Dave Metzener's Weblog

A while back, Apple told a developer to either take out some offensive words from their dictionary application (Ninjawords) or be removed from the AppStore. This prompted Apple’s Phil Schiller to write to John Gruber at Daring Fireball to respond to the accusation that Apple was censoring the dictionary app.

I felt that Apple finally had an idea that they needed to take a good long look at their process and make some changes.

Well, I’m afraid that either they are still taking that “long look” or they decided that nothing was wrong with their process because sure enough, developers seem to be getting shafted more and more since.

Case in point: iStat from Bjango. Originally, iStat had a great feature that allowed its users to “Free Memory” on their device so that they could play a game or run an application that might otherwise crash to the SpringBoard due to memory issues. Apple sent Bjango a letter stating that their software was causing confusion with it’s iPhone/iPod touch users and that they needed to remove the Free Memory feature from the software or have their iStat program removed from the AppStore.

Bjango capitulated and has since been updated with new features like a battery status display and process list.

Now Apple has sent a letter to the folks over at Vanilla Breeze telling them to remove the “Broken LCD animation” from their iSurprise application or be removed from the AppStore. When asked why, Apple responded saying that they were getting too many phone calls from their customers telling them their devices have become broken by using iSurprise.

Now, I understand that the iPhone is a great device and that its designed so that even a small child can use all the features of a cell phone without having to dig into it’s manuals. However, this is getting ridiculous. Apple is actually saying that their users are so stupid that they can’t tell the difference between an application bringing up a picture of a broken screen and an actual broken screen?

Are these users so stupid that as soon as the screen appears broken, they pick up their landline and call Apple claiming that the application iSurprise broke their phone? They don’t notice that the “glass” is broken only to the edge of where the display is and not to the upper and lower edges of the phone? That pressing the Home button “fixes” the break and then tapping the iSurprise icon then tapping the screen again causes the screen to break again?

Seriously?

Are they saying that they get calls when someone’s iPhone shows a broken screen but when they have a similar application running on their iMac and the iMac’s screen shows a graphic of a broken screen that they are not confused by this, but are by the iPhone app?

Something has to be going on at Apple above and beyond confusion by 0.001% of Apple’s iPhone/iPod touch users (assuming 400 people are calling complaining about this application, and that is being generous). It would take 400,000 users calling complaining about this problem for it to even show as 1% of their user base. What that something is, I just can’t even speculate on. It’s just too damn strange for me to figure out.

Apple needs to fix this AppStore problem, or they are going to have absolutely no developers for their precious phone/ipod as all the developers move to other platforms that don’t act like dictators.

“Bulk Apps” or Mass Produced Applications have been an increasing problem with Apple’s AppStore for quite some time now. More and more developers are finding that they can “bulk up” their application catalog or portfolio by simply taking a simple template app, applying different data and publishing the application as a totally separate app.

They started out simply as e-books published to the AppStore one book as one application. Usually a book that is in the public domain. Then, actual book publishers saw that iPhone e-books were becoming popular and decided that they would join in and publish their books as e-books. At the time there were a couple of pretty good e-book reader apps out there for publishers to attach to and before you knew it, there were hundreds of e-books in the AppStore.

e-books have become a huge segment of the AppStore comprising over 9,500 titles ranging in price from Free to $20 and more. e-books are an acceptable “bulk” app because Apple gave developers little choice when it came to applications. Sure, you could put 10, 100, even 10,000 books in a single application. However, a book publisher wouldn’t want to because they would have to sell the application for hundreds if not the maximum $999.99.

The real problem started with a new type of application. Location-based apps as well as fan apps. Location-based applications pull data from RSS feeds, flickr, and other sources to create an application that doesn’t require an internet connection to get to the data. A developer pulls the data for a specific region together, creates an application for the AppStore, and published it. Before long, that developer has 100+ apps all using the same code base.

There are currently 71,617 published applications in the AppStore. This number is based on AppShopper.com’s tally. Games comprise the bulk of that number at nearly 20%. e-books take a good 13% and Entertainment another 13%. The rest of the AppStore categories are less than 10% each, the biggest of which is over 7% in the Travel category.

Interestingly, one developer holds just over 13% (that’s equal to all the e-books that are published!) of the 71,617 published applications with a whopping 9,500+ applications. One developer! Brighthouse Labs currently holds the record for the largest collection of applications in the AppStore. Clearly, this is a lucrative business for Brighthouse Labs. It’s probably safe to say that there is more than one person behind this developer. I would even venture to guess that we are talking between 50 to 100 people work for Brighthouse Labs.

Update: Whoops, I don’t know where I came up with 9,500 apps for Brighthouse, that number should be 2,280 which is 3.2% of all the apps published, still an impressive number. 2,280 comes out to about 6 apps a day since the store was opened. Not inconceivable for a one or two developer shop to produce. However, from information garnered from other bulk application developers, it’s probable that Brighthouse employees around 20 or so people to turn out the apps that they do. Consider that Brighthouse didn’t start creating their apps back on July of last year. they have probably been punching out apps for about 8 months which equates to about 10 apps a day, 7 days a week, for 8 months.

Thanks Frank for pointing out my mistake there. I don’t know where the 9,500 came from unless I read the number of e-books as being the number from Brighthouse. I’m leaving the old text in but crossed out to show that I had made the mistake and corrected it.

I would also venture to guess that 95% or more are minimum wage or possibly even “sweat shop” labor that do the bulk of the work, no pun intended. In order for Brighthouse labs to have 9,500+ applications in the store, they would have had to submit to Apple, 24 applications a day, 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year! That’s assuming they started submitting apps the day the AppStore opened!

Brighthouse Labs isn’t the only developer out there creating Bulk apps either. One such developer, Khalid Shaikh, was booted from the AppStore and their privileges to the iPhone development program revoked. At the time, he was the 3rd most prolific developer with over 900 applications published. Apple pulled the developer, not because he was a bulk developer, but because he was publishing copyrighted material in his apps.

Apple made a change to the way developers could sell their wares when they released OS 3.0 not long ago. A new feature called In-App Purchasing allows developers to combine their content into one application and still make money for their separate content. Comixology is taking advantage of this feature with their application “Comics“. Comics is a $0.99 application that allows you to download comics to your iPhone. They have a large collection of comics from 15+ publishers as well as creater-owned titles. There are several comics that are free, but the bulk of the titles cost $0.99. You don’t have to find these titles in the AppStore, you go into the Comics application, find a title you want, and tap a Buy button. You are charged through Apple for the purchase, but no new applications are downloaded to your iPhone/iPod touch. Its downloaded into the Comics application where you can read it at your leisure.

Game developers are taking advantage of this feature to offer new downloadable content for their games like the PS3 and XBOX-360 have done for years. Developers as well as patrons benefit from this since patrons don’t have to buy whole new applications for 3-5 times the price and the new content doesn’t take up extra space on their device. Developers benefit since they don’t have to charge 3-5 times the price which makes the content that more appealing to patrons.

The problem though, and the reason for the headline to this article, is that Apple should have thought of this before opening up the AppStore to developers back in 2008. Now, to be fair, no one predicted the rise of bulk apps back in 2008, so it’s hardly fair to blame Apple for this. However, if Apple had given developers the ability for In-App purchasing back in 2008, would we be seeing the Bulk application problem we are seeing today?

The fever I have right now is not the kind where my forehead is hot, nope its the kind that speeds up my weblog reading by an amazing amount. FeedAFever.com is an unusual kind of application. It doesn’t run on your desktop computer or your mobile device. Nope, it runs on your webhost. OK, I suppose it can run on your desktop computer if you are running MAMP/XAMP or running a Linux distro that can run a web application that uses Apache, PHP 4.2.3+ and MySQL 3.23+.

Fever is a web based application that takes reading your RSS feeds to a whole new experience plane. Instead of reading post after post like Google Reader or NetNewsWire or “name your favorite RSS feed reader here“, you are presented with articles that have a temperature based on a normal human body temperature of 98.6˚ degrees Fahrenheit or 37˚ Celsius.

What this means is that if you have 300 RSS feeds that you try to read regularly, odds are that 3 or 4 of them will talk about the exact same news that has come up on that day. So instead of having to slog through those multiple posts, Fever sees that they are talking about the same thing and assigns a temperature to the topic. The more sites that you normally follow that talk about it, the “hotter” the article is.

When you go to your installation of Fever to see what’s happening. You will be presented with a list of articles from hottest to coldest as shown on the left (click on the image for a larger view). As you can see, stories like “Ramp Champ” and “Apple Answers the FCC’s Questions” are mentioned my multiple blogs, each listed under the title of the article. You can pick and choose which article you want to read or read multiple articles if you wish. It’s totally up to you.

The way Fever accomplishes this is by the user assigning subscriptions to either the “Kindling” pile or the “Sparks” pile. Fever looks at all the feeds in the “Sparks” list to determine what articles seen in the “Kindling” list are being talked about the most. Even if an article isn’t seen in the Kindling list, it will be assigned a temperature based on how many blogs are linking to the article.

Along with articles displayed by temperature, you can also read your most important blogs as you had in the past by viewing the Kindling. This will give you a display just like what you are used to in your old reader. You can read them all by clicking on the “Kindling” tab, or you can click on the individual blogs/groups to drill down to specific sections.

Kindling is where you put blogs like comics or personal blogs that you want to make sure you read.

To get your feeds from your old reader into Fever, just “export” an OPML file of all your feeds and import them into Fever. Then you need to do a little work and assign blogs to the Sparks list as needed. Once you have established which blogs are Sparks and which are Kindling, you are ready to rock and roll.

Installing Fever is an absolute breeze! You start by creating an account at the feedafever.com site. This doesn’t cost you anything to start with. You download the Fever server compatibility suite (a very small zip file), extract it and upload it to your webhost. Then open your browser to the specified page. This will cause Fever to test your webhost to see if it’s compatible with Fever. After the tests are run and you check out OK, you need to enter your database information (MySQL DB info that you setup on your webhost). If the database checks out too, you will be given a compatibility confirmation code.

At this point, you can purchase Fever if you wish. It’s $30 and let me tell you its well worth every penny! You enter the code into your account at feedafever.com, and you will be sent to PayPal.com to make the purchase. After your purchase is approved, you will be sent an activation key. Head over to your installation of Fever on your webhost, enter the key. At this point, you will be taken to a login page where you enter an email address and password (not the same one you used to create your account on feedafever.com) and you will be sent to a screen where you can drag a bookmarklet for add new subscriptions as well as a button to press to let you import an OPML file you exported from your older reader.

Thats it. Fever will start pulling articles from your subscriptions and before you know it you will be off and running. There is a great demo screen cast on the feedafever.com website that explains how Fever works and demonstrates an installation and purchase.

I have to say that I was skeptical at first, but after watching the screen cast and talking to a friend that had purchased it just a week earlier, I knew this was the way to go for me.

Unfortunately, due to the nature of this web application, its probably very difficult for a “demo” installation to be created. I did find a YouTube video of someone demo-ing Fever. Give that a look after checking out the demo screen cast.

If you use Google Reader or NetNewsWire (the two ways I “used” to follow my feeds), head over to feedafever.com and check out the demo screen cast. I have a feeling you will want to grab a copy yourself.

When I first heard about Ramp Champ, I was excited about the idea of IconFactory doing a “Skee-Ball” type game. The ones that are currently out there are OK, but they have their problems. When I heard that it had been released in the AppStore for $1.99, I immediately purchased it.

Update: Just minutes after I posted this review, I found this article from one of the developers of Ramp Champ: Designing Ramp Champ. Check it out, it’s a great read!

The graphics I see are top notch, I expected nothing less from IconFactory. They have some great applications, both Mac and iPhone and some outstanding Icons and Desktop wallpaper.

The User Interface for the game is also very smooth and well designed. The game comes with 4 “ramps” to play in. You can also purchase two other ramps for the game in the In-App store, $0.99 each.

Unfortunately, this is where the happiness ends. Unlike the other Skee-Ball games I have played, this one doesn’t appear to use 3D or any kind of physics engine. It’s more like Paper Toss, in that you flick your finger on the ramp, and depending on how fast your finger moves across the surface, the ball animates up the screen to a variety of targets. The targets are more like carnival rifle range games than Skee-Ball, but that’s nothing to be unhappy about.

Nope, the part that makes “me” unhappy, is the actual “flick” part. In most Skee-Ball games, the apparent range is, lets say, 1 to 100. In Ramp Champ, its’ more like 1 to 10. It’s very difficult to hit the first tier of targets (the 4 clowns in the first screen shot here). It’s much easier to hit the third tier targets (bottles and circle targets).

I actually got quite frustrated the first couple of attempts I played. I put it down and walked away for a while. I decided to give it another chance and found I was able to achieve the first “Goal” in Clown Town. To knock down all the clowns. So it is possible to get the targets, but you might get pretty frustrated at first.

There are 3 goals to achieve in each ramp. Knock down a first set of targets. Knock down a second set of targets that appear after the first are knocked down, and achieve more than a set number of points.

Then, the big problem hit me. The game started getting very sluggish then finally crashed. I had heard others complaining about this, but figured it was just a memory issue. It usually is with most people. The old “turn off your device, then back on” is the usual cure. However, with those symptoms hit me, I immediately jumped over to iStat to check the memory situation out. Not only was there enough memory, I had have the iPhones 256MB’s of memory free. That’s unheard of. There is usually something taking up a good chunk of the devices memory.

The only thing that would leave the iphone is a state of low memory usage, is if the application prior to running iStat had used up a bunch of memory, then freed it. This way, when you look at the current state of the devices memory, it looks like there is a bunch of free memory. The devices Springboard app (the devices “desktop” for lack of a better description) was also very sluggish. This is because the OS’s memory management system is taking the memory that it had Paged Out earlier for Ramp Champ and was Paging it back in.

My guess here is that either Ramp Champ has a memory leak problem that fills up all the available memory to the point that the game appears to crash, but in reality simply shuts down because of a low-memory condition (part of the iPhone SDK), or it uses so much memory that it’s on the cusp of the low-memory condition, and something pushes it over the edge.

Either way, it’s a 1.0 game that when IconFactory and DS Media Labs comes out with it’s first update, I’m sure the game will be much better and probably won’t crash anymore.

Over all, I would suggest waiting till the first update on this one. It’s worth playing, it’s not really a Skee-Ball simulator, but its still a fun carnival type game that will keep you entertained for a short while once the kinks are ironed out.

OK, what the hell is the matter with you Apple! This blackmail tactic of threatening to remove an application from the AppStore because you don’t like a feature is really getting very very old!

I just learned that Apple is threatening to remove iStat from Bjango if they don’t remove a feature in the application that attempts to free up memory that is otherwise not being used.

As you can see from the screen shot to the right, the first section of the applications data is a pie chart of memory usage. Wired and Active is memory that is currently being used by applications, Inactive and Free is memory that is not being used. The “FREE MEMORY” button to the right of the pie chart allows the user to attempt to free up memory that is not being used at the time.

For this example, tapping the FREE MEMORY button would probably free up about a quarter of the memory currently being colored in the pie chart. This has been my experience with the app. It probably attempts to fill the device with used memory by allocating as much memory as it’s allowed, then freeing it up. This will force the device to “Page Out” memory, freeing up some memory for other apps.

Typically, the Mail, Phone and iPod apps don’t quit when you press the Home button. So they take up memory that may not be needed if you are not listening to music. You don’t need Mail in memory if you are not reading messages and you don’t need “most” of the Phone app in memory either.
The news hit Twitter just a few hours ago directly from Bjango. Here are the tweets from their Twitter account: http://twitter.com/bjango

We’ve been asked to remove iStat’s free memory feature. This leaves us with two choices. Resubmit with free mem gon (cont) http://tl.gd/dme8 You all know who asked Keep the replies coming. User feedback is a VERY important part of this decision. Those who want more info: we simply don’t have any. It is exactly what it is. All the detail we have: iStat will be removed from the store unless the free mem feature goes. If you don’t update iStat to version 1.1, then yes, you get to keep 1.0 as is, free mem included. On the plus side: If we remove the free mem feature, we will be able to update iStat with all the features we’ve been wanting to add. We haven’t made a decision yet but it seems like people would rather have updates even if it means free memory is gone.

Now, there were a lot of folks chiming in with suggestions including myself. I would personally like to keep iStat as is, and purchase a new iStat app that doesn’t have the free memory feature, but has the new features that Bjango is promising. Were not talking a huge amount of money here. If I paid full price for the app, it was $1.99. I would gladly eat that for a way of freeing memory other than turning off my phone, then back on. That is so annoying and is just because there is no memory free to run the application I am attempting to run.

I have seen symptoms in several apps I run. With PandoraBox, I’ll see application entries with all blank data, meaning that there wasn’t enough free memory to load the app description and icon into memory to display. I’ve seen apps shutdown seconds after starting. After I free the memory, the applications work fine.

I have to wonder what in the world Apple doesn’t like about the ability to “Page Out” memory not being used presently by other applications. It’s what a Paged Memory Management system is designed to do. If the “embeded” version of OS X is not capable of PMM, I would have to question Apple’s saying that the iPhone/iPod touch uses an Embeded OS X.

As usual, Apple is not stating way Bjango has to remove the feature from its app. Just that they remove it or the app is removed from the store. I’m actually surprised that Apple actually gave Bjango a warning that they would remove the app if they don’t comply. We have clearly seen examples of Apple pulling the plug on an application and surprising the developers with the news after the fact.

So, come on Apple, get your head out of your collective asses and fix this AppStore problem, or you are not going to be seeing the applications you would like to see in your wonderful AppStore in the future. Just hundreds of thousands of “Bulk” apps that we all enjoy so much right now. (You know what I’m talking about, don’t you Brighthouse Labs?)

Gameloft’s much anticipated Gangstar: West Coast Hustle was released to the AppStore today for $6.99 [AppStore Link]. There has been a lot of blog posts about this game from many iPhone/AppStore weblogs. All saying that this is the iPhones answer to the GTA franchise. Well…

I have to say that they are pretty close to correct. This game doesn’t disappoint. The game has a pretty big driving area to work with as seen in the screen shot below.

The controls for the game are pretty smooth, you have a virtual joystick on the right and a virtual button on the left when you are moving around as a person, pedals and tilting the iPhone/iPod touch to control vehicles. This can be configured in the game. However, you can’t configure the joystick to be on the right and button on the left. I’m not sure if that is an issue for lefties. I’m not a lefty, so I don’t know if they are used to using their dominant hand for buttons or if they just use what they are given.

The graphics are amazing for a game that is run on an iPhone/iPod touch with 480×320 graphics. Lets face it, it’s no GTA IV, but its a great homage to the Grand Theft Auto franchise. The trees look pretty darn good. The streets have lights, street signs. There are places where you can jump your vehicle just like the jumps in GTA. Not as dramatic, but still entertaining. You can run over pedestrians, hit other vehicles and even receive some damage to your vehicle. Again, nothing like GTA, but pretty good considering.

There is a story with chapters in this game. Apparently, you are in LA taking a “Vacation” from some trouble that your character was in prior to the start of the story. You are given missions like in GTA. You have to fight rival gangs, drive around a big shot in your gang, etc… I have not got that far in the story yet. I’m pretty close to finishing up the first of 6 chapters. It’s take only an hour to get as far as I have. So, its likely to not be that many hours of game play, but there has been talk of expansion levels probably sold in game later.

Over all, this game will not disappoint and will definitely keep you entertained for at least a couple of days.

Jump-Parkour Game Coming Soon To iPhone Gameplay Exclusive

I came across this video of an amazing looking game for the iPhone/iPod touch in development. It reminds me of Mirror’s Edge for the PS3, XBOX 360 and PC.

Can’t really tell what the controls will be like for it, but man, it looks killer. If the music used in the video is actually in the game, that would really make it rock. Probably not though. Since the song is My United States Of Whatever by Liam Lynch (YouTube Video), so probably not.

Here’s hoping that this game actually sees the light of day.

I’ve decided to take the plunge and use Feedburner.com for my RSS feeds instead of what WordPress creates. No huge deal, and I suspect that there are not that many people out there that are actually subscribed to my feeds. If you are, this is a note to let you know that you should probably re-subscribe to them. I suspect the old WordPress feeds will stop updating now.

I’m making this change mostly for the statistics and also to support a great service.

Thanks for hanging in there with me and I hope I’ve been helpful in some way to you in my writings.

I guess it was bound to happen sooner or later. Looks like the RIAA has decided to crack down on sites that supply lyrics to songs. Not necessarily themselves, but if they supply an API (Application Programming Interface), then that site will have to kill any ability to pull lyrics from the site.

LyricWiki is one of the sites that is having to drop any API method that gets lyrics from it’s database and sends it out to the caller of the API method. “Get Lyrical” is an application that takes advantage of LyricWiki’s API methods.

LyricWiki posted info on this change (see Editor’s Corner section of their main page) on their website recently and posted a link to a letter that was sent out on August 2nd to all LyricWiki’s API developers:

Dear LyricWiki API Developers, It has been a great run, and I have seen some fantastic and interesting applications come from all of your skills and hard work. Unfortunately, licensing agreements with the biggest publishers in the music industry require us to no longer offer the ability for programmatic access to LyricWiki’s collection of lyrics. We tried to arrange some way to let API Developers license through us, but this was not possible. While this is not something we are happy about, it is a necessity in order to finally secure licensing for LyricWiki from the major publishers which will allow the project to survive indefinitely.

As of this writing, the API methods are still working. How long they will remain working is not known. I would suspect that the developer of Get Lyrical and other developers will search for other means of getting lyrics after this change takes place. I suspect the results will not be as good as they have been.

My guess is that this has something to do with changes being rumored by Apple’s iTunes Store called Cocktail. The idea is to add liner notes and other features to help sell full albums instead of selling individual tracks. I’m not saying Apple has anything to do with this, just that the RIAA and record labels are pushing electronic stores to encourage sales of albums versus single tracks.

Sometimes you just can’t help but laugh at how totally obvious SPAM can be. I got this one today, and it totally cracked me up.

I blurred out the “Reply-To” email address, because that’s probably a real person’s email address and I really don’t want to have anyone else bothering them. The rest of the email addresses are fair game in my opinion.

Either this SPAMmer is 4 years old, not an English speaking/writing human, or just completely clueless. Either way, the inconsistent spelling of lawyer, the attached file named “safe_mail.txt”, the name of the contact vrs. the email address of the contact, punctuation, etc… It all just makes me laugh.

I just hope and prey that in this day and age, that people are not falling for these kinds of SPAM. Mind you, most decent, even average SPAM filters can handle this kind of SPAM so that the end user won’t see them. Still, please do us all a favor, don’t open attachments in email, at all.

If you are sending someone pictures, use flickr.com or any of the many other picture sharing sites. If you are sending a text file or even some binary data, there are plenty of sites that will let you store the file on their server for a short period of time so that your recipient has time to get an email with a link to the file to download from that server. yousendit.com and transferbigfiles.com are just a couple I found with a quick search on Google.

So, just sit back and enjoy some of the SPAM you get on a regular basis.