Rob Rhyne on Briefs’s Rejection From the App Store

Briefs is an ingenious tool for creating interactive prototypes of iPhone apps. Rob Rhyne introduced it at last year’s C4 conference, and it blew a bunch of us away. It’s a great idea, well-done, and it very much complies with the letter (and, I think, the spirit) of Apple’s App Store guidelines. To wit: the interactivity is, as stipulated by section 3.3.2 of the developer’s agreement, “interpreted and run by Apple’s Documented APIs and built-in interpreter(s).” You cannot use Briefs to create or distribute actual apps, only mockups of apps.

Alas, Briefs was rejected. Rhyne suspects it is a misunderstanding — that the App Store reviewers, upon seeing what Briefs does, assumed it contains its own interpreter or otherwise executes arbitrary downloaded code. It does not. This one truly deserves reconsideration, Apple.

Learn more about Briefs at the spiffy website Rhyne created for it.

★ Thursday, 3 June 2010