Apple Gestapo

[dude]

This week cartoonist Mark Fiore made Internet and journalism history as the first online-only journalist to win a Pulitzer Prize. Fiore took home the editorial cartooning prize for animations he created for SFGate, the website for the San Francisco Chronicle.

Read it HERE

[The Pecman]

The bulletin board software chopped off the end of the line, which was "He can't get his iPhone cartoon approved for the iPhone store."

Steve Jobs himself said this was a glitch in the system and has promised to restore the app. As Paul Harvey used to say, "here's... the rest of the story," at this link.

The deal is, Apple has had a firm policy in place stopping companies from making applications that "mimic" the iPhone's buttons and functions. The fear is that some idiot might try to hit some buttons, thinking it's actually the phone, when it's just a program sitting on top of the phone's interface. It's like if somebody temporarily removed your steering wheel in your car and replaced it with a fake one that didn't really do anything. It could sorta lead to trouble.

[colinian]

"Steve Jobs himself said this was a glitch in the system...."

That made me laugh. I have a friend at school who developed a great iPhone app that lets you know how far you are from home and school and your dorm room and wherever, actually any predefined set of locations, and about 4 months after submitting it Apple rejected it with no reason given. Typical. I've played with it, and it works great. He still has it under developer mode on his iPhone. I told him today that all he has to do is win a Pulitzer Prize and he's golden. Instead of waiting for that to happen, he's rewriting it for the Android (non-trivial because the developer tools are so different).

Colin

[The Pecman]

Laugh all you want. I'm not an apologist for Apple, and I've often been very, very critical of the company over the last 25 years. I'm very much in the category of "Love the Mac... hate Apple," and in fact, wore a T-shirt with that message for several years in the early 1990s.

The link I gave was extremely accurate in regards to Mark Fiore's story. Apple's own problems in being anti-competitive and discriminatory about the iPhone have been hotly debated since the day the phone launched, almost exactly 3 years ago. But it hasn't stopped more than 50,000,000 people from buying them (including my partner and I). They're great for users -- not so great for developers.