Never try to play a fool with Apple on their iPhone App Store

To date, we all know that the iPhone App Store approval process is pretty much of a black box, where apps are accessed by different staff with different yardsticks. We had seen apps being approved for sale which used private APIs (eg. QuadCamera for using the UIGetScreenImage() API), while others got rejected.

But what we learnt today is that if you have breached the trust with Apple like what Allen the Geek did, they call pull ALL your apps from the App Store.

Allen the Geek had a "Hottest Girls" app approved by Apple and put on the app store, which retrieved pictures of sexy girls from his server. He apparently added some almost nude photos onto his server after it was approved, intentionally. Some of Allen's other apps also included a "Hottest Guys" and also a "EliteBrowser" meant for browing naughty sites.


After the whole fiasco, all these apps were pulled from the App Store.


The lesson to learn is, never try to play around/ breach the trust with Apple (or any one else in general) or they'll try to screw you a few times over.

Comparing Google with Microsoft Bing - A Singapore Perspective

Microsoft Bing's search engine is finally launched in Beta. Being a developer in the IT field who uses Google on a day to day basis, I feel intrigued to find out how Bing hold ups in comparison to Google.

Bing's search engine started with a picture of Greece's Santorini, a magnificent and romantic Greek island. Being always quite fascinated with that Greek island, the start page scored a point.



But a search engine is good for its search, not pictures. Well for starters, I started with with a few of my usual searches. Being lazy to type the full URL most of the time, I relied on Google to bring me my usual sites based on the site's acronym. A search for "ADC" for Apple Developer Connection is 2nd placed in Google but is no where to be found on Bing's first 5 pages. I could not be bothered to search further. Well, it could be a case of rivalry between the 2 big technology companies. But hey, a entry of "Analog-Digital-Convertor" on wikipedia which I may be interested in is 3rd on Google but is on page 5 on Bing. On further analysis of Bing's search results page, I found multiple search results from the same domain "adc.com" and "adc.com.sg". This is pretty silly if I want to search other things that do not belong to this domain. If I wanted to search within the domain, I would have used Google's "site:" keyword.



Then I tried the keywords "Food Sg". Google's top 2 searches "SbestFood" and "Hungry Go Where" was nowhere to be found on Bing's first page. I didn't bother to search further. In fact, I was quite surprised to find "Burger King" to be the 2nd entry on Bing. Singapore's reputation as a food paradise is about to become one of fast food culture, going by Bing's search. On further analysis of the search, the results returned had "food" and "sg" in their URLs. This test made be wonder if Bing's search engine only emphasised on the keywords in the URL amongst many others elements like website popularity and meta tags.



Next, i was quite disappointed to find that the "News" is not yet available in Singapore. Whats worse was that I could not even view the news at all of any other country, even in the States. Similarly, Google took some time to add "Singapore" into its list of countries, but even so I was able to view the news of any other country in the meantime. Perhaps Bing will need the extra time to get it right, Google's news engine still sometimes gives me news of "Queenstown" in New Zealand and "Woodlands" in the United States.

Then I tried "News Sg". Other than Microsoft's "news.sg.msn.com" as the first entry, I could not find any of Singapore's news publishers "Today", "Asiaone", "Straights Times", "ChannelNewsAsia" on its first page. Again I was quite appalled to find "www.ibm.com/news/sg/en" as entry number 4 on Bing's first page. The same analysis on the keywords in the URL apply.



It may be a bit unfair to compare Bing which is still in Beta to Google, but I remember when Google was in its infancy, I could find things on it much better than the incumbents (Yahoo, Alta-Vista) can. This is certainly no way to stage an upset.