Jeff Mesnil

TangTouch and TangTouch Lite are displayed in the grey area at the top of the iPhone shell, below the last two 0 of 10,000+

[via Daniel Jalkut]

For the posterity, the paper prototype for TangTouch’s main view:

and the 1.0 release available from the App Store:

The Preferences paper prototype:

and the 1.0 version:

TangTouch is now available on the App Store.
It is a Tangram puzzle game for the iPhone or the iPod Touch.

I wrote this game as a way to learn more about Objective-C and Mac/iPhone development. The bulk of the application was written months ago but I waited until I had an iPhone 3G to finish it and test it in situ.

It’s a very simple game but I find it quite fun to play (being the author, it’s possible I’m biased…)

I released 2 versions:

• a commercial version with more than 200 puzzles
• a free version with 32 puzzles

This way you can download the free version with no strings attached. And if you like it, you can buy the commercial version.

Enjoy!

[Update: thumbs up to Apple for listening and dropping the NDA]

Learning that Apple extends NDA to rejection letters on the same day that the first phone with Google Android is launched sends a bad message to developers hesitating between the two platforms.

PC Vs Mac circa 1990, all over again? We know how it ended for Apple.

When I think about it, there is more lessons to learn from the Macintosh than the iPod to know what lies ahead of the iPhone. Apple needs developers to make a long term success of the iPhone. They provide a good SDK to create applications and the platform is really good. However, it they continue to prevent open communication (through the SDK NDA) and reject applications without a well-defined policy, they will scare a lot of developers from building on this platform and send them into Android’s arms.

If Apple wants to be consistent about the App Store acceptance policy, it must reject every application.

Given that the reason MailWrangler was rejected is that

[The] application duplicates the functionality of the built-in iPhone application Mail without providing sufficient differentiation or added functionality, which will lead to user confusion…

and knowing that the Zawinski’s law states that

Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.

The inevitable conclusion is that every application will end up “duplicating the functionality of the built-in iPhone application Mail” and thus must be rejected.