Hey Darkroom and Darkroom Pro users, if you haven’t tried our online service yet, this is a good time to start. We’ve just added some more functionality to Darkroom online to make the experience better for you and visitors to your photos.

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.

Thanks to @adevadeh on Twitter who first told us that Stepcase Darkroom Pro was picked by Scott Bourne of PhotoFocus.com in last week’s episode (episode 171, Dec 15, 2009) of MacBreak Weekly.

“Oh my goodness, is it cool!”

– 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 Premium is finally available to iPhone users, again! The support for OS 3.1 is here, so go download the Darkroom Premium update and start using it.

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!

UPDATE (9/19/2009) – Darkroom Premium (v.2.3) has finally been approved by Apple and it’s available now in the iTunes Store. So update now! Darkroom Standard, on the other hand, is still awaiting approval from Apple.

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.

We wanted to update everyone on the status of both Darkroom and Darkroom Premium. For those who attended or saw the news coming out of Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference 2009 last week, you have no doubt learned iPhone OS 3.0 will be available on June 17. You’ve seen how the new OS 3.0 is packed with great features, but with these great features, comes bad news for developers and more importantly, users.

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?

UPDATE: The issue has been fixed by Apple. Please read below for the latest update and instruction.

The new version of Darkroom 2.2 was officially approved by Apple on 8th April. However after several hours of the release, we received floods of support queries. Users reported that they could not update their copy. When the user tries to update the application through iTunes and sync it to iPhone, iTunes returns an error message, “The application “Darkroom” was not installed on the iPhone because it could not be verified.”

We took immediate action to make sure this is not the binary problem that we submitted, and it should not be the case. First, the testing indicates that we do not have any problems on the Darkroom Premium, which was approved several days before the regular version. Both Darkroom Premium and Darkroom were generated from the same codebase (with different features activated). Plus the binaries were signed properly, otherwise iTunes Connect would not have accepted them. Second, this error occurs before the runtime, when verifying the application binary from iTunes store. (more…)

Designed by BeansBox.

Several months ago, we launched the Stepcase corporate site with very little information, a homepage and a job page—just lean enough to get us started. Today, we’re launching another set of content, mostly to provide more information about Stepcase as a company and its offerings. We are working hard on our web application suite, Stepcase Apps, which will also integrate with this site later. Exciting times!