Geoff's Random Thoughts

It's easy to buy an app from the Apple App store isn't it, go into the app store, find the app you want, click on the price and enter your password. Voila. Couldn't be easier. Could it? Well, as you can probably guess, I'm going to disagree. Yes, if you know exactly the app you want, it's really easy, You follow the instructions below. What if you only know your own requirements. e.g. I want an application to read RSS feeds. Well, you can go on the best selling lists, you can search the hot apps, if you've already bought a few apps you can use the Genius feature, but these avoid the actual problem of buying apps for a platform like IOS. For many years we've used Mice and Keyboard to activate things on a screen in front of us, but IOS invites us to get literally hands on. Some of the functionality is baked into the Operating System, but some of it is based around the way that the Application has been designed. You immerse yourself into these apps and ...

After my switch to twitterific a couple of weeks ago, I had a problem with an in app purchase. Which was detailed on this blog as a problem with the app store process here http://geoffsrandomthoughts.blogspot.com/2010/07/itunes-store-bug-and-in-app-purchase.html I fired off emails to Twitterific and Apple support and Twitterific came back with a far more timely and useful response that if I redid the purchase with the same iTunes account, I wouldn't be charged again. The action of re-purchasing the in app upgrade informed me that I'd already purchased it, so wouldn't be charged again. Unfortunately Apple came back with a very generic answer which didn't help me one bit. I can't fault apple for this for the simple reason that there are 200,000 apps in the store and they can't know each one intimately, but there should be a requirement on their part to have enough information about each an every app. One of the things that Apple Store support pointed out wa...

I recently bought an iPad, which led to me downloading lots of iPad apps to find the best. The flip side of this was that due to the nature of iTunes, I ended up with those compatible for iPhone also being synced across onto my phone. This was an inconvenience, so I unticked the box on the apps tab of both my iPhone and ipad so that new apps weren't synced. Job done I thought. This week, I downloaded feedle and it didn't take long to set it up, but the following day feedler wasn't there when I went looking for it. I put it down to a glitch and re-synced it again, luckily setup was easy. It was only this morning that it twigged with me what was happening. Tweetdeck crashed on me once too often this morning, so I downloaded Twitterific which I love version 2 of on the iPhone and after confirming I liked it, I purchased the upgrade to premium which was an in app purchase. A little later, I synced with my Macbook Pro and after picking the iPad up again, I soon realize...