E-reading is one of the cornerstones of the iPad, and iBooks handles that pressure with style. This beautifully designed app is a pleasure to use on almost every level, and it quickly earned a starring role in our dock. From the moment iBooks launches, its rich presentation captures you. The lovely wooden bookshelf contains one book, Winnie-the-Pooh , to get you started, so your first stop will likely be iBookstore to snag some paid or free e-books. Tapping the Store button essentially opens up a tunnel into iTunes, which you can only access from your iPad—it’s weird (and a bit lame) that you can’t shop for e-books from iTunes on your Mac. As you start browsing, you’ll find a fairly respectable selection of bestsellers and famous authors, but if your taste is even slightly off the beaten path, it won’t take long for you to find holes you could drive a monster truck through. Still, it’s just as easy to find something you want to read–even if it’s just checking out a free sample version, which duplicates the whole “read a few pages at the bookstore” thing by giving you anywhere from a handful of pages to a chapter or two to help you decide. Unfortunately, my second purchase (Charles Stross’s Saturn’s Children ) was a buggy disaster—the whole book was jammed into 28 dense pages with no spaces. Fortunately, everything else I devoured, even the free version of Art of War , was formatted just fine, so it’s probably an isolated hiccup. (That didn’t stop me from requesting a refund from Apple Support.) On a brighter note, it’s easy as pie to drop EPUB-format e-books into your iPad: just plop the file into the Library area of iTunes, sync, and start reading. (To stock up on EPB books, including loads of freebies, check out our how-to .) Once you tuck into some serious reading, iBooks really flexes its muscles. The page-turning animation is incredibly book-like, and that makes reading e-books feel instantly natural. We also loved how the it rearranges so smoothly between the larger one-page portrait orientation and the smaller two-page landscape spread. If you somehow tire of swiping to turn pages, you can also just tap the left or right side of the screen to page backward or forward. Tapping away from the edges brings up (or removes) the HUD, which grants you access to bookmarks, highlighting (select “bookmark” on the pop-up to highlight text—a little counter intuitive, to put it mildly), search, dictionary lookup, fonts, type size, brightness, the table of contents, and scrollbar for the entire book

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iBooks

With the App Store Review Team’s undisguised animosity towards approving apps that “duplicate” innate functionality of the iPhone’s built-in applications a stark fact of the iPhone development scene, releasing a third-party web browser for the most widely adopted smartphone on the market is a risky proposition… but Opera’s going to try it anyway, having just

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Opera to preview Opera Mini for iPhone at MWC next week

With the App Store Review Team’s undisguised animosity towards approving apps that “duplicate” innate functionality of the iPhone’s built-in applications a stark fact of the iPhone development scene, releasing a third-party web browser for the most widely adopted smartphone on the market is a risky proposition… but Opera’s going to try it anyway, having just

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Opera to preview Opera Mini for iPhone at MWC next week

Apple may have turned around App Store approval times since the first of the year and lightened up on some of the draconian restrictions regarding 3G data access, but there are still a few “no-nos” left for them to rap developers’ knuckles with. The first one comes courtesy of MacNN , who is reporting that Apple has notified App Store developers that they are prohibited from using location-based information for mobile advertising. Cupertino is restricting the use of any GPS data within an app for “beneficial information” reasons only. “If your app uses location-based information primarily to enable mobile advertisers to deliver targeted ads based on a user’s location,” the note to developers reads, “your app will be returned to you by the App Store Review Team for modification before it can be posted to the App Store.” Of course, the note — which is really in the best interests of the app’s user in the first place — has created suspicion that Apple is planning to use its recent acquisition of Quattro Wireless to launch its own mobile advertising network to serve ads through free apps on the iPhone, iPod touch and soon, the iPad. “Looks like Apple is going to keep location-based advertising to themselves,” remarked Twitterrific developer Greg Hockenberry on Twitter in response to the news. Switching gears to a more petty App Store restriction, Apple has requested that the developer of the flash card app Flash of Genius remove a reference to Google’s Android from his app description. “Providing future platform compatibility plans or other general platform references are not relevant in the context of the iPhone App Store,” reads Apple’s e-mail to developer Tim Novikoff. According to the Silicon Alley Insider , Novikoff included a sales pitch in the app’s description that reads “Finalist in Google’s Android Developer’s Challenge.” While we’d agree that it doesn’t make much sense for the developer to boast about his app’s success on another platform — especially when the App Store is currently the top dog in that race — it does strike us as a little too “schoolyard” of Apple to strike the reference in the first place. (Image courtesy of Silicon Alley Insider)

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Apple Says No Location-Based Ads or Android References in App Store

I’m not unfamiliar with video game emulators. I’m not endorsing them, mind you, but I’m not unfamiliar. So my curiosity was piqued when I heard tell of a Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) emulator for the iPhone, one that had managed to gain official sanction and was being sold in the App Store. I didn’t get to it fast enough. Nescaline , as the app was called, not only allowed you to play some built-in homebrew games, which probably would’ve been fine all on its own, but provided a way to download additional ROMs remotely. In effect, you could import any copyright-violating old-school NES ROM that you could find on the web. Such an ability was bound to get the app pulled, and pulled it has been. While it lasted, it sold for $6.99 and boasted many features like “multitouch” control, full-screen mode, tap-to-shoot light gun emulation, save-state writing and retrieval — even support for Game Genie codes. While the feature list may sound fairly impressive, user reviews from people who did manage to get their hands on the game were less than stellar, though not entirely negative. Commenter TokyoDisco at Pocket Gamer had this to say: I spent far too long trying to add my own roms though. I know where to get them and everything, but I’m obviously entering the URL in wrong.

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NES Makes Short-Lived Appearance on the App Store

If there’s one thing you can count on about Apple’s App Store review policy, it’s that the process will be consistently inconsistent. Today, an app launches that was originally rejected for known and acknowledged use of private APIs, despite the fact that developers haven’t modified the app in any way since its rejection. Knocking Live Video, the app in question, makes use of Apple’s forbidden private APIs to enable live video streaming over Wi-Fi and 3G for the first time on the platform. Apple has made clear its policy on the use of private APIs, most recently via the introduction of an automated layer of the review process for app submissions that automatically checks all code for the presence of unauthorized API usage. Knocking’s usage of live streaming video is very particular, as Ars Technica explains , something which may have had something to do with it being approved while other apps like Qik haven’t been able to break down the streaming wall: Knocking Live Video uses an interesting take on streaming video. Unlike Qik, which is designed to stream video to multiple clients, Knocking streams from one iPhone to another. (…) You simply launch the app and “knock” another iPhone user with Knocking Live Video installed. That user will receive the “knock” via push notification. Once answered, you can then stream live video directly to them. An iPhone 3GS or iPhone 3G is required to transmit video, but other iPhones and iPod touches can receive and view the stream via WiFi. The app was initially rejected about a month ago for unauthorized use of the private APIs, but Knocking development Brian Meehan decided not to just take the refusal lying down. Instead, he went straight to the top, contacting Steve Jobs directly via email. Jobs has been known to actually respond to emails personally on occasion, so it was at least worth a shot. Meehan’s plea was not about self-interest, but instead focused on appealing to Jobs as a lifelong Apple user who wanted to create a better experience for other members of the community. The Monday following Meehan’s email, which was sent on a Saturday night in late November, he was contacted by an unnamed Apple executive who informed him that the app’s rejection had been reversed, and that the decision to allow it into the App Store had come “directly from the top.” It is now available for free in the App Store .

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Rejected App Gets Special Approval From Steve Jobs Himself

I’ve had a rant building up for a few weeks. A rant about developer’s treatment at the hands of the App Store submission procedure. However unlike many rants on the topic, mine is not directed towards Apple. It is directed towards the iPhone developers who complain about the poor, unfair treatment they get, carrying their bleeding hearts in their palms while claiming Apple is bludgeoning the life out of them. Two recent news headlines, seemingly separate, are intrinsically tied together and the synergy of them have made my eyes dislocated from the continued rolling they involuntarily perform. The first headline,  Facebook Developer Turns Back on iPhone relates how another high-profile developer has thrown their hands up in disgust over how Apple’s closed system runs against their principles. A direct quote from Joe Hewitt, developer of the popular Facebook application can be found on  TechCrunch , and is most relevant. I will come back to this later: I respect their right to manage their platform however they want, however I am philosophically opposed to the existence of their review process. The second headline is  Apple’s App Store Approval Process Now Includes an Automated Layer . The quick version is that Apple is now using an automated tool to determine if the Apps that developers submit to the App Store are using any Private API calls. These two headlines are actually the same story, a fact that was made quite apparent by a popular direct iPhone-to-iPhone messaging App called Ping!

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Cut the Drama: Private APIs, the App Store & You

TouchArcade reports that the eagerly awaited RPG Ravensword has been rejected by App Store reviewers, along with several other applications written with the Unity engine. The engine includes API calls which, according to one lawsuit , were used by Storm8 to steal phone numbers of people playing the game and upload them wirelessly. Unity acknowledges the potential exposure, and said it was a carryover from the fact that the product was based on the Mono runtime from OS X where those calls are used regularly (and user phone information isn’t part of the system environment). They are releasing version 1.5.1 of their development engine to close the security risk. But from the long string of comments on Unity’s forum , it appears that Apple is rejecting all apps using the earlier Unity engine whether those apps do any networking or not. Meanwhile, developers need to update their development software, regenerate their application, and resubmit their application for approval—at the back of the sometimes lengthy review process. Neither Unity nor any app developers other than Storm8 have been accused of using the API for illicit purposes. Storm8 has acknowledged the acquisition of user phone numbers, which it described as a "bug."

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Ravensword and Other Unity Apps Rejected

Filed under: Humor , Apple Wow. This has been an especially long wait for the Apple Store to return. So here’s TUAW’s top reasons this is taking so long. Reason #5 (via @serpicolugnut at Twitter, updated via TUAW reader Zaph): The App Store reviewers are “reviewing” the new store. The current average wait is 14 days. Reason #4: They might be done with their Time Machine backup by now… Reason #3: Man, WebObjects is outdated technology…

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Top 5 reasons the Apple Store refresh is taking so long

Tap the remaining-characters countdown ticker to toggle between the keyboard and often-used tools.   Features spring out of Tweetie 2′s diminutive, clean interface like items from Felix the Cat’s bag of tricks. No matter how you use Twitter, Tweetie 2 lets you use it better.   Tweetie 2′s basic features never feel bogged down by its deep extras. The tool quickly downloads and uploads messages over Wi-Fi or a phone network, and navigation within the app equally feels snappy. You’ll begin composing messages with a tap or two, even bringing up a directory to add contact names and recent hash tags.   Pictures load previews within messages, but you can expand them with a tap. More advanced tools embed pictures and videos through your choice of host services, shorten URLs, and add a Google geotag. However you use Tweetie 2, your favorite options will always be nearby.   And Tweetie 2 excels at reading messages. You can see previews or full versions of embedded photos within the app. Great search tools show trending topics, specific queries, or even a map of local messages. You can follow web links, including YouTube videos, and return to Tweetie 2 without going to the Home Screen. Or suppose you want to read a link or see a video later, Tweetie 2 interfaces with Instapaper and Read It Later .

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Tweetie 2