In addition to just uploading your photos taken with Darkroom, you’ll now be able to:

• Register from the web
• Comment on all photos posted on Darkroom Online
• See how many times your photo has been viewed
• Access Darkroom Online from your iPhone Safari browser

Of course, you’ll be able to continue sharing your photos or those photos you find interesting to your Twitter and Facebook friends, bookmark it to Delicious and recommend it through StumbleUpon.

Not a Darkroom or Darkroom Pro user? Not a problem! You can still be part of the Darkroom community and participate with the existing users. But for the full experience, download either Darkroom or Darkroom Pro and start sharing your snaps.

– Scott Bourne on Darkroom Pro

We are very excited about being mentioned in MacBreak Weekly and the positive review that was given. What a great way to end our somewhat turbulent 2009! In the New Year, stay tuned to Stepcase as we continue to improve Darkroom and more importantly, improve the online features to provide a community for everyone to share their photos through existing social media tools such as Twitter and Facebook.

So if you haven’t already, head over to MacBreak Weekly to listen to episode 171 (Darkroom Pro is mentioned towards the end of the show) or download Darkroom Pro to take your next shot!

Happy Holidays from the Stepcase team in Hong Kong.

Darkroom Standard v.2.3 will now work for iPhones running the latest OS, 3.1. iPhones running OS 3.0 will continue to encounter issues, so please update to the latest OS.

We’re also working on some exciting improvements, so stayed tuned for that! In the meantime, enjoy your Darkroom Standard or upgrade to Premium!

For the time being, Apple has only approved our Premium version, Darkroom Standard version users will need to wait a bit longer for Apple to approve.

Finally, we’d like to thank our users for being patient with us during this unusually long (and ongoing) approval process. Thanks and enjoy Darkroom again!

We have included video from our information session held back in May at City University of Hong Kong. The program was conducted mainly in Cantonese with a portion of it in Mandarin. Aside from Leon and Greg, the info session included speakers from two other startups, David Lee of EditGrid and Geng Chun-ya of EastSpider.

0 to 0.1 Incubation Program Info Session Part 1/2:

0 to 0.1 Incubation Program Info Session Part 2/2:

If you want to follow these startups, stay tuned as we will introduce the teams and their ideas in future posts.

Due to the number of support questions regarding Darkroom and OS 3.0 support in the past week, it seems many are still unaware of why Darkroom is not compatible with OS 3.0. Therefore, I have created this blog post for your use. We will to respond to everyone’s general OS 3.0 support concerns via the comments, but if you want to address us privately, you can certainly do so by emailing us.

Here’s the complete rundown of what’s been happening:

• Current versions of Darkroom and Darkroom Premium are NOT compatible with OS 3.0.
• We have an OS 3.0 compatible version but Apple has repeatedly rejected it because we use a custom camera interface. They have approved it in the past, but have since stopped and claims we are using an undocumented API to achieve the interface.  In other words, we are at a standstill with Apple.
• If we strip it down to comply with Apple, Darkroom will be no different than default Camera app.
• Other photo apps that uses a custom camera interface are also having the same problems with getting approved.
• We have not been updated by Apple of any changes in developer guidelines that would result in this situation.

Additionally, this past weekend, we noticed Apple has approved a photo app that uses a custom camera interface, Real Cam LE. So, this could be a sign that Darkroom is in line for approval or Apple has some serious issues with their apps approval team, as many have suggested.

So, if the approval action for the photo app mentioned above is not flawed, you could still see Darkroom make a comeback to your iPhones. For now though, we’ve done as much as we could on our end and it’s not resulting in any response from Apple. What we suggest is for you, our users, to contact Apple directly either by their iTunes feedback form or by phone and express your concerns about this matter.

We have cross post this entry into our Support Forum. You may choose to leave your comments in our support forum as well.

Last month, we did exactly that, updated to support OS 3.0 but was rejected on different occasions. We have exchanged emails but have yet to hear back anything solid from Apple.

Since being rejected, we have heard from at least few other developers of photography apps having the same issue with Apple. All this could have a huge impact not on us developers, but the iPhone users, since there’s a chance that these apps will be removed from the iTunes store, as described in this article.

Unlike Darkroom, there are other developers, of apps like NightCamera, QuadCam, ToyCamera, to name a few, lucky to have their apps approved before what appears to be Apple’s stricter control of their custom camera view in their API. This is what we assume from Apple’s email. Sure, iPhone users can continue to download and use those photography apps even after June 17. However, we predict those apps might eventually lose its popularity because even though they support the OS 3.0 now, these apps will have difficulty with publishing new features. Apple will reject them because they use the custom camera view just like Darkroom. In other words, we suspect all these photography apps that uses a custom camera interface will experience a slow death.

To give an idea of the numbers, there has been over 700,000 users who have downloaded Darkroom and that excludes those who downloaded Darkroom Premium. Other photo app developers are affected too, one being QuickShot (from a comment on previous post), they too should have solid download figures with both their Lite and Paid version as their Lite version is included in iTunes Top 20 Free Apps (as of this post). Based on our numbers and some guesstimates, the total number of users and paying customers affected could approach a few million. If those popular apps mentioned above do slowly fall to the bottom, the number of users affected could easily double or triple.

Is Apple going to abandon all these users? And is it fair for Apple to force users to give up an app they have purchased?

For some reason or another, our latest update was rejected. We are scratching our heads here because we updated Darkroom so it can support OS 3.0. But after reading the email from Apple, it was not an issue with OS compatibility, rather it was an issue with us modifying or extending an undocumented API. Say what?!

The fact is, we have always been using their published APIs when developing Darkroom. Sure, we need to transverse into camera’s subviews and access the button event control programatically to delay the shutter action (so that we can check the steadiness of the device), but we only use published API (UIControl’s API) to accomplish that. Therefore this certainly complies with iPhone SDK Agreement section 3.3.1. All core features of Darkroom, such as steady mode, timer mode, and full screen shutter mode require an extra interface for the camera. Otherwise, such functions will not work if it’s not for the custom interface.

Apple has been approving this since we started developing Darkroom, but why this sudden rejection? We believe that other camera apps, such as Night Camera, CameraKit, Camera Zoom, QuadCamera, ProCamera, CameraBag, Pano, Fast Tap Camera, Self-Portrait and many others are also using this method to create their own camera interface as well.

We’d understand if Apple decides to reject apps when they first make their way to the app store, but when our existing app is updated specifically to meet Apple’s new policy (OS 3.0 support) and it gets rejected, we see discrepancies in their approval process and it’s misleading developers. Ultimately though, users and especially the paying customers will no longer have access to the functionalities which they paid for.

Are you a iPhone app developer? Feel free to comment if you have had similar issues with Apple’s approval process?

So what’s it all about?

If you want to follow the developments of a Hong Kong startup, then you should follow @stepcase. We’ll provide updates on our products, news and just about anything relevant. You may also offer your feedback on Twitter, but we’d also recommend submitting them to our support portal. This way, we can use more than 140 characters to help you out. Either way, we will be listening and responding.

Stepcase Lifehack (@lifehackorg), our productivity and lifehack blog, provide feeds to lifehack articles found on Stepcase Lifehack blog. If you are a lifehack kind of guy, then follow this Twitter feed.

Enjoy our tweets.

We have also added a quick help for troubleshooting our iPhone apps and we encourage those who experience problems to run through the list first. If that doesn’t work, then shoot us a support ticket via the support portal.