“The Internet has been incredibly empowering to creators, and just as destructive to middle men. In the 20th century, every musician needed a record label to get his or her music heard. Every author needed a publishing house to be read. Every journalist needed a newspaper. Anyone who wanted to send a message needed the post office. In the Internet age, the tail no longer wags the dog, and those middle men have become a luxury, not a necessity.  Meanwhile, the software industry is moving in the opposite direction.” (keep reading)

by Joe Hewitt via joehewitt.com

Sorry for the delay in getting the next version of the Recipes App out.  Its been 2 weeks since it was first submitted to the App Store.  After one week, i received an email saying i needed to change something to adhere to Apple guidelines (when there is no Internet connection available you get a pop-up now… they didnt point that out in the first version!).  Its been another week since submitting the updated version (with the popup) and it’s still in review.

Hopefully it will get the all-clear soon.  I certainly hope they dont find something else and force us to wait yet another week or so.

I have rolled out an update to the Recipes App backend that allows the recipes to be in multiple categories. This makes sense with recipes as many of them seem like they should be in more than one category. You wont be able to take advantage of this until you install the new version of Recipes App. It is in the App Store review stage now. I havent gone through and put all the recipes into multiple categories though, only a few.

I have also added support to keep track of where recipes come from. So if people have free recipes that they want to share with this app, I can keep track of which recipes came from which people/companies.

I have also knocked off the Help tab from the app as it was a bit redundant. Hopefully the new version will be available very soon. The new version makes a big difference.

I downloaded Skype for the iPhone this morning and made a SkypeOut call (I phoned my bank’s helpdesk in NZ) to a) arrange for something, and b) to test the quality of the call.  I was pleasantly surprised that the quality of the call was very good.  My Internet connection here in Honduras is fairly poor, and there were a couple of jitters but in general the quality was as much as could be expected – or better – for an international phone call.  I was also pleasantly surprised to find that my bank in NZ has people working at 3am NZT!

If Skype can use the Apple Push Notification system to alert of incoming calls when Skype isnt open, this will be an amazing app.  I dont see why they shouldnt be able to either.  In version 3.0 of the iPhone OS – when push notifications finally arrive – the developers can specify an audio clip to be played when a notification arrives, perhaps even a vibration.  So if in the Skype app settings, I specify a certain ringtone from a list of available ringtones specified by Skype (im not sure if custom ringtones would work – actually, im not sure if the name of the audio file is sent through the push notification, or the actual audio file?), then those settings could be synced with Skype’s servers.  When a call comes in, the Skype servers would send the message to the Push Notification system along with my chosen ringtone.  How much data can be sent in the Push Notification’s?  Would it only pop up as a standard notification box on my phone?