‘Gridlee’ appears to be just another retro-style arcade game with tacked-on touch controls. But look closer, and you’ll find an entire arcade emulator.

Photo from idownloadblog.com.

Apple doesn’t typically allow emulators on their closed iOS platform, with very few exceptions. Apple typically falls back on the defense that they’re protecting users from potentially malicious code that can be run through an emulated system, which is technically true, although some have debated this logic. The more likely rationale is that Apple doesn’t want to have to deal with DMCA enforcement problems and cease-and-desist orders from game companies when users start loading illegally downloaded ROM images of their games onto iDevices through their marketplace.

In order to get around Apple’s App Store regulations and play emulated games on their iDevices, users typically jailbreak them and load third-party apps. Back in 2011 a port of popular emulator MAME (Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator) had been released under the moniker ‘iMAME’, which was quickly removed by Apple. But now a new app has surfaced on the App Store, going by the name ‘Gridlee‘.

At first glance, the Gridlee app appears to be just another retro-style arcade game with tacked-on touch controls. But dig a bit deeper, and you’ll find an entire arcade emulator hidden in the app’s source files. Just plug in your iDevice, and use iExplorer to navigate to Gridlee’s ROMs folder, and upload as many ROM files as your device can handle. Not all games are supported, however, so quality may be hit or miss. Gridlee’s emulator even supports iCade’s physical controls.

At least one App Store customer has caught on based on their review, and I’m sure more will follow suit, which means Apple will likely catch on and pull the plug on Gridlee for good relatively soon. Until then, you can grab a fistful of ROMs and head on down to the App Store for some old-school arcade action.

This is a great article, right here. The author, Richard Gaywood of TUAW, raises a very interesting and tense issue in regards to software licensing: does removing the features from an app already paid for by the customer, and moving them to a more expensive “Pro” version, constitute “double dipping”? Do the legal implications of software ownership, outweigh the ethical implications of being a scumbag? Fascinating. No, wait- the other thing. Shitty.

Look, I get that Instacast could very well be within their rights by removing said features from their paid app, as outlined by software licensing agreements. But that still doesn’t make what they’re doing okay, as evidenced by any one of the myriad 1-star reviews the app is now being avalanched with on the App Store from angry customers.

The argument of actual software ownership versus perceived software ownership doesn’t really matter here- at the end of the day, this is an issue of doing right by customers. Shazam did it right when they changed their app’s pricing model: they grandfathered loyal customers of their app into the new feature set, free of charge. Did they technically have to do that? Probably not. Did they see a firestorm of 1-star reviews on the App Store as a result? Absolutely not- in fact, they saw the opposite, receiving a swell of high praise from customers who appreciated the respect shown to them.

And that’s really what this issue is about: respect. In this digital age, people are very, very protective over their perceived ownership of software, since there isn’t such a thing as a “boxed copy”, or any sense of tangible ownership that comes with a physical product. Pulling the rug out from under your own customers may not break any laws, but it violates the hell out of the law of common sense.

Instacast pricing raises hackles: are apps bought or rented? [Updated] [TUAW]

Update: I made a mistake about Instacast’s support for notifications in the original draft of this article. Please read my corrections at the end. My

Adobe’s new Edge program, part of the newly-released Creative Suite 6, basically does what Flash can do- create animations, interface design, etc.- but it does it with HTML5 and JavaScript. It’s basically a frontend for HTML5’s incredibly powerful Canvas element. I cannot WAIT to dive into this app.

I read an interesting article over at TUAW this morning, chronicling a digital magazine’s decision to nix its native iPad app in favor of an HTML5-based web app. First off, I was impressed because the magazine, Blackline, is a satirical magazine. God knows we could use more humor on the dry, banal Apple Newsstand. Second, the article speculates that this could be the beginning of a trend in which publishers begin to recode their native apps in favor of web-based issues.

It makes perfect sense for online magazine developers, and app developers in general, to want to move away from dedicated apps. After all, “porting” a web app for compatibility between devices is a hell of a lot different than actually going in and recoding a native app from scratch for those same platforms. Not to mention the fact that it liberates the content producer from having to navigate the choppy and inconsistent waters of each platform’s app submission process.

Hopefully we will see a migration of more developers away from native apps, as HTML5 standards become more, well, standard across browsers and devices. God knows I’d rather be working in HTML than in C++.

Timeline WW2 offers museum-quality app interaction