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.