Weiye Loh's Library tagged App → View Popular, Search in Google

Feb

2012

Roger Pielke Jr.'s Blog: Jobs in the App Economy

Nothing illustrates the job-creating power of innovation better than the App Economy. The incredibly rapid rise of smartphones, tablets, and social media, and the applications—“apps”—that run on them, is perhaps the biggest economic and technological phenomenon today. Almost a million apps have been created for the iPhone, iPad and Android alone, greatly augmenting the usefulness of mobile devices. Want to play games, track your workouts, write music? There are a plethora of apps to choose from, many of them free.

rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/...jobs-in-app-economy.html

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App Economy Jobs

How do we think intelligently about innovation and its consequences when the relevant data doesn't even measure what is going on in the current economy. Are we trying to drive by looking in the rear-view mirror?

FT launches first major HTML5 mobile news app « What We’re Doing

the craze for native apps is a short one and we are already seeing it on the wane. Native apps, which need to be distributed via a proprietary app store controlled by an operator or device manufacturer, also suffer from being restricted to the platform for which they are built, necessitating an almost complete rewrite for each different platform. Maintaining separate, functionally equivalent apps for Android, iOS, Blackberry OS6, Playbook, WebOS AND Windows Phone is an expensive and time consuming business, something that major publishers realise only too well.

assanka.net/...st-major-html5-mobile-news-app

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App Open Source Internet

Native apps have other limitations too. Web technology has matured over 15 years to provide a rich set of tools for making web applications that are open, accessible and linkable. The very ethos of web development is that it is fundamentally an open platform, inviting integration, connecting, linking and sharing of information. Native apps construct a silo around themselves and operate in their own artificially constructed world. Everything in that world may be beautiful and the user experience may be dazzling, but the value is locked into that container.
Native apps will always have a place on mobile devices, particularly for applications such as gaming where the performance demands are high and graphics requirements are intensive. Games often also take advantage of features such as accelerometers which are not (yet) available to access from web applications. For apps that need to take advantage of bleeding edge technology and offer exceptional performance, native code is still a good option. But for news and magazine publishers, the tide is turning.

Oct

2011

Goondu review: travel apps we love | Techgoondu

www.techgoondu.com/...ndu-review-travel-apps-we-love

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Travel App

Sep

2011

Apple bans satirical iPhone game Phone Story from its App Store | Technology | guardian.co.uk

Removal of game that includes references to child labour and factory-worker suicides reignites debate about how Apple treats apps differently to music, books and films

www.guardian.co.uk/...apple-phone-story-rejection

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Apple App Censorship Capitalism

he game was released by Italian developer Molleindustria, whose mission statement is to "reappropriate video games as a popular form of mass communication" and "investigate the persuasive potentials of the medium by subverting mainstream video gaming cliche".
In Phone Story's case, that took the form of four mini-games about the "troubling supply chain" behind smartphones – all smartphones, not specifically iPhones – including coltan extraction in Congo, outsourced labour in China, environmental waste in Pakistan, as well as the mania for gadgets in the West. One of the mini-games sees workers leaping from their factory building: a clear reference to suicides and attempted suicides by workers at Apple's manufacturing partner Foxconn.
Molleindustria said that all its net revenues from sales of the iPhone game would go to charities tackling corporate abuses.
4 more annotation(s)...
- Pedercini goes on to talk about Apple's wider attitude to cultural products. "Of course, Apple has the right; it is the acceptance of Apple view about the cultural status of the 'App'. For them, games and applications are not part of culture like books or music. Try to imagine what kind of reaction iTunes would provoke if they banned all the songs with 'excessive objectionable' content."
- On one level, Apple can't be faulted for its transparency on this score. In September 2010, it published some App Store guidelines, available to all developers (and reprinted in full at the time on several websites). "We view Apps different than books or songs, which we do not curate," explained the document.
- According to Pedercini, Apple's email informing him of Phone Story's removal claimed the game had crossed four specific lines, in the form of specific guidelines for unacceptable apps. Two relating to charities and contributions appear to be wide of the mark, with the guidelines focusing on in-app donations, while Molleindustria was merely saying it would donate its download revenues to charities once it was paid.
  The other two flouted guidelines relate to depictions of "violence or abuse of children", and "excessively objectionable or crude content". The former appears to be crucial to the satirical intent of the game, while the latter is something of a grey area – who is most likely to object to the content here: users or Apple?
- The rejection of Phone Story raises wider questions for app publishers beyond the Games category in 2011. What kind of treatment could a newspaper or magazine expect if it ran a lead feature exploring exactly the topics highlighted in Molleindustria's game, for example?
  It should be noted that thus far, Apple has shown no appetite for censoring editorial-based apps in this way. But the debate around how an app store owner responds when an app criticises and/or satirises its own business practices and those of its partners is not just restricted to Apple: it's one for all the platform owners, device makers and mobile operators launching their own curated stores.
  Apple declined to comment on the story when contacted by The Guardian.

Mar

2011

The App Store Moral Quandary

Apple shouldn't make any moral judgments—or very, very few in very obvious cases, like legit hardcore pornography or clearly illegal stuff—when it comes to apps. As horrible as I think Exodus International may be, I don't like that Apple pulled it out of the App Store, nearly as much as I dislike the fact there still isn't a South Park app for the same reason. It seems like the only fair way to make everybody equally happy (or unhappy) is to not make those kinds of judgments. Or at least not make them after the fact, which feels disingenuous—why approve the "gay cure" app in the first place? (Conversely, it's a fair point that Apple does respond to criticism from time to time—like in this case, or reversing its censorship of an illustration of Ulysses.)

gizmodo.com/#!5784923/the-app-store-moral-quandary

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Apple App Mobile Morality Ethics

Apple doesn't want people to perceive the App Store as a seedy place (which the Android Market kind of seems like sometimes!), or a place where kids can get their hands on stuff they shouldn't. It's family friendly, mostly. (Apps that could lead to bad stuff, like browsers, carry 17+ warnings and can be blocked via parental controls.) And it keeps regulators and Congressmen off their back
Apple occasionally places itself in an awkward position. Like, for instance, when Exodus International, one of those ministries that promotes "gay cures," released an iPhone app. People complained that it was offensive (I don't like it myself), and Apple removed it, saying it violates their "developer guidelines by being offensive to large groups of people." Just last year, Apple repeatedly rejected the app Gay New York: 101 Can't-Miss Places-basically a gay sight-seeing app. The creator found Apple's rejection of the "PG-13" app to be "homophobic and discriminatory to the point of hostile," since, he claims, that "far racier photographic material is routinely available on other apps."
3 more annotation(s)...
- a handful of senators are calling on Apple to pull apps that allow users to self-report DUI (and speeding and other law enforcement) checkpoints, like Trapster and FuzzAlert. Which, on the face of it, sounds almost like a no-brainer-the apps facilitate breaking the law. On the other hand, the data is entirely user reported. Somebody could tweet all of it, theoretically. Should Apple take down apps comprised entirely of user-generated data? Both of those apps are still in the app store.
- Who's to say where it ends? Everybody finds something offensive, and everything offends somebody.
- the App Store is Apple's world. They rule it, and can pull or approve whatever they want. They'll keep selling tons of apps regardless of what they remove or don't remove, or what some people find offensive. There's little consequence for Apple in the end. But as long as Apple makes itself the arbiter of App Store morality, or concerns itself with what one group finds offensive versus another, this stuff will never stop.