Apple Cracking Down On Sites Selling Access To iOS Betas

Last month, Andy Baio wrote a story for Wired detailing the world of selling access to Apple beta software to non-developers. Specifically, Baio’s piece focused on sites that, for a price, allowed regular people to have their UDID (unique device identifier) activated for installation of iOS betas, which Apple makes available for developers only. To install an iOS beta, a developer has to register his/her account with Apple, which costs $99 per year and allows for the configuration of 100 devices in the so-called “Provisioning Portal” through the aforementioned UDID.

While becoming a registered developer costs $99, sites selling UDID activation did so for a low price, usually within the range of $10. Baio wrote:

For a small developer, unauthorized activations are a lucrative business that’s likely worth the risks. UDID Activation publishes their order queue on their official site, which shows more than 2,300 devices activated in the last week alone. At $8.99 for each activation, that’s more than $20,600 in revenue, with $2,277 paid to Apple for the 23 developer accounts. Their homepage claims that more than 19,000 devices were activated so far, and that’s only one of several services. And since device activations only last for a year, each service can reuse their expired slots with no additional cost.

After noticing several of the sites mentioned in Baio’s article had become unavailable in recent weeks (activatemyios.com, iosudidregistrations.com, activatemyudid.com, udidregistration.com, instantudidactivation.com), we reached out to some of them asking whether Apple was behind the takedown of their “services”, which infringed on Apple’s developer agreement. While most of our emails bounced, we heard back from one of the site owners (who asked to remain anonymous), who confirmed his hosting provider took down the site after a complaint for copyright infringement by Apple. Similarly, the CEO of Fused tweeted in a reply to Andy Baio that Apple had been “fairly heavy-handed” with DMCA requests to UDID-selling sites hosted on their network.

In the email, the site owner said that their website made $75,000 since last June, when Apple released the first beta of iOS 6 to developers. “We do not believe our service was infringing and our services did not violate their guidelines for iOS 6”, the site owner commented, adding that they will soon launch another similar site, “with better and more secure data lines to handle Apple”.

The owner of another site replied to our emails with a “no comment”. According to him, “the Wired article has caused all these sites to go down”.

Indeed, it appears Apple has started taking action against these sites recently, and more precisely after Wired ran the story on UDID activation. Last year, Apple reportedly closed developer accounts of people who sold their available UDID slots to other users; this year, it appears Apple has chosen the more direct path of shutting down websites and their services by filing DMCA requests to their hosting providers.

When Wired published its story, Apple added that “unauthorized distribution is prohibited, and may be subject to both civil and criminal liability”. It is unclear whether Apple terminated memberships to the Developer Program this year as well.

Surprisingly, one of the most popular sites selling access to iOS betas, udidactivation.com, is still online. However, their “UDID order queue” – a webpage displaying the amount of total sales – fails to load, and the same page on their “backup site”, udidactivation.us, displays the latest sales as being from June 28.

Apple seems to have taken action against sites selling access to OS X beta downloads, as well. A popular one, iMZDL.com, put a notice on their website saying “we will no longer be putting up downloads on iMZDL.com for Apple Betas”. Their website is still up, and rather than hosting the download links themselves, they have now switched to torrents for sharing links to iOS and OS X betas.

As we previously wrote, access to Apple beta software should be restricted to developers, as they know how to provide meaningful feedback and report bugs to Apple.

Get A Sense Of What A 7.85” iPad mini Would Be Like

Rumors of a smaller iPad were back again this week with a report from Bloomberg and since then the rumor mill has been in full swing. Not much detail was in the rumor, other than it’s a smaller iPad and that it’ll launch later this year. Earlier in the year, the display was rumored to be around 7.85” and A.T. Faust of AppAdvice gave compelling reasons as to why it makes sense. That number seems to have stuck around with this latest round of iPad mini rumors.

“The reason we [won’t] make a 7-inch tablet isn’t because we don’t want to hit [a lower] price point,” Jobs said. “It’s because we think the screen is too small to express the software. As a software driven company, we think about the software strategies first.” - AllThingsD

When I read the rumors this week I sighed, not again. I wasn’t the only one either, an iPad mini seems like a compromise, with little advantage. Plus the old Steve Jobs quote about 7 inch iPads just kept circling around. But others weren’t so closed minded and were considering whether it might actually have a place in Apple’s product line.

The biggest issue I have is with the screen, and whether the screen can still be sufficiently useful at the smaller size. To find out, I decided to do the old hack of making a little paper template of the iPad mini and see how it looked. I decided to stick with the 7.85” diagonal display size suggested and use a bezel only slightly smaller than those on the current iPad. For comparison I also made a paper template for the current iPad and versions of both with the bevel colored in. You can download, print and cut them out for yourself.

Note: make sure when printing that it isn’t being scaled up or down, as that will adjust the size of the “screen”. Check the little measurement guides to ensure it printed out correctly.

That was all good and well, but it didn’t really give me a sense of what the UI might look like on an iPad mini. So I decided to take some screenshots and shrink them down to the appropriate size. But I also made a duplicate copy of the screenshot and using Photoshop, reconfigured the UI to fit on a 7.85” display without adjusting the size of the buttons. To my mind that’s the only way that Apple would do this - Apple does frequently remind iOS designers to keep buttons at a tappable size (mentioned prominently in iOS Human Interface Guide), just shrinking the current iPad display would make buttons more difficult to tap.

Finally I put it all together into a Keynote presentation so that I could view it on my iPad and visibly see and compare how it would look. I’ve uploaded it, so you can do the same yourself. You just need Keynote for iOS and go into presentation mode to look at it yourself. If you want to go the extra step, cut your iPad mini template out and place it on top of your iPad whilst viewing the screenshots.

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Why Apple’s Passbook Doesn’t Do Credit Cards (Yet)→

Why Apple’s Passbook Doesn’t Do Credit Cards (Yet)

Jessica E. Vascellaro of The Wall Street Journal writes:

Apple’s head of iPhone software, Scott Forstall, was interested in the idea, say people familiar with the matter, and engineers on his team began to brainstorm a comprehensive “wallet app.”

They discussed whether Apple should facilitate payments to merchants directly, one of these people said. The idea didn’t go very far, on account of the complexity, including the possibility that the company would need to become a bank.

[…]

Apple’s Mr. Schiller was worried that if Apple facilitated credit-card payments directly consumers might blame Apple for a bad experience with a merchant.

The executives ultimately opted for the more scaled-down version of Passbook, which engineers still referred to as the “wallet app.”

However, what Passbook ended up doing is far more interesting than simply tying in your credit cards. Passbook integrates store cards, movie tickets, flight tickets, concert tickets, and more into a single application. Rather than strictly being a digital wallet solely for bank cards, Apple took the idea of managing paper and plastic (tickets and extraneous store cards that add sometimes senseless bulk to our wallets) and utilized the screen to display the required barcode — not necessarily revolutionary, but it’s simple and effective. Utilizing the iPhone, Passbook can even display location aware notifications on the lock screen, “handing” you your ticket when you reach the airport for example. If the next iPhone does enable some sort of NFC payment system, then that’s great. But from what we already know, Passbook seems like a solid step in the right direction.

Honestly, you only have to look so far as the Samsung Galaxy Nexus and Verizon to understand why Apple executives weren’t so keen on the idea of introducing their own “wallet.” Mobile payments may be a “gold mine,” but it’s a gold mine that’s in a state of flux. When the Galaxy Nexus launched on Verizon, the carrier disallowed the ability to run Google Wallet, Google’s mobile payment app that works with NFC. Instead, Verizon wanted to focus on Isis, a separate mobile wallet being developed in tandem with AT&T and T-Mobile.

Secondly, companies like Square and PayPal are bringing the point of sale straight to mobile devices through innovative combinations of hardware and software. While Square offers features that allows customers to simply have merchants add a bill to their tab, their hardware dongle for iPhones, iPads, and Android devices depends on credit and debit cards for the payment of goods. While it’s early in the game, Square has certainly disrupted the idea of payment processing, allowing virtually anyone to become a seller and distributer of goods practically anywhere Square is supported. Where NFC focuses on modernizing traditional payment systems, companies like Square are focused on turning that idea on its head.

When (not if) Apple does decide to further integrate Passbook with our wallets, they’ll want to be sure that both sides of the spectrum (how to pay and how payments are accepted) are resolved. While companies like Google and Microsoft are testing the waters, Apple’s a company known for making the right moves when it counts.

We can agree that while everyone (okay — just the people who read tech blogs a lot) want the future now, Apple is justifiably err’ing on the side of caution. They clearly can’t ignore mobile payments, but what they can do is build a platform that allows them to utilize the stuff that’s… well, not in flux. It’s not like what we’re using right now is going away anytime soon. And it looks like Apple certainly have a good solution, at least in the meantime, towards managing all of the annoying stuff that also goes in your wallet — the stuff that often seems to be ignored in the course of discussing wallets vs. mobile payments. So while we clamor for phones to become an instant portal into our bank accounts and account balances, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. It looks like mobile payments have a long way to go before people not only get comfortable with the idea, but companies finally agree how to do things.

 

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Scanner Pro Gets iCloud Support For Scans→

Scanner Pro Gets iCloud Support For Scans

Scanner Pro by Readdle is a powerful application to use your device’s camera to scan receipts or just about any document on the go. When version 4.0 was released, I was positively impressed by the iPad version, which sported an elegant interface and a terrific set of functionalities to turn photos into documents while adjusting borders and colors through multitouch. The app also came with Evernote and Dropbox integration, making it easier to, say, automatically upload scanned items into the same Dropbox folder also used by Readdle’s PDF Expert.

Last night, Readdle released a major 4.1 update to the app that brings the new UI design to the iPhone version, and adds iCloud sync for scans. Readdle writes:

Having introduced Scanner Pro 4 two months ago, we released an iPad version of Scanner Pro (making it universal) with a revamped interface and applied a bunch of new things we’ve learned from Scanner Pro users during the last 3 years. The latest version of Scanner Pro (4.1), brings a completely new interface to the iPhone, focusing on the most important things to make the scanning process easier and more intuitive. With Scanner Pro 4.1 users will enjoy the new design and experience, which are consistent on both iPhone and iPad.

In my tests, I installed Scanner Pro on my iPhone, and scanned a receipt from the Apple Store. After some basic cropping, I went back to the app’s main screen, and noticed an iCloud indicator that made it clear the app was uploading that scan to the cloud. I then updated the iPad app, and, after confirming I wanted to use iCloud, seconds later the scan was there. While it was downloading the item, the thumbnail preview was slightly dimmed and the iCloud indicator progressively filling in blue. This is a good iCloud workflow and seamless presentation to the user.

Scanner Pro was already a solid app, and this latest update adds the convenience of using the iPhone’s camera – particularly with the 4S, you’ll undoubtedly be producing better results than the images returned by the iPad’s camera. All of the features I mentioned in my review of version 4.0 are still there; as a bonus tip, iCloud integration means you’ll find PDF documents on your Mac as well by visiting the Mobile Documents folder inside Library (and perhaps you could set up a Hazel rule to automatically rename those scans or mirror them to Dropbox).

Scanner Pro is $6.99 on the App Store.

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Launch Center Pro and OmniFocus→

 Launch Center Pro and OmniFocus

Michael Schechter has created a series of Launch Center Pro templates to speed up the creation process of repetitive tasks in OmniFocus for iPhone, inspired by David Sparks’ snippets for TextExpander and OmniFocus for Mac. With actions to easily attach the contents of the clipboard to a new task or setting up a reminder to follow up on something with a colleague, Michael’s snippets can be huge timesavers if you’ve been looking for a way to automate certain aspects of OmniFocus on the iPhone.

All I’ve done here is create a new group in Launch Center Pro called OF Actions. This allows me to have 11 rapid-fire actions for my most commonly created tasks. Rather than 11 unique actions, I’ve actually created duplicates for most that include whatever I have on the clipboard. This way I have a version that duplicates the Quick Entry field and another that emulates some aspects of the Clipper.

Based on OmniFocus’ new URL scheme and Launch Center Pro’s support for prompts (more details in our review of the app), these snippets won’t offer the same degree of customization found in desktop solutions like the aforementioned TextExpander or Keyboard Maestro, but they surely are the best way to automate OmniFocus on the iPhone for now. Because of the nature of iOS, you won’t be able to set up scripts that, for instance, let OmniFocus communicate with other apps automatically, but at least you’ll be saving some typing and navigation inside the app.

Inspired by Michael’s work, I have set up actions to access my most used perspectives and a new one called “Review Latest” that makes up for the lack of an Inbox perspective on iOS (as it’s project based rather than context based) and displays the latest tasks I may have added without a context or due date using Captio. Furthermore, I have assigned a scheduled reminder to the action, so that every day after dinner I’ll be reminded by Launch Center Pro to process my newest tasks created throughout the day.

The Omni Group’s Ken Case also chimed in on Twitter explaining how OmniFocus URLs work, and Justin Lancy collected the tweets in a Storify bundle. Nick Winja took a look at how it’s possible to access contexts via URL, as well.

You can see the full text for Michael’s Launch Center Pro snippets here.

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Apple Removes Negative Reviews From Apps Affected By DRM Bug [Updated]

Earlier this week, an error in Apple’s DRM code generation for App Store apps caused a number of app updates to crash on launch. The issue, initially reported by Instapaper developer Marco Arment, began spreading to more than 100 iOS and Mac app updates including GoodReader, Angry Birds HD Free, and The Early Edition. As the bug was causing updated apps to crash immediately after launch without even displaying an error message, several users became upset with the developers of the apps – as they didn’t know the issue was on Apple’s servers – and began leaving negative reviews on the App Store. Developers, on the other hand, had to deal with a issue that they couldn’t fix, while explaining to customers how they should back up their data and wait for a solution.

Last night, Apple officially acknowledged the issue and explained it was associated with DRM code generation on the App Store. Apple said they had fixed the issue, and Macworld reported that, according to their sources, Apple would also remove all negative reviews that had been left during the hours the bug was spreading on various international App Stores.

As of this morning, it appears Apple has indeed removed negative reviews from apps affected by the bug. Apps like Instapaper, GoodReader, and The Early Edition are showing no reviews for the latest versions available, which are the ones that were crashing earlier in the week. We haven’t checked on every single app that was affected, but it is safe to assume at this point Apple will remove all reviews (not just negative ones) from any app that received a corrupted update.

Apple hasn’t issued a public apology to developers, but the removal of reviews will definitely help in leaving this issue behind without having to deal with the aftereffects on the App Store as well.

Update: As noted by several readers on Twitter, it appears Apple didn’t completely wipe the old reviews left during the DRM outage – it re-issued app updates for the same version of the app, and moved the “Current Version” reviews to “All Versions”.

In spite of the version being the same – for Instapaper, the affected version was 4.2.3 – the old reviews are not showing up in the Current Version section of the App Store. This helps hiding possible negative reviews from the section that it loaded by default in iTunes.

By re-issuing the old version as an update again, Apple is making sure customers can re-install the fixed version of an app without having to delete it first, as noted by Marco Arment. It is unclear whether the old reviews will still affect overall ranking of an app.

Apple Rectifies Corrupted App Store Downloads, Advises Users to Delete and Reinstall Broken Apps

Late Tuesday evening, Instapaper developer Marco Arment was met with a nasty surprise when some users updating to Instapaper 4.2.3 found that their updated app instantly crashed after opening. Upon investigating and hearing similar reports from other developers, Marco found that the App Store itself was corrupting app updates, leaving users with broken apps and developers with one star reviews from confused and upset customers. Writing at Marco.org, Marco addressed the issue to his audience and began gathering a large list of apps that were also affected, calling on Apple to quickly resolve the problem as developers dealt with the consequences.

On Thursday evening, Apple acknowledged the problem to AllThingsD and Macworld, informing the publications that the issue had been resolved.

Lex Friedman from Macworld writes,

Around 6:00 p.m. PT, Apple acknowledged the problem to Macworld, describing it as “a temporary issue that began yesterday with a server that generated DRM code for some apps being downloaded.” Apple added: “The issue has been rectified and we don’t expect it to occur again.”

Customers with affected applications should be able to delete and reinstall a working application through the App Store.

Additionally from Macworld,

Sources told Macworld that Apple will be removing one-star app reviews developers earned unfairly because of the company’s server issue.

As Matthew Panzarino from The Next Web points out, both Apple customers and developers have little to no recourse when problems like this occur. Developers currently have no way of effectively communicating with customers outside of developer blogs.

When the one-star reviews started rolling in, there was very little that developers could do to notify users of their app that it was an issue with Apple’s packaging of their apps, not the apps themselves. The users just saw that the app was crashing on launch and rated it accordingly.

Reinstalling applications also leads to users possibly losing information — Glasshouse Apps’ is still dealing with the aftereffects as the company prepares an app update and advises users on the best course of action that will keep their news feeds and data intact. The developers of GoodReader have also written a step-by-step guide that helps customers back up, reinstall their app, and restore data onto their devices.

While Apple has acknowledged and fixed the issues disrupting application updates on the App Store, they have not yet issued an apology to developers, nor did they want to themselves acknowledge that they’d be removing one-star app reviews apps received because of the error. If Apple should do anything more, they certainly need to reach out and apologize to developers, who’ve unfortunately had to run damage control to prevent one-star reviews and angry customers.

[Sources: Macworld via AllThingsD]

MacStories Interviews: Brett Terpstra

In our ongoing series of interviews with developers and creators in the Apple community, I recently had the chance to talk with Brett Terpstra, developer of Marked, Senior Developer at AOL Tech, TUAW blogger, and “mad scientist” with a knack for finding great solutions through code. When he’s not making awesome things or writing at his personal blog, Brett tweets as @ttscoff.

The interview below was conducted between January 17 and July 4, 2012.

MacStories: Hey Brett! Could you introduce yourself to the readers who haven’t heard about you or haven’t tried any of your apps & scripts before?

Brett Terpstra: Hey Federico,

I’m the original author (now working with Elastic Threads) of a Notational Velocity fork called nvALT, which seems to be what I’m best known for. I also sell an app in the Mac App store called Marked; a MultiMarkdown previewer that watches your text file for changes and updates the preview every time you save it. I’m a bit of a plain text nerd, and a lot of my work focuses on working with and manipulating plain text, as well as keeping data portable and application agnostic. Most of what I do is pure experimentation, coding for the joy of problem solving. Mad science, if you will. Read more