This article is a perfect time to lament the poor quality of many of these 'news' sites. Nowhere in the story does it say that Slashgear made any attempt to contact Apple and ask about this situation. Apple has an entire media department that you can call and ask (http://www.apple.com/pr/).
The worst case is that Apple will give you a no comment, or we'll get back to you. That you can report. But here all we have is a sentence wasted burbling And considering that NDrive isn’t the only GPS application available on the iPhone, or within the App Store proper, we’re not sure why Apple would choose now, or this app, to pull that lever.
At the start of the article they claim That would mostly be because Apple hasn’t had any reason to use it. Is that true? Did they ask Apple?
If you follow the blog chain backwards you'll come to someone who did call Apple, and has a possible explanation for why the application was removed: it appears NDrive may not have fully licensed the map data used in the application.
The entire article would be much more interesting if they'd called Apple and asked them a few questions. And then called NDrive and asked them about the map licensing, or called Teledata and asked them. You know, actually done some work towards the article rather than 'reporting' rumors.
Also, they need someone to look over their copy.
Several customers are reporting that the application called NDrive, which was developed by a small team to be a GPS alternative.
What did the customers do? Also, I'm pretty sure this small team did not develop an alternative to GPS. That would have required launching and maintaining a large number of satellites.
And then subsequently pulled from customer’s iPhones as well.
One customer or many?
Some months ago I wrote a blog post about baggage tags used on airlines (http://blog.jgc.org/2009/08/whats-on-baggage-tag.html). In it you'll see documented the work it took (with a little help from a friend) to get the answers I wanted.
And the other day I was writing something that appeared on The Times' web site and needed information about the status of the BT site at Goonhilly (http://timesonline.typepad.com/science/2010/06/sea-sand-sun-...). I simply called BT's media relations and they were very, very helpful. They even got me an answer on a day when half their staff were off on a training course.
While it would be a benefit to this story, I don't see why anybody should have a duty to write both sides of the story on their blog - I properly would have written to Apple, but if they didn't give a good reason I can't fault the guy for not posting it.
The important part of "journalistic integrity" is "integrity". People are certainly free act without integrity in what they say, but that doesn't mean they should.
The worst case is that Apple will give you a no comment, or we'll get back to you. That you can report. But here all we have is a sentence wasted burbling And considering that NDrive isn’t the only GPS application available on the iPhone, or within the App Store proper, we’re not sure why Apple would choose now, or this app, to pull that lever.
At the start of the article they claim That would mostly be because Apple hasn’t had any reason to use it. Is that true? Did they ask Apple?
If you follow the blog chain backwards you'll come to someone who did call Apple, and has a possible explanation for why the application was removed: it appears NDrive may not have fully licensed the map data used in the application.
The entire article would be much more interesting if they'd called Apple and asked them a few questions. And then called NDrive and asked them about the map licensing, or called Teledata and asked them. You know, actually done some work towards the article rather than 'reporting' rumors.
Also, they need someone to look over their copy.
Several customers are reporting that the application called NDrive, which was developed by a small team to be a GPS alternative.
What did the customers do? Also, I'm pretty sure this small team did not develop an alternative to GPS. That would have required launching and maintaining a large number of satellites.
And then subsequently pulled from customer’s iPhones as well.
One customer or many?
Some months ago I wrote a blog post about baggage tags used on airlines (http://blog.jgc.org/2009/08/whats-on-baggage-tag.html). In it you'll see documented the work it took (with a little help from a friend) to get the answers I wanted.
And the other day I was writing something that appeared on The Times' web site and needed information about the status of the BT site at Goonhilly (http://timesonline.typepad.com/science/2010/06/sea-sand-sun-...). I simply called BT's media relations and they were very, very helpful. They even got me an answer on a day when half their staff were off on a training course.