wayner.org

After news of Apple's decision to purge their App Store of exciting content, I decided it was time to fill a void for all of the iPhone owners out there who want to look at beautiful women. (For more, see here and here. )

Click Here for the App!

The irony is that this is a web-based iPhone application built using jQTouch. You can add it to your pages of app icons by just hitting the plus sign at the bottom of the screen. There's no need to get Apple's permission or to even let Apple know that you're looking at hot women. (For more information, begin with O'Reilly Book's Building iPhone Apps with HTML, CSS and Javascript.


Poor Apple. I don't blame them for wanting the App Store to be more than a mechanism for selling saucy photographs. But when you make yourself the Supreme High PooBah of the iPhone realm, well, you get the good and bad jobs that come with absolute power. I've always thought that the founding fathers of America passed the bill of rights because they didn't want to waste their time trying to pick sides in censorship battles. Perhaps if Apple didn't discourage serious developers, they might have a signal-to-noise ratio in the store.


My book Free for All is also available as a webkit version and so is a copy of Cory Doctorow's Makers.


I wonder how publishers are going to react to all of this censorship. Everyone wants to be part of the iPad platform, but how do they know if their books won't be pulled in some late night fit? Book sellers should think very carefully about getting into any partnerships with Apple.

After much consideration I am opting out of the Google Book Settlement. While I still hope that Google's entry into selling content will make it more aware of the needs of content creators everywhere, I think the current structure is short-sighted and destructive. The information ecology will be hurt more than it will be helped.

For the last fifteen years the world gorged on the free information flowing on the Internet. Free news, free comics, free stock quotes, free dating services, free medical advice, free recipes, and free history are just the beginning of a seemingly endless list of free things. Along the way, a fair number of philosophers and armchair economists tried to explain just how wonderful free things happen to be. I was one of them when I wrote Free for All, a book trying to understand free software.

Cory Doctorow released his new book Makers under a Creative Commons license and so I decided to use it as a further experiment with my iPhone software for books. This is a very simple tool that builds upon Vladimir Olexa's CiUI framework by adding some simple paging features. All it takes is a tap to the bottom or top of the screen to advance one page or go back.




Click Here to Read It




Some features:

• This web based version doesn't require Apple to sign off of the book, something that's a big pain. ( See here. )
• Paging takes just a tap of the finger. Tap on the bottom to scroll down. Tap on the top to scroll up.
• I can update this quickly with bug fixes. Write me if you have thoughts or suggestions. (p3 at-sign wayner dot org)
• You can install this as an icon on the main panel of your iPhone by just clicking the plus key at the bottom. There's a custom icon and a nice splash page with a classic image from James Wright of Derby.

Instructions for installing are below the break. Click through to read them.

The kind folks at Geekbrief.tv found the worst seat in the new stadium built for the Dallas Cowboys. It's not for someone who sees the glass 80% empty, it's for the optimist who doesn't want to be bothered by all of that dithering around the 50 yard line. When someone is ready to score, then they'll pay attention.

There's some new startup called PollyTrade that wants to make it possible to trade stock with Twitter. And why not? A ticker is only a few characters. That leaves more than 100 characters to specify the number of shares. Whoo hoo.

According to this story and Slashdot discussion , the UK government carefully checks out each RAF officer who might handle sensitive information. They don't want the wrong type of person who might be subject to blackmail. But then they store taped copies of these interviews on hard disks and then the hard disks disappear. (A smarter thief would just make a copy.) Who has them?

Heartland, a company that suffered a massive data hemorrhage, is now looking to split up their data between 50 or more servers. The data won't be encrypted and they won't use any other translucent techniques, but the damage from a break in to a single machine will be limited to 1/50th of the data. Chris Walters at Consumerist has a long interview with Evan Schuman who lays out the limitations forced by Visa and Mastercard.

You can get a free version here .

It was not easy to get this through the Apple iTunes police. Sheesh.