Today, TechCrunch reports that Apple has started pulling "overtly sexual" applications from the App Store. This is good news for anyone trying to deploy iPhone OS devices in an educational context.

I do feel a little uncomfortable that some developers have had the rug yanked out from under them. That said, if there was one kind of app that it was absolutely clear from day one that Apple looked down upon, it was "adult" apps. Steve Jobs said so on the day he announced the App Store. Why those rules haven't been enforced I'm not sure (I suspect lack of staff effort), but they are being enforced now.

Additionally, I just did a little check and iTunes (on the desktop) now hides the screenshots of apps whose ratings are above the level set in iTunes' parental controls. That was one of my main concerns in the earlier post and Apple has addressed this, which is great.

An unfortunate consequence of this, though, is that developers whose apps retrieve content from the web will all have their screenshots hidden. It's not my concern right now but, in the longer term, Apple needs to develop a way to distinguish between "Frequent/Intense {sexual,gambling, drug use,violent} content" and "accesses the internet".

I should add that I don't really claim personal credit for this. Apple's emails to developers cite "numerous customer complaints" which, I bet, outweigh my complaints 1000-to-1. Having said that, it was fairly clear that the App Store as it stood was inappropriate for use in schools and, with the launch of the iPad, I'm sure that's a market Apple want to target.

The head of the £24 million Bristol Brunel Academy — a beacon of Labour’s Building Schools for the Future (BSF) programme — said that its wireless system had yet to work properly and teachers still did the register on paper because of problems with swipe cards

Incompetence on an epic scale.

In my school, we aim to lose no more than five teaching hours per school year to computer failure. The last couple of years have been less than three.

some heads, particularly those involved with the BSF programme complain that they have lost freedom over their IT budgets, and are forced to buy expensive equipment through designated suppliers

This is a huge issue. Overpriced, underpowered hardware on long inflexible contracts coupled with fashion-led purchasing (interactive whiteboards, fingerprint scanners).

Let's not even get started on GLOW, Scotland's nationwide Microsoft SharePoint deployment.

Delivering yesterday's technology tomorrow.

I'll have more to say later once I've had a chance to install and play, but I wanted to remark on one thing straight away: Aperture 3 is being marketed as a direct upgrade for consumers from iPhoto.

A few points of evidence:

• The marketing line on apple.com is "Pro performance. iPhoto simplicity.", implying that iPhoto users could easily step up to Aperture.
• The main Aperture page has four sub-boxes: "What is Aperture?", "New in Aperture 3", "Aperture in Action" and "Go from iPhoto to Aperture".
• There's a full two pages of content on "Why move" and "How to move" from iPhoto to Aperture.

Since 1.0, the Aperture team has been on a mission to continually refine and simplify the Aperture interface. Aperture 2 was a big step in closing the simplicity gap with iPhoto. I don't yet know that Aperture 3 has closed it, but Aperture has never before been so heavily marketed at iPhoto users as this version is.

I've been saying for some time that the more modern, more scalable Aperture should at some point become Apple's only photogaphy application for both professionals and amateurs. Is today the first step on that road?

a distributed phalanx of tablets will be far more palatable, more civil, than the walls of laptop screens that are temporarily erected during meetings now

This is one of my fervent hopes for the iPad in school settings. Putting the screens down on the desk changes the shape and feel of the classroom.

I spent this morning going through the Apple iPad videos - the keynote and the promotional video - trying to pick up some cues about how the UI conventions are supposed to work. The result is in a set on Flickr.

The iWork demos were most enlightening. Here are some screenshots. Apologies for the quality - they're screenshots of Quicktime Player:

Pages Styles Inspector

Pages Layout Inspector

Numbers Formula Library

Keynote Transition Inspector, showing Magic Move

Look at what's in here: a full stylesheet engine, multi-column page layout, a complete library of cell formulae and a full set of builds and transitions. You can create a Magic Move transition on the iPad. That's probably the most advanced technique you can do in Keynote, and it's there on the iPad.

Someone on iPad4Edu pointed out that the Tech Specs page states that:

The Camera Connection Kit gives you two ways to import photos and videos from a digital camera. The Camera Connector lets you import your photos and videos to iPad using the camera’s USB cable. Or you can use the SD Card Reader to import photos and videos directly from the camera’s SD card.

So you can import media from a camera on the fly, and you can use all the power of the iWork suite to create documents. I haven't even mentioned the Brushes demo that was in the keynote.

Are you still telling me this isn't a content creation device?

In Who Will Save Us? he writes:

Who will save book publishing?

What will save the newspapers?

What means 'save'?

If by save you mean, "what will keep things just as they are?" then the answer is nothing will. It's over.

...

We need to get past this idea of saving, because the status quo is leaving the building, and quickly. Not just in print of course, but in your industry too.

I think "The Status Quo is Leaving the Building" might be a perfect motto for 2010.

If you're not reading Seth you really, really need to start.

"the personal computer is a petri dish for malware. It's a terrible consumer product. You wouldn't accept that flaw in any appliance"

..followed by:

Control over code execution is just a part of 21st century digital consumer products. You can argue with *how* Apple does it, but not *why*

What if someone at Apple looked into the future and saw computer vendors in the dock for knowingly selling defective products to the unknowing consumer in the same way that tobacco companies have done in times past?

Sounds like a great resume-builder for any hungry young DA, no?

I have absolutely no doubt that the major OS vendors know of serious security bugs in various parts of their products, but have decided that the task of fixing them all is far beyond the cost/benefit curve.

What if "starting over" (conceptually, if not literally) is the only way to demonstrate good faith?

iPad4Edu is a website dedicated to helping educators understand and use the iPad in educational contexts. Education is broadly defined - from early years through to further, higher and adult education.

iPad4Edu is based on the popular Stack Overflow platform, which has proven a big hit in the area of knowledge exchange on the web. I hope this site can become useful to teachers interested in using the iPad in education.

Please feel very free to sign up and start asking and answering questions. I'd love to see you there.

I have no information to prove or disprove that my bug reports, articles and the subsequent coverage on Ars Technica has anything to do with this policy change. There will, I understand, be an article in the Sunday Times this weekend on the issue (I was photographed for the piece on Friday).

My bug reports didn't request an App Store policy change, as much as a slightly tighter enforcement of the parental controls that already exist. Still, it's good to see Apple living up to their original intent for the App Store.

[Update] It strikes me that, although this wasn't what I asked for, it's probably less effort for Apple than trying to clarify the conflation of "contains smut" and "loads web pages" that the current ratings policy requires.