First, sorry for lack of updates. Both on the news front and the apps front. It’s been a crazy few months and things should hopefully go back to normal after April.

The biggest bit of news is that http://www.figmentdevelopment.com is shut down (for now). I expect it will be down for a few weeks. When it comes back, I’m hoping it’ll be better than ever. The domain points to this server for now, with no content. With this outage, the WeatherAlert (iOS) service is stopped. Please bear with me while everything is moved.

In other news, I’ve also branched out into contract iOS dev work. I recently worked with some folks on a custom iPad app for an Enterprise customer. It was successful and on time, and everyone was happy. So if anyone out there is interested in a custom application, please contact me.

As of yesterday, the Push Service for CurrentTemp should be back and running fine again. There are still tweaks to be made, so you may see small windows of an hour or so where it doesn’t work, but otherwise it should be back for good. Look for updates to the app (hopefully) in Q1 2012. Thanks for your patience.

The push service for CurrentTemp has been disabled for the time being.  November showed a very high piracy rate for the app, causing the number of pushes sent for the month to increase by over 25%.  This increase in push traffic through the provider I’m using caused my costs to go up over $200 for the month.  For the month of November the app cost over 10x more to run than it brought in as revenue.  I’ll be building and hosting my own push service, as well as implementing some piracy detection.  I apologize for the inconvenience and hope to have the app back running ASAP.

With the release of iOS 5.1 beta, Apple has killed the method that the Toggle apps used.  The initial rejection stated that using something not officially documented could change at any time.  Guess they’re proving that point by changing it!

Figment’s first app WeatherAlert will soon be transitioning from figmentdevelopment.com to figmentapps.com. During this time, the alert service will be disabled. The move to WeatherAlert 2.0 is taking much longer than expected, due to a number of reasons. The app will get the big update, I have no ETA on that though.  In the mean time, a small update will probably be issued to make the move easier and the upgrade to 2.0 smoother.  More will be posted as this happens.

Interested in a Figment t-shirt?  Makes a great holiday gift!  Head on over to the Swag page for more info.

I was hoping this post would be a press release announcing the arrival of WiFiToggle and BTToggle in the App Store.  Instead, it’s a note saying that Apple rejected the submission of these apps.  I submitted an appeal to them, but I’m not very optimistic that the ruling will be reversed.  They claim the apps were rejected for use of non-public APIs.  That is 100% incorrect.  I use perfectly legitimate and public APIs in the apps.  My guess is they’ll just change the wording of the rule.  Either way, I’ll keep you updated.