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Apple’s 7 commandments of app sex?

Filed under: App Store

Jon Atherton at Chillifresh, the app developer of Wobble, has posted what he says are Apple’s new rules regarding sexual content in an iPhone app:

I have spoken with Apple, and the following are the new rules:

1. No images of women in bikinis (Ice skating tights are not OK either)
2. No images of men in bikinis! (I didn’t ask about Ice Skating tights for men)
3. No skin (he seriously said this) (I asked if a Burqa was OK, and the Apple guy got angry)
4. No silhouettes that indicate that Wobble can be used for wobbling boobs
5. No sexual connotations or innuendo: boobs, babes, booty, sex – all banned
6. Nothing that can be sexually arousing!!
7. No apps will be approved that in any way imply sexual content (not sure how Playboy is still in the store, but …)

Keep in mind that these rules have not been verified or posted by Apple, and Atherton has been on a roll recently of trying to drum up as much press as he can about Apple’s changes to the App Store policy on sexual content. But I guess that’s what happens when you make your living off of selling dumb apps (my opinion) that rely on a childish ‘wow’ factor appropriate to the matu twelve year-olds.

I’ve said this before, but I am glad that Apple has made these changes (pulling stupid “sexy” apps). I’m sick of seeing a “Hot Asians” app show up in every category (from Entertainment to Productivity to Utilities). The “sexy” apps were getting out of control, and they started to show up so much it was making it even harder to find good apps in the App Store.

There’s a good chance that this is the reason Apple has decided to pull those apps and not, as Atherton insinuates, that Apple has imposed some sort of Sharia law on the App Store – which is pretty insulting to Islam’s 1.3 billion members. The fact that Playboy is still available while thousands of junk “sexy” apps have been purged should be evidence enough that Apple is going after these cheap clutter apps and hasn’t actually launched a war on sexuality.

Is Apple handling this in the best way? Perhaps not. I think Apple could create a new category of “sexy” apps that could be disabled in iTunes’ preferences (or, even better, require an opt-in from users before they’re visible). Apple’s not the only vendor that chooses to exclude some content in its store. Best Buy, for example, doesn’t allow hardcore porn to be sold in its stores. That’s not censorship — there are plenty of other places customers can go to get what they’re looking for other than Best Buy.

The problem with this analogy, of course, is that for most iPhone owners, there’s only one App Store, and no place else to go for adult-themed apps.

TUAWApple’s 7 commandments of app sex? originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Sun, 21 Feb 2010 20:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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8coupons And Yipit Are One-Stop Shops For Groupon-Like Daily Deals

If you’re a frequent TechCrunch reader, there’s a good chance you’re familiar with Groupon, a rapidly growing startup that offers steep discounts on local goods and services. It’s a great idea: the deals are only activated once a certain number of people sign up for them, which makes the service viral and allows businesses to quickly gain lots of new customers and move inventory (and consumers obviously save money in the process). What you may not realize, though, is that there are quite a few other companies that offer very similar deals. Now sites like 8coupons a Yipit are letting you find all of these deals in one place.

8coupons is a pretty straightforward site: it uses your IP address to figure out where you are, and then serves up both national and local deals — the same kind you’d find in your local newspaper. Now, it also features a section for Groupon-like “Deals of the Day”. The feed for San Francisco currently includes a handful of deals from Groupon, including 50% off a sightseeing tour, and there are also some deals from competitors including Townhog, Group Swoop, and Bloomspot.  8coupons says that there are actually around 30 different companies across the United States offering similar kinds of deals (Groupon is the largest), and they’re new aggregating them for 10 markets in the US, including New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco.

Yipit is very similar, and it also allows you to get daily Email digests showcasing deals from these Groupon-like services. I actually like the UI for Yipit better (it’s much more polished), but the service is currently only serving five cities, compared to 8coupons’s ten. Yipit has some other services too, including Spotter, which is a deal-finder that learns about your interests and habits to suggest deals that will best match you. But that’s NYC only for now.

8coupons has been around for much longer than Yipit: it launched in August 2007 as a mobile coupon service.  After signing up with your phone number, you can receive regular coupons and offers from local businesses via SMS. The company has since branched beyond just SMS (though it’s still offered) to include a website full of aggregated deals. 8coupons has 150,000 users and sees around 1 million uniques a month.

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feature: Hug your kids: Ars reviews Heavy Rain

Heavy Rain shouldn’t have much going for it. Developed by a man known for his failure to properly end his last big game and filled with what look like quick-time events, it’s endlessly dour and depressing… while being exclusive to the PlayStation 3. We said before that there is a good chance Heavy Rain is going to fail. That being said, our time with the game proved it to be a savvy, impressive, and often chilling experience.

If you’re a fan of story-driven single-player games, do yourself a favor and at least rent the game. Get through the first few scenes, and give it an hour or two to allow it to grab you. Yes, that’s a large investment on a game that is going to leave some cold. For those who are drawn in, however, this is something of an achievement in the art of gaming.

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Arizona school bus gains WiFi, students suddenly chill out and get productive

Who woulda thunk it? Giving WiFi to fidgety students on a bus actually makes them more productive. Nearly three years after an Arkansas school launched a trial that delivered laptops, iPods and wireless internet to a bus, an Arizona school district is discovering the merits of such a system — though with this one, there stands a good chance for it to go well beyond the “pilot” phase. Students in Vail, Arizona have been able to handle school assignments, engage in research and even update their Facebook status on the lengthy rides to and from school, and the suits responsible for hooking Bus No. 92 up have stated that mischief has all but subsided and the bus has magically morphed into something of a “rolling study hall.” As you’d expect, Autonet Mobile is responsible for the technology (the same company equipping select GM vehicles with in-car WiFi), and it has already sold similar tech to schools or districts in Florida, Missouri and Washington, DC. We always dreamed of being whisked off to another lousy school day on the GamerBUS, but this ain’t a half bad alternative.

[Thanks, Nate]

Arizona school bus gains WiFi, students suddenly chill out and get productive originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 14 Feb 2010 21:42:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Piazzza Gives Classmates An Online Forum To Trade Their Knowledge

Ah, the college library photo. Look through any school’s brochure, and there’s a good chance you’ll see photos of an ethnically diverse group of students pouring over the same math problem together, all of of them inexplicably grinning ear to ear. It’s a nice thought, but unfortunately it doesn’t happen all that often — instead, many students wind up studying alone, and when they can’t figure something out, they’re out of luck. Now, entrepreneur Pooja Nath is looking to turn this kind of group learning into a reality for more students (at least online) with her startup Piazzza.

Piazzza is still in a private beta and has quite a ways to go before public launch, but we got a sneak peek at its current progress. The site is designed to help classmates share their questions and answers in a format that’s a bit like a mixture between a wiki and a forum. Each class gets its own hub for Q&A, and students can bookmark any questions if they’re also eager to find out the answer. Multiple students can contribute to each answer in a wiki style but there’s a version history that shows what each student wrote.

Students are free to independently create Piazzza hubs for their classes, but I suspect the site will get more traction if it gets professors to sign up. When a professor joins Piazzza, their answers are separated from the students’ to make them easier to find. And professors can also look to see which questions have been bookmarked by the most students to gauge which topics they should explain better in class. So far Piazzza has opened to around 600 students across 9 classes, and plans to open to around 50 classes in a few months. Initial response from professors has been quite positive. And I liked what I saw from the service, though I think it needs to build out some technology that would make it harder to reproduce. I also think that Piazzza will really need to get a large number of professors using the service, which will be difficult.

Nath says that Piazzza was inspired by her own personal experience. As a student studying computer science at India’s prestigious IIT Kanpur, she found herself to be one of only three female students in a class of fifty. She says she was a bit shy and never really got to know many of her classmates, so when it came time to study, she didn’t get to bounce ideas off her peers. After working at Oracle, Kosmix, and Facebook, she’s now a Stanford MBA student.

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Facebook’s HipHop: Impact on the Enterprise May Go Deep into the Code

The influence that Facebook is having on the enterprise now goes beyond making the corporate world a more Web-oriented place – its impact now goes deep into the code.

Facebook announced this week that it has rewritten the PHP runtime, translating it to C++ (a more machine-readable language) which is then compiled with g++. This is no small feat. Facebook engineer Haiping Zhao said that the rewrite significantly reduced the CPU usage on its Web servers by an average of about 50% depending on the page

The impact of this development on the enterprise will depend on a few factors:

Sponsor

• What kind of community develops around HipHop.
• How willing enterprise developers will be to embrace HipHop.
• How the improved run time will actually benefit enterprise operations.

Community

Facebook has done something remarkable. They changed the foundation for the programming language that powers thousands of Web sites. But for now, the change really only affects Facebook.

Marco Tabini is a PHP developer out of Canada who is helping provide perspective about the impacts HipHop may have. Tabini says the next step is to develop a community that will actively build upon the improvement. If they do that, there is a good chance that HipHop may be adopted by the enterprise community.

“Even though Facebook’s imprimatur is certainly enough for people to take notice of HipHop, it’s important to keep in mind that, in its current format, this tool is promising but not ready for prime time–not because the tool itself is not production-quality (after all, Facebook is already using it to handle 90% of their traffic), but because there is no ecosystem around it. If you’re running 1,000 servers, using HipHop is going to be mighty difficult without some sort of deployment tool–and no such tool exists at the moment. Therefore, Facebook’s biggest challenge, having overcome the nontrivial hurdle of making HipHop work technically, is going to be that of fostering a community around it to ensure its growth outside of the company’s systems.”

But this should not be overly complex. With HipHop, Facebook created a drop in replacement that Web developers may make without any significant changes to its existing codebase. Tabini says that if it takes off, the impacts may be significant:

“HipHop could be massively destabilizing to the PHP marketplace, because it is designed as a drop-in replacement to stock PHP; in other words, in most cases it will not be necessary to make significant changes to an existing codebase in order to make it work with HipHop. Flipping this concept around, site owners now have every incentive to write code that is compatible with HipHop, thus giving Facebook significant power over the future direction that PHP takes, since it can dictate what works and doesn’t work–and this is potentially going to affect what even the small company does.”

Resistance

The enterprise developer community is dominated by Java and .NET developers. Java is a heavyweight technology. Historically, Microsoft has had a significant hold on the enterprise, primarily due to the hegemony of Microsoft Office, and the enterprise community has scoffed at PHP. Will they be more open to HipHop? We wonder if the term itself may be a cultural barrier for developers. We love the term and think it represents the youthful, modern transformation that is happening in the enterprise. Companies are moving to Web oriented architectures that embrace the open Web. APIs are becoming more important as companies see the importance of connecting with external applications.

Further, PHP is a language for developing Web applications. That seems like reason enough to adopt it. The enterprise is moving to the Web. They’ve been following what Facebook is doing. It makes sense the enterprise would also follow the lead Facebook is taking with HipHop.

Operations

If the impacts really are what they appear to be, the efficiencies alone will create an impetus for adopting HipHop:

Warren Benedetto, a Web developer with Transfusion Media says that, “If it truly is 80% faster than PHP, then it will save companies a ton of money on hardware resources.”

He continues, “This also allows enterprises to seriously consider PHP when they otherwise may not have. A lot of enterprises stick to Java and .NET because of PHP’s perceived (and actual) performance flaws. If HipHop can raise PHP’s performance to the levels of these other languages, it can remain on the table as an option. Then other companies get the same benefits of PHP that Facebook has reaped — more programmers, cheaper salaries, faster development, etc.”

Conclusion

This is a long term transition. Facebook impacts the community then it may affect not just the direction of PHP but of the enterprise as well.

Discuss

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Everybody Forgets The Readers When They Bash News Aggregators

I remember way back before the Internet when I got most of my daily news via the San Francisco Chronicle and CNN. If it wasn’t reported by either of those outlets, there was a good chance I wouldn’t hear that news at all.

Those days are over.

The problem is that most of the people running legacy news sites today are way older than I am, and still can’t get their arms around the fact that the world has fundamentally and irreversibly changed. Today I get my non tech news via scores of sources. I’m led there via social sites like Twitter and Facebook, and from aggregators like Google News and Memeorandum. Most of my tech news comes, of course, via my phone and email inbox.

It’s ok that the legacy guys don’t understand that, because when they erect paywalls it just stokes TechCrunch, which isn’t behind a paywall. Live and let live, I say. Far be it from me to talk them off the ledge. Paywalls kill social links and aggregators unless they are specially designed to allow them via a set number of free views. But even then there’s enough friction that most people won’t bother.

But when Mark Cuban starts saying aggregators are bad, that’s something new. He’s one of the guys that gets it. He’s not supposed to be on the losing team:

Outspoken billionaire cum provocateur Mark Cuban charged Google and other content aggregators Tuesday of being freeloaders — or worse. “The word that comes to mind is vampires,” he said. “When you think about vampires, they just suck on your blood.”

Telling the world that you don’t want them to do you the favor of visiting your site is just ridiculous.

Let me repeat that. When someone visits your site they are doing you a favor. Not the other way around.

And when an aggregator puts up a link to your site, they are doing you a favor by sending you traffic. Not the other way around.

As I’ve written before, “We throw a party when someone “steals” our content and links back to us. High fives all around the office. At least there’s some small nod in our direction.”

The real problem out there today for news sites are the guys that just take stories and rewrite them on the cheap without any links or attribution at all. When you erect a paywall, you’re just encouraging this behavior. It’s less anyone will notice.

What About The Users?

But forget all that navel gazing for a minute while I jump back up to my first paragraph. Aggregators are popular because they help users find the news they’re interested in. They serve a very real purpose and add value to the system. Without aggregators and social links users would be forced to choose which news sites they want to pay for, and trust that they’ll get everything they need from those sites.

I don’t want to jump back to 1993. I want to live in the present where each piece of news lives and dies by its own merit as it spreads virally around the Internet. That means I spend less time finding better content.

Mark Cuban knows all this, and he agrees. Which is why I don’t understand his lash out against aggregators. If news sites block aggregators, as Cuban urges, they lose and the users lose. No one wins. Except the sites that remain free. And those sites are here to stay.

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Catan: The First Island brings tabletop gaming glee to iPhone

Filed under: Gaming, Features, iPhone, iPod touch, App Review

Catan. If you’ve ever visited, there’s a good chance you’re passionate about it.

First unveiled as a traditional board game in 1995, the now-classic trading and settlement game has evolved over the years to include dozens of scenarios, expansions and reworkings, from limited edition game maps to browser-based Internet versions. Naturally, the Settlers of Catan is now also available for the iPhone [iTunes link], and it’s a a damn good condensed version.

First things first. This is the full, but basic, game. The original ruleset isn’t condensed at all, but none of the expansions are present in the current version. While long-time board gamers might scoff at simple “vanilla Settlers,” the basic game as presented in Exozet’s iPhone version acts just like the tabletop big brother. You can choose to play on the fixed beginner board or a random map, you can play with three or four people (or bots), you can trade, you can go for longest road, etc. All the things that make Catan such an enduring game are here, and that’s great to have in your pocket.

Read on to find out more about Catan: the First Island on the iPhone (and iPod Touch).

The Game

The Settlers of Catan is, at heart, a game of collecting resources and building a collection of settlements and cities on a modular board, with the goal of reaching a set point total (between 8 and 12, but defaulting to 10) before the other players. Players who know the rules will be able to jump right in. You can set the animations to turbo and turn off the opponent comments for the fastest possible game. If you’re quick, a full game can take around 10 minutes – about as much time as it takes some people to set up the tabletop version. Players who aren’t familiar can go through a tutorial with digital Catan’s familiar Professor Easy to learn how to build, trade and acquire points or read up on the game at Board Game Geek.

The App

The Catan gameplay doesn’t suffer on the iPod’s small screen. Each resource hex is clearly differentiated by both color and graphics, but colorblind players might have trouble figuring out which settlements and roads belong to which player since there are no player icons to be found. You’ll have to rely on memory to kept things straight,

Figuring out how the game operates is superbly straightforward. Things blink when you can can affect them, the menus are easy to figure out and so on. If you know how to play the tabletop game and aren’t totally new to the iPhone, you will probably know how to play the app in, at most, 90 seconds.

Take, for example, the trade screen. You can see the five resource types and how many you happen to be sitting on at any given moment. Flick one up towards your opponents and the number goes down. This is what you’re offering. Flick one down towards your player avatar and the number goes up. Simple and clear. Click on the big green checkmark to try and seal the deal – and notice how this icon is located at the opposite side of the screen from the decline/exit button. Very smart.

If you get fed up with AI opponents trying to trade with you, there is an option to decline all offers for the rest of the turn. When you have the resources that you want already, this greatly speeds up the game (a good thing).

This brings up a point: who is this app’s target audience? With the tutorial and the easy playing time, someone totally new to Catan could pick up the game and enjoy it. But, c’mon, the people who will be most excited about this are the hardcore players. A skilled player will be able to beat the game’s toughest bots – William and Hillary – with some regularity, but there is still enough challenge here to be worth the five spot. If you’re addicted to Catan and want ultra-easy access to a quick game (make your decisions fast and you can be done in ten minutes), this is the app for you. Hopefully, enough players will complain about the less-than-brilliant AI and we’ll get another update to make them play better.

While it would be feasible to implement in the tabletop version, one new feature in the app is the “resource bonus.” This setting allows a player to never go too long without getting at least a little something. Especially early in the game, a series of bad rolls can mean you’re not building anything while your opponents erect cities all over the place. With the resource bonus option turned on, after five empty rolls, a player can simply select one resource of their choice.

A drought like this is less likely to happen if the dice option is set to Stack (or Stack5). When using Stack, the dice rolls have perfect distribution, so that if the game ends after exactly 36 rolls, you’ll have seen every possible combination of two dice during play. With Stack5, five random options are removed at the start of the game and the numbers reset after 31 rolls. There is a deck of cards that Mayfair Games sells for the tabletop Catan version that does the same thing, but the extra text on those cards is not included in the iPhone version.

Speaking of mini-additions, the First Island is ripe for mini-expansions like The Great River of Catan or The Fishermen of Catan, and I hope we’ll be seeing some of the more game-changing expansions like Seafarers or Traders & Barbarians. They’d better be working on these options. Seriously.

Looking even further down the road, should Exozet ever develop a larger version for the iPad, adding the 5-6 player expansion might also be cool, and players could play a tabletop game just by setting the iPad on the the table and going from there (dealing with cards hidden in players hands will be tricky, for sure). It’s a thought.

Final thoughts

For some reason, Exozet thinks players want to listen to in-game music instead of their iTunes library. The game’s music and sound effects can be muted, but is still doesn’t allow your own music library to play; that’s annoying, and one of the most-requested changes in customer reviews. Another downside is that there’s no way (that we could find) to offer trades with other players on their turn. This is important if you’re trying to offer 2-1 trades to stay under the 8-card robber hand limit, but because the game moves so fast it’s not that much of a problem, really.

We’d also really, really love an undo button. The app is pretty idiot-proof, but mistakes do happen.

Finally, there’s a bonus feature to this $5 app that hasn’t gotten nearly the attention it deserves. The Settlers of Catan needs at least three players (the 2007 expansion Traders & Barbarians expansion for the tabletop game gave us a reasonable two-player ruleset, but it’s not the same game) to get going. With this app, we now have a very good way to play real two-player Catan. It’s a slight hassle to coordinate, but this app gives two people a third “player” whenever needed. Catan: The FIrst Island is the next best thing to having an extra friend around who’s always up for another trip to Catan.

TUAWCatan: The First Island brings tabletop gaming glee to iPhone originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Sat, 30 Jan 2010 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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