Did we receive similar interest or support from Apple? Not so much. The app was rejected 3 times in total, and today we’ve had to make the very hard decision not to resubmit it again. We cannot give out specifics about why our app was rejected by Apple. But let’s just say that sometimes even the very best efforts to stay open for everyone can shut you out. We have no desire to make our publishing community more restricted than it is today, and thus we’ll have to consider an alternative path of how to support the iPhone than through the App Store. Stay tuned.

Issuu, which makes the page-flip technology that we use at the Jackson Free Press, has had an Android app for some time now, with the iPhone app right behind it. Apparently Apple won't approve the app... the suggestion appears to be that Apple doesn't like that Issuu doesn't block objectionable content in its flipbook magazines. (I've never seen anything pornographic in Issuu, although I haven't dug deeply for that sort of thing. I have seen things that struck me as both "artsy" and "vaguely European" which might be what Apple is objecting to.)

I was recently installing an iOS Web browser alternative to Safari and noticed all of the disclaimers it comes with... I guess because you can see "bad stuff" in a browser. But if the browser gets through, why not the magazine flip app? Double standard? Or is the standard simply too subjective?

Apple... this isn't good. It's nice that you're all about the quality, but you should be testing apps to see if they handle data elegantly, avoid crashing and don't do things in the OS that they're not allowed to do. The Orwellian focus on how many fart apps or whether or not you might see a bare breast or two is a bit much for my taste, and I'm a fanboy.

I've got to figure that sooner or later Apple's going to hit a legal wall with this much control, too, if not in the U.S. then in Europe.

Meanwhile, it looks like I might need a new flipbook solution if I'm going to have an iOS app...

Of course the minute I bought a new Mac Mini Server for the office (about three weeks ago), Apple introduced the newest model and the price for the direct-from-Apple refurbs has gotten even lower. Whatevah. It was still a good deal when I paid $830 on eBay, and one Free Shipping experience later, I had a brand new boxed Mac Mini Server -- the not-so-swanky 2009 edition.

To me, it was a Porsche compared to a Focus. The Mini is a replacement for a G4/400 that had been our creaky fileserver for YEARS, and hadn't quite grown along with us. On press days the server has to support between 15-20 simultaneous connections, with InDesign files, print-quality photos and PDFs all being worked on while stored on the server in real time.

With the G4, we were literally using built-in file sharing and a basic username/password scheme; now, everyone has their own account, and they're tracked by the system -- if you close your laptop and walk about without logging out of the server, it notices that and puts your account in a deep sleep mode.

Rumor is that our one PC guy is even able to access the Mini server now, although I can't guarantee that.

In the past 24 hours I've signed up for three different iPad giveaways, with winners chosen at the end of the month. Can you imagine -- I've got THREE iPads coming to me in the first week of August. Yahtzee!

iPad is the new iPod, it seems, at least in the give-away-to-getcha biz. Looks like I'm going to have to come up with a reason for JFP to give one away in the next little while. (Step #1: Come up with a reason for JFP to buy *me* one. Step #2: Worry about other folks then.)

Confluence of events -- over my vacation I started reading the "Girl Who..." trilogy at the behest of Ms. D and her friend Ms. H, and they're good. Very entertaining. I don't have the third one, which I plan to procure.

Meanwhile, this weekend while trying to kill some time waiting for Ms. D while she got her glasses fixed, I was in a Best Buy and got to fumbling around with the Nook. I found it interesting -- a bit tough to navigate initially, but then it kicked in and starting doing some cool stuff. Ultimately it got me thinking that a nice little reader of some kind could be what the doctor ordered -- might even be how I decide to read "The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest."

Later, it occurred to me that the Kindle had also lowered it's prices as well. (Congrats, Amazon -- marketing works.) So I went to Amazon and floated around on the site for a while and *almost* bought one this weekend.

Since I've pretty much been wrapped up in the idea of getting an iPad (when the stars align and the $500+ makes sense), I haven't thought much about a Kindle or Nook. Now I'm second guessing that.

Things I would use it for -- reading books (a plus for Kindle or Nook over iPad, IMHO) as well as for some quick surfing from my easy chair -- I like to read Wikipedia and IMDB entries about movies I've just watched. While buzzing around the Amazon.com site, I also got in my head the possibility that I might consume the New York Times on a regular basis if I had it in a fabulously portable format.

Advantages to the iPad, of course, are that I would also use it for app development and testing (for JFP and BOOM) as well as more in-depth surfing, perhaps some Netflix watching, documents, perhaps even sales, PDFs, flipbooks (again for sales or for demo-ing our publications) and other things I haven't thought about, like GTD processing.

But, iPad is $500 down the road and these things are less expensive. And enticing. And shiny (actually, rather matte, but you know what I mean). Hmm.

The Morgan Stanley analyst says that the world is currently in the midst of the fifth major technology cycle of the past half a century. The previous four were the mainframe era of the 1950s and 60s, the mini-computer era of the 1970s and the desktop Internet era of the 80s. The current cycle is the era of the mobile Internet, she says — predicting that within the next five years “more users will connect to the Internet over mobile devices than desktop PCs.

The pitch is that mobile Web may actually be growing at a faster clip than Netscape/AOL were growing in the early 1990s. That'll put the hurt on carriers, but could be interesting for folks who get out in front of the mobile data needs of their customers. (Not that I have much of a clue what that means, although I'm certainly interested...)

At the JFP a little while back we had a bit of a tussle with the ShopLocal folks, a digital ad services company now owned by Gannett (the newspaper/TV conglomerate that owns our local daily paper and comes up with all sorts of irritating schemes).

ShopLocal is about anything other than "local" in the sense of "locally owned." The firestorm began with this entry JFP You're Just Wrong where ShopLocal offers a tepid defense for its business model, which is essentially to offer national chain store ads in flipbook format on the Web.

In so doing, the blogger coined the ridiculous phrase "national-local" ... which just goes to show you can convince yourself to say pretty much anything as long as you're getting paid enough.

(Also of note -- that entry has been scrubbed of its comments by yrs truly and our rascally posse. Nice.)

The whole ShopLocal concept is nothing but Orwellian "local washing," based on the suggestion that spending money with chain stores in your locale is somehow equivalent to shopping with locally owned businesses. (It's not.)

So I come across this recent entry of their site and note the caption on the image -- watch them swoon with pride: If there is one image that the team here at ShopLocal is proud of, its not of any of our digital solutions that we bring to market. Rather it's an image of our clients and the relationships we have with each of them. The longevity and multi-year partnerships that most of the retailers have with ShopLocal is truly unique and exciting.

I just threw up in my mouth a little bit.

Look at all those local clients. It must certainly make the pretenders at ShopLocal proud.

For real "shop local" thinkin' check out here or here. Viva los originales!