When I was at WWDC, there was an Apple engineer named Eliza Block. She and her partner gave a really good (best of WWDC) presentation on Designing Scroll View UIs. Her name seemed familiar so I googled it and it turns out she was the author of a very successful iPhone app. Apparently, she probably got recruited or asked to become an iPhone Applications Engineer at Apple. A testament to her software development ability (the googled articles said she was a graduate Philosophy student).
She's the author of my favorite iPhone crossword app. Good on her for getting hired by Apple, although I'm a bit sad if that's the reason there's no iPad version of 2 Across.
Thankfully Apple's curated walled garden approach to ensuring quality (keeping out Flash, Python, Java, Ruby, anything "obscene", competitive functionality, etc.) still managed to allow cartoon panda anus farting!
As an aside: I thought this quote from an Apple spokesperson was interesting, given Microsoft's plan to encourage employees to develop Windows Phone apps "in their spare time" [1]:
"Apple’s policy allows for employees to have apps on the App Store if they’re developed and published prior to their start at Apple."
Uh, right. I'm sure he intentionally followed an escort service in Hyderabad. (Or, more likely, a spammy website that claims to be a Hyderabad escort service.) And one in New Delhi.
I might believe it if the escorts were from San Francisco, LA, Vegas. But India? It seems unlikely that he's a frequent visitor to India in a context where he'd want to link escort services in two cities there.
Please. Web savvy fail. Most likely somebody with a 'circle jerk' ring of bogus escort sites spammed twitter accounts and hit this guy's, and he didn't pay attention to it.
How did they disprove it? By showing that a lot of these follows happened close to each other? That seems perfectly explainable if one escort agency decided to start spamming and let their bots loose promoting several of their models at the same time.
I'm really struggling to be offended that this guy is making money on a side business selling things that people buy, even if I wouldn't personally buy them and think they are kind of puerile.
I guess the article's author wants us to contrast the puerility of the director's apps with the fact that it's his job to decide which apps get rejected on the basis of content.
But maybe this is exactly the kind of person one would want in charge of the decision-making process? ...someone who knows that if the content bar is set too high, he would never have gotten into the app store -- and his current job.
Sadly no; I suspect that if he's lowering the bar here, he has to unreasonably raise it somewhere else to make him look like he's doing his job. Considering the infamous reasons apps have been rejected, I'm not sure I'm wrong on this.
He was embarrassed enough to try and purge all history connecting him to his company's apps. I think that says enough. I'm not offended, but I think that it is pretty low class.
That being said, I don't know if this character assassination by Wired is warranted. It is just some idiot selling fart apps. Not exactly newsworthy.
I don't know if you're pretending or if you really missed the point, but it isn't that Python would kill his apps. It's that his apps get special protection.
Fart apps are essentially the poster child for "crapware" in the App Store. Anytime someone wants to criticize the App Store, they will probably point to apps like the ones he's making. But while Apple constantly expands its list of unacceptable things (the programming language ban is merely the most ridiculous, not the only the thing on the list), fart apps remain the one genre that seems untouchable. It's a messed up state of affairs.
It's a pretty far leap (down right silly, really) from "man sells some silly apps prior to getting job curating App Store at Apple" to "fart apps would be banned if only he weren't giving them special protection!"
There is literally no evidence to support the latter interpretation.
Do people complain that they can't let their kids look at the App Store because of Scheme apps or apps that superimpose the time over an image? Don't see the relevance. Even for objectionable apps, you can just block them.
If Apple blocked fart apps of third-party developers for the sake of... I don't know what, quality or decency, then people would complain Apple are being censors.
Regarding Shoemaker, maybe Apple hired him to direct the App Store because he can run a massive online marketplace, and not because he's a talented or creative app developer.
(A little semantic aside: Apple cannot censor. Governments can, companies cannot. If we broaden the definition of censorship to include companies Apple already censors. Their system is a picture perfect example of censorship, you could use it as an example to explain censorship to school kids – but so are newspapers. This all doesn’t really matter because the word censorship doesn’t have some sort of magic properties. Something can be just as despicable as some activities described by the word censorship even if the usual definition of censorship doesn’t include it. Something can also be a perfectly reasonable activity even if the usual definition of censorship does include it.)
If I were responsible for hiring people for that position I would first of all notice that he has experience developing for iOS (but also that his experience doesn’t seem to be huge, he is not at the cutting edge and that he is not very creative) and second of all that because of the type of apps he is developing he might not – culturally speaking – be a good fit for Apple.
A great developer might be wasted at the position Apple were hiring him for but a little experience might be quite good, so the first point could even be positive for him. Whether that second point is true can more or less be sorted out in the interview.
Are you really confident in assessing this person if this is the only thing you know about him? I’m certainly not.
Erm, there's tons of alternate browsers. There just can't be one with it's own JavaScript parser baked in because of the ban on interpreters, and even then they said you can ask to include one in the latest round of SDK revisions.
Is there an alternative browser that does not use WebView, which handles all the html for you?? Apart from Opera of course, which is more an image viewer.
I don't think there is. There is a lot of stuff you can do with UIWebView, which is what all those other apps are doing, like blocking ads, adding tabs, storing stuff offline.
You are a fool. They banned it in the beginning, then they stopped banning it. All the webbrowsers use iPhones UIWebView.
You are just repeating the first thing you see, rather than doing any research into the matter. There is loads of information out there about problems with Apple banning stuff, if anyone cares enough to actually look.
There haven't been any yet that I can recall, but they have cannibalized popular third-party Mac apps before — try searching for Watson or Konfabulator. And their rejection of that picture frame app seemed to be on the basis that it trod on ground they wanted to cover themselves.
You don't. His apps were developed and in the store before he was hired, Apple's policy doesn't seem to allow their own employees to develop appstore apps in their spare time, and only allows them to have stuff in the appstore (in their name) if that stuff was there before they got hired.
"Still, it comes off as hypocritical that a director of the App Store sells apps that some might call inappropriate, said Ben Kahle, developer of Me So Holy, a satiric religious app that Apple rejected in mid-2009 for containing “objectionable material.” Kahle said after he re-submitted the app to the store, an Apple employee called him and said Me So Holy would “never” be approved."
Obvious stuff. Never underestimate the power of well-established special interest groups. There's no powerful interest group against farts so of course it's not considered "objectionable", unlike religion.
