Apple rejects iPad app for pinch-to-expand

Apple did NOT "invent" this gesture, or at least did not do so uniquely. If anyone deserves credit for it, it is Jeff Han, whose demo at TED was such a hit. You can find a video of Jeff's presentation at http://trunc.it/79rcg

Clearly Jeff, Apple, and others all considered the pinch-to-expand gesture to be the most intuitive way to achieve this expansion goal in a multitouch environment. As others have said, that just lends weight to the proposition that Apple should encourage use of consistent gestures, not suppress it!

Does Apple get anything out of this besides looking bad? Why are they pushing whizbang 3rd party apps to other platforms?

Interesting, because the Facebook app has the same functionality...

Considering that all developers ride on the back of Apple's tens, probably hundreds of thousands of man years of endeavour with Xcode and the SDK, have access to an excellent worldwide distribution system, and might receive thousands of dollars of free marketing out of the blue, it isn't too much to expect that now and then Apple might like to hold on to their unique and original ideas for a while before as always they are copied and imitated.

It was a novel feature, very much a two fingered imitation of how one might spread a few photos out on a table, as such it is patentable.

The article mentioned that their implementation was hand-coded. I wonder if OS 4.0 will offer this interface in an API and Apple would like devs to use that implementation for stability and performance reasons. It's really the only good reason I can think of for this decision... I hope one of these developers sue Apple for anti-competitive behavior and just put an end to all this nonsense. I appreciate the fact that apps are reviewed for basic security and stability, but at some point they're going to have to learn to play nice with the other kids.

They probably wanted to emphasis that the devs did not access a hidden API in the SDK to implement that feature which is something that Apple has repeatedly disapproved apps for. In this case however the issue is the gesture itself that was deemed problematic.

T.

Yhis is the true face of Apple, make no mistake, they will restrict anything and everything if they have the power. Steve jobs talking about open standards in web makes my blood boil

They put a lot of work into that app. I think there should be some sort of predesign approval from apple. Then they would not of coded the feature that then had to be removed.

BOOOO!!!

I think that about covers things. Suffice to say that this action is totally unjustifiable. Does the App Store have any form of appeals process yet to address stupidity like this?

Crap like this is pushing me toward Android, unless the 4.0 announcement tomorrow and the inevitable new hardware knock me off my feet.

If I invested a lot of time into creating an application and paid for the privilege of doing so, I'd be furious if it was rejected for this or any other petty reason.