Wow. Now I know this was probably to be expected, but now that it’s come, it feels pretty sudden. Today Steve Jobs stepped down as the CEO of Apple for the second time, and most likely, for the last time. It’s probably safe to say that the whole internet (more or less ) is abuzz with the news and most people aren’t taking it too well (eg Wall Street lol).

I dunno if I’ve said it much before, but we are complete Apple nuts in my household. My father has been with Apple since the beginning; since the original Macintosh computer and has NEVER deviated since then (currently rocking a MacBook Air ). When I bought a Windows PC for my university studies, I almost got evicted from the family.

It’s really hard to put in perspective how much Steve has personally contributed to the sheer ‘concept’ of personal computing (and by extension now, the concept of post-PC computing), but it’s probably safe to say that he is without a doubt one of the pioneers and forefathers of most of the technological customs we take for granted today.

Now, it’s been said he’s not leaving entirely and he will be remaining as Chairman of the Board, so it’s quite possible that this isn’t going to be as bad as everyone is making out. Odds are he’ll still be making sure all of the products leaving Apple are still up to his level of standards, and that the rest of the responsibilities of managing the company will now rely on Tim Cook. So all in all, I really don’t think Apple is going to rapidly change much at all now, or in the perceivable future.

In any case, since now is as good a time as any, I would personally like to thank Steve for everything he’s done, and I wish him the very best from here on.

Yeah this is old news. REALLY old news, but I can’t believe I didn’t write a blog post on it at the time.

Even still, up to this point, this is blowing my freaking mind. iPokédex managed to get app of the day on Kotaku!!!!

I’ve been an avid reader of Kotaku for 5 years now and their Twitter account holds a special section in my list of feeds. Never did I imagine that some of my work would actually get so much as a whisper.

In hindsight though, it makes it a bit sader that I eventually had to remove iPokédex.

Either way, like before, mad props to Luke Plunkett for reviewing my app. Hopefully there will be more to come in future.

Bahaha. Alright. This is what I get for opening my trap on Twitter. Moar work.

Lately, I’ve been thinking that I really do need to start doing more blogging in a more timely/regular fashion; there’s lots of stuff I want to write about that just won’t fit in a tweet, no matter how hard I try.
My good pal Dean was thinking the same thing, and so based off the conversation above, the idea of a mutual blogging challenge came along.

This is a really cool idea. It’ll hopefully motivate the both of us to try and put more content out online on a more regular basis, hopefully without quality suffering too badly.
I can say it right now though; doing a blog post per day is a pretty hard thing to do. But as long as they’re longer than a tweet, and get the message across, that’s all you really need. In fact, I might set another personal challenge to make posts as lean as possible.

On a lesser note, I think it’s also become a test of platform scalability. I’m on a self-hosted WordPress implementation and Dean is running entirely off a standard tumblr account. Personally, I always thought self-hosted would be better purely because of the degree of control I thought I needed (eg, custom skins and plugins etc), but a quick glance at Dean’s tumblr shows you might just be able to get away without it.

In any case, let the challenge commence! Let’s see how long this lasts!

Well now. Given recent events, I think it’s fair to say that I feel like I understand the intricacies of international copyright law a little more than I did a couple of months ago. After my communications with the TPCI lawyer, coupled with some readings from some other sites concerning similar copyright cases, I thought I’d write up a bit of a clarification of how this stuff appears to work.

MANDATORY DISCLAIMER: I am not a lawyer, and the following text is my own supposition. It shouldn’t be taken as absolute truth, and if you see something you know is incorrect, please let me know.

So, the crux of the matter is that ‘fair use’ is a rather convoluted and complicated ‘convienience’ clause added to copyright law, with the original goal of (subjectively) ‘limited’ re-use of copyrighted material without needing to get the original holder’s permission primarily for purposes of  things like critical commentary or research. With the existence of the fair use clause, this basically means that most forms of unauthorized copyright usage go from ‘blatently’ illegal to ‘potentially’ illegal.

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Well, sadly it’s happened folks.:(

As of last Friday, I had to pull iPokédex from active distribution and leave it offline indefinitely, by personal request of a representative of The Pokémon Company International.:(

I’m really disappointed it came down to that, but sadly, there doesn’t appear to have been any other option.

Since I was slightly busy on the weekend, it’s taken this long to follow up on the matter here, but now I’ll see about putting up what’s been going down since my last blog post.

After receiving the notice from Apple, I immediately followed up by sending this email to the address they provided to me:

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