts back we got into a few App Store early growing pains/gripes, including that some less-scrupulous — or more marketing-savvy, depending on your point of view — developers were prepending spaces and symbols to their App names in order to get them to sort higher in the alphabetical listings. Well according to MacUser (via Ars), seems like Apple called shenanigans on that one and has put an end to the practice.
Visiting the App Store now, I see that Jirbo’s titles, as well as quite a few others, still have a space in front of them, but are simply alphabetized by the following letter.
Nicely done. Would that all App Store problems were so easily solved…
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The App Store went live last week (what day exactly depends on whether you snuck in to iTunes 7.7 and snooped around on your own, or waited for the official links to surface), tying in to the iPhone 3G and 2.0 software launches. How’d it do? According to Steve Jobs:
“The App Store is a grand slam, with a staggering 10 million applications downloaded in just three days. Developers have created some extraordinary applications, and the App Store can wirelessly deliver them to every iPhone and iPod touch user instantly.”
Probably why Apple has finally started putting a dent in its backlog of developer acceptances, eh? But is all happy in App Land? Nope. Find out why after the break…
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