Apple Rejects Snowtape for iPhone, But Doesn’t Provide Any Specific Reason

Alright folks, this is weird. Vemedio, the developers of Snowtape for Mac, have been working for the past few months on an iPhone version of their application, which I’ve got the pleasure to beta test. The application is stunning and impressive both in looks and functionalaties, but that’s not the point.

From what we can read on a post on Vemedio’s official blog, Apple has rejected Snowtape for iPhone due to its built in feature of recording internet radio and storing the files on the iPhone.

From the post:

“I got a call from Steve Rea of iPhone Developer Relations telling me that they can not approve Snowtape for iPhone. Effectively he said that Apple can not publish an app that records audio from an internet stream and store it permanently on the iPhone and of cause he explictly said that we can not have a function in our app for re-distribution of these recordings. What he meant is that Apple can not allow you folks to record internet radio and store it as MP3 on your local storage. Of course I tried to asked him about the paragraph in the iPhone Developer SDK agreement, we are violating. His sole words were, that there are lots of things missing in the SDK agreement and that they can not foresee any circumstance that leads to a denial of an app. That‘s right! We did not violate any paragraph of the SDK, yet they forbid us distributing our app.”

Vemedio didn’t violate any paragraph, but the app has been rejected because there are “a lot of things missing from the SDK” and they just can’t approve it. Too bad for Steve Rea that Martin Hering (the developer) went looking for other internet radio apps in the App Store and found at least 3 apps that have the same feature, but they’re online and available.

Unbelievable? A huge fail, I say. Come on Apple, go approve Snowtape - the app is great.

Snippets Winners Announced

Thanks everyone who entered the Snippets giveaway. Also, we’d like to thank Lucky Ants for the licenses they gave to MacStories.

Here are the winners:

notyoubutme

stream

Andre Kradolfer

You’ll receive the licenses in your inbox in a matter of a few hours. Stay tuned for other giveaways coming this week.

In the meantime, you can follow the official MacStories Twitter account as @macstoriesnet. And also, be sure to check out our teaser page for the MacStories:Next project. Something magical is coming soon.

On Symlinks

Shawn Blanc has published two interesting posts (here and here) about the process of creating symbolic links on Mac OS X, following up to Gruber’s post from last week where he wrote about his configuration of Yojimbo’s library synced and backed up with Dropbox.

I’d like to cover two neat ways of playing around with Symlinks (for a basic knowledge about the subject you can head over the Wikipedia page) which involve the terminal, and I’ve found them very useful so far.

Read more

Taptaptap Is Giving Away 14 Limited Edition iPads

The launch of the new Digg app for iPhone has been a huge event so far, but Taptaptap plans to make it even bigger. Turns out that the guys have been working really hard together with Digg to developed the mobile application, and they want to celebrate the launch by giving away a limited edition Colorware iPad every day for 2 weeks. This is the official giveaway page.

Whether this might end up in a Twitter spam galore, no doubt Casasanta and company know how to get the word out for their products.

Today 2.2 Adds Exchange Support

Today, the application from SecondGear Software we reviewed here, has been updated to 2.2 version, which brings Microsoft Exchange support and various UI improvements. If you missed our review, here’s an excerpt:

“It basically displays in an elegant and uncluttered window all the events and tasks you have in iCal. The cool thing is, iCal doesn’t have to be running for Today to work.It can run both in dock and the menubar only, you can assign a shortcut to invoke it, you can adjust the window’s opacity. It’s all there, in that tiny yet powerful window.”

You can download Today here. If you’re an heavy iCal user, you might want to check it out.