Saturday, June 27, 2009

Scam or Legit?

Yesterday some door-to-door salesman came by, from ECR magazine company or something like that. Bec initially agreed to get some magazines, but when she came in to get a checkbook, I said I don't like to ever buy things like that since it's impossible to tell if it's a scam. I just never buy anything if you call me or show up at my door.

The kid was understandably upset we backed out of buying, and it was a bit of a hassle to get some contact info so we could make sure nothing would get charged or sent to collections. You have to cancel in writing within 3 days? With no email or fax or website listed? It just seemed shadier and shadier as we were trying to stop. Bec did get a number and talked to somebody and sent a fax to cancel, so that should be good.


I wish I'd have thought to whip out the iPhone and start searching right then on the doorstep. The only references to the company I found were at RipoffReport.com. Bad sign for them.

And the continued magic of the Internet: according to Google, this is what is at their address in Florida. Doesn't really inspire confidence. I was expecting to at least see an office park or a "Mailboxes Etc" type store. Which building do you think is "Suite #3"?

Magazines make sense if I was making up a scam, you'd not notice anything was wrong until months later when nothing had arrived.

I'll never know if it could have been legit, but that Googling raised some big suspicions. We'd just be out the cost of a magazine. The kid earns points and will (supposedly) get a big $5000 reward for getting enough points. From Seattle, what's he going to do if some company in Florida decides to not pay?

Saturday, June 20, 2009

Wow! Thanks again Apple!

So after a lot of thought I decided to upgrade to the new iPhone 3GS. I could upgrade without paying the early-upgrade penalty, and really need to be able to test with all the different devices.

Waiting at the store seeing the various displays and things, I thought "Wouldn't it be cool if they had one of our icons." Next thing I see is our FTP On The Go icon! At the end of the promo video running in every AT&T and Apple store. It's only there for a few seconds, but it is an obvious one "installed" on the iPhone at the end, not just one of the flyby icons (it's possible another might be in those, we'll have to do a frame-by-frame view to see.)


I filmed it with the new iPhone, and uploaded to YouTube sitting in the car in the parking lot.

Wednesday, June 3, 2009

Very fine line in app approvals...

We submitted our new iPhone app, Poker vs Girls and pushed the images a bit too much.

We weren't really sure where the line is drawn, and now have a better idea. People taking off clothes or in their underwear is OK, but pretending to take off that underwear is not OK.

We removed the offending images and resubmitted. Of course when the next iPhone OS is out, with more parental controls, it should be OK to be more explicit, just mark it R rated.


Update 1: And that did the trick! Poker vs Girls is available in the App Store. Now we get to figure where the line is for pictures of dudes--we're equal opportunity and Poker vs Boys is coming next. Is there some crotch-bulge limitation? The wife will enjoy choosing those pictures :)


Update 2: The 5 offending images we weren't able to include...

Tuesday, June 2, 2009

Poker vs Girls

Coming Soon...hopefully any day now.