digg

Facebook Connect Join Digg About
See the original image at macenstein.com

Developers furious over App Store “Line Cutting”

macenstein.com — There’s a bit of bad blood brewing between developers of iPhone Apps these days. It seems several different companies have renamed their iPhone games to begin with either a space, a quotation mark, or some other symbol so that they appear first in the list of 197 games on the iPhone portal to the App Store.

Who dugg this? Made popular Jul 14, 2008

Digg DudeWhat is Digg?

Digg is a place for people to discover and share content from anywhere on the web. Digg surfaces the best stuff as submitted and voted on by the community. Take the Tour to learn more.

113 Comments

show profanity settings
expand all
  • dvsbastard, on 07/14/2008, -3/+123" AAA I don't think this works for Digg comments...
  • stefpet, on 07/14/2008, -2/+105trim() -> problem solved
  • fraul, on 07/13/2008, -4/+81That's being an a hole with capital A.
  • CatsAreGods, on 07/14/2008, -16/+86Did these guys ever look at a Yellow Pages? People thought of this stuff 100 years ago.
  • RBrenner14, on 07/14/2008, -49/+112App store?? More like CRAP store! Am I right, or what?
  • airmann90, on 07/14/2008, -1/+38Lol, I thought this would be about steve wozniak cutting line for his new iphone...
  • Lunarbunny, on 07/14/2008, -2/+36Reminds me of arranging game server lists by alphabetical order. "Sure, let's try ' !!!!!!AWESOME SERVER!!!!!!'" That was another thing I noticed CoD4 got right - server lists sorted by alphabetical order started from the first alphanumeric character in the name, ignoring spaces and symbols.
  • jacobj, on 07/14/2008, -0/+29aaaaaaaare you sure?
  • mistermaster, on 07/14/2008, -0/+26After Apple fixes this, expect a sudden surge of aardvark-related products
  • tedrock, on 07/14/2008, -3/+26Clearly you didn't read the article considering that point was mentioned in it.
  • xero9, on 07/14/2008, -0/+23Then you end up with:
    AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAWESOME SERVER!!!!!
    AAAAAAAAAAAAAAWESOME SERVER!!!!!
    AAAAAAAAAAAAAWESOME SERVER!!!!!
    AAAAAAAAAAAAWESOME SERVER!!!!!
    AAAAAAAAAAAWESOME SERVER!!!!!
  • haikuFU, on 07/14/2008, -6/+27You mean " A"
  • ThankTheCheese, on 07/14/2008, -0/+18trim($name);
  • inactive, on 07/14/2008, -1/+16There once was a time where comments similar to this would be buried.
  • pezholio, on 07/14/2008, -2/+16So tacky and unprofessional. Personally I'd give any apps that employed this tactic a wide berth. If their coding's anything like their business practices their apps are bound to suck...
  • KenSPT, on 07/14/2008, -1/+13Who cares?
  • ahmedb07, on 07/14/2008, -1/+12u sound like a bad comedian fishing for laughs...'cmon, am i right?!'
  • inactive, on 07/14/2008, -0/+11this could be a reply for almost every story on digg.
  • mossblaser, on 07/14/2008, -0/+10possibly not in "visual basic"...
  • blackjack75, on 07/14/2008, -3/+13To be fair many developers didn't stand a chance to publish their apps (I got my key yesterday, having asked months ago). I bet in a few months the selection will be more worthwhile.
  • Sairynn, on 07/14/2008, -0/+9"It seems several different companies have renamed their iPhone games..." Several? Every app in the screenshot was made by Jirbo, Inc.
  • danj321, on 07/14/2008, -1/+9At least you didn't go. "Apple Store? More like CRAPPLE store!" Thank you for not subjecting me to that.
  • Skarz3d, on 07/14/2008, -0/+7Let what seems like one of the worst offenders know how you feel:

    http://jirbo.com/contact.php
  • bradleyland, on 07/14/2008, -1/+8Easy fix. ***** with the listing by arbitrarily changing the name of your app? Suspend them from the store for the three months. If they do it again, six months. Then a year, and finally permanently.

    Also, I just deleted the one Jirbo app I had on my phone. It sucked balls anyway.
  • DD00, on 07/14/2008, -0/+6Apple fixed this by the way. If you go check Jirbo isn't at the top of any lists anymore.
  • zoomzoom83, on 07/14/2008, -1/+7The ideal solution would be to sort non-alphanumeric characters to the *end* of the list. That way any such cheaters suddenly get thrown to the end of the list.
  • inactive, on 07/14/2008, -0/+5In the article.
  • maexus, on 07/14/2008, -1/+6That and ignore ignore special characters when doing alphanumeric sort though I agree it's not the best solution.
  • abandonedhero, on 07/14/2008, -0/+5You've obviously never used Java. Overgeneralized statements like you just made just make you look stupid.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trim_(programming)
  • KarateMedia, on 07/14/2008, -1/+6Aaaaaare you going to the mall today?
  • ozziegt, on 07/14/2008, -0/+4Yeah, but it should be easy for the app store to fix.

    Honestly though, doing an alphabetical listing isn't fair in the first place. Someone who writes asteroids shouldn't have an advantage over someone who writes tetris. They need to come up with a better way to list the titles that is fair for everyone.
  • PhoenixAvatar2, on 07/14/2008, -0/+4Don't know why you don't just sort by lowest ping...
  • Epistaxis, on 07/14/2008, -9/+12I see what you did there.
  • susilou, on 07/14/2008, -0/+3Dugg for Billy Madison.
  • Galaxylander, on 07/14/2008, -1/+4They aren't? Who browses apps by the list of every app? You browse by category, and you don't have to browse them by alphabetical order. Also- how else were they supposed to organize them? Popular apps end up on the front page and everything, and if a person knows what they're doing they can advertise their product online and get the word out. Good apps will make it whether they start with a Z or not- ZEN Pinball is on the front page and one of the most downloaded games.
  • TheShad0w, on 07/14/2008, -0/+3My question is why doesn't Apple sanitize the title data? Its not hard to strip out whitespace characters before and after the string... Talk about novice mistake.


    Rules of Data
    1. Never trust the user input
    2. Never trust the company feed
    3. Never delete w/out logging.
  • auricomnet, on 07/14/2008, -4/+7freaking bs
  • MalDON, on 07/14/2008, -0/+3Just imagine the game! "Aardvark Racing!"
  • Lunarbunny, on 07/14/2008, -0/+3I do, I just was citing an example.
  • roadtripguy, on 07/14/2008, -0/+3HAR HAR I'm Steve Jobs and open platforms don't make me richer! (even though they are far superior to closed, buggy, no-outside-input proprietary platforms) Crap is right.
  • taizoshiozaki, on 07/14/2008, -2/+5Apple will probably be forced to apply download stats for sorting sooner or later. Alphanumerics is nonsense in non-latin countries anyways.
  • thelizardreborn, on 07/14/2008, -0/+3It's this kind of "marketing strategy" that makes those of us who didn't major in business lose all respect for the marketing folks.
  • IceX, on 07/14/2008, -0/+3I hope no one bought jirbo's ***** games in the first place.
  • SteelFrog, on 07/14/2008, -0/+3...I got Rick Rolled. =/
  • oneoverzero, on 07/14/2008, -0/+3There's a company owned by a parent of a friend of mine and it's called AAAA1 storage.

    The man who owns that is actually (though not because of the name, but because his company was found to be dumping asbestos into a reservoir, or something like that) one of the few people I'd consider evil.
  • beerbarron, on 07/14/2008, -1/+4Well now that the issue has been brought up, apple will pug it I am sure...how long it will take is anyones guess, I think personally apple released to much to soon. They should of rolled out mobile me about a month ago, then rolled out the app store 3 days before the 2.0 release, giving developers time to see how the app store would handle..
  • billbugger, on 07/14/2008, -0/+2Use google. That was the whole point behind their engine that the rest were failing at.
    This alphanum sorting issue was solved ~10 years ago.
  • Elranzer, on 07/14/2008, -0/+2How long until some iPhone app company names itself Aardvark?
  • TrevorPace, on 07/14/2008, -0/+2Well I was wrong it appears.

    I guess I was thinking about C++ too much.
  • billbugger, on 07/14/2008, -0/+2lol, or Gates. He has nothing better to do now :-p
  • Fetching more discussions...
    Show 51 - 100 of 115 discussions

  • Add a Comment

    Login or register to comment!
    Or, sign-in super fast with your Facebook account ...


© Digg Inc. 2009 — Content created and posted by Digg users is dedicated to the public domain | Terms of Use Updated | Privacy Policy
DIGG, DIGG IT, DUGG, DIGG THIS, Digg graphics, logos, designs, page headers, button icons, scripts, and other service names are the trademarks of Digg Inc.