Fiore irked Apple’s censorious staffers with his cartoons making fun of the Balloon Boy hoax and the pair that famously crashed a White House party, according to Laura McGann at the Neiman Journalism Lab.

Fiore won a Pulitzer Monday for animations he made for the SFGate, the online home of the San Francisco Chronicle. But Fiore, who is a freelancer who runs a syndication business, was rejected by Apple in December for an app called NewToons that features his work.

According to a Dec. 21 e-mail reprinted by Neiman, Apple rejected his app because it “contains content that ridicules public figures and is in violation of Section 3.3.14 from the iPhone Developer Program License Agreement which states: Applications may be rejected if they contain content or materials of any kind (text, graphics, images, photographs, sounds, etc.) that in Apple’s reasonable judgment may be found objectionable, for example, materials that may be considered obscene, pornographic, or defamatory.”

Neither Fiore nor Apple responded to requests for comment.

The news of the rejection comes not long after Apple decided to purge its App store of content that included nudity, a retroactive ban that included apps from respected German publications such as Bild and Der Spiegel.

Fiore’s rejection may be especially disconcerting to news and media organizations, many of which are betting heavily on iPad apps as a way to get users to pay to read magazines and newspapers, and to get advertisers to pay print-ad prices for online content. (Online ads cost a small percentage of what ads in glossy magazines cost, in no small part because the net has almost infinite advertising space.)

Apple has built a little slab of Disneyland with its iPad, which is meant to be an experience unsullied by provocative or crude material. It’s beautiful and enticing — the company has already sold more than a half million of them in the first two weeks it’s been available — but it’s not the real world.

Publishers, including such august organizations such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and Wired.com’s parent company Condé Nast, see a solution to their declining dead-tree ad sales in building a pay-to-play attraction in that park. But they need to understand that to do so, they have to play by Mickey Mouse’s rules.

The signs have been there from the start, as Wired.com’s Brian Chen pointed out in February. Apple banned an e-book reading application once because it figured out that iPhone users could use it to read a free version of the Kama Sutra. Then last week, Apple abruptly banned apps developed using programs that translate apps into multiple platforms.

Adding the news of Fiore’s ban to that, the publishing world is now officially on notice that the iPad is Apple’s, and unlike with their print and web editions, they don’t have the final say when it comes to their own content on an Apple device.

Screenshot: Mark Fiore cartoon lampooning the nation’s telecoms for helping the Bush Administration illegally spy on their customers.

Resource:
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/04/apple-bans-satire/

Mobile Roadie is a service based on one simple tagline, “The simple and inexpensive way for anyone to build and manage their own iPhone and Android apps.” In short, wannabe developers can use the service to create template-driven applications.

While there’s a little bit of customizability involved in selecting the various categories, or tabs, that you want the app to deliver, the created apps are all relatively similar for the most part. And if you don’t believe me, just check out Mobile Roadie’s offerings yourself–the proof is in the digital pudding.

This isn’t a critique of Mobile Roadie’s services–not by me, at least. Schneider’s post about Apple’s alleged new quality standard has been pulled off of Mobile Roadie’s Web site for some strange reason, but here’s what it said, so claims the blog Tap Swipe Pinch:

According to the post, an Apple representative contacted Mobile Roadie and informed them that ‘cookie cutter’ apps which do little more than pull feeds from web sites or reproduce websites with webviews will no longer be accepted in The App Store. The Mobile Roadie post also mentioned that Apple will be imposing further guidelines on certain industries, but offered no specifics only stating that “we’re [Mobile Roadie] already working on the features requested,” implying that the details of the guidelines were given to Mobile Roadie.

It’s no secret that Apple’s been on an app-targeting binge lately: It first went after applications featuring “overtly sexual content,” which included more than 5,000 different, “babes, boobs, and bikini” applications, reports ZDNet. Next up came a batch of WiFi discovery applications, which were recently removed from the App Store because their core feature was based on private APIs.

If cookie-cutter applications are next, what will ultimately define this concept? Could a developer be punished for using a similar template throughout a series of applications? Would Apple dare risk drawing the ire of record companies that have made similar, template-based applications for a number of today’s popular artists?

If anything, Apple’s push toward making its App Store apps feel more “special” than a typical Web app could very well turn off interested—but not committed—developers.

“Now the challenge for Apple is that the app building platforms are extremely attractive to a wide swath of the market that would otherwise be reluctant to bear the cost and complexity of developing an app from scratch,” said Medialets CEO Eric Litman in an interview with Techcrunch.

“We have already seen apps from personal bloggers up to major media brands using some of these platforms, and many of the folks in that spectrum have content Apple would certainly want in the App Store. Interestingly, some of those same developers also have fully custom-built apps in the App Store, too.”

Resource : http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2361040,00.asp