—By Elisabeth Oppenheimer Marcus Watkins, over at VersatileMonkey.com, has a writeup of what it was like to develop his first BlackBerry app. (BlackBerry came out with its own app store earlier this year, but it’s been strangely reticent about advertising it. BlackBerry users have long been able to get third-party apps from individual developers’ websites […]
—By Elisabeth Oppenheimer It’s been a while since we’ve done a roundup of what’s going on in the iPhone app world. Apple continues to reject or kill apps at a slow but steady pace. The rejections fall into a various categories: political rejections, content-based rejections (both explicable and not), and catch-all rejections of cool and useful […]
I’m starting to get a better sense of what Google’s open mobile OS, Android, will look like in practice. Google has just pulled tethering apps from the Market, the on-phone equivalent of Apple’s App Store. Tethering apps allow users to use their mobile phone as a sort of modem/internet connection for their laptop, and carriers […]
Imagine that you’re playing World of Warcraft and you decide you could use a little help finishing your quest. So you go to a site that aggregates and distributes “add-ons”—independently-written programs that hook into WoW and create new functionality for game players. You choose a popular one called QuestHelper and go on your way. As […]
As you all know, one of Prof. Z’s projects is Herdict, which monitors blocked web sites around the world. One of the ways you can help out the project is to jump over to the Reporter, a.k.a. amiblockedornot, which lets you test the accessibility of websites where problems have been reported. The Reporter will suggest […]
—by Elisabeth Oppenheimer In several of the posts on this blog, we’ve talked about how we’ll be waiting to see how Apple’s semi-open model competes with Android’s mostly-open model over the next several years. Slashdot links to a few articles addressing that question. The first two articles say that Apple is totally overwhelmed by trying […]
–by Elisabeth Oppenheimer The iPhone App Store is selling e-books, and (surprise!) has upset authors and developers by rejecting books with “objectionable content.” As usual, we don’t really know how the App Store rejection process works. But they seem to be searching books for the f-word and rejecting those that use it. Author Moriah Jovan […]
—By Elisabeth Oppenheimer FOI readers may have noticed the story (or experienced the phenomenon!) last weekend about a Google malfunction, where Google temporarily labeled all sites as potentially dangerous and placed interstitial screens with warnings if any were clicked upon in the search results. Since 2006, Google has teamed up with the FOI-approved (and JZ-cofounded) […]
—By Elisabeth Oppenheimer There’s been some recent discussion about a “rogue” Android app, MemoryUp, which was supposed to manage memory on the G1 phone, preserving battery life and allowing apps to run more smoothly. Apps are posted in the Android Market with user reviews, and many of the reviews for MemoryUp complained that it froze […]
—By Elisabeth Oppenheimer If you use Facebook, you’ve probably seen some of the viruses that have been hitting site users. (That message from your aunt telling you to “click here to see paRiS Hilton!!1”—probably not actually from your aunt.) Initially, it was phishing scams—the user would click on a link, be taken to a site […]
