samsoff.es

The latest X3watch iPhone app update got rejected. Here some of the highlights from the rejection email:

We have reviewed your application and have found that it is accessing and displaying the contents of the iPhone OS filesystem outside of your designated container area. The iPhone Developer Program License Agreement provides specific guidelines about this behavior in section 3.2(e).

There is no public method for obtaining the device's restriction settings. You will need to revise your application to read only within your directory container and resubmit your binary to iTunes Connect in order for your application to be reconsidered for the App Store.

They think that I'm using some private API and going outside of the application sandbox to see if Safari is enabled. This made me laugh. I'm just being really clever. Here's the code to see if Safari is enabled:

+ (BOOL)hasSafariEnabled {
    return [[UIApplication sharedApplication] canOpenURL:[NSURL URLWithString:@"http://xxxchurch.com"]];
}

I sent them an email with this code explaining I didn't break any rules. They never replied, but we got an approval email 2 days later. Silly Apple.

Lately I've been trying to teach an awesome friend front-end web development. It's so hard to even know where to begin.

The good ole days

I started writing HTML when I was 10 years old. Back then, it was easy. We were writing our tags in all caps (HOW AWFUL), not closing tags if we didn't feel like it, frames were regarded as professional, and the animated gif was cool (some would say it still is).

I remember when Javascript became popular and JavascriptKit.com was the place to get copy and paste scripts for your site. I can remember when CSS started to become popular and when table layouts finally died out. It was easy to pick stuff. The technologies evolved at the rate that I learned them (which was awesome).

Trying to start from scratch today is pretty difficult. Things are a lot easier than they used to be (especially if you're using frameworks and such), but there is so much knowledge that you need to acquire before you can be a useful web developer.

It's possible

After a few hours typing HTML and CSS, she started to pick it up. I told her to reference W3Schools and the mighty Google. I'm pretty confident that with today's resources and some perseverance, it's possible to get started pretty quickly.

I posted a screencast on Heroku a few months ago. Since then, my company has moved all of their stuff to Heroku. It has been working really great for us.

I've had my blog on GitHub pages for awhile. I recently came across a good article on running Jekyll from the Ruby5 podcast. It was really easy to get setup. So far, I'm a fan of my new setup.

I'm still working on my Rails 3 version of my blog when I have time. Lately, I've been playing a lot of music and occasionally dabbling with Markdownr.com due to a recent spike in traffic (thanks to @defunkt).