In March 2010 i received an email from V Festival who didn't want me to carry on development of an iPhone app i had been working on, in these emails legal action was mentioned in an effort to scare me, this is my story.
I personally don't think it is an unfair assumption to believe that most big corporations use questionable methods to make the little people, who threaten their profits, go away. Methods that i'm sure everyone back in reality would see as bullying, a way of throwing around their "big boy" name to make you stop what you're doing.
You would have to do something rather special to get yourself into a position where a big company would want to stop you from doing something they thought could damage them financially, something quite sizeable to even be noticed by these people.
Apparently i've managed to get myself into a real pickle of a situation with Virgin Media because of an iPhone app i created called iFestApp something that, at the time, seemed innocent enough but apparently threatened a few pennies in V Festivals pocket.
So let me tell a little story about a nice young developer who just wanted to share his love for a music festival with like-minded people through the "geeky" means of iPhone App Development.
Just a quick post on daylight savings Sunday (a new holiday i made up) to tell you about the super swanky website for the upcoming iFestival App (iFestApp) for the iPhone and iPod Touch. The iFest app is an unofficial V Festival application for people who want information on their phone about V Festival and everything going on at V.
Signup to the newsletter and get told when the application is available to buy or follow @iFestApp on Twitter or fan-it-up at Facebook.
Stay Tuned!
I have had some queries via e-mail and Twitter about the iPhone app currently under development, i thought i would provide some further information to keep you guys updated.
The application will officially be called iFestApp (Festival App) and will be on sale for 59p in the iTunes app store when complete. The app will provide information on artists playing at V Festival, the stages they play on and links to their Twitter/Facebook/Websites, it will also provide the latest news and rumours about V Festival along with Twitter updates split into 3 categories, Official V Festival tweets, Artist Tweets and your tweets.
The application is being worked on and development updates can be found on Twitter at @iFestApp and you can signup for updates via e-mail on the iFestApp website.
Well as you may have read from my last blog post, i created my first iPhone app which was a rejigging of content from this website, in an iPhone app, for free. Well that got rejected because it was useless, i quite agree, so i gave it another shot.
I decided this time it was better to go with something a little more "native" so i decided to read some articles on creating iPhone apps and they were very helpful in teaching me the basics allowing me to create something useful.
I have always been a fan of the iPhone and have always made it a goal of mine to one day develop an iPhone application. Well today i can announce that i have completed my very first iPhone application and it has been submitted to the iPhone App Store for review and will hopefully appear soon.
It has been suggested for quite some time that i shouldn't jump into full-on iPhone development because i do not know Objective C, in the slightest, so a web app has been my starting goal.
UPDATE: The app got kinda rejected. So scrap that idea.
Oh my. It appears that i broke comments a while back, which explains the lack of comments. This has been fixed, sorry to all those who tried to enter into the competition for a free $5 gift card for TunesPro. You can still enter.
To apologise for breaking the site here is a video of Baby chasing a laser-pointer. Silly child.
With any blog successful blog it is all about finding your audience and keeping them on board, however one problem a lot of blogs have is that the audience simply doesn't find them.
This is a problem i have had previously with this blog and it is what forced me into taking serious action to increase the readability of my posts, the feedback and lastly increase traffic to the blog.
Just thought i would post a quick update to let everyone know where the website stands at the minute because it has undergone some changes again over the last 48 hours.
The Design
Last week i launched the new website and new design along side that, i thought the design would stay like that for a while because i quite liked it. I then decided on Friday that i didn't like the design anymore and thought i would add some pattern to the background, i have done this now with a wood effect. I then decided that i didn't really like the logo anymore, despite it being my logo since 2007 when the website launched, so this has now been revamped with a nice new font and slogan.
Over the last 2 weeks i made some changes to the blog's Content Management System, and by changes i mean i started again, so as a result the database was reconstructed and all the data from the old one was wiped. I decided to do this because a lot of the old stuff was…. well..… old and is kind of unrelated now.
I did however keep some of the old content simply because it was a traffic driver and clearly someone somewhere found it remotely interesting. Everything else is gone.
Well over the last few weeks i have been working on a brand new Content Management System for slater.john and today i'm happy to launch it, along with a brand new design.
The reason behind the change is simply to make it easier for me to post, it was also a chance for me to refresh my PHP knowledge and implement new techniques that have been learnt over the last 2 years. The first noticeable thing is the lack of content, i decided that the majority of the content on the old website was sat their for no reason and it really did nothing, so i removed it. As a result i have a brand new website with a nice clean look, minimal content and more of a blog.