The big story in iPhone news this week was the approval policies of the App Store. John Gruber at Daring Fireball initially criticized Apple for appearing to censor a dictionary, even though the dictionary was rated 17+, but then Apple wrote back and said that isn't exactly what happened. I believe Apple when it says that it is trying hard to do the right thing, and I understand that the app review process is difficult when you have such a crazy number of apps being submitted every day. But I still feel for developers who get caught in the cracks, and for users who lose access to good software as a result.
- As a backdrop to the latest story on the App Store, recall that Apple recently rejected the Google Voice app and revoked two previously-available apps that provided the ability to use Google Voice. I wrote on this back on July 29. [UPDATE: If you want to learn more about the Google Voice service, check out this good post on the Young Lawyers Blog.] Since then, the FCC has decided to take a look at this situation, issuing letters to Apple, AT&T and Google saying essentially (cue Ricky Ricardo voice) "Lucy, you got some 'splainin' to do!" Futurelawyer reports on the Washington Post's take on this story, asking "What Did Apple Know And When Did They Know It?" David Pogue of the New York Times also has a thoughtful analysis here.
With the background of many prior app rejections including the rejection of Google Voice, noted columnist John Gruber wrote this piece about Ninjawords, a dictionary that the developers claimed was censored by Apple because it contained some naughty words in it such as some four letter ones that begin with letters like F and S. Even though other dictionaries already available for the iPhone, like the New Oxford American Dictionary, contain the same words.
- Gruber's article was reported all over the Internet, resulting in something very rare—a public response from Apple. Apple's PR department is sometimes considered one of the easiest places to work because they so often just say "no comment." But this time, Apple's Senior Vice President Phil Schiller wrote to John Gruber and said that there was another side to the story. As reported in a follow up post by Gruber, the app developer didn't have to remove the dirty words, and could have instead just marked the app age 17+, but the developer chose to remove the words to speed up the approval process.
- This doesn't end the controversy; people are noting that Schiller is just a marketing guy, one who some argue sometimes stretches the truth, and we haven't heard from someone in charge of reviewing apps. I actually take Schiller for his word on this one, but the fact remains that Apple could do more to improve the App Review process. And I believe that they are trying to do so.
- At the same time that all of this is going on, the App Store also made news by banning a developer who had over 900 apps for sale. But this time, people seemed to side with Apple. The apps excluded included questionable titles like "Top Sexy Ladies" and mostly consisted of packaging up some information already available on the Internet and selling it for $4.99 and in many cases including photographs and other content that the developer had no right to resell.
- Others took the time this week to write about good apps that are in the App Store. For example, Philadelphia Attorney Lauren Tracy Hirsch wrote about Five Useful Apps for Lawyers in TUAW. The apps that she discussed have all been reviewed on iPhone J.D., so if you missed it check out these posts on Documents to Go, Black's Law Dictionary, time tracking apps such as TimeWerks, Court Days and apps from The Law Pod and Cliff Maier.
- And for attorneys on the road, Ernie "the Attorney" Svenson took some time to discuss a $69 GPS app from Navigon that provides turn-by-turn directions. He likes it.
- And now, shifting to more general iPhone stories, for those of you with kids about to start college, Macworld writes on the reasons that your kids will be giving you as to why you really need to buy them an iPhone. Please, please, please?
- Art of the iPhone wrote this great post on 11 iPhone typing tips. Even if you think you already know these, it serves as a nice refresher course, so check it out.
- Michael Scalisi of PC World writes this interesting article on supporting iPhones in an Exchange environment. As he writes, it is much easier for a company to support iPhones than to support Blackberries and Apple clearly "takes the role of the iPhone in the enterprise seriously."
- And finally, for those of you who (like me) use a Mac at home or are lucky enough to use a Mac in your office, Apple is about a month away (maybe less) from releasing its next operating system, Mac OS 10.6, also known as "Snow Leopard." The upgrade to Snow Leopard will be much cheaper than previous OS upgrades, and if want to support iPhone J.D., you can use these Amazon links to pre-order an upgrade from Mac OS 10.5 for only $29.99
or pre-order a Family Pack 5-user upgrade license for only $49.99
. Amazon is also letting you pre-order a Mac Box Set Family Pack (with Snow Leopard)
for $229 which, I believe, will include a full version of Snow Leopard (which doesn't require you to already own Mac OS 10.5) and the latest versions of iLife ’09 (including iPhoto ’09, iMovie ’09, GarageBand ’09, iWeb ’09, and iDVD) and the latest version of Apple’s productivity suite iWork ’09 (including Pages ’09, Numbers ’09, and Keynote ’09).
