We created a small App in a few days for a trusted customer. After some arguable but quite productive Review round with Apple, the App was really polished and streamlined.

Our apps main functionality is to upload, share and vote photos of bodybuilding athletes. We faced the following rejection reasons:

12.3 We found that the experience your app provides is not sufficiently different from a web browsing experience, as it would be by incorporating native iOS functionality.

So we had some partner websites of our customer that we displayed in the in app browser. We removed them in the end.

17.2 We found that your app requires customers to register with personal information to access non-account-based features, which is not in compliance with the App Store Review Guidelines.

We asked for a Nickname and an optional email address. We stated clear from the beginning, that we will use the address only to contact the user in case he won the sweepstake. Apple suddenly stopped mentioning it.

10.6 Apple and our customers place a high value on simple, refined, creative, well thought through interfaces. They take more work but are worth it. Apple sets a high bar. If your user interface is complex or less than very good it may be rejected

We shuffled some dialogs around to make it a bit different. And they mentioned a place, where a Youtube video is embedded in the news feed. We removed all Youtube Videos.

20.2: Official rules for sweepstakes and contests, must be presented in the app and make it clear that Apple is not a sponsor or involved in the activity in any manner

Makes sense, we included it in a Information Screen which is displayed when you enter the Sweepstake the first time.

2.2: Apps that exhibit bugs will be rejected

Our backend had a bug. We fixed that.

Then all of a sudden, they let us into the Store! We were like yeah! until we realized that due to a bug/api change in iOS 5, Restkit couldn’t upload images on iOS 5 devices and other strange behavior. The restkit team fixed it. And we submitted the update for review.

Now we’re already half a year into the project, spent many unpaid days just to please Apple and bring the App in the store when Apple rejected us again:

8.3: Apps which appear confusingly similar to an existing Apple product or advertising theme will be rejected

Oh yeah. The only thing we never touched in this 6 month was the look of the app:

Luckily Apple mentioned, that their main concern is the rounded icon. So we removed it and were looking forward to publish this critical update to our already released app.

And then it started getting weird. Apple rejected us again:

18.2: Apps that contain user generated content that is frequently pornographic (ex “Chat Roulette” apps) will be rejected

And they provided a screenshot for what they found to be explicit:

Ok, we understand that! Naked upper bodies are quite something. So we removed these images and implemented a tagging system, which allows users to report images so we’ll review and remove them.

After replacing the images the app looked like this:

We were really confident to get into the App Store now!

No luck, still

18.2: Apps that contain user generated content that is frequently pornographic (ex “Chat Roulette” apps) will be rejected

and additional

Your app allows to vote for people which is inappropriate for the App Store. 

Thanks Apple for telling us after half a year of hassling, that you don’t want out app

Dear Internets,

this morning I created two basic iPhone toolbar icons. I really don’t understand why these icons are not shipped with the SDK, so I’m shipping them now. For you. For free.

They look like this:

I included the original Fireworks files as well. Remember, the PNG is only used as alpha mask and thus the colors do not matter, just the transparency.
Download: iphone-icons.zip (176 KB)

They can be used like this:

[[[UIBarButtonItem alloc] initWithImage:[UIImage imageNamed:@"Icon-tb-settings"] 
style:UIBarButtonItemStyleBordered
target:self 
action:@selector(showInfoArticle:)]autorelease];

I’m used to really high quality from everything with an Apple on it. So I was surprised to found this.

From my own experience I know how hard it is to do money calculations with floats. Microsoft had their own problems with it, but what Apple experiences now, is far worse.

• some prices are not displayed correctly: 2.99Fr instead of 3.00Fr
• it’s currently not possible to buy something for 3.00Fr

Ok, I started working with Macs by the beginning of this year. First everything looked fine and I enjoyed working on a Unix based system with such a high focus on usability. But after a few days I started wondering why the ball on the Mighty Mouse is not so mighty at all. Its ridiculous.

Using it to scroll through a lot of pages is so tedious. Is anyone using the Mighty Mouse to do serious work?
So I connected my Razor Diamondback and WOW, what a difference. Suddenly scrolling is a bliss. But after using it a while, I noticed, that I often have a hard time clink on small stuff. Why?

It’s called mouse acceleration and OS X has a different and IMHO worse approach than Windows and Linux. A steep courve. So the mouse feels sluggish slow and a s soon as I try to be fast the cursors flies over the screen like mad.

Good thing is, I’m not alone with that, there a quite a few articles that point out the problem and offer a solution. In the end James sums it up nicely here:

So I started using USB Overdrive, which does a great job and works fine for me.

Btw. ControllerMate is extremely sophisticated and unique, because you can design your own mouse acceleration curve.

From my Linux time, I know that ssh-copy-id is extremely handy. Sadly its not available on OS X.

But nonetheless, thats how you can setup a password less login to another host from OS X:

# Generate your local public/private key (if not already done)
# (you can press enter to accept the defaults)
ssh-keygen
# Create the remote directory (especially for Windows hosts)
ssh user@host.com mkdir "~/.ssh/"
# Copy the public key to your remote host
scp .ssh/id_rsa.pub user@host.com:"~/.ssh/"
# Add it to the authorized_keys File
ssh user@host.com "cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys"

And your done!

Since I work for airbit.ch, which is a Mac friendly company, I started to like Macs. Yes, its true.

From time to time I use RDC for Mac to administer some Windows boxes and this is how I transfer files to them:

Share Mac Directories as Windows Drives

• go to the Preferences
• choose Drives (it should be called Shares, but anyway)
• choose the Mac Directory you want to share

and this is how it will look like on My Computer

(gosh, Windows looks ugly)