Although every App Store product page offers a company and support web site, you can interact better with your users by inviting them to contact you from within the program. You may still get a few cross-eyed, single-starred, annoyed reviews, but opening up lines of communication can help redirect that anger towards concrete bug fix requests and enhancement ideas.

Many developers have found that by adding a mailto: link into their apps, they're not only getting excellent feedback from users who might not have otherwise contacted them, but they're building a relationship with these users that helps guide and direct the application's growth.

It's easy to add a simple contact button to your app. Just drop in a UIButton to your interface, label it appropriately (e.g. "Send comments, feedback" or whatever), and have it trigger a method that launches e-mail with a pre-filled letter.

- (void) emailDev: (UIButton *) button
{
    NSString *content = @"subject=Converter Feedback&body=I have been using Converter! Here are my feature requests and my overall feedback:";
    NSString *mailto = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"mailto:feedback@ericasadun.com?%@", [content stringByAddingPercentEscapesUsingEncoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding]];
    NSURL *url = [NSURL URLWithString:mailto];
    [[UIApplication sharedApplication] openURL:url];
}

I have received some of my most valuable feedback from users who have not only tried out my program exhaustively but who have a vested interest in seeing it improve. Nearly every enhancement and bug fix in my currently-being-reviewed Converter update is due to user communication. By integrating the feedback option directly into the program rather than making my users seek out my web site, I have increased the number of user contacts by a couple of orders of magnitude.

IBM won a preliminary injunction barring Mark Papermaster from working at Apple as the company's new senior vice president of devices hardware engineering. But according to Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, the injunction comes with a requirement to post a bond that could reasonably cover damages if the injunction is later stricken. A federal judge then ordered IBM to post $3 million in order to grant the injunction against Papermaster.

Rule 65(c) says, "The court may issue a preliminary injunction or a temporary restraining order only if the movant gives security in an amount that the court considers proper to pay the costs and damages sustained by any party found to have been wrongfully enjoined or restrained." The amount determined by Judge Kenneth M. Karas was $3 million. Though actual damages may be less, depending on the eventual findings of the court, that $3 million is the maximum IBM is liable for if it is determined that Papermaster was "wrongfully enjoined or restrained."

Court documents entered into record this week show that IBM has posted the bond as ordered by Judge Karas. A status conference was held this week, but no arguments have been heard regarding Papermaster's counterclaims. It could be some time before this issue is resolved if IBM and Apple can't reach a settlement out of court. If the case gets tied up in court for very long, though, the $3 million dollars might not seem like such a large amount.

The iPhone dev team has posted details and recommendations about the new iPhone 2.2 firmware release, which hit iTunes last night. Both PwnageTool and QuickPwn updates are under way and will be released in due time. The team writes that they are modifying the tools for the new firmware and that it needs to test and validate the changes. The Pwnage/QuickPwn efforts are produced entirely by volunteers.

All iPhone jailbreak users are still cautioned against applying the update. iTunes offers two ways to apply a firmware change: you can "update" your iPhone, which leaves your personal data intact, or "restore," which does not. The team says that updating to 2.2 may allow the phone to remain activated, but that restoring to 2.2 will likely kill any current pseudo-activation. Deactivating your phone renders it unusable for certain users. This applies to both users who have unlocked the phone to for out-of-network use as well as those who applied the activation feature to allow the phone to work with AT&T SIMs outside of the normal iPhone contract.

3G users may be particularly hard hit by the update. The 2.2 firmware for 3G phones contains a baseband update for the 3G iPhone that may prevent a future software unlock. There is currently no software unlock available for the 3G iPhone as of yet, but the dev team has made great strides in the past weeks toward that end. (There's no equivalent baseband update included in the first-generation 2.2 phone firmware.) SIM-proxies are small circuit boards that offer a hardware-based solution for using a non-standard SIM with a locked iPhone. The team writes that SIM-proxies may also fail to work with firmware 2.2. 

Third-party jailbreak applications—i.e., those not purchased in App Store—will stop working with the 2.2 update as well. Jailbreaks, as you know, allow the iPhone's underlying OS to permit third-party software launching and execution. You will lose this feature should you update, even if your apps remain physically on your phone's media partition.

The final question is: should you update your iPhone? If you are using a standard non-jailbroken iPhone, there's absolutely no reason not to. If you have jailbroken your phone, we recommend that you wait things out. Although completely unpaid, the team has reliably delivered jailbreak updates within a few weeks of each firmware release.

The Hackulous pirating site is dedicated to cracking and distributing iPhone applications without paying any money to their developers. In what can only be described as hilarious irony, a beta version of that application was itself pirated and released before it could enter a full open-source distribution.

SaladFork, the author of Crackulous, called the leak "absolutely disgusting, and downright insulting." He writes about his pride of development, saying, "[I] have released a new version of Crackulous almost every day or two, fixing all the bugs that had been reported up until that day. I was proud of Crackulous, and put a large majority of my free time into ensuring it will be the best application it possibly could be. I responded to beta tester feedback, and each version of Crackulous was better than the last."

Alas, one of his pirate compatriots betrayed him, allowing the Crackulous beta to be freely downloaded. After a time of reflection and calming down, SaladFork announced that he would not, after all, be abandoning the project and looks forward to a public release. He asked, however, that bloggers and forum members not spread the leak, putting his faith in their humanity and goodness. He wrote, "Several of you had noticed the irony in me complaining that a tool used to steal from other developers was stolen, but I hope you realize the difference in situation. iPhone developers almost always (99% of the time) develop applications for the App Store in hopes of getting money."

Leaving aside the obvious jokes about honor among thieves, it's a shame this experience was not more of an ethical learning opportunity for Mr. SaladFork and his friends.

I'm sure you, like me, furiously downloaded the iPhone OS 2.2 update this morning and immediately began checking out the Google Transit features added to Maps. In that case, you might have missed some other updates from Apple—one for iTunes, and one for Final Cut Studio 2.

iTunes 8.0.2 includes, in Apple's words, "a number of important bug fixes," as well as improvements to "stability and performance." Specifically, Apple mentions that iTunes 8 is now accessible with VoiceOver, including iTunes U content. Also, MP3 quality is improved on some computers, and connecting to the iTunes Store over a proxy should be more reliable. The 57MB update is available via Software Update or direct download.

Pro Application Update 2008-004 updates four pieces of the Final Cut Studio 2 package—specifically, Final Cut Pro 6.0.5, Compressor 3.0.5, Color 1.0.3 and Shake 4.1.1. The note in Software Update merely state that the update "addresses general performance issues and improves overall stability." Thankfully, Apple includes more detailed information on its website. If you use Final Cut Studio regularly, then the phrases like, "Application of Display LUT Now Indicated Consistently," probably mean a lot more to you than to me. The update is available now via Software Update. The direct download wasn't available at the time of publishing, but I expect it to show up soon.

Although not a widely-publicized addition, one of the newer "features" Apple has added to its iPods and iPhones is a hash that protects the iTunesDB file, which stores information about what music you have on your iPod and where it's located on the iPod's hard drive. As it turns out, Apple doesn't seem to like people meddling with the iPhone and iPod touch hash, and according to Slashdot, Apple lawyers recently sent a DMCA violation notice to a project that was attempting to reverse-engineer the current version of the iTunesDB protection.

Without the ability to access the iTunesDB file, it's harder (or impossible) for iTunes alternatives like Songbird to work fully with iPods. The hash used on things like the iPod classic was cracked fairly quickly, but Apple changed the iTunesDB hash when it released the iPhone and iPod touch 2.0 firmware. According to the notice, Apple is claiming that attempts to reverse-engineer the iPhone 2.0 hash count as circumvention of its FairPlay DRM, possibly because the new hash is more closely related to Apple's DRM technology. Apple really doesn't want people trying to hack FairPlay, and appears to be nipping the iPod hash project in the bud before too much progress is made.

In this case, the project received a DMCA anticircumvention notice rather than a DMCA takedown notice (which deals only with copyright), so the situation is a bit different than in many of the DMCA news items that you see here on Ars. It's still unclear just how the iTunesDB hash is related to FairPlay, as well as what the legal ramifications of the project are, so the team is currently evaluating its options. There's still hope for iPodhash, but I wouldn't place any bets on a speedy return.

One of the common complaints about the iPhone is that it doesn't offer any continuing visual notifications for things like missed calls or new text messages. Plenty of other mobile phones feature a second screen or a tiny blinking LED to warn users of these things. So what does Apple do to solve the iPhone's problem? It threw Occam's razor out the window.

In a patent titled Secondary backlight indicator for portable media devices, Apple describes a dual backlighting system where a second backlight below the primary backlight of a display could show visual notifications of various events. The idea is to offer a low-power, flexible notification mechanism that can work even when the iPhone's primary display is off.

"In accordance with another aspect of the present invention, a display system may provide multiple status indicator icons or information displays of any suitable size, shape, and color, and may selectively choose between them," says one portion of the patent. "In some embodiments, the icons may be displayed at different locations on the display. In these embodiments, each icon may correspond to a separate transparent or semitransparent region of the primary backlight system. Thus, during operation, the secondary backlight system may selectively guide light toward certain regions of the primary backlight such that only selected icons are shown on the display."

Interestingly, the patent was filed on May 18, 2007, and published just this week. The patent continues, extensively, to explain various formats of dynamic icons that can blink, increase in intensity, and more. While we would have been happy with some kind of LED light, we have to admit that our interest is piqued. This secondary backlight could be useful for all sorts of notifications, not just new messages, and its flexible design means that it could provide a lot more information than basic new message notifications.

It also means that Apple is putting together a fairly appealing reason to turn the heads of more potential customers, and to inspire current iPhone owners upgrade. Considering the more useful home screen features that Apple has in store, the iPhone's idle home screen states may shape up to be pretty useful.

Further Reading

Apple released the iPhone OS 2.2 update around the head-scratching time of midnight tonight. As par for the course and right on rumored schedule, the download weighs about 246MB, and comes with many of the changes and new features we've seen over the past couple of months, including:

About the only feature we didn't see in previous reports was the Home button trick, which sounds pretty handy. We're downloading the update as we write this, so we'll check back in later with any thoughts or other interesting nuggets we find.

The iPhone is "more than a phone," Apple's new website claims. "It's a way of life." As long as we don't need to start singing songs or drinking mysterious elixirs with friends to hop a cosmic ride on a passing asteroid, we'll cautiously agree.

Apple's new iPhone Your Life site is essentially a guide for how the iPhone can fit into various aspects of one's life, starring hand-picked favorites of the most successful and useful iPhone applications in their respective categories. The "Around Town" section, for example, features big-hitters like Yellow Pages Mobile and Apple-favorite Urbanspoon, as well as more niche applications from smaller developers like G-Park and Rocket Taxi. "Getting Things Done" highlights OmniFocus and reQall, and "Fun and Games" hits the gamut with Cro-Mag Rally, Enigmo, YouTube, and even Etch A Sketch.

The sections vary between featuring a "Staff Picks" area or a "Top Free/Paid Apps" badge. More interestingly, though, this very prominent new section of Apple's site shows an even broader effort on the company's part to elevate the value of its products by highlighting quality software from third parties. Hosting a Downloads area is one thing, but this "iPhone Your Life" site is a subsection of the iPhone 3G product page. Granted, Apple has as much of a stake in encouraging iPhone owners to purchase third-party software as the third parties do (remember: Apple charges developer fees and takes 30 percent of each purchase of a commercial application). But the acknowledgment of this platform symbiosis in such an elemental part of Apple's product pages is a pleasant sight to see.

Some people, myself included, often find themselves wandering through life running into things that they'd like to buy (or at least look up online), but while not at home in front of a computer. Books on a friend's bookshelf, DVDs in your apartment complex's rental office, music that your DJ friend brought over—any of these things could cause you to try and scribble down notes so you can look things up later.

Of course, there are a plethora of high-tech options that let you look these things up on-the-go nowadays, many of which are SMS-based. Send a text to Amazon, for example, with the name of a product, and it will send you back prices. But what's easier than sending an SMS? Taking a picture. And if you have an iPhone, you can do exactly that to look up books, music, DVDs, and games using a relatively new addition to the App Store called SnapTell Explorer (iTunes link). 

The app claims it can look up practically any one of those items and spit back Amazon, Barnes & Noble, IMDB, Rotten Tomatoes, and Wikipedia links so you can get as much info as you can on whatever you're trying to look up. I took it for a test run and found that SnapTell can be handy, but it is somewhat limited. 

No match = sad panda

The above screenshot (almost) says it all. SnapTell really is limited to books, DVDs, music, and video games. It couldn't identify a random iPhone box I found, nor could it identify the retail box for Windows XP Pro, although one could argue that it should, considering that it's a product you can easily buy on Amazon. Still, I didn't expect much from snapping unsupported items, and this just confirmed it. Books, music, DVDs, and games only—got it?

When you actually do run into an identifiable item, SnapTell shines. I wouldn't exactly say it was fast—SnapTell took longer than I would have liked to identify a DVD set that I snapped—it eventually found what I was looking for and presented me with all the relevant options.

When you tap on Amazon, for example, you're presented with a mobile version of Amazon's store that allows you to see the pricing info and ratings. You can also add the item to your wish list or shopping cart, which I think is pretty cool. Tapping Wikipedia or IMDB will load their respective web pages within SnapTell. 

Unfortunately, not all books, music, DVDs, and games will be recognized by SnapTell. I had good luck with items that I snapped with fairly recent covers, but older book covers (like an out-of-print version of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings) didn't yield any results for me.

Needless to say, I appear to have had a starkly different experience with SnapTell than the folks at TechCrunch who apparently were blessed with nothing but a plethora of easily-identifiable items. That's not to say I dislike the app, however. I found it to be quite handy and easy-to-use; I just wish that it could identify a wider variety of items.

Luckily for you, the app is free, so you can try it out yourself and decide whether it's accurate enough to keep on your iPhone.

Although Google's GrandCentral service is still in a beta stage (as most Google services tend to be), we occasionally hear about apps that presumably make life better for GrandCentral users while simultaneously making the rest turn green with envy. A recently-released application called Vocito is no exception. Pronounced like "mosquito," Vocito is a desktop GrandCentral client for Macs, so GrandCentral users can now place calls from their Macs using the service.

Vocito and its iPhone equivalent, GrandDialer, actually work in fairly identical ways to facilitate outgoing calls. Once you punch a number into Vocito and hit the button, GrandCentral will place a call to the number that you're calling, and will also call one of your phones. The service will then connect the two calls, and the talking can commence. The application also offers users quite a few ways to find numbers and place calls, as it integrates with Address Book, works with Quicksilver and Automator, and can be controlled via AppleScript, among other things.

There's some good news and some bad news, though. The good news is that Vocito is open source, free, and works on both the PowerPC and Intel flavors of both Tiger and Leopard. The bad news is, of course that it's still pretty hard to get an invitation to GrandCentral, so many people (myself included) will have to wait a while before we can see what Vocito can really do. 

Image via Aaftab Munshi

The OpenCL working group, formed under the auspices of the Khronos Group to implement Apple's proposed Open Computing Language, has nailed down a complete specification for OpenCL in just six months. The announcement of the completion of the spec came at this year's Supercomputing Conference in Austin, Texas, this past Monday.

OpenCL was proposed so that programmers could write software in a way that would allow computing tasks to be best handled by whatever hardware resources are available to a given machine. In many of today's computers, that means multiple multicore processors, as well as multicore graphics processors, and sometimes specialized DSPs or other processors. "Highly-accelerated parallel computation across GPUs and CPUs is essential to many emerging rich consumer applications that will transform the computing experience of diverse users," said Khronos Group president Neil Trevett at the time the working group was formed.

In addition to Trevett, who also works for NVIDIA, Intel's Tim Mattson and AMD's Ben Gaster where on hand to present details of the group's work. But it wasn't easy to meet the tight deadline Apple set to include the technology in the next release of Mac OS X, which may ship as early as the first quarter next year. "If you go to some other larger standards bodies, it's quite normal for a standard to take five years or more," Trevett told Macworld. "You actually have to really push to get it down to 18 months. Our record was 12 months up to now; we've done this one in six."

"[W]e have, you know, divorced our families, we've had two phone meetings a week, face-to-face meetings and I can't count how many hours I've spent," said Mattson. "I'm just almost dead, I'm so exhausted. So, I'm really proud of what we pulled off."

But the work isn't done just yet. Though OpenCL has been defined from a technical standpoint, the spec still has to be vetted by all 20 of the companies involved in the working group, ensuring there are no problems with trademarks, copyrights, patents, or other issues. Until that time, the working group cannot release the specs publicly or give any demos.

However, Mac users may be the first to get to see the effects of OpenCL with the release of Snow Leopard. "If Apple ends up following through on the plans they stated on building this specification into Snow Leopard, I think you could see opportunity for imaging applications vendors, video application vendors to tap into the goodness of GPU hardware," Trevett told Macworld. "Everyone has a supercomputer locked away in their Mac, but it's hard to get at it. And OpenCL will unlock the potential of that supercomputer."

"The whole point of OpenCL is that it really doesn't matter what the underlying hardware is," Trevett said. "If it's programmable, OpenCL will let you tap into it."

Apple recently updated Apple TV to offer direct downloads of HDTV shows and work with iTunes 8's Genius feature. Now, Apple is adding even more features via AppleTV 2.3 Update.

The update, available for download directly to the Apple TV via the settings menu, adds the ability to stream music from one Apple TV to another, or to an Airport Express, using AirTunes (in the past, you could only stream music from a computer to the Apple TV). The update also adds a remote learning feature, so you can use third-party or all-in-one remotes with the Apple TV. Compatibility is added for playlists that mix movies, TV, podcasts, and music videos, there is now support for controlling music volume via the Apple TV itself.

Now, if Apple would add support for 4:3 TVs with component input and Netflix streaming, I'd be all over it. Maybe 2.4 update? I mean, I can wish, can't I?

Growl is a great Mac OS X plug-in that allows applications to display visual alarms for things like new e-mail, song changes in iTunes, new RSS headlines in NetNewsWire, or when friends hop on AIM. Quite a few applications support Growl notifications out of the box, and there is a simple way to add audio alarms into the mix, including custom sound effects or even iTunes music.

Our how-to post was inspired by a tip at MacMembrane, which shows users how to add a sound alarm for when Daniel Jalkut's excellent MarsEdit blogging client finishes publishing a post. In a nutshell, you simply open the Growl System Preferences pane, double-click MarsEdit under the Applications tab, and toggle the default Mac OS X sound alert for the "Finished Sending to Weblog" notification.

Growl's System Preferences pane running a custom sound for MarsEdit alarms. Before you ask, no, I don't play an entire 311 song every time MarsEdit publishes a post. Click for a larger view

But what if Mac OS X's limited selection of notifications doesn't float your productive boat? The default set of sound effects that Growl and other alert-y applications, like iCal, use for their notifications can be found in /System/Library/Sounds. You can add to this system-wide list of available notification sounds that applications can use, but it's usually a good idea to leave the /System/ folder alone, so browse to ~/Library/Sounds, where ~ stands for your Home user folder.

The path to a user's Sounds folder, courtesy of Path Finder. Click for a larger view

Your Sounds folder is probably empty, but you can fill it with any sound files that QuickTime is capable of playing to make them available to Growl, iCal, and others. After adding files, you'll probably need to restart any alert-y applications that were running, but your custom sounds should now appear below the list of default Mac OS X sounds.

This customizability is great for a number of reasons, not the least of which is instant ubiquity. When it comes to apps like MarsEdit that already work with Growl, developers may not have to lift a finger to gain custom audio alerts; Growl's developers already did all the work.

Update

iCal used to see sounds from this tip, but it appears that Apple may have changed something in Leopard. One commenter says iCal might require .AIFF files, but even those don't work on my machine. Growl can still see QuickTime-compatible files, but I'm not sure what's going on with iCal otherwise.

When it comes to customer service satisfaction, Apple can normally be found towards the top of the list. The company seems to be holding on to its spot thanks to a recent survey conducted by a company called Vocal Laboratories (or VocaLabs). As pointed out by the Consumerist, Apple received top marks in several categories when compared to other major computer companies.

The last customer service survey we discussed also had Apple coming out on top, but that survey measured satisfaction using an index. The VocaLabs study provides results for a number of different categories, including company, call, and agent satisfaction, as well as wait times and call resolution. When compared to Dell, HP, Gateway, and Toshiba, Apple measured up well, winning the top score for call satisfaction, agent satisfaction, and call resolution. In this case, the scores are percentages of people who responded that they were "very satisfied," so those are good categories to be on top of. Unfortunately, the company didn't make out as well in other categories, such as acceptable wait times.

While good satisfaction scores are never a bad thing, the VocaLabs survey is relying on fairly small sample sizes. 159 Apple calls were evaluated, the most of any company, while less than 50 callers were asked for ratings for two of the companies. A quick look at the VocaLabs site also suggests that the survey data is gathered by having people call a VocaLabs 800 number, transferring the call to Apple, and then asking the caller questions afterwards. Based on the questionable survey method, Apple probably shouldn't throw a big party or anything, but I guess a bit of back-patting would be okay.

Tonight, our peeps pointed us to this Daring Fireball post that suggests that Google Mobile got an application by Apple that uses private iPhone APIs. Said peeps asked me whether Google is getting a better deal than most devs, or whether Google just pulled something over on Apple. The answer is, to say the least, complicated.

First of all, Apple is a private company. It can do whatever it wants to stock its App Store shelves however it pleases. There's nothing that says the company must treat Joe Q. Developer the same way it treats Moneybags J. Google. So, Google could be linking to private palooza and it wouldn't be a problem if Apple was cool with it.

Having said that, I wanted to clarify that there are two very different ways that developers use non-standard calls. These are:

Linking to private frameworks. This is the bad, the evil, the Sauron of App Store. Apple offers two sets of frameworks, or libraries that contain linkable routines for developers. There are Public Frameworks, which are fine and dandy to link to, and Private Frameworks, which are not.

That's not to say that developers don't do so. It's really easy to tell whether an application is likely doing the naughty. From the command line, enter the App bundle and grep for "dlopen." This reveals whether the Application makes calls into frameworks that it normally cannot link to at compile time. The dlopen call opens a library during runtime, a feature that's not needed when the library is public.

As you'll see with unpublished APIs, using private APIs can mean that your code may break without notice as Apple updates its libraries. Worse, should your application be found to be using said libraries, it can be kicked out of the App Store without recourse; you will not be able to update that application and resubmit it.

Using unpublished APIs. If linking to private frameworks is unacceptable, unpublished APIs play the role of a minor jaywalking. You might get a ticket, a citation, and a talking to, but you're not going to jail forever. The App Store is absolutely littered with unpublished APIs. I've learned to spot them pretty well. When you see applications doing things that you know they can do but that they're not entirely supposed to be doing, you can lay odds that the developers have gently called unpublished but public routines.

Using unpublished APIs means that your applications can break at any firmware upgrade; Apple does not guarantee that routines will not change the way they stand behind the published APIs. However, developers use these routines for all sorts of good reasons both for items in App Store as well as out. And, often, the routines don't break and have been stable for a long long time. Using them is clearly a risk but it's not crossing the private-public framework bridge.

So what is Google doing?

Surprisingly enough, Google appears to use both dynamic linking and calling unpublished APIs. First, the linking. I unzipped the Google ipa file, which is nothing more than a renamed zip file. I then ran a few diagnostic tests on it and looked for the telltale dlopen. Google failed.

% grep -i dlopen *
Binary file Google matches
gnm:         U _dlopen
grav: ; dlopen (fe000c98) -> ?
grav: ; dlopen (000a36d0) -> ?

But the question that John Gruber raised was not about linking to private frameworks, but rather whether Google was using UIApplication's unpublished proximityStateChanged: call. This is an unpublished call in a public framework. So I turned to iPhone hacker Drunknbass. It was easy, he told me, to catch those proximity state changes by subclassing UIApplication.

Based on Drunknbass's suggestion, I put together a simple test application, using nothing but the standard SDK Public Frameworks. Once compiled and deployed onto the iPhone, it caught all the proximity update events, exactly as he had promised. Here is the code that I tested:

#import <UIKit/UIKit.h>

@interface UIApplication (proximity)
- (void)proximityStateChanged:(BOOL)fp8;
@end

@interface TestAppDelegate : NSObject <UIApplicationDelegate> 
@end

@implementation TestAppDelegate
- (void)applicationDidFinishLaunching:(UIApplication *)application {    
    [application setProximitySensingEnabled:YES];
    UIWindow *window = [[UIWindow alloc] initWithFrame:[[UIScreen mainScreen] bounds]];
    UIViewController *vc = [[UIViewController alloc] init];
    vc.view.backgroundColor = [UIColor whiteColor];
    [window addSubview:vc.view];
    [window makeKeyAndVisible];
}
@end

@interface TestApp : UIApplication
@end

@implementation TestApp
- (void)proximityStateChanged:(BOOL)isOn
{
    printf("Proximity blanking is now %s\n", isOn ? "on" : "off");
    [super proximityStateChanged:isOn];
}
@end

int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
    NSAutoreleasePool * pool = [[NSAutoreleasePool alloc] init];
    int retVal = UIApplicationMain(argc, argv, @"TestApp", @"TestAppDelegate");
    [pool release];
    return retVal;
}

In the end, it looks like Google decided that it was better to get the job done and provide a richer user experience to the end user than to live according to Apple's exact dictates. Was Apple aware of these shortcuts? Hard to say. But truly the Application is really nifty, assuming you don't speak with a Texas or British accent, and it's a real delight for the end user. Which is, of course, why developers write these things in the first place.

News is circulating today that Apple has reportedly been in and out of talks for the last several months with at least three music labels in hopes that they can soon add their libraries to their DRM-free iTunes Plus lineup. According to CNet, most of the negotiations are sill in early stages, but a deal with one major label is close to being done. The site points to an unsubstantiated rumor from last week that Sony BMG was/is close to a deal with Apple in order to speculate that Sony might be the deal being talked about, although CNet's own sources could not confirm that.

Apple originally launched the iTunes Plus section of its popular iTunes Store in May of last year, offering DRM-free 256kbps AAC files for download at a price premium of $1.29 per track, $0.30 more than their DRM-ridden counterparts. Initially, EMI was the only label to offer its library, but in October of the same year, Apple lowered prices to the $0.99 mark and added some independent labels to the iTunes Plus offerings. Today the iTunes Plus includes tracks from a wider variety of labels, including (but not limited to) Blue Note, Capitol, and Death Row.

The fact that Apple is "in talks" with major labels seems like a no-brainer. After all, Apple wants to sell music, the labels are in the business of selling music, and anything that's going to help them sell more music is in everyone's best interest. For them not to be in negotiations of some kind over iTunes Plus would be astonishing. The music industry has tried to strong-arm Apple by letting Amazon sell a wider variety DRM-free music first, but at this point, the iTunes Store is still holding strong (despite its DRM) and it seems the industry will cave before Apple does.

Hey, congratulations! You just received your green light. Apple wrote you and said that your application status is now Ready for Sale. Should you start emailing your press releases and letting everyone know? Perhaps not yet. It typically takes another 24 hours once you're alerted before your application goes live on App Store. I have heard of apps taking even 48-72 hours. So what do you do?

First take a deep breath. You have made it through the hardest part. Your application has passed the ravening hordes of Apple reviewers, so feel good about that. Now it's time to revisit your write up and make sure that your App Store presentation is ready.

Start by reexamining all your text on the iTunes Connect site. Run them through a spell checker, have a friend read them, whatever. Now is your last chance to make revisions before the public becomes aware of your product. If you have updates that you've held back while waiting on Apple, now is the time to mention them in your marketing text. They may save you from a few of those mad-eyed one-star reviews.

Make sure to check your date to go live in iTunes Connect. If your application has any known significant issues, you may want to push up that date and allow a new version to go through review before you actually go live with it. If your date is significantly set in the future, your app remains, for all intents and purposes, unpublished. Ensure that any future dating is both intended and well thought through.

Review your pricing strategies. Many vendors now release their products with a free initial period and a later jump in price. If you're planning on doing this, the delay between approval and going live in App Store is the best time to adjust that price and add sale-related text to your write-up.

Finally, take some time to once again go over all your support materials on your web site and your press releases, before sending them out. As you have seen, Apple's built-in gap between the green light and the go live time offers an excellent chance to review, reflect, and update. Don't let this last second opportunity to do so pass you by.

Do you have feedback for how Opera (yes, the browser) can be improved on the Mac? If so, the Opera team is looking for your input, especially in regards to the UI and how it feels as a native application on your Mac. (And Windows too, of course. And Linux. And everything else.)

The call for feedback comes from Opera's new lead designer, Jon Hicks, on the Opera Desktop Team's blog. Last month, Hicks announced that he was going to be making the jump over to Opera, focusing mostly on the desktop browser as well as widgets and the Mobile/Mini browsers.  For those of you unfamiliar with Hicks' previous work, he is the guy responsible for the logos and branding for Firefox and Thunderbird. 

In the most recent blog post (pointed out to us by Macworld), Hicks notes that some Mac users may prefer that Opera look "utterly native" to the Mac, whereas those who use the browser across multiple platforms may feel differently. That's the kind of feedback he's looking for so that the team can decide what kind of makeover the browser really needs, and to what degree. "I'm predominantly a OS X user, so I'm particularly looking for (constructive!) feedback from users on other platforms," Hicks wrote. "In the past, I'd always thought that the Mac was the only platform where where Opera looked like it didn't quite 'fit', but I need to be sure!"

If you're interested in offering feedback that might help Opera improve, you can fill out a handy survey form hosted at Google Docs. We'll be looking forward to seeing what changes come out of Hicks' contributions in the coming months, and given the positive response we got from the last post we did on this topic, it sounds like many of you are looking forward to it too. 

Tumblr is a great blogging service for people who have an eye for style but are low on time. With a focus on both bare essentials and clever perks of blogging, Tumblr provides a simultaneously beautiful, elemental, and non-burdensome "tumblelog" experience for both users and readers. While the service has its own minimal support for mobile blogging, Mobleux's Tumblrette (iTunes link) has emerged as arguably the best iPhone client that takes blogging on-the-go with Tumblr to its logical, stylish conclusion.

Here is a quick primer for the Tumblr uninitiated. A core concept of the service is that there can be different kinds of posts, each with their own functional and visual aspects when viewed live on the site. There are text, photo, quote, link, chat, audio, and video posts. Text posts, for example, function much like any blog post or e-mail that has a title (or subject) and body, except that titles are optional in Tumblr text posts. On the other hand, media posts like photo, video, and audio don't even have the option of a traditional title, as the media takes center stage, and a description area (again, optional) allows for any supporting material or links. Quote posts place an emphasis on the quote itself, typically setting it in a larger type (at least in Tumblr's default themes), and link posts use the name of the link and its URL as their title, which allows users to click through to the linked site.

As an iPhone Tumblr client, Tumblrette excels. Its default screen is a springboard for creating almost any of Tumblr's post types, and while video is missing for obvious reasons, a recent 1.2 update brought the creation of audio posts (more on those in a minute). Other features include drafts for saving posts, advanced post options like tags, setting privacy, and adjusting the current post's date, integration of the Tumblr Dashboard to stay on top of friends' tumblelogs, the ability to post to multiple tumblelogs under a single account, and even support for Markdown syntax.

To my surprise, I have never experienced a crash (most of my apps, especially Apple's built-in apps, crash sporadically for me), and performance has remained pretty fast when creating any post type, including long audio posts. Most of the post types are both designed true to Tumblr's form and integrate well with the iPhone's features, though it would be nice to see a JavaScript bookmarklet for Safari to make it easier to create link posts on the fly. Photo posts, for example, allow a choice between picking from a photo already in the iPhone's library, or snapping a new one with the camera.

Audio posts open up a whole new door on torturing entertaining one's readers, though there is no audio alert to warn about the 30-second time limit. A simple, quiet beep out of the speaker when getting close or hitting the wall during while recording would be useful. A bit of humorous irony exists with audio posts, however, as they are the one kind of post that Tumblrette can create but not view in one's Tumblr Dashboard due to the iPhone's lack of Flash. Tumblr uses Amazon S3 for file storage, but a simple Flash front end to play files on the site for simplicity and, again, to deter file sharing. Update: Turns out this isn't true. When viewing your Tumblr Dashboard in Tumblrette, the Flash player is replaced in audio posts by a "Listen" link that plays the audio in the iPhone's QuickTime player.

Tumblrette's draft feature is definitely appreciated, as I have found myself on more than one occasion having to switch to another app to do something while in the middle of a post. The feature isn't automatic, however, so answering a phone call or switching to an SMS will blow away any progress. If you want to save a draft of any post type, you have to hit the close button on the post creation window, then chose "Save for later" instead of "clear post." Drafts are marked with a blue ball next to their respective post type, and finishing the post is as simple as clicking its post type. This can be both a blessing and a curse, however; once a draft is saved, you'll need to finish it before creating any other posts of that type. There will be no sitting and stewing on a killer one-liner with which to finish a particular post while you create others of its kind. At least, not yet.

Tumblrette's full integration of the Tumblr Dashboard can also be a blessing and a curse. It's great for easily staying on top of posts from others on Tumblr that you follow and marking posts as "liked" (sort of a thumbs-up or a "good show old chap"). But using Tumblr's reblog feature to repost something interesting to your own tumblelog from within Tumblrette will generate a new post creation window that's designed for desktop browsers, sans the rich text editor that desktop browsers support. Safari for iPhone (or, more accurately, its modified WebKit engine that Tumblrette is using to render the Tumblr Dashboard) doesn't do rich text editing, so reblogging a post in Tumblrette is an exercise in sifting through code on a mobile phone screen. It can get the job done if you need to, especially if you won't be adding any commentary on the reblogged post, but I can neither recommend the experience nor blame Mobelux for Safari's limitations.

I do wonder, however, whether it would be possible for Mobelux to basically hijack the reblog command from the Dashboard, then pull the content and attribution information into one of its own post creation windows.

Technical iPhone limitations and feature requests aside, I've been using Tumblrette ever since I found its 1.0 release in the iTunes App Store in September, and I've been very pleased. With a healthy dose of Tumblr integration, unique features like drafts, and gorgeous UI polish throughout, Tumblrette is a great choice for both established Tumblr users and those considering signing up.

Tumblrette costs $1.99 in the App Store (iTunes link), and more information can be found at Mobelux's site.