When iOS4 was announced, we were ecstatic. Multitasking was finally coming to the iPhone! But as we listened on, our dreams of an ideal Pastebot were crumbling away as we heard the limitations of this new feature. In the end, Apple had not provided a way to let Pastebot run in the background. We spent weeks replying with bad news to our customers as they emailed us about Pastebot running in the background on iOS4.

But not all was lost. About a week later (after iOS4′s release), Paul came up with an idea that would actually allow Pastebot to run in the background. Yes, you heard that right. It was a bit of a gamble, but it did not use any private API’s. All we want is to make Pastebot work in the way we always intended it to. The idea is to have a silent audio clip play in the background. This would use one of Apple’s backgrounding APIs that allows music to play in the background. Turns out it works flawlessly. You can finally copy from your Mac or on your iPhone without having to open Pastebot after each copy. When you copy from another app, the signature Tapbots copy sound plays to inform you that Pastebot received it. We added options for timing out after inactivity (to preserve battery life even though it doesn’t use much in the first place) as well the option to turn it off completely. It’s a very elegant solution and behaves flawlessly. We tested it for about a month and our beta testers seem to love the feature and have reported no issues with it.

With excitement, we submitted the final build to Apple last week. A week passed by and we finally received a notice about Pastebot. Rejected. It wasn’t what we hoped for, but to be honest it was expected. We aren’t allowed to play a silent audio clip in the background. After reading over the rejection letter a few times, frustration faded away. They have rules to follow to keep the background services from being used in ways they were not intended to. Fair enough. In the rejection letter, Apple gave us two options:

1. Provide audible content to the user while running in the background
2. Remove the audio from the background

We thought about it for a bit more. We want to provide this invaluable feature to our customers. Pastebot benefits greatly from it. Why don’t we just let our users select a song from their music library to play in the background? This would allow this feature to get approved and everyone would be happy. Yes, having a song playing in the background while Pastebot runs in the background isn’t ideal, but nothing is stopping the user from putting their device on mute or better yet, using a silent audio clip of their own (wink wink). So that’s what we are going to do. We are going to take option #1 so you’ll have to select a song to play if you want Pastebot to run in the background. All you need to do is add a short silent audio clip to your library and use that. After all, silence is golden and nobody can prevent you from listening to nothing if you choose. Apple even sells silent songs themselves.

In Other Pastebot News

I also wanted to mention that in this last update, we’ve added 2 more small features:

1. The ability to view images full screen. This was actually requested by a few iOS app designers so they can store mockups in Pastebot and be able to view them full screen.
2. The ability to send clippings as text messages. This was a long time request, but wasn’t available until iOS4.

That’s all the info we have for now. We will resubmit Pastebot soon and hope that this time it will be approved. Cross your fingers!

Version 1.2 lets you connect multiple devices to your Mac at the same time. If you copy something on the Mac it’ll show up on all your connected devices. If you Paste something from your iPhone/iPad, you’ll get the choice of either sending it to the Mac or to your other connected devices. It’s all pretty cool and should make life easier for all of us with multiple devices.

Pastebot has no eyes for you.

You may have noticed Pastebot v1.2 has an updated app icon. About 2 weeks ago we received a letter from a company claiming that our old Pastebot app icon infringed on their trademarked face logo. After consulting with different lawyers, we were given two simple choices. Try to settle with the company or spend upwards of $250k in legal fees to fight it. We feel that the logos, market and customer base are different enough that we aren’t infringing on their trademark, but we don’t want to waste our time and energy in a protracted legal battle. We want to focus on creating software. After much discussion we decided that the best solution for us was to just settle with the company. We originally suggested changing the color of our icon but that wasn’t sufficient enough. Removing the eyes was the only solution that didn’t make Pastebot unrecognizable and appeased the other party.

We’ve been asked not to publicly identify the company, so don’t ask us who it was. I will say that their trademark was issued before Pastebot was even started, so this isn’t a case of a company using trademark to extort another company. Trademark is also an interesting brand of law in which you have to proactively defend against anyone you think is infringing on your rights. So while we don’t agree that we are infringing on their rights, we understand where they are coming from.

We aren’t happy that we had to change the icon, but really didn’t have a good choice. I’m sure that most people won’t be crazy about the change, but by putting this behind us we can continue to focus on our next app.

• New Language Translation Filter
• Ability to select app launch location
• Ability to create new folder during move
• Ability to duplicate clips
• Ability to group and ungroup clips
• Support/About sections in preferences
• Enable/disable text links in preferences (disabled by default)
• Various bug fixes

I wanted to mention that there have been some reshuffling of some of the button icons and menus. We hate making changes like this, but felt it was necessary for the growth of the app.

You also need to update your version of Pastebot Sync. FYI, the new version of Pastebot Sync doesn’t work with Pastebot 1.0x and vice versa. You can grab the new version of the sync app here.

We are now hard at work on app #4 and extremely excited about it. Let us know what you think and don’t forget to leave a review in the app store!

New Features

• Ability to paste images directly to the Finder and iPhoto.
• Ability to copy groups of images both ways.
• File names of images copied from the Finder, iPhoto, and Safari are saved and also automatically become titles in Pastebot for better search results.
• Titles added to images in Pastebot become the file name when pasted to the Finder

Bug Fixes:

• Fixed issue with no menubar in 10.5.
• Fixed issue with images appearing in Pastebot as “Unknown Data” in 10.5.

There are 3 ways to get this update.

• Wait for the auto-update to pop up.
• Select “Check for Updates” from the Pastebot Sync menu icon. (10.5 users can’t do this because of the bug which has been fixed)
• Download directly from our website (If you redownload, be sure to turn the Sync app OFF and back ON after the install to restart the service)

Let us know if you have any questions or issues!

App #0003 has finally launched! It’s been 6 long months since we started on this project. I don’t want to turn this into a long post about how we got here, because all that really matters is we made it and hope you’ll enjoy it. Pastebot is definitely different than our previous apps. Some would say it’s riskier. But there’s no other way to grow and move forward without taking risks. After all, who would have thought anyone could make a living creating software for mobile devices? Pastebot was a lot more work than our previous apps, but it also does so much more than them. We are happy with the results and hope you are too.

Visit the Pastebot Website for videos, screenshots, and more info

Download on iTunes

A Quick Thank You

We want to thank our customers for keeping us driven to make more apps. The reviews, emails, and twitter posts have really kept us excited about what we do. We also want to thank our beta testers for all the support and feedback they have given us. They truly helped make Pastebot a better product than it was. And last but definitely not least, we want to thank our localizers (Guy Parrot, Yuzuru Shiraiwa and Tobias Brummer) who have taken their free time to help translate our app into other languages.