#A TALE IN THE DESERT STORE CODE#
What was the holdup? Who knows, but users continued to be frustrated, and I couldn't get the new code to them even if I knew who they were. There was no need to scramble, though, because the App Store team took about two weeks to approve the dozen or so new lines of code I had added to my application. So I guessed a bit, duplicated some of the users' problems, and rushed out a bug fix. There's a URL for support listed in the store, but Apple owns the customers. Users' complaints show up only in the product reviews. Apple, though, controls all of the interaction. If I were distributing the software, I could communicate directly with the customer. (Remember, ad hoc distribution rules make it onerous to recruit testers.) The problems the new users found never appeared in testing, no doubt because the testers were too familiar with the app. I like the idea that a single tap at the top or bottom of the screen sends the HTML scrolling up or down. Somehow the bouncers patrolling the velvet rope decided that one twin with slightly shaggier hair couldn't join the other at the bar.Įven this success has been frustrating for me because some users started complaining about the scrolling mechanism I implemented in JavaScript. The only difference was an extra block of text. I like to think of this as a victory even though the charity version with the new forward was rejected again about the same time.
#A TALE IN THE DESERT STORE FREE#
One of my two applications - the free version without the new forward - was accepted and published by the App Store after several months of rejection. But the e-mail note I received two days ago just said that it was "requiring unexpected additional time for review." Is it rejected or am I just waiting for the reviewer to come back from a meeting? Other developers confirm that notes like this are the equivalent of a sailor on shore leave in Marseilles saying, "I'll call you." In preparing this text, I just discovered that one database at tells me that the Gold version of my application was rejected.
If this count sounds a bit sketchy, it's because it is. In the last three months I've submitted slightly different versions of my book reader to Apple close to a dozen times, but the code has been approved only twice. In addition, there are a number of very talented people devoted to cracking the iPhone's security layer and taking complete control of the iPhone, a process they call " jailbreaking," but that option isn't practical for most users or most developers. There's also an Enterprise plan that might help companies, but it's just a Web site designed to work around the same basic limitation: iPhones won't do something unless Apple allows it. Anyone who thought that cryptography was going to liberate the world was sadly mistaken. The ad hoc distribution mechanism puts a strict limit on 100 copies and enforces this by requiring a copy of each iPhone's unique identification code to be bundled with the digital signature. The iPhone wants to see a cryptographically signed note from its mother before firing up any binary code. During the last four months I've spent little time working on the application itself and almost all of that time waiting for Apple to respond.Ī man, a plan, an App Store It is possible to skip the App Store if you want to give your application to a friend, but even this requires getting Apple to sign off on the transfer. Apple's App Store is the only way to share your applications with the world, and it is lorded over by an inscrutable team of guardians devoted to maintaining control over the platform. The programming for this plan was very simple, but the distribution has been nearly impossible. All it takes is a few calls to a UIWebView object, a part of the iPhone OS that implements the WebKit HTML rendering engine. It was an easy idea that didn't require understanding much about the trickier parts of the iPhone API, like the accelerometer or the camera. Just for grins, I would also write a new forward to the book, call it the Gold version, charge $1 per copy, and give all of the revenues to the Committee to Protect Journalists, a charity that seems as deserving as any these days. I would dump the raw text of my book on the open source movement into HTML, render the HTML on the iPhone screen, and give away copies. A long time ago in March, I hatched a simple plan.
0 kommentar(er)
