The update to FastFinder is still caught up in Apple’s approval process. It’s now facing the App Rating Squad who have rejected the update stating:

“we cannot post this version of your iPhone application to the App Store at this time because it is not appropriately rated.“

iPhone OS3.0 introduced parental controls and Apple requested developers to self-rate their applications. Apple did not seem to review those ratings, creating potential for inconsistencies and loopholes. It looks like Apple is now catching up by validating those ratings whenever reviewing the next update. So unless the reviewer agrees with your rating you won’t be able to release your update.
Unfortunately the reviewer did not seem to agree with our current 4+ rating:

“Our review indicates that the application content is not consistent with the current rating. FastFinder allows unfiltered access to the internet, where content with mature or suggestive themes can be accessed. Applications must be rated accordingly for the highest level of content that the user is able to access.“

This immediately made me think of a high-profile case a few months ago, where a newspaper aggregator application got rejected because it included ‘The Sun’ newspaper. And because that newspaper also has a page3 with some scantily clothed ladies the whole application got rejected. Rather than fight it, the developers decided to simply remove that newspaper.

I’m finding the whole thing a bit silly and inconsistent. Yes, because FastFinder has unrestricted access to all search engines, you could search for mature content as well. But that doesn’t make it a “mature” application, does it? And the silly thing is, as long as you have Safari on your iPhone, you can get to those search engines (and thus to “suggestive themes”) anyway. And I checked, even if you turn parental controls on, you can still access whatever you want through Safari. So the rating system would become pretty much useless unless every parent switches off access to Safari (which you can do in parental controls), but that completely neuters your iPhone or iPod. No kid will be happy with that.

The inconsistency comes from the fact that there are many similar apps in the Appstore that all have a 4+ rating. So Apple would have to fight every one of those applications on their next updates and pretty much force any app that has any internet access to a higher rating.
The only consolation at this point is that we’re not alone. The popular News Addict application has found itself facing the same problem. Its developer rightly states:

“Apple needs to rate apps based on what they actually contain not what they might be used for. This is the equivalent of putting 17+ ratings on TV sets because they have the potential to play R rated movies.”

We have now resubmitted the FastFinder update with a 12+ rating, let’s see if that satisfies the censors.

Needed a break and hooked up with some friends in Japan. While the visit was a leisure pursuit, it gave me the opportunity to do some iPhone field research as well. After all, PhotoNote is selling better in Japan than anywhere else. This was my third visit to Japan, so I more or less knew what to expect, but as it turns out the country is still full of surprises.

First observation: The complete absence of wifi. I was on a foreign SIM-card and did not want to incur outragous roaming charges, so needed to rely on wifi for my broadband fix. Normally, in any city in the US or most cities in Europe , you open up the wifi finder and you’ll hit 10-20 networks. Still a challenge to find one that will work, but at least you’ve got options. Here, mostly nothing, nada, zero wi-fi. Didn’t matter if you were in a residential street, an apartment building, a shopping street or a mall. Keep the wifi finder open and maybe you would find 1 new network every 2 blocks. Weird.

Second observation: The Japanese are not yet addicted to broadband. Admitted, I’m a broadband junkie. But so are many of the people I know. We’ve gotten so used to obiquous broadband, that there’s always something to do, someone to contact, something to check. This, in my view, is one of the reasons the iPhone is doing so well. It brought the internet into our pockets in a portable and user-friendly format We don’t really care if it’s called wifi, edge or 3g, it’s always-on Internet. The Internet dial-tone as it was called when I was working at Cisco.
But in Japan, it seems people have not yet taken on the broadband addiction. My host for instance had an internet connection, but no wifi for me to hook into. He only turned on his laptop when he needed it. This seemed to be common. When there is a pc in the house, it tends to be a pc or laptop in a dedicated corner. Not an always on, always carried from couch to kitchen-table device. Don’t quite understand why, the Japanese have many other addictions and this one would seem to fit nicely. But no, broadband internet is not one of them, yet.

Third observation: iPhones have not reached a critical mass. My plan was to look on the street, in trains, subways, restaurants and to peak over people’s shoulders, just to see what apps they were using on their iPhone. That could provide me with inspiration for new apps. I was very observant, kept my eyes open and guess what: in 1 week I only spotted 5 iPhones. Granted, I didn’t spend any time in Tokyo and limited time in Osaka. And of course I’m not counting the dozens of iPhones I saw in the Apple store in Nagoya. But still, only a handful of iPhones in a week. In Japan! How is that possible?

Fourth observation: I watched many people on the trains and many of them were wearing the all-too-familiar white earbuds. At the same time they were frantically emailing on their (mostly clamshell) phones. In other words, they were using and carrying an iPod AND a phone. It appears that the people have not yet converted to the idea that the two can easily be one.

Fifth and final observation: most Japanese are not yet beyond email/txt on their phones. I already noticed this 5-6 years ago on my first visit to Japan. And it really doesn’t seem to have changed. Everyone has a fancy phone, most with a decent data connection, but they don’t seem to use it beyond txt or email messaging.

This could be why the iPhone is not popular yet in Japan. Japanese are not broadband junkies yet and it’s true distinguishing feature, broadband in your pocket, would not really be used. In the crowd of fancy phones that the Japanese want and expect, the iPhone would feel like an overpriced and under-featured (i.e. the crappy camera) phone. The 3G S plays a bit of catch up but it’s probably not enough to provide the momentum.

So I guess it’s up to us developers to create apps dedicated to a Japanese audience that uniquely use the iPhones’ capabilities, tap into Japans unique cultural context and create so much excitement that everyone will want an iPhone. Peer-to-peer pachinko anyone?

Thank you for the many positive responses to the release of FastFinder. Since its launch there have been major developments in the world of search. In recent weeks two major new search engines were launched, Wolfram Alpha and Microsoft’s Bing. And both are claiming to be the next frontier in intelligent search.

Wolfram Alpha launched under a big hype, and some were already predicting the end of the Google era. The reviewer at Trusted Reviews was probably more on the ball when he commented “I suspect it is Wikipedia, not Google, which might feel the pinch…”. It seems that the interest in Wolfram has faded as quickly as the hype, so it will be interesting to see what happens next. No offense to it’s founder but I personally still don’t like the name. It’s too complex, but then again the whole search experience feels a bit nerdy. But it will have its fans, so we have included WolframAlpha in FastFinder and have grouped it under ‘encyclopedia’, just under Wikipedia.

The second big launch was Bing, Microsoft’s attempt to finally get their search offering right. Reviews have been mostly positive. Personally I’m still confused on what the homepage pictures of rustic buildings and sweeping landscapes have to do with search and I’m not convinced that ‘Bing’ is a good name either. More problematic is the fact that the ‘decision engine’ part of Bing, which is supposed to show in the ‘intelligent’ sidebars, only seems to work well in the US. But you can be sure that Microsoft will keep investigating and most people seem to agree that it’s a major leap forward from the mostly failed Live search. “Live” has now been fully replaced by Bing, so we’ve updated the logo and the links in FastFinder to reflect this.

In addition to these new arrivals and in response to customer requests, we’ve also added support for del.icio.us (now delicious.com) and digg. We are planning to keep on top of developments in the search engine world and will keep adding and updating the engines in FastFinder accordingly.

The new version of FastFinder also includes a fix for a bug that’s showing under the new 3.0 iPhone operating system. The application re-uses the same UITableView both for displaying and editing search engines. Unfortunately, OS3.0 has implemented some stricter controls around the use of TableViews, which sometimes causes FastFinder to crash when pressing the edit button. The fix will solve this.

The new release was submitted to Apple 3 weeks ago, but unfortunately it seems that FastFinder has now also got stuck in Apple’s review process. We appreciate your patience while we wait for Apple and hope the update will get approved soon.

UPDATE 1-JUL-2009: we’ve now received the dreaded email from Apple stating:

“Your application, FastFinder, is requiring unexpected additional time for review.“

Without any further explanation. We’re hoping to receive better news soon.

We receive many emails from customers and really appreciate the execellent feedback we receive through that. The feature that has been requested most often for some time was the ability to email your photonotes. People loved the ability to take notes with their photos, but felt restricted by the fact that their photonotes were locked within the application.

Unfortunately adding email was not that simple. Well, a simple text email would’ve been easy enough, but the Apple SDK does not allow attachments, and emailing a PhotoNote without the photo is somewhat pointless. So a workaround was required. Fortunately a developer by the name of Ian Baird has released an open source package called SKPSMTP. That allows sending of smtp emails from within an application. And more importantly it supports attachments.

So we are very pleased to announce that the new version of PhotoNote now allows you to email your notes.

However, it is a temporary solution and it is far from perfect. It works outside of the native iPhone mail client, which means it cannot be a background process. You need to keep PhotoNote open while sending the email. It’s also not as robust as the native mail client, so it only has basic retry and recovery functionalty. Finally it relies on our mailserver, which means the email is send from our account and the recipient won’t be able to simply reply to it. Similarly there is no notification to you in case the email bounces, for instance because of a typo in the email address.

We found an answer to the mailserver problem and will allow you to configure your own smtp account. Every gmail user will be able to use this option. Many other email providers will support it as well, but not everyone.

The other issues are somewhat tied to the workaround and can only be solved once Apple allows email attachments within apps. Once that happens, we will upgrade PhotoNote and provide the more robust option.

Meanwhile we hope you enjoy the new functionality and do let us know if you are having any issues or have suggestions for improvement.

Happy to introduce the release of version 1.2.1 of PhotoNote today. This is primarily a bug-fix release, but we managed to include a new feature as well.

A customer raised the issue of the application crashing on certain types of deletes. Turns out that this was related to the new sorting functionality that was introduced in the last release. This issue is now fixed. We’ll aim to do some more regression testing when we introduce new features. 

Another customer raised the issue of odd behaviour when typing notes in landscape mode. They stumbled on a piece of new functionality that wasn’t supposed to be there yet, so that’s been removed. We are still working on landscape functionality for the notes screen, which will make it easier to write larger notes (diary style), but this will be released in a future release.

Many customers asked for the ability to add notes without a photo. That would take PhotoNote on the path of a full Notes replacement. The feature has been included in this release. It appears as an extra “source” option when adding a new PhotoNote, so make sure that the “Select Camera/Library” function is turned on.   

We will continue to add new functionality to the application, so let us know if there’s anything that would rate very high on your wish list.