Update: According to news.com.au, Apple has issued an official apology for letting this app onto the store.

Sometimes, you really have to question the App Store approval process.

Sure, this isn't the first time that Apple has made an unwise decision regarding the approval (or lack thereof) of applications to the App Store. But, this one takes the cake. For the span of a few hours on Wednesday, Apple allowed the release of "Baby Shaker," an app from Slkalosoft (ironically, the company no longer has the app listed on its site). The application displayed an image of a crying infant. You had to shake the iPhone or iPod touch repeatedly in order to get the child to stop crying -- literally shaking the baby to death. When the crying ceased and two red Xs appeared over the baby's eyes, you succeeded.

There's plenty of criticism over App Store standards. You can find a plethora of fart-simulating apps and other programs designed just to be a sheer nuisance, yet legitimate apps such as Tweetie get caught up in the pipeline because of potentially offensive language. "Baby Shaker" quickly hit a lot of news sites, and it didn't bode too well for an Apple doing its best to spotlight its second quarter earnings.

App Store approval is already something that is cumbersome and vague at best -- often leaving developers in limbo as to the status of their product. "Baby Shaker" certainly isn't the first dubious piece of software released into the App Store, but it is by far the worst. Even though Apple did yank "Baby Shaker" within a couple of hours, it does leave a nasty taste in people's mouths. It means that somewhere, somehow, there was a failure to communicate to employees that releasing an application promoting infanticide is a moronically stupid move. I do wonder how long "Baby Shaker" would have remained in the App Store if the media suddenly hadn't jumped on the story. What do you think this latest situation says about the App Store process? Let us know in the comments.

[Via CNet]

UPDATE: Apple has apologized for the app's release. [thanks to Paul for the tip]

Apple has issued a cease and desist letter to Pivotal, creators of Podium, a hands-free iPhone stand - namely over the use of the word "Pod" in Podium.

An excerpt from the cease and desist letter provided to TUAW states that "The term POD has also been adopted and used extensively in the marketplace by consumers as an abbreviation to refer to Apple's IPOD player. The IPOD and POD marks indicate to consumers that a broad range of products, including portable electronic devices, computer software, and related goods and services bearing those marks and marks similar thereto originate from or are sponsored or endorsed by Apple."

"If you look at our product and then look up the word Podium in the dictionary, I think it becomes pretty clear where our branding inspiration came from" said Scott Baumann, president of Pivotal.

Podium (noun)
Etmyology: Latin
Date originally used: 1743 (a good 243 years before Apple was founded)
1: a low wall serving as a foundation or terrace wall: as a: one around the arena of an ancient amphitheater serving as a base for the tiers of seats b: the masonry under the stylobate of a temple
2: a dais especially for an orchestral conductor
Source: Merriam-Webster

The letter also alleges that Podium infringes on Apple's trademark because the stand mimics recent iMac models and that Pivotal's site for the product is also ripping off Apple's brand stylization. The cease and desist also covers Pivotal's currently in-development product, FlyPod. Pivotal states that the company will be seeking legal advice on the matter.

Update: Cooler heads appear to have prevailed, and Loren reports that Tweetie 1.3 has cleared the App Store bluenose barrier and should be showing up later tonight.

We saw this hit the fan early today, hot on the tail of the AMBER Alert post. Apparently the 1.3 update to Tweetie, a popular Twitter client for iPhone we've covered before, has been denied release in the App Store because the app could potentially show "offensive language."

As you may know, blatantly offensive apps (like really "adult" content) are verboten on Apple's store. Unfortunately, that rule was probably intended to keep X-rated content (maybe hard R as well) off the store, not inadvertently prevent an update to a popular Twitter client. In this case, the offensive material could pop up in Twitter trend searches -- never mind that you can find much worse using Google's search app or mobile Safari itself.

This latest episode plus the Amber Alert app's delay and many other examples continue to shine a light on what is clearly a broken approval process. As Engadget's Nilay Patel says, "It's time to drop the seemingly-random black-box approach... and actually work with innovative developers like Tweetie's Loren Brichter to push your platform forward in the face of newly-stiff competition."

That last point is important, because hardware companies are working hard to avoid an iPod-like market lead for the iPhone. Last night's demo of the Palm Pre had my eyebrows raised, to be sure. If Apple can't quit shooting the feet of some of the best developers out there, it'll be all too easy for them to switch to a platform that provides less restrictions, less doubt and less uncertainty.

[Via The iPhone Blog]

Last November, as visions of cranberries and turkey danced in our heads, the first tidbits about a forthcoming Sirius/XM app for the iPhone began to emerge on the Howard Stern fan forums. In January, the satellite radio player's name and details were confirmed -- StarPlayr was on the way from NiceMac.

Two weeks ago, word arrived from NiceMac that the app was neither approved nor rejected by Apple... perhaps keeping it out of the way of an official Sirius app rumored last week. No independent developer wants to be in this no-app's-land between approval on the store and a branded app around the corner, so you can probably guess what happens next.

Early this morning, a blog post on the starplayr.com site confirmed what many of us expected: NiceMac is abandoning development of the StarPlayr app, not only on the iPhone but on Windows Mobile as well. Refunds for WinMo licensees will be available on a first-come, first-served basis until NiceMac runs out of cash.

It's a sad and frustrating outcome, not only for the hardworking team behind StarPlayr but also for the eager fans who were ready to lay down their cash for the app. Without some sort of advance roadmap for internal/partner projects from Apple, or a published list of 'no-go zones' for third party developers to stay clear of the official-app juggernaut, this is going to happen again. I understand that competitive pressures may force Apple to keep licensing and development deals under wraps -- chances are, the team answering emails in Developer Relations has no idea what's in the works up in the executive offices -- but there's got to be a way to avoid this deep chill on innovation and investment from third-party devs.

Update: As some commenters have pointed out, the back-end infrastructure of StarPlayr is being shut down, which will disable the WinMo version of the app. This points strongly towards Sirius/XM, and not Apple, as the Big Bad in this scenario.

Thanks Jim

Over the weekend, the mailbag caught a few notes of problems starting up once Leopard users had applied the 2009-001 Security Update (thanks @danielbru), and on Friday the spotty issue was noted by MacFixIt as well. Affected users report a variety of symptoms: the dreaded 'boot disk not found,' a 20-minute hold before the login screen shows up, and a disabled keyboard & mouse -- making the usual first troubleshooting step (a Safe Boot, triggered by holding down the shift key at start up) rather more difficult. As with most Mac OS X patches, the majority of those who applied the security update did so with no reported problems, but that's cold comfort if you're one of the unlucky few.

While it's always a good idea to verify your backups before updating to major dot releases, I doubt most users would bother with that due diligence when facing a 'simple' security update; unfortunately, since these updates often touch multiple subsystems, issues do emerge for some folks in the aftermath. MacFixit's thorough guide to troubleshooting startup problems is a good starting point if you're having problems, and if you've already been through the mill this weekend, let us know how you resolved your problems in the comments below.

The well-known tech blogger Om Malik has broken up with his iPhone. It seems that despite loving the iPhone itself, AT&T's shoddy service in San Francisco just wasn't cutting it. A couple of dropped calls during a phone interview was apparently the straw that broke the camel's back and Om traded his iPhone for a iPod touch plus a couple of phones from other carriers.

That got me wondering. Just how much of a drag on the iPhone is the AT&T network? My service has generally been reliable here in the Twin Cities, but I have suffered problems when traveling. So how about it? How many of you have actually had to dump an iPhone because of the carrier?

[via jkOnTheRun]

The cutest Beatle, Sir Paul McCartney, did an interview with Entertainment Weekly recently for his new album, and the long-running subject of the Beatles on iTunes came up right at the last question. At this point, this is probably our favorite Apple failure -- they've reinvented the way we listen to music, they've made smartphones mainstream, they've constantly re-created and revolutionized the personal computer, and yet they've never been able to get the best band in history on their iTunes service.

Not for lack of trying, says Sir Paul. He says that he's down with it, and that both sides are still trying to come to an agreement, but that "we" (presuming that means the band themselves) definitely "want it to happen." But he also says that "the record company" (presumably Apple Records, who have had their troubles with Apple Computers in the past)
"was taken over by new people quite recently, so there is a gridlock of sorts." So we continue to wait for The Beatles to show up on iTunes.

Meanwhile, they are apparently going ahead with the Rock Band version featuring The Beatles -- McCartney says that Harmonix is still planning to put the music in the console videogame/band simulator, and that they're going to feature The Beatles in different eras: "early days, Liverpool, then psychedelic, and on from there. It's very cool." Sounds like it -- even if we can't play the White Album from AppleTV, at least we'll be able to do it from the Xbox.

There has been plenty of confusion over the continuing saga of Seagate hard drives with firmware problems that can lead to eventual failure and data loss. We've followed the story here and here.

It hasn't been pretty for either Intel or non-Intel Macs. It would have been nice for Seagate to provide a Mac OS X-native firmware updater for older machines. There must be an awful lot of hard drives out there just waiting to fail. Many people who don't follow tech news don't even know what pain might strike them.

Mac users who had written Seagate about their problems did not get much information, but now there are some more details sent in an email to customers about the bad news for non-Intel based Mac owners. Full email reproduced below:

If you are trying to update your drive firmware with a MAC, you must have an INTEL MAC to allow you to perform this action. If you do not have an INTEL MAC, you will then need to take the drive to a PC, or a MAC with an Intel Processor. If you do not have either, you may need to warranty the drive with Seagate, and the return drive should have the updated firmware upon receipt.

If you have an INTEL MAC, you would simply need to burn the ISO file to CD using the burning utility that you have installed on your system. Once you have the CD created, you will then need to reboot the system with the newly created CD in the CD ROM bay while holding the "C" key on the keyboard to tell the system to boot to the CD rather than the internal hard drive. Once you have booted to the CD, simply follow the onscreen prompts to complete the firmware update. Older Macs that are PowerPC (PowerMac G3,G4,G5, iMac G3,G4,G5) based can not bootup to the FreeDOS. FreeDOS is the operating system that is booted to when booting to the firmware update CD. Please keep in mind that you should always backup the data on the drive before doing the update in case there is data loss. In most cases, the data on the drive should remain in tack and unaltered; however, things happen, and its always better to be prepared in case we come across any obstacles with the integrity of the data on the drive.
Instructions for updating firmware on a Intel based Mac.
1. Download and burn the Firmware ISO that has been provided to you by Seagate for your drive/s
2. Burn the ISO to a CD (how to: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=Mac/10.5/en/8729.html)
3. Insert the freshly burn CD back in to your Mac.
4. Reboot
5. After the Chime press and hold the Option key on the keyboard.
6. Once you see the Apple with the spinning gear beneath, release the Option Key.
7. At this point the system will come to a screen with pictures of hard drives and a CD, the CD should be named Seagate.
8. Click on the CD
9. Click on the arrow pointing to the right.
10. At this point FreeDOS will boot and the on screen instructions should be followed.
Once again, I want to thank you for your business.. If you still need further assistance, or the information provided was not of good use, please feel free to contact Seagate Technical Support at 800-SEAGATE ( 800-732-4283).

Translation: You are well and truly hosed if you don't have access to a Mac Pro or a Windows PC that can update the firmware. People who have returned their drives to Seagate got a refurbished drive, even if a brand new one was sent in for exchange. Worse, there are some scattered reports that the replacement drive still had the bad firmware! Way to go, Seagate: if your Mac-owning user base didn't feel completely screwed over before this, we all probably feel that way now.

The first generation of iPod nano models may have been small and sleek, but they also apparently had an image problem -- mainly, that it rapidly grew difficult to see the screen after the nicks and scratches began to accumulate on the face of the player. As far back as 2005, users expressed their displeasure over the nano's likelihood for damage, including cracks in the screen in some cases.

Thanks to a now-settled class action lawsuit, nano owners who experienced the scratchies can apply for a refund of $15 (if the iPod shipped with a slip case, as later ones did) or $25 (for no-case shipments). You can get all the details from the settlement website. Refunds may take up to a year (!) to arrive.

[via AppleInsider]

Yesterday's Boy Genius Report post citing the top ten deficiencies of the iPhone (no copy & paste, no video recording, and more) has generated more than 100 responses, some suggesting a fix for many failings (jailbreak the phone) and others hopping on the Blackberry or Palm Pre bandwagons in the hope that competition for the iPhone will spur more software innovation from Apple. While the App Store may be the hottest thing since that soldering iron you accidentally left turned on that ignited your Dad's workbench (and that's why you're not allowed in the garage anymore), even the sneakiest third-party developers can't effectively replace what Apple has failed to provide.

Given the sense of pent-up frustration from some (but not all) iPhone 3G owners over a laundry list of things the phone doesn't do, or doesn't do well, here's your chance to cheer or castigate Apple in the hopes of a brighter day to come. Vote in our poll and comment below with your top priorities for improvements -- or, if you're a happy camper, your favorite feature of today's iPhone.



[via Smoking Apples/Twitter]

With the end of the year comes the cavalcade of best and worst lists, just in case you didn't know what was best and what was worst over the course of the year.

Apple made glassdoor.com's list of "50 Best Places to Work," placing 19th. It scored a 3.8 out of five, and 90 percent of employees approved of the job that CEO Steve Jobs was doing. 303 employees completed reviews at the site, contributing to its score. (The reviews themselves are interesting to read, incidentally, if you have a few minutes to kill.)

On the other hand, Apple made Fortune magazine's list of 21 Dumbest Moments in Business for the year, twice -- but the second time really wasn't its fault.

The first head-smacker, at number six, was for the approval (and subsequent removal) of the "I Am Rich" iPhone application. "The real losers?" Fortune asks: "The eight suckers who bought it."

The second blooper, number 19, actually goes to CNN and Bloomberg for two false stories about Steve Jobs' health. Bloomberg accidentally released an obituary on August 28, and retracted it the same day. In a similar gaffe, a post on CNN's iReport site falsely claimed that Jobs had suffered a heart attack. CNN took down the post -- but not after Apple's stock dipped 10 percent in 10 minutes. Ouch.

[Via Macsimum News and MacNN.]

The BBC reported today that a TV ad for the iPhone has been banned in the UK by the government's advertising standards watchdog group for being misleading.

The Advertising Standards Authority received 17 complaints about the ad above, which showed web pages, the Maps application, and mail attachments loading in fractions of a second. The group said that the ad "led viewers to believe that the device actually operated at or near the speeds shown," the BBC story read.

The ASA said after reviewing the complaints, "Because we understood that it did not, we concluded the ad was likely to mislead."

Apple argued that the claims in the spot were "relative rather than absolute in nature," comparing the 3G speeds to the speeds of the first-generation iPhone. Nevertheless, the ad cannot be run on UK airwaves again in its current form.

One of the complainants was a man named Roger Browning, who said in a post at The Guardian that he complained about the advertisement as retribution for a bad customer support experience he had with O2.

Apple has run afoul of the ASA before, with a claim in August that the iPhone could view "the whole Internet." Since the iPhone doesn't support Flash and Java, the agency decided the ads were misleading, and yanked them off-air.

[Via MacDailyNews.]

Yesterday, our buddy David Chartier at Ars and Sam Oliver at AppleInsider both publicized an issue that's been burning up the support boards for a while now: iTunes video rentals and purchases in HD are flagged for HDCP control, and in cooperation with the new Mini DisplayPort connector on the MacBook and MacBook Pro unibody models, those movies and TV shows are refusing to play back on non-compliant external displays.

In this case, 'compliant' means HDMI or recent-vintage DVI, but even monitors or TVs that support HDCP may not properly negotiate with the DisplayPort connector to give iTunes and QuickTime the all-clear signal (if so, quitting and relaunching iTunes once the display is hooked up may clear the playback hold). Equally annoying: HDCP is only supposed to apply to 'high-value' digital streams, meaning standard-def purchases and rentals on the iTunes store should be out of scope... but some reports indicate that both the HD and SD instances are flagged, blocking playback on anything but the laptop's internal display or a straight-thru HDMI connection. Argh!

While Apple TV users with unconventional output setups have been dealing with this aggravation since the beginning of the year, MacBook and MBP owners have largely steered clear, even as the HD content on iTunes became available for playback on the laptops. Now that the hardware and software have come into sync on the unibody models, Apple's compliance with HDCP -- a necessary but appalling condition of the content companies that deliver the HD movies and TV shows -- is beginning to close out the 'analog hole' and cause real aggravation for laptop owners with legitimate use cases. Talk about a bag of hurt.

Some of you might remember the music event in September. Not only did Steve Jobs give us new iPods, but he also promised that Apple would be releasing new in-ear headphones in October. If anyone hasn't noticed, it's now mid-November, and there's no sign of the new headphones anywhere.

Has Apple simply abandoned the release of these new headphones? If history repeats itself, then we might get these sometime next year. When I contacted Apple's sales staff, they told me that there is "no set release date." You can check out the In-Ear Headphones store entry by clicking here; someday you might even be able to buy them for $79 US .

The responses to the blog post were largely in support of my thesis: that losing FireWire from the MacBook is a big deal and a potential (or actual) deal-breaker for many, many users. This was to be expected, as people who are upset about FireWire's disappearance are more likely to respond to an article sharing that sentiment. On Twitter, however, when we just asked, "Is the lack of FireWire on the new unibody MacBook a deal-breaker for you, yes or no?" the data was less skewed.

A majority of the Twitter users that responded to our poll said "no, it is not a deal-breaker." Many commented that the loss is disappointing, but ultimately it won't prevent them from buying a new MacBook. Still, more than one third of the responses were "yes, this is a deal-breaker." Many users are considering putting off upgrading altogether; others expressed discomfort with being forced to buy a MacBook Pro (either the new units, or the now heavily-discounted older units).

A note to concerned future MacBook Pro users: you can get an inexpensive cable with FW400 on one end and FW800 on the other -- no adapter needed, just a new cord for your camera or audio device. Be warned, however, that the presence of a FW400 device in the chain will drop the speed of any FW800 devices to the older standard.

Reader David sent Steve Jobs (or sjobs@apple.com) an e-mail, expressing his disappointment by the lack of FireWire on new MacBooks. The response (which David forwarded and we verified had the correct mail-header information), is pretty interesting...