Martin Gordon's Blog

CD Baby's shipment confirmation:

Your CDs have been gently taken from our CD Baby shelves with sterilized contamination-free gloves and placed onto a satin pillow.

A team of 50 employees inspected your CDs and polished them to make sure they were in the best possible condition before mailing.

Our packing specialist from Japan lit a candle and a hush fell over the crowd as he put your CDs into the finest gold-lined box that money can buy.

We all had a wonderful celebration afterwards and the whole party marched down the street to the post office where the entire town of Portland waved "Bon Voyage!" to your package, on its way to you, in our private CD Baby jet on this day, Monday, January 5th.

I hope you had a wonderful time shopping at CD Baby. We sure did. Your picture is on our wall as "Customer of the Year." We're all exhausted but can't wait for you to come back to CDBABY.COM!!

Thank you, thank you, thank you!

Sigh…

Companies with personality ROCK.

Podcaster, an iPhone app that downloads podcasts over-the-air, was rejected from the App Store this past Friday on account of it "duplicating iTunes functionality." The Mac community is justifiable upset, with at least one developer refusing to develop any more apps, and others looking to coordinate some form of organized protest. I think that many are confounding two separate issues that the Podcaster rejection raises. First, that there are App Store approval guidelines that extend being what is listed in the developer agreement, and second, that Apple has seemingly decided to not allow any third party applications to compete with their own.

The first issue is not new. I wrote about it in my post about Flickup being rejected and we've seen it many times of the past couple of months. This incident just gives us yet another item to add to our unofficial approval guidelines. That these guidelines are (1) not published provided by Apple, and (2) a result of trial and error on the part of many very frustrated developers is inexcusable and irresponsible. As both Fraser Speirs and Paul Kafasis mention, development takes time, effort and money, and without a reasonable expectation that an app will be approved makes the App Store that much more unappealing to develop for, scares away developers and undermines Apple's goal of building a long-lasting ecosystem around its mobile operating system.

The solution, of course, is simple. Apple needs to release an all-inclusive set of guidelines. Knowing what is off-limits cuts developers off from the get go instead of forcing them to develop an app and spin the roulette wheel. Developers may not be happy that they can't release an app that does X, but at least they'll know before pouring weeks into development. A scary, but entirely possible situation is that Apple hasn't released such a document because even they aren't sure exactly what's in it.

The second issue is the anti-competitive nature of this specific rejection. I don't want to spend too much time extrapolating meaning from this specific rejection, particularly the common view that this rejection indicates that Apple won't allow any application into the store that competes with *any* of its products. I don't see Apple being stupid enough to actually have an explicit non-complete policy in place, so my view is that this is simply a case of a reviewer not fully understanding Apple's (currently nonpublic) approval guidelines and I fully expect Apple to correct this mistake. Until we see more cases of this anti-competitive policy being applied, I don't think we should go running for the hills just yet.

Technorati Tags: Apple, iPhone, iPhone 3G, App Store, iTunes, Podcaster

It pains me greatly to post this, but I just learned that Dave Matthews Band saxophonist Leroi Moore passed away today. The news came via the band's official site:

We are deeply saddened that LeRoi Moore, saxophonist and founding member of Dave Matthews Band, died unexpectedly Tuesday afternoon, August 19, 2008, at Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center in Los Angeles from sudden complications stemming from his June ATV accident on his farm near Charlottesville, Virginia. LeRoi had recently returned to his Los Angeles home to begin an intensive physical rehabilitation program.

Leroi had been with the band since its inception in 1991. I will miss him tremendously and there is no doubt that he will be missed greatly by the band, the crew and the entire DMB community.

Jeff Coffin has been filling in for Leroi since his accident in late June. Leroi's final show was at the Nissan Pavilion at Stone Ridge in Bristow, Virginia on June 28, 2008. If anyone would like a copy of the show, let me know and I will provide you with a copy or tell you where you can get one (DMB explicitly allows taping of their shows, so it is completely legal).

Technorati Tags: Dave Matthews Band, DMB, Leroi Moore, death

Merlin Mann on iPhone development (from the SF iPhone Dev Camp):

Think about having the courageousness to make an app that is crazy easy. Instead of making a circus that’s really fun to play in, just make something that’s easy to get in and out of quickly without hassle.

Yes! This is exactly what I'm going for with Flickup. I wanted it to be dead simple to post photos to Flickr and I think I've gotten pretty close. While I don't want to add frivolous features, there are some that are reasonable to consider - uploading to a set, security settings, etc. I struggled to fit the metadata view onto one screen and now I'm faced with the challenge of adding these new features without undermining the simplicity that I was going for in 1.0.

Technorati Tags: Apple, iPhone, App Store, Flickup, Flickr, Merlin Mann, iPhone Dev Camp

A few hours after my post about being rejected from the App Store, Flickup was approved. If that was all there was to the story then I would have posted about it immediately. Sadly, however, it took nine days from the time Flickup was approved until the time it was actually available for sale on the App Store.

In preparing the now-defunct demo version of Flickup, I stumbled across the contracts page on iTunes Connect and realized that my Paid Applications Contract wasn't complete. I completed it on July 17th and incessantly refreshed the contracts page to see if it had been approved yet. When Flickup was finally approved hours after my last blog post, I was met with the status of "Pending Contract" and frustration returned. I would have thought that three days would have been enough time for someone to review the contract, but apparently that wasn't the case. Having given Apple some breathing room, I finally sent them an email on the 24th asking how long the process would take. Their response? Nothing.

I didn't hear anything from Apple until the contract was approval last Monday, July 28th and the status changed to "Ready For Sale." When I finally got tired of searching the App Store every few minutes to see if Flickup was listed, I sent Apple another email. Again I received no response. It wasn't until I saw a tweet from Jon that I learned that Flickup had finally been posted and that the three week ordeal was finally over.

When I first started working on Flickup I set a lifetime sales goal ("If only X number of people ever buy the app, I would be satisfied"). I'm happy to say that I reached 10% of that target in the first full day alone. Since the app went live, I've been answering support emails (already!), pushed out (well, submitted to Apple anyway) a new version with some bug fixes, and already started working on some new features.

Now go out and buy it!

Technorati Tags: Apple, iPhone, iTunes, App Store, Flickr, Flickup

I am now a proud member of the elite group of developers who have had applications rejected from the iPhone App Store.

The application I have been working on since a few weeks after the SDK came out is Flickup, a simple Flickr uploader. When Apple announced the July 7th deadline, I pulled an all-nighter that day to finish it up and submitted the app to Apple around 6am in order to meet the 3pm deadline for inclusion in the App Store at launch. When the App Store is launched on Thursday/Friday, my app is nowhere to be found and the status remains "In Review". I sent an email on Saturday to Apple asking why Flickup was still in review and I received a non-response three days later telling me that "In Review" means my application is being reviewed by Apple. I responded immediately clarifying my inquiry and I finally received this response yesterday:

At this time, Flickup cannot be posted to the App Store because it does not allow the user to logout or change the Flickr account that they are using.

In order for your application to be reconsidered for the App Store, please resolve this issue and upload your new binary to iTunes Connect.

This is a perfectly valid critique, and an oversight on my part, but did it really take them two weeks to tell me about it? Would they have even told me had I not emailed them about my app's status? In any case, the time it took to get a decision on Flickup gave me time to fix some bugs, and of course add the required logout functionality.

As an aside, the Flickr Authentication API's Implementation Guidelines merely states, "Users must be provided with 'logout' functionality." The API documentation does not provide any way to revoke tokens and log users out. I had to resort to directing users to their revoke permissions page instead.

In the mean time, the App Store turned one week old and gripes about the review functionality sprouted everywhere, particularly with regard to the ability for people to review an app without actually having used it. This "feature" of the App Store prompted the cheapskates out there to use reviews as a medium to complain about price. Taking this to heart, I spent some time last week preparing a demo version of Flickup that would allow people to sample the app before dropping two Washingtons on the full version. I submitted the demo version on Friday and received a decision today:

Flickup Demo cannot be posted to the App Store because it is a beta or feature-limited version. Any reference to demo or beta needs to be removed from the binary and metadata. Free or "Lite" versions are acceptable, however the application must be a fully functional app and cannot reference features that are not implemented or up-sell to the full version.

In spite of the lightning fast turnaround time, I am still just as angry about this rejection than the last one since there was no prior warning (in program agreements or otherwise) that demo versions would not be allowed. It's hard to believe that Apple isn't aware that people are crying out for demos and trials; going as far as explicitly prohibiting them (while letting all other sorts of crap through) is nothing short of infuriating.

Technorati Tags: iPhone, iPhone SDK, App Store, Apple, Flickup

Twitter is great for those fleeting thoughts one has that maybe aren't work blogging about, but are worth saving all the same. I had a bunch of these thoughts last Thursday when the iPhone App Store went live and I was testing out all sorts of applications. Here are the relevant ones:

07:24 App Store is live on my phone!
07:36 First tweet from Mobile Twitteriffic.
07:47 Replacing all my webclips with proper iPhone apps.
10:19 Exposure's "Near Me" feature is broken. What are "metres"? :-p
10:23 Is anyone else able to use the Facebook app? I'm getting a "Cannot connect at this time." error.
10:39 Protip: Do not enter your News Gator credential into NNW Touch if you haven't logged into the account in a year or so.
10:47 Now we know why Apple stopped including remotes with Macs: They'd rather you buy an iPhone and use Remote.app instead. Talk about upselling.
13:58 Shazam accurately found two songs playing at the restaurant during lunch today. Midomi did not.
14:18 It's annoying that I have to keep retyping my iTunes password almost every time I want to download something from the App Store.
18:35 Facebook app gets a big "meh" from me. Much less functionality than the webapp.
18:42 Putting on an extra polo shirt while Loopt installs.
19:22 It appears I haven't opened NNW since Feb 07. I can't give up GReader, so it looks like I'll need to come up with an On The Go feed list.

And here are some quick reviews that I posted on Ars:

AIM - This is slightly less useful until push functionality is available.

Facebook - Looks promising (at least better than using the web interface), but I can't get past the login screen ("Unable to connect at this time.") NOTE: I have been able to login and the app has less features than the mobile site. So far this is the only app I'm considering going back to the webclip.

Twitterrific - Pretty nice. Definitely beats the Twitter's mobile site. Photo integration and location updating are cool too.

Exposure - Nice, but limited on 2G. Not sure how often I'll look at Flickr on the go, but photos near me might be cool if I'm traveling.

CheckPlease - Works fine for me, but the icon is a bit dark for some reason.

NetNewsWire - I made the mistake of adding my NewsGator account after not visiting it for over a year. I'm a Google Reader guy so I'm curious to see how I'll put NNW to use.

NYTimes - Beats hitting up any mobile site, although the ads make the reading area a bit too small.

Bloomberg - Another NYT-style app. Being able track my stocks in nice, but I don't think it would replace the Stocks.app until they added a graph to it. Also, entering the number of shares using scrollers is pretty dumb.

Box Office - Looks good and the near me functionality works great.

Urban Spoon - Shaking for a random restaurant is cool, except that the first time I shook it came up with a restaurant that I hate.

Currency - Simple widget-like app. Nothing too fancy, but it's useful at time when I want to depress myself about how poorly the US Dollar is doing.

Dial Zero - This uses gethuman.com to show you how to get a human on the phone instead of dealing with automated systems. I rarely need to call tech support lines, but when I do, I'll hit up Dial Zero instead of the company's web site.

Cube Runner - One of the few free games out there. Very well tuned accelerometer handling, but not very fun. A nice tech demo, if anything.

midomi/Shazam - Both are "ID this song" apps that I haven't tried out yet. Cool and useful if it works well. NOTE: Since posting this, I've found that Shazam works infinitely better than midori, even though midori looks to have a few more features.

Remote.app - Looks just like iTunes on the iPhone except your music plays on the computer/Apple TV instead of the phone. This is really killer for Apple TV as it obviates the need to use the pretty-terrible Apple Remote. I'm hoping it lets me type into Apple TV searches as well, but even just scrolling through media will be much better on the phone than with the remote.

Fun Fact: To say that Thursday was just a tweetful day would be an understatement: I made 17 posts to Twitter out of 740 total. To put that in perspective: I've been on Twitter since early Feb 2007. That means 2.29% of my tweets came in just .2% of the time I've been on Twitter. Yowza.

Technorati Tags: Apple, iPhone, iPhone 3G, iPhone SDK, App Store

So it's about time I get back to posting here. I've been away from here for far too long, just shy of three months, longer than any other break I've taken.

My case of "noblog" wasn't isolated, however. Prolific blogger and VC Fred Wilson, had nothing blog worthy to say one day in mid-June, after finding something to write about every day for the past five years. Instead, he made a handful of posts on Twitter and Tumblr that day. As he put so bluntly, "I think its time to acknowledge that long form blogging every day may be coming to an end."

Other bloggers were also not putting as much down as they'd like. Russell Beattie, who took a year off from blogging before returning in April 2007, also found it difficult to keep up with a rigorous blogging regimen: "So I'm going to start blogging regularly again… A couple months ago, I was getting sick of blogging and decided to ratchet down the number of posts I wrote in some sort of attempt to change things up and maybe improve the quality of the blog. It didn't work."

So after an 8-post April and a 2-post May, Russell was back up to around 20 posts in June, about what he was doing prior to the two "slow" months.

Fellow Arsian Josh Bancroft not-so-recently wrote about how he wants "write more. Do more. Hack more. Learn more." In that post he writes on a topic that I've touched on a bunch of times over the years - making the transition from consumer to producer. I think Josh is way more on the producer side than I am, and his desire to move even further in that direction makes me think I could push myself a bit more in that direction as well.

That is not to say that I haven't been producing content just because I haven't been blogging. I've been twittering a whole lot more (although the number of tweets I put out fluctuates tremendously from day to day), and perhaps the number one enemy to my desire to blog is Google's "share with note" feature that they introduced in early June. Instead of linking to an interesting item here, I can just share the item and a few words to my Google Reader friends. It is much easier than preparing a post on a blog, for better or worse.

And of course there's the iPhone SDK. I've been working on a few ideas (for myself and others), one of which was finished just this morning and submitted to the App Store (more to come on that once the NDA expires).

Perhaps my hiatus was part of a more general trend towards something else (Twitter, FriendFeed, Google Reader Shared Items, etc). Even if that is the case, a personal blog feels, well, personal, and even if it doesn't provide value (or as much value as the aforementioned services) to the reader, it does provide quite a bit of value for the author, and I'll keep doing this until it ceases to do so (with month-long gaps at times, naturally).

The New Yorker has a piece on elevators, perhaps the world's most commonly used and most commonly taken-for-granted mode of transportation. It also recounted the story of a man who was stuck in an elevator for 41 hours after coming back from a smoke break (of which there's a disturbing time-lapse security video). The aftermath of the ordeal ended up costing him his job, his apartment, his money, and all contact with his friends. Remember, kids, smoking will ruin your life.

My favorite passage of the essay was the following, on elevator etiquette:

Passengers seem to know instinctively how to arrange themselves in an elevator. Two strangers will gravitate to the back corners, a third will stand by the door, at an isosceles remove, until a fourth comes in, at which point passengers three and four will spread toward the front corners, making room, in the center, for a fifth, and so on, like the dots on a die. With each additional passenger, the bodies shift, slotting into the open spaces. The goal, of course, is to maintain (but not too conspicuously) maximum distance and to counteract unwanted intimacies—a code familiar (to half the population) from the urinal bank and (to them and all the rest) from the subway. One should face front. Look up, down, or, if you must, straight ahead. Mirrors compound the unease. Generally, no one should speak a word to anyone else in an elevator. Most people make allowances for the continuation of generic small talk already under way, or, in residential buildings, for neighborly amenities. The orthodox enforcers of silence—the elevator Quakers—must suffer the moderates or the serial abusers, as they cram in exchanges about the night, the game, the weekend, or the meal.

Technorati Tags: elevators, The New Yorker, essay, smoke break