AppStore: Rejected
Posted PlainNote for review two days ago and got the rejection notice last night. I used an action button to spawn the mail view and this was against user interface guidelines.
Just a quick swap to a text label and resubmitted it. For future reference if your trying to do something that isn’t an action button don’t use this:
use this:
Or map a custom image to your button which is also possible. Hopefully in a couple more days it will be available. I’m encouraged by how fast it got reviewed though that was only about 48 hours vs my previous submissions taking over two weeks.
Exciting things
The Lowdown
I’ve been working for a few weeks on a pretty basic note pad application for the iPhone. It’s called PlainNote. It’s got a basic set of functions and should be as usable as the built in note pad that comes with the iPhone. Initially the functionality will be very basic and allow for standard notepad use. In the future I plan to expand it with online syncing, change the storage method from plist to a database, perhaps some basic themes (probably just reverse white text on black).
Initial Features:
- Create / Update / Delete notes
- Sort by date so newest notes are always at the top
- In App mailing of notes
Vision
I had a goal in mind when I started PlainNote of learning to code something that used a UITableView and to write it in Objective-c. I’ve always had the intentions of releasing the source for PlainNote so that other people could see how I accomplished certain tasks such as storing dates in a plist, sorting an array by date, in app mail etc…
The app store reviews should be interesting on this one since it is just another note pad. Hopefully people will get that it is an open source project so other budding developers can see how to accomplish things in Objective-c but I don’t have high hopes for that. The reviews seem to be a pretty mixed bag on applications.
I submitted it to the AppStore on 2/9/2010 so lets see how long it takes to get there.
Twitter removes option to see @replies of those you don’t follow
Twitter has has the option to view @replies to only the people you follow or all @replies in the settings for quite some time. Last night unexpectedly they changed this to only allow you to see @replies to those people you follow. This change effects the API (all client applications) as well as the web. There is no longer a way to see replies to folks your not following unless you directly visit each users profile page.
I think that this is a change for the worse and there are others that would agree with me.
The reason I dislike it so much is I used it extensively when I first joined twitter in 2007 to help me find other interesting people to follow. Twitter states the change is to reduce confusion. Huh, normally when I want to reduce confusion I write some more documentation and try to educate users instead of removing a useful feature. Perhaps it was removed to reduce load on the cache from having to load up timelines with tons of @replies that weren’t normally associated with a persons followers list but I see it as an important change that impacts how some people were using twitter.
Twitter claims that less than 5% of the users were using the feature but lets say hypothetically that twitter has only 2 million users I’m sure they probably have more in reality but this unexpected change impacts 100,000 people of that hypothetical 2 million number. Doesn’t seem like such a small population to me. If it was confusing maybe they should have altered the default or done a sweep to turn it off for everyone but leave the option to turn it back on. As it is right now it’s a fundamental change in the way the timeline works for quite a number of people and impacts how someone might find new friends via twitter. I hope they will reconsider and enable this but I fear it’s a done deal at this point and won’t be coming back.
You will still see mentions inline in a tweet that isn’t a reply but the way I’m interpreting the functionality is anytime you specifically reply to someone that someone else isn’t following they won’t see the reply.
If I compose a new tweet though “Having lunch with my brosef @funkatron” then that will be visible to all users of my time line since it wasn’t a reply. But if @funkatron replies to that message and says “@vkoser we’ll talk about that new library your writing can’t wait to see it” None of @funatrons followers that don’t already follow me would see his reply even if they were interested in finding out more information about whatever cool new library I’m writing.
I’m with @funkatron, I don’t like it one little bit. Here is a link to the original blog post from twitter.