Some updates on the iPhone Google Voice Uproar I blogged about late Friday night.

There's no app for that!

Not only was the Official Google Voice app rejected by Apple, but other apps that connected to Google Voice such as "VoiceCentral" were ripped from the shelves as well. In the case of VoiceCentral, the app had already been approved by Apple previously and units were being sold over the last 4 months. Apple did not even bother to notify the manufacturer, Riverturn; they found out when a customer complained that they couldn't download the application from the store.

Read Riverturns surprising conversation with an Apple rep who finally called them on the subject. What is Riverturn to do? Do they start refunding customers without any meaningful answers from Apple if they will ever allow a modified app in the future? Riverturn cleverly entitled the post, "There's no app for that", mocking Apple's commercials for the iPhone declaring that there was an app for everything.

ATT initial PR response regarding the FCC letter

"AT&T does not manage or approve applications for the App Store. We have received the letter and will, of course, respond to it."

The unofficial Apple Weblog has a brief writeup on this, and also notes that AT&T admitted their involvement in keeping the slingbox app off of the iPhone.

Finally, Erick Schonfeld of TechCrunch.com has a nice writeup in the Washington Post: Why The FCC Wants To Smash Open The iPhone.

The FCC Friday sent out 3 letters to inquire about the nature of Apple's rejection of Google Voice (and Latitude) iPhone apps.

The actual letters are available as a matter of public record:

• FCC Letter to Apple LETTER (DA 09-1736)
  
• FCC Letter to AT&T LETTER (DA 09-1737)
• FCC Letter to Google  LETTER (DA 09-1739)

It would appear from the letters that the FCC is really trying to determine is whether or not there was any interaction between AT&T and Apple regarding these rejections to see if anti-competitive practices are at play.

But if the iPhone were not so popular would the government care?
Or is there something even more interesting going on with the FCC and other public response to Apple's play?

What may be good for a voice podcast, is not good for music.

Ever listened to a sermon podcast in the car and got frustrated fidling with the volume control when your pastor goes from really quiet to really loud or visa versa? To deal with this problem we post-process our sermon recordings with a software compressor, effectively making the recording all one level. (Actually doing this with software [we use audacity's compressor effect] as opposed to hardware at recording time introduces it's own complications and sometimes we still don't get it right. Primarily this is because it requires investigating each recording and then applying the appropriate compression ratio's.)

However, making a recording all one volume pits listening convenience against dynamic quality.

I Decided to take shadyvale.org from blue to green, being a lush valley and all that. The old logo didn't work, so I thought I would spend a little time and see if I could come up with something other than a plain text site name.

So I fired up the old inkscape, and played around a bit. I know so little about graphics or artistry, but was able to make use of the fine tool and took advantage of the Open Clip Art SVG Library.

I then set out to create a favicon (the little picture that appears in the address bar for those using cool browsers) which I have done previously in theGimp, and ran across a little web tool, FavIcon from Pics which did the trick. Just exported a png from inkscape and uploaded it to the site and was given a decent favicon.ico. It appears that the background is white instead of transparent, but good enough for now.

Note: IE 6 users, you will see an ugly site logo since PNG transparency was broken for years in Internet Explorer. Sorry, I am tired of providing work-arounds for the bug, I would highly suggest downloading a newer browser.

I have to say that the Drupal 5 rocks, the drupal core Garland Minnelli theme has met my needs, and with the included "color" module I was able to alter the colors of the theme without editing any css.

Anyway, let me know what you think.

Long overdue for some attention, I have updated shadyvale.org to Drupal 5.2. The upgrade from 4.7 was quite smooth, and everything should be about the same as it was. One exception is that I switched themes because the previous one wasn't updated for the new version of drupal. I was pretty much ready for a change anyway. The old logo didn't fit right for the new theme, so I held off.

I look forward to playing with some of the new modules available. I have a lot of catching up to do with the Drupal community which has really blossomed.