Classical Philippines Radio

I am happy to announce that the Classical Philippines Radio app is now available for download in the iTunes store.

In their own words, Classical Philippines Radio is "the only station in the planet that broadcast the forgotten melodies of the Philippines. Classical Philippines Radio (Classical PH) plays unique blend of traditional spanish guitar, kundiman, harana and other regional music." Read more about the station here.

While working on this app I had to do a lot of testing, which meant a lot of listening to classical Filipino music. I must admit, I really found myself enjoying most of the tunes. Some of it even reminded me of traditional Japanese music, oddly enough.

WRNI feedback

The WRNI app has been available now as a free download in the iTunes store for 2 weeks. So far, it has received very positive feedback - all 6 reviews in the iTunes store gave it 5 stars!

My favorite quote so far about the app comes from a Newspaper Association of America blog post: "Poised like a fragile little flower among heavily plowed fields is WRNI radio -- NPR from Rhode Island." The app was only mentioned in passing, and this sentence was the complete mention, but still, it was nice to get the mention.

As for usage, over the past 2 weeks the app has been downloaded about 5000 times - not bad for something specifically designed for a Rhode Island public radio audience.

iPhone NDA finally dropped!

Good news today for all iPhone developers. Apple has officially dropped the NDA!

Here's a quote from their iPhone developer web site:

We have decided to drop the non-disclosure agreement (NDA) for released iPhone software.

We put the NDA in place because the iPhone OS includes many Apple inventions and innovations that we would like to protect, so that others don’t steal our work. It has happened before. While we have filed for hundreds of patents on iPhone technology, the NDA added yet another level of protection. We put it in place as one more way to help protect the iPhone from being ripped off by others.

However, the NDA has created too much of a burden on developers, authors and others interested in helping further the iPhone’s success, so we are dropping it for released software. Developers will receive a new agreement without an NDA covering released software within a week or so. Please note that unreleased software and features will remain under NDA until they are released.

Thanks to everyone who provided us constructive feedback on this matter.

I look forward to now being able to be a bit more descriptive in future posts regarding iPhone development.