I’d like to take a moment to talk about Apple’s new policy on paid ‘content’ in iOS applications. If you don’t live in the Apple bubble I live in, let me explain: Esentially, all apps that allow users to comsume pay-for content (magazines, music, books etc.) must allow the user to buy access to that content in-app, using their iTunes account. For this, Apple will take 30% of the retail price of the content. Content can also be sold outside of the app, via whatever means you can think of (books on your web site, an newspaper subscription bought via…

A couple of the guys I worked with via Missing Ink Studios on the first apps to use the Eucalyptus reading engine (including the Hitchhikers’s Guide To The Galaxy and Peter James apps) have started up their own web and mobile development company, “Webmoco”.

I found them great to work with, so if you’re looking for a development team, check out their site, which includes a showcase of the great apps they’ve been involved with in the past.

In which a convenient method of using POSIX regular expressions from Objective-C is presented.

It’s a common complaint that the Mac and iPhone platforms don’t have native support for regular expressions, but that’s not entirely true. If you drop down to the UNIX core, there’s an implementation of the old (and only partially busted) POSIX regular expression interfaces. Here, I’ll show a simple Objective-C wrapper class for them that lets you use them conveniently in Mac or iPhone apps.

Before I start, some preemptive remarks: There’s a lot wrong with POSIX regexes to modern eyes. Firstly, and most glaringly, the work …

Earlier today I received a phone call from an Apple representative. He was very complimentary about Eucalyptus. We talked about the confusion surrounding its App Store rejections, which I am happy to say is now fully resolved. He invited me to re-build and submit a version of Eucalyptus with no filters for immediate approval, and that full version is now available on the iPhone App Store.

Since my previous post, I’ve been so pleased with the overwhelmingly positive articles, blog posts, comments and tweets - and also the emails from those of you who felt so strongly about the issue…

Update

The situation has now been resolved. Read more in my later blog entry.

Original Post

If you’re wondering why Eucalyptus is not yet available, it’s currently in the state of being ‘rejected’ for distribution on the iPhone App Store. This is due to the fact that it’s possible, after explicitly searching for them, to find, download from the Internet, and then read texts that Apple deems ‘objectionable’. The example they have given me is a Victorian text-only translation of the Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana. For the full background, a log of my communications with Apple is below.