Mike Cohen

ICHC Update Rejected again

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This is getting to be an ongoing ritual. I submit an update and about a week later Apple rejects it.

Here’s my latest rejection letter:

Follow-up: 78814583

Dear Mr. Cohen,

Thank you for submitting I Can Has Cheezburger 1.5.2 & I Can Has Cheezburger (Ad Free) to the App Store. We’ve reviewed I Can Has Cheezburger 1.5.2 &I Can Has Cheezburger (Ad Free) and determined that we cannot post these versions of your iPhone applications to the App Store at this time because they are not appropriately rated. Our review indicates that the applications’ contents are not consistent with the current rating. I Can Has Cheezburger 1.5.2 & I Can Has Cheezburger (Ad Free) contain user-generated content, which can include frequent mature or suggestive themes. Applications must be rated accordingly for the highest level of content that the user is able to access.

Please visit iTunes Connect to resubmit your binaries and rate your application appropriately.

Regards,

iPhone Developer Program

However, it isn’t possible to change the rating because everything is grayed out on the rating screen! A few developers have told me that the rating can only be changed for 3.0 apps, so I’m building it for 3.0 only so Apple will finally let me change the rating so they can approve it.

Things Ripoff

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There’s a new web app called 2dooo Things which is a direct ripoff of Cultured Code’s wonderful Things task management application. In fact their home page shows a screenshot of the actual Things app.

2dooo Things

If you actually sign in, you’ll see that the main screen is identical to things on the Mac. For some strange reason, a new account gets 6 items in the trash.

Things desktop app
Things 		2dooo Things web app
2dooo Things Main Screen

If Cultured Code isn’t involved with this and didn’t explicitly give them permission to copy Things, they should take action against 2dooo.

Fast image loading with Three20

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I get a lot of complaints about the slow swipe action in ICHC, as a result of loading each image the first time they appear. Although I added caching in version 1.5, I chose to do it that way to minimize the memory usage and avoid low memory crashes.

I’ve been looking at ways to improve the speed and one of the best options seems to be to rewrite it using Joe Hewitt’s Three20 framework. As a proof of concept, I wrote a simple test program which loads a pre-defined set of images. The scrolling & image loading performance is excellent.

Note this is just a proof of concept. I haven’t figured out all of the details of how to implement it in the actual application. The major hurdle is that I need to handle mixed photos & videos in a single stream, while the photo browser only handles photos.

Of course there won’t be any new updates until Apple approves the updates that have been in review for over a month, as well as the new updates I submitted a week ago with.

Seeing Red

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A common problem with many Nikon cameras, including the D90, is the tendency to over-expose and blow out reds. It’s especially obvious when shooting brightly colored flowers, like these.

Why is this happening?

Thanks to some good advice in Flickr’s Nikon D90 Club, I’ve been able to improve it a bit. Here I set it for spot metering using a red area and set it to underexpose -2.0EV. I would probably get even better results if I shot RAW.

Bougainvillea

If you look at the RGB histogram of the first image, you’ll see that the red channel is clipped.

Blown out reds
Uploaded with plasq‘s Skitch!

Adjusting the exposure has a much bigger effect on the red channel.

Balanced Color
Uploaded with plasq‘s Skitch!

links for 2009-07-22

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  • FactCheck.org: Born in the U.S.A.
    In June, the Obama campaign released a digitally scanned image of his birth certificate to quell speculative charges that he might not be a natural-born citizen. But the image prompted more blog-based skepticism about the document's authenticity. And recently, author Jerome Corsi, whose book attacks Obama, said in a TV interview that the birth certificate the campaign has is "fake."

    We beg to differ. FactCheck.org staffers have now seen, touched, examined and photographed the original birth certificate. We conclude that it meets all of the requirements from the State Department for proving U.S. citizenship. Claims that the document lacks a raised seal or a signature are false. We have posted high-resolution photographs of the document as "supporting documents" to this article. Our conclusion: Obama was born in the U.S.A. just as he has always said.

    (tags: politics obama truth tcot birthers wingnuts)
  • Google Code Blog: Apollo 11 mission's 40th Anniversary: One large step for open source code…
    Source code for Apollo 11's control software
    (tags: apollo11 opensource)

ICHC 1.5.2 Re-submitted

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I’ve resubmitted ICHC 1.5.2, with /tag/g-rated specified for FAILblog & Engrish Funny, the two sites that support it.

Apple requested that I rate it appropriately, but there’s no way to change the rating in iTunes connect – everything in the ratings screen is completely grayed out. If this is rejected again, I won’t resubmit it. I’ll withdraw it from sale instead.

iTunes Connect
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More Ratings Stupidity

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Barnes & Noble’s eReader contains no content and doesn’t access internet content directly. All content comes from books downloaded from your B&N account. It has to display all of these warnings, yet it gets a 12+ rating. In this case, the parental control restrictions should be set in the B&N account rather than restricting the application.

iTunes
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PS – KRAPPS picked up the story of ICHC’s latest rejection.