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Electronic Frontier Foundation attorney Fred von Lohmann has put together asnarky analysis of Apple’s iPhone developer licensing agreement. Needless to say the agreement isn’t pretty for the developers. The EFF got their hands on the agreement through a Freedom of Information Act request after NASA signed the agreement while putting together their NASA App.

People are getting up in arms about this, but is anyone really surprised at this point? That old 1984 superbowl ad is getting more ironic with each passing year as Apple’s success allows them to pull all of their products into lockdown. Remember that this is a company that nearly ran themselves out of business in the mid ’90s due in large part to their proprietary format and had to take a hefty bailout from Microsoft to keep things going. If they’re willing to ride proprietary practices all the way to the edge of bankruptcy then what makes the Internet think that success will suddenly turn them into benevolent benefactors of everything computing?

The example of the Apple II is always brought up when people bemoan Apple’s modern closed-door policies. But the Apple II was nearly three decades and several business models removed from the Apple we know and love to hate today. Apple hardware has been in lockdown since the first Mac debuted. Show me someone who disagrees with that assertion and I’ll show you someone who has that free Apple bumper sticker that comes with every iPod and iPhone proudly affixed to their car’s back window.

When you buy an Apple product you are buying a lifestyle choice, not a piece of technology. You have to ask yourself if you’re willing to put up with a little bit of corporate crazy on their part for the convenience built into their products. I’ll freely admit that I’m willing to make this trade with iTunes and the iPhone because of the ease that iTunes offers and the large development base that the iPhone boasts.

But I bought my iPod and iPhone fully aware that Apple has been, and always shall be, just a little on the nutty side. Maybe they should start handing out pamphlets detailing their corporate history back to the mid-’80s so that no one else is taken by surprise the next time a story of an Apple lockdown burns through the geek world?

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Final Fantasies 1 and 2 are now available for download in the app store for the steep price (for iPod/iPhone, at least) of $8.99. That’s not $8.99 for a package deal either. You’re going to pay close to $20 after tax if you want to enjoy both games from the convenience of your phone.

The games are a port of the PSP versions of the game. Except that it’s more choppy on the iPhone/iPod if the reviews are any indication. And Square-Enix cut out all of the cutscenes that provided a little value-added for gamers who bought the PSP version. And the controls aren’t nearly as intuitive since they’ve had to graft a touch screen interface onto games that were originally designed for a blocky NES controller.

And you have to ask yourself a simple question: “Do I really need another port of the original Final Fantasies?” I can see some of the excitement when Final Fantasy 2 finally came to the U.S. (legally) for the first time, but at this point these games have been repackaged and re-released so many times that I wouldn’t be surprised to find there’s a version available for my toaster that utilizes revolutionary new crumb processing to generate the graphics and convection current manipulation to move the characters.

Final Fantasy has 4.5 stars so far while Final Fantasy 2 has surpassed that to sit at a solid 5 stars after a few dozen reviews apiece, but don’t let that fool you. Most of the reviews boil down to “Wow! Final Fantasy on my iPhone! I’m so desperate for anything approaching a recognizable video game at this point that I will grasp and inflate the rating of anything that comes close to replicating the experience of a real portable gaming system!”

I’m paraphrasing. Slightly. But sheer amazement that a particular game is available on a platform is not a good reason to go out and spend your hard-earned money on said game.  Don’t be that guy or girl. If you absolutely must buy Final Fantasies 1 and 2 then there are far better versions out there.

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Wordpress 2.2 for iPhone has been more stable than its predecessors so far, but I have come across a minor bug that could potentially turn into a major annoyance depending on how often you save.

The app has a “feature” that kicks you out of whatever you’re working on when you hit the save button. This is annoying enough in and of itself, necessitating thumbing back into whatever you were working on each time you save, but the 2.2 release has added another helpful save feature that occasionally deletes whatever you worked on between your last two saves.

So if you tend to save every few sentences it’s not a huge issue. But it can really suck when you forget about the bug after writing a long post and lose everything you’ve been thumbing out for the past hour.

There’s a simple workaround for the problem. Just Select All and Copy whatever you’re working on before saving and then go back into the article and make sure that everything saved properly. If it didn’t then you just have to Paste, save, and repeat until the app decides to cooperate.

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The techblogging world has been on fire this past week because of a decision handed down from on high at Apple banning all apps with sexual content. When I first heard the story I figured that meant a ban on most of the lame bikini and nipple pasty apps out there clogging the app store, and good riddance.

Except now a new story over at Tech Crunch claims that the ban is far larger than originally thought. Click through to the Tech Crunch article for a full list of content being deleted, but it looks as though anything remotely sexy is being pulled. Sexy includes anything that shows skin, skating pants, and a host of other ridiculous restrictions.

Keep in mind that this is an unconfirmed report base on a blog post from one of the allegedly affected app developers. There’s been no official word from Apple about the great softcore app store purge yet. But this is also Apple, so it’s entirely likely that there will never be any official word. Steve Jobs seems to have taken all of his public relations cues from a dog-eared old copy of Orwell’s 1984, and mysteriously pulling apps that offend the great and powerful Jobs without any acknowledgment is right up Apple’s alley.

If this is the case then a few things come to mind:

1. This is a terrible message for current and potential app developers. Sure Apple is going after content that’s an acceptable target in our puritanically self-righteous culture, but arbitrarily banning and removing once acceptable apps on a whim here means that they could do it again for equally capricious reasons. I don’t think this is going to stop people from developing for the iPhone, there’s too much money to be made from Apple’s mammoth install base for people to abandon it entirely, but I also wouldn’t be surprised if this had a chilling effect on some developers
2. This shows just how far Apple has gone on the sliding scale from open to insular. This is the company that made its initial fortune with the Apple II hardware thanks to a third party spreadsheet program they didn’t even know existed and only discovered after doing a bit of market research to see why their hardware was selling so far above initial expectations. Open development would probably be a boon for Apple at this point, but I doubt it’ll happen as long as the cult of Jobs reigns supreme.
3. Finally, does anyone else appreciate the irony of Apple closing off access to racy content on an Internet enabled device? Anyone who has access to Safari has access to the biggest and most hardcore porn app ever invented: the Internet. So by their standards Apple should probably remotely disable Safari on everyone’s phone until they can issue a content filter patch to save everyone from themselves.

If I were a particularly wily advertising executive at one of Apple’s handheld competitors then I’d be putting together a diabolical parody of their infamous 1984 Superbowl ad right now. The tagline writes itself in light of recent events: “Apple, see how we’re making 2010 exactly like 1984.”

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The reaction to Steve Jobs’ iPad announcement in the social circles I run in was an overwhelming “Meh.”  Even I found the burgeoning fanboy credit that Apple had earned with the iPhone quickly burning away as I wondered what the hell they thought they were doing rolling out this product that’s really nothing more than an oversized iPod Touch or iPhone as though it was the second coming of the FSM himself.

But the more that I thought about it, the more I realized that the months of leaking information to a starving media and the flashy unveiling yesterday are exactly why the iPad is probably going to succeed despite the fact that it brings absolutely nothing new to the mobile computing market.

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It looks like Apple might be starting off the new year with some welcome changes for iPhone app developers. The Next Web is reporting that the turnaround on app approvals has mysteriously gone from a couple of weeks to a couple of hours in some cases. None of this has been confirmed by Apple, of course, but that’s hardly surprising considering how tight lipped Apple is about its internal workings.

If this is the case then it will be a welcome change. I can think of a few cases where firmware updates or API changes broke apps that I’d come to rely on only to discover that working updates had been submitted to the app store but were stuck in the approval pipeline.

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I use my iPhone so much that it’s almost become a complete computer replacement except for the rare occasions when I need to use Photoshop.  What can I say?  I’m a huge gadget geek and I’ve wanted a pocket computer with Internet access ever since I first saw the PADDs on display in Star Trek: The Next Generation growing up.  Now that I have the early 21st century equivalent of the PADD I find that it’s already replaced quite a few everyday items that I used to carry on me at all times, including:

1. Old School PDAs

I started carrying a PDA (that’s short for Personal Digital Assistant for those out there too young to remember late ’90s buzzwords) starting my freshman year of college with an Ipaq from Compaq. It was a simpler time before HP assimilated Compaq and when everyone still capitalized the letter i if it came at the front of a proper noun.

Early PDAs were nothing more than expensive pocket organizers.  They quickly grew more sophisticated, however, and soon rivaled the computing power of desktops that had rolled off the line just a few years before. The only drawback to the PDA was a lack of constant Internet access in a world that was increasingly relying on the ‘net for the most basic day to day activities.

The iPhone is hardly the first phone to combine constant Internet access with the mobile computing power of a PDA.  Smartphones have been browsing the web at a snail’s pace since the late ’90s. But the iPhone is one of the first smartphones to enter the market with an artificially low price combined with a level of hype that has the general public clamoring to own it. While the iPhone doesn’t have all the functionality of an old school PDA right out of the box, a quick look through the app store and about $30 will get you everything you need at a fraction of what any PDA ever sold for.

The PDA is dead. Long live the PDA smartphone.

Dell Axim photo by Jon_Aquino via Flickr Creative Commons.

2. Watches

I stopped wearing a watch years ago. They might still be useful as a fashion accessory, but I can just reach into my pocket and my phone will gladly tell me what time it is anywhere in the world. Throw in a stopwatch and a countdown timer and you’ve got a handy replacement for the most impressive digital watch.

Image by alexkerhead via Flickr Creative Commons.

3. Alarm Clock

Did I mention that the clock also comes in with a built in alarm? I never listen to the radio on my old alarm clock, so it’s been sitting unplugged and gathering dust while the iPhone pulls duty as a convenient alarm clock replacement that travels with me.

Image by respres via Flickr Creative Commons.

4. Notepad

I do a lot of writing. I blog, I write stories, and I was writing 5-10 page paper equivalents every week while in grad school. One thing that I’ve learned the hard way over the years is that if you don’t jot down an idea when it strikes then you run the risk of losing it forever. So with that in mind I always carried a small notebook or my PDA so I could keep track of ideas as they occurred to me.

Now I don’t have to worry about keeping a pad of paper or a (relatively) bulky PDA with me at all times for note taking. I can draft blog entries directly in Wordpress. I can jot down ideas for stories or write out full drafts with Documents to Go and have them already formatted and ready to go in Word when I get home that night.

Image by net_efekt via Flickr Creative Commons.

5. iPod

I worried that I would be making a major downgrade in capacity when I bought the 8 gig iPhone 3G. Sure that’s the same amount of space that seemed expansive on an old Toshiba laptop just ten years ago, but it’s also roughly one third the space I’ve filled on my 30 gig iPod classic.

Ultimately it turned out tha I didn’t listen to nearly as much music as I thought I did. I’ve always been more of a podcast listener, all that legally free content appeals to me, and once I stopped hoarding old episodes and syncing them to the phone “just in case” I wanted to listen to them someday I discovered that 8 gigs of space was more than enough.

So now the iPhone is in my pocket where the iPod used to reside while the iPod gathers dust in a drawer at home.

Image by dyobmit via Flickr Creative Commons.

6. Camera

I’m sure this one is going to raise a few eyebrows. The iphone camera isnt much stacked up against other digital cameras on the market. The 3G camera isn’t even that great compared to cameras on other cell phones. But the iPhone camera does have the huge advantage of being on me at all times allowing me to snap pictures anywhere.

I also think back to the first few digital cameras that I owned that cos upwards of $400 each back in the mid 90s and the early 00s and then look at the iPhone camera that has about the same specs with better picture quality. It’s all a matter of perspective with some technologies.

Image by fotographix.ca via Flickr Creative Commons.

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This is the time of year when people arbitrarily decide that they’re going to make a change in their life for the better in the form of a New Years Resolution. The annoying longer-than-usual lines for weights and cardio machines at my local gym is one if the more obvious symptoms of this New Years fever. The good news for me (and the bad news for all those people huffing and puffing their way onto the treadmill for the first time in years) is that most people give up on theylir Resolutions pretty quickly, usually due to a lack of time or inclination and often due to a combination of both. People bite off more than they can chew and try to make too much of a change too fast.

Which is why I plan to keep my New Years Resolution short and simple: 2010 is going to be the year of the iPhone for me. Anything that I schedule on my calendar will be attended. Any task that I add to my list will be completed. No slacking, no procrastinating, and no excuses. So it’s time to get started and see how long I can keep up without going insane.

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App: Twittelator Pro

Type: Social Networking

Developer: STONE Design

Price: $4.99

Grade: 10/10

I touched briefly on the Twitter functionality in my IM+ app review last week.  A hybrid app like IM+ might be serviceable for someone who only tracks a few of their friends or uses Twitter mainly for messaging, but anyone who updates their Twitter account regularly and follows more than a handful of people is going to want a more robust dedicated application.

I used Twitterfon until the author decided to ad-support that obscured most of the screen.  And while Twitterfon also provided nice basic functionality, I wanted something that was more robust in the features it offered.  A good choice, too, as it appears that Twitterfon has since been removed from the app store and hasn’t been updated since the 2.0 update.

Twittelator Pro has been a robust and inexpensive solution for all of my Tweeting needs.  Twittelator offers the same basic necessities as most Twitter applications out there: friend updates, @ posts, and private messaging.  But what separated it from the competition at the time for me was the added ability to handle multiple accounts from one application, the ability to view trending topics from within the app, and a search function.

I mostly use Twittelator for the basic functions with the occasional glance at trending topics, but STONE is constantly adding new features and tweaks for users who like their apps to come with as many bells and whistles as possible.  Since I bought the app they’ve added the ability to create custom themes, shoot and link to video created on the 3GS, and even geocoding if you want everyone to know where you are while you’re tweeting.  The current theme is just fine by me, I’m saddled with an old 3G, and geocoding makes my inner privacy advocate want to run screaming for the hills, but it’s nice to know that STONE is listening to what their customers want and responding with quick updates.

Just talk to someone who bought the old TwitterFon pro app to see the dangers of spending cash on a developer who abandons their software.  There’s definitely something to be said for developers with good customer service, and STONE deserves a kudos on that count.

Twittelator has also been blessedly bug free for the several months I’ve used it.  Other Twitter applications tended to crash from time to time, but so far the only issue I’ve had with Twittelator is that it has an annoying tendency to hang for a few seconds when it’s pulling updates from Twitter.  I haven’t had a chance to see Twittelator in action on a 3GS, but I suspect that the hanging is more a problem with the processing power available on my old 3G than anything else.  Either way, it just means a bit of extra waiting from time to time which is hardly the end of the world.

Twittelator is a must-have app if you’re a Twitter power user or you use multiple Twitter accounts.  I’ve come to rely on it to the point that using Twitter on the computer just doesn’t feel right since I don’t have the range of features that are available in Twittelator.  Twittelator might be a bit more costly than other Twitter apps on the iPhone, but those extra few dollars will be well spent.

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Wordpress 2.1 for the iPhone is out and it comes with an undocumented but potentially quite annoying bug.

Two days ago I noticed that there was an update for Wordpress on the app store and downloaded it.  As it was loading I was thinking about how wonderful the 2.0 update had been in terms of adding stability and making the app crash-free.  A nagging voice in the back of my head was reminding me of the Blizzard Authenticator update issues and wondering why we should upgrade to a new version if nothing was broken in the current version.  The API changes that they made with 2.1 might be nice for some people, but it certainly wasn’t a pressing issue for me.

I downloaded it anyways, still riding high on a wave of good feelings from the 2.0 update and forgetting all of the issues that plagued earlier versions of the app.

Yesterday I fired it up to post a Local Draft of an old article that I’d thumbed in.  Imagine my annoyance when I set the status to Published, hit the Save button, and watched my wonderful post disappear into the series of tubes never to be seen again.  I checked in all the various Wordpress folders on my iPhone.  I logged onto the site itself to make sure that it hadn’t posted anyways and just wasn’t showing up in the iPhone interface.  Ten minutes of searching later it became clear that the post was gone forever.

This was more than annoying, so I set about testing it to see if I could duplicate the issue.  I started by making a completely new test post that had only seen the current 2.1 version of the iPhone Wordpress app.  The test post went through and posted to the site just fine.  I then went back to an older draft that I’d written in version 2.0, copied and pasted the text just to be sure I wouldn’t lose it, and tried posting it to the site.  It promptly suffered from a Sudden Massive Existence Failure and disappeared.  I then created a new post, copied and pasted the text from the post that had just disappeared, saved it as a published document, and it promptly appeared on the website.

So it appears that Wordpress 2.1 for the iPhone comes with an undocumented feature where it eats Local Drafts of posts that were created before upgrading in version 2.0 of the app.  A workaround exists in that you can simply copy the text of the old draft created with version 2.0, copy it into a new post created with version 2.1, and then post from there.

So use the workaround, downgrade to 2.0 if you have the ability to do so, or simply sit back and wait for the next update as the changes from 2.0 to 2.1 are mostly cosmetic anyways.

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