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

Guitar Pitch Pipe Lets You Quickly Tune Your Guitar

News from Hypercompact, the software company whose logo has inspired designer Evgeny Skidanov to create one of the most beautiful 3D animations I’ve ever seen. If they had published their app Guitar Pitch Pipe just one week earlier, I definitely would’ve integrated it in my story about the current state of music-making on the iPad — filed in the “small tools” sections. This guitar tuner is a perfect example for a small, reliable companion for guitarists on the road.

The App Store is flooded with guitar tuners. Apps like the UltimateGuitar tuner or Gibson’s effort are very prominent and elaborate apps — why considering this one then? Well, because it has one thing these other apps most of the time do not have: an innovative and simple UI. Guitar tuner apps are generally cluttered with features just a few percent of guitar players need like alternative tunings or the ability to change the tuning frequency; unfortunately, they are placed as prominently in the app as the standard tuning. This makes many tuner apps unnecessarily complex.

Guitar Pitch Pipe is different from that. Using a single main window, it plays back the six notes of the basic, 440Hz EADGBE guitar tuning with two different sounds: pipes (being the more unusual sound, and therefore integrated in the app name) and “classic” strings. The selected one is displayed in a visual interface, including tappable strings or pipes with the note characters on them. The currently playing pipes or strings are indicated by a closed pipe illustration or a cool 3D movement respectively. You can switch between these two layouts using the button in the top right corner.

You can either let Guitar Pitch Pipe play a note twice with a little pause in between for tuning, and then move on to the next one, or manually choose a string using the on/off switch at the bottom. The app then plays it until you move to the next one by tapping the respective string or pipe. The app constantly plays a note, there is no way, you could make it silent. Because of this you are more or less forced to only open it up when you really want to tune a guitar, otherwise it quickly becomes pretty annoying. This ensures a quick and focused use of the tuner, and makes it unobtrusive and functional.

The output sounds are very accurate, fitting to tuning both electric and acoustic guitars, and therefore make the app a very useful tool. The second reason for me using the Guitar Pitch Pipe guitar tuner from now on is its UI. We recently covered WTHR, a Dieter Rams inspired, minimalist weather forecast app for the iPhone. Guitar Pitch Pipe is quite similar to it. The app features no instructions or settings (because it doesn’t need any in its current state), it is colored beige, and uses skeuomorphed, plastic switches. The fretboard with strings and the pipes are crafted with love for detail; they are gloomy and very polished. It also features a cool icon but has a confusing description: “Super Quick”. The user could believe that the app is super quick, but without remembering which kind of app is behind the icon, it is very confusing.

However, while using the app for the first time, I immediately thought “Man, you could do much more with this design”. Retrospectively, this is still totally true: this app has potential to be enhanced with many new features while still maintaining its usability and simplicity. You could just add a second button, let’s say in the top left corner, make it trigger a pop down menu (which obviously needs to correspond with the rest of the app’s design), and let the user switch to alternate tunings like Drop D or C, or maybe even let them change the frequency. You wouldn’t need to change anything in the main screen design, just the sounds and the letters on the pipes or next to the strings to indicate different notes. This would make the app an even more complete and functional guitar tuner, suited for every type of guitarist — traditional (using standard tunings), metal and rock (dropped tunings) and progressive and experimental players (open and alternate).

But don’t get me wrong — Guitar Pitch Pipe already is a very good guitar tuner for the iPhone. Its output quality is outstanding, it’s fast and reliable, perfect for quick access, and does everything you need for tuning your guitar in standard tuning. There is just one thing that really annoyed me in its current version: sometimes, for instance when you use dropped tunings (which I personally use very often), you need some time to get back to standard tuning, especially on the lower E string. When you’re using Guitar Pitch Pipe’s automatic mode for that, the app plays each string just twice and then moves on to the next one, which is way too short in such situations. Users definitely must have the option to adjust how often single notes should be played back in auto mode. Otherwise, I absolutely recommend Guitar Pitch Pipe for any guitarist who is still searching for a good guitar tuner for his iPhone. Get Guitar Pitch Pipe for $0.99 on the App Store.

Some App Updates Resulting In Instant Crashes Due To Presumed Apple CDN Issue

In the last 24 hours or so, a number of apps that have been updated by users have crashed on launch due to a problem presumed to be connected to the App Store’s content distribution network (CDN). A number of popular apps from Instapaper, Readdle Scanner Pro, Angry Birds Space HD Free and CommBank Kaching amongst others have been just some of the affected apps. The issue, not affecting every customer, occurs when a user updates their apps and goes to launch them but instead the app crashes before it can load.

Instapaper was one of the first to be affected by the issue with an update that went live late on July 3rd. Developer Marco Arment was instantly “deluged” by support requests complaining of instant crashes with the latest version. After a bit of digging and looking at his support requests, Marco believes it comes about due to a corrupt version of the updated app being distributed by the App Store CDN in some regions. For Instapaper the issue was resolved (a non-corrupt version propagated to all regions) within two hours but it isn’t known if it was due to Marco’s emails to the App Review team or just an issue resolved with time.

If you’re a developer, and you have a non-critical update pending release, I suggest waiting a few days for this to presumably get sorted out before releasing it. [Marco Arment]

Apple has yet to make any statement on the issue and Marco and the other developers affected by the issue have yet to receive responces from any of the developer relations groups at Apple either. You can view a tentative list of apps affected by the issue over at The Next Web and at Marco’s personal blog which also goes into detail about the issue.

It may be wise to hold off from updating any apps for the time being as well, with the issue affecting people across all regions and all different apps. If you’ve already been affected by the issue, the only real way to fix it is to delete the app and try re-installing the app - but this will only work if the app is no longer corrupted on Apple’s side.

[Sources: Marco.org and The Next Web]

Grab Key Codes Directly From Your Dashboard With “KeyCodes”

Designer Tobas Ahlin (@tobiasahlin), working as a UI designer at Spotify, is known for his simple and useful OS X dashboard widgets for web developers. His widgets Loremify and Minicodes (both available for free) are well-known within the community. Loremify automatically generates “Lorem Ipsum…” placeholder text, with the option to specify the amount of characters and paragraphs — perfect for testing various text layouts on websites. And if you coded large CSS or JavaScript files, you can use Minicodes to “minify” them into smaller file sizes using the YUI compressing algorithm for faster upload and transfer. Both widgets feature minimalist, very polished UIs. And today, they are joined by a third one: KeyCodes.

When you develop a web application, you sometimes want to bind functions to single or multiple keys (for example to quickly toggle actions). For that purpose, you need their so-called key code (a specific number each key has) to make sure you adress the right one. KeyCodes makes it easy to get this code. Just open your dashboard, click on KeyCodes, and press the key whose code you need, and both the key and its key code number are instantly displayed using a neon-styled, stainless steel UI (similar to Loremify’s look; see header image).

Simple, fast, intuitive, and free of charge. Go ahead and download KeyCodes for free from Ahlin’s website.

The Current State Of Music-Making and Discovery On The iPad

I have a confession to make: I’m a nerd. Yes, and I’m proud of it, because I think being a nerd means two things: I’m constantly curious about details, and I don’t hesitate to try out new stuff. To satisfy my curiosity, I’ve always dived into Apple’s ecosystem and the latest hardware related to it. Fortunately, my passion for Apple correlates with my love for discovering new music. I’ve been playing guitar since I was eight years old, and I love electronic music from the bottom of my heart as well. I’ve always found myself interested in both the traditional (perhaps organic) hardware side of music, and the more modern, digital software production process.

When the iPhone came out, many blogging colleagues and people around me predicted that its new software system, combined with the mobility of the device itself, would change the way people produce music and think about audible art as a whole. Three years later Apple unveiled the iPad. iPhone music software was indeed present at the time, but people soon recognized that the device’s screen was too small to create usable professional software for it — playing on-screen keyboards was nearly impossible and attempts to build high-end software synths like ReBirth or drum machines ended up in cluttered, untidy screens.

This problem seemed to get solved with the large screen of the iPad. Professional software retailers like KORG immediately started coding software versions of their most successful hardware. For instance, the iElectribe was one of the first apps available after the device’s launch. Over the years, I constantly tried out music apps for the iPad, tested hardware accessories (made possible with the release of iPhone OS 3), and never stopped investigating advantages, problems, and future possibilities of all those apps. Now, five years after the launch of iOS and the iPhone, I think it’s time to look back at how Apple’s mobile devices, with the focus clearly on the iPad, have changed the world of music and how they’ll continue to affect the future.

To do this, I recently went through my app archive and analyzed which kind of music apps remained installed on my devices, and which ones I liked when I tested them, but didn’t gain a place in my personal workflow. I discovered that I had to clearly divide music apps in several areas when discussing them. I distinguished between eight types of available music apps: promotion, discovery, entry level playing apps, handy/learning tools, sketching apps, recording, and professional software.

Throughout this post, I will cover each of those areas separately and point out their current state by discussing the most elaborate app(s) in their respective areas. I will point out the advantages and problems iOS brings to them, and predict — as far ahead as possible — what the future might hold.

Read more

Ars Technica Investigates The Future Of Thunderbolt Cables→

Ars Technica Investigates The Future Of Thunderbolt Cables

In an investigation for Ars Technica, Chris Foresman explores why Thunderbolt cables, more than a year after Thunderbolt debuted, remain at the expensive $50 and greater price range. Foresman dug into what the current situation was and discovered that apart from Apple, there is currently only one volume supplier of Thunderbolt cables that are likely rebranded by Belkin, Elgato, Kanex and others that offer Thunderbolt cables.

While other vendors are now offering their own Thunderbolt cables, prices have mostly stayed the same—in fact, some have gone up. We found this surprising; typically more vendors offering competing products leads to lower prices. And as the high cable price represents a fairly high barrier to entry for Thunderbolt devices, it relegates the standard to niche, early-adopter territory.

Foresman found that prices won’t really drop until early 2013 when a second generation design by Intersil will enter production. The current “first-gen cables” are based on a Genum transciever from Semtech that is built with silicon germanium which makes it much more expensive to produce.

It’s likely that Intel and Apple chose the Semtech part because it was either an already existing part that fit the requirements for Thunderbolt’s high 10Gbps bi-directional data rate, or Semtech had something similar that was easily adaptable.

The new design from Intersil does things differently by combining the cable’s microcontroller and transciever into a single processing chip and the power management and voltage regulators into another single chip - meaning the number of integrated circuits in the cable will go from 4 to 2. Intersil’s John Mitchell says to Ars that their solution is “half the chips, half the size, uses half the power, and cheaper conductors can be used. By the end of the year, cables will be less expensive.”

The chips are manufactured on a lower cost, 40nm CMOS process, improving yields and lowering costs significantly. The 40nm process also dissipates less heat, reducing the need for bulky heat sinking within the cable plug.

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