The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘because-it-does’

No, it’s not ready yet. But it does at least look like the Mac release of Chrome is getting ready for prime time.

Now, let me be clear: I am not testing out that rather bogus “Developer Release” of Chrome that Google announced to placate users last month, I’m testing out the daily builds of Chromium, which you can find for the Mac here. How different are they? Well, in look in and feel, a lot.

Just look at the difference in the start pages. The Developer Release of Chrome for Mac has a ho-hum old-style history overview page. The new builds of Chromium feature the new, sexy layout. This includes thumbnails of pages that you can move around and pin down. And because the build also includes favicons (which the Developer Release only does in certain places), it also includes the ability to switch to “list view.”

But more importantly, it has the new “Recent activities” and “Tips and Suggestions” windows below the thumbnail section on the launch page. This Tips and Suggestions page is particularly interesting because it does offer up sites that I am finding to be generally interesting based on my browsing.

The “History” area of Chromium (where you see your browsing history) is also looking great thanks to the favicons. And search is working in that section.

When you launch an “Incognito” window, the resulting window looks right as it has a dark blue trim with a spy man logo, indicating that the browsing session is private.

Overall, the browser feels very snappy and most sites seem to load and render just fine. Dragging tabs around works perfectly, as done “ripping” one off into its own window. The one major thing still missing is the lack of a Flash plug-in, which prevents sites like YouTube from working.

So again, if you want to use Chrome for the Mac, forget about that Developer Release and get one of the new builds of Chromium. It’s not perfect yet, but it looks like it’s getting pretty close.

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Apple has a lot of silly reasons for rejecting iPhone apps, but Twitter seems to bring out some of the best of them. A few months ago, Apple rejected the popular iPhone app Tweetie because it featured curse words in the trending topics area — something which obviously the app has no control over. Today, it appears another app has been rejected because of Twitter — only this time it looks like it was rejected because the reviewer who looked over it did so on Friday when Twitter had its scheduled maintenance.

Developer Kuan Yong, received the following letter from Apple letting him know about the rejection of his app, Tweetspotter:

Hello Kuan,

Your application, TweetSpotter, cannot be posted to the App Store at this time because it does not achieve the core functionality described in your marketing materials, or release notes. Applications must adhere to the iPhone Human Interface Guidelines as outlined in iPhone SDK Agreement section 3.3.5.

The user could not sign in with the demo account provided, please see the attached screenshot. In addition, though multiple Twitter accounts were used, the user still could not sign in. This review was conducted on iPhone 3G running iPhone OS 3.0 Beta 5.

In order for your application to be reconsidered for the App Store, please resolve this issue and upload your new binary to iTunes Connect.

Should you require more assistance with resolving this issue, Apple Developer Technical Support is available to provide direct one-on-one support for discrete code-level questions. Please be sure to include any crash logs, screenshots or steps to reproduce this issue in your request.

Young also sent the picture Apple attached, and notes that the timestamp seems to prove that Apple was testing it when Twitter was still Fail Whaling big time after its planned maintenance on Friday.

While on one hand, it’s kind of hard to blame Apple for a Twitter downtime that it’s almost for sure not paying attention to — on the other, it’s kind of lame that these app checkers only apparently check it one time during a day, and if the service it’s tied to is down, they reject it. Yong notes that the app works fine now, so no changes are needed but he’ll still have to resubmit the exact same app and wait another several days before its reviewed again.

The moral of the story I suppose is to coordinate your app approvals with Twitter (or any other service) downtime. Twitter actually was supposed to have more maintance today, but postponed it. We hear they did so because of the NASA mission that was planning to tweet today. And while they didn’t give a reschedule date, we hear it may be Wednesday. So iPhone app developers working on Twitter apps, do not let Apple review your app this Wednesday. Unless you like headaches.

Update: And you’ll note that the Twitter account in the screenshot, Zictest3, is listed under the name, “Apple Test Account.”

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