For some reason that I can't quite fully fathom, the iTunes App Store is just a hotbed of faith-based folderol lately. The latest 99 cents worth of downloadable God silliness comes not from an app you can get on site, but from an app that was recently rejected by Apple. The failed software was the Me So Holy application, which really involves nothing more complex than slapping your face onto some significant religious figure. Want your face on Jesus? There you go. Want to look like the Blessed Virgin? Hail [your name here] full of grace! There did not appear to be a Marduk-Me option, but I'm sure they'd have remedied that with add on content.
Some folks are crying censorship, and there may be some truth in that. But as I look at the app I can only see raging, flagrant lameness. Slapping your face onto a religious figure...as a mobile app...just could not be weaker. So you've got some time to kill during a layover at O'Hare, and decide to graft a mugshot of a random traveller onto the body of Shiva? Wow...I can imagine that happening all the time. Sounds. Like. A. Hoot.
Of course, there's no real point to my faux taser app, either.
What this bit of censorship is, of course, is just reflexive corporate lameness, that wheedling profiteer's fear that somewhere, some hypersensitive zealot is going to make a stink about your product. Apple is manifesting the same corporate counsel tushie-covering instinct that Sony showed in delaying the launch of Little Big Planet last year because they were terrified someone might take offense at a song that included verses of the Koran.
I mean, gracious. This program does nothing that Photoshop doesn't already do ten thousand times better. Who's going to be riled by it? Apple would have been better off just letting the marketplace handle it. We'd have taken one look at this bit of tedium, uttered a collective yawn, and then let it get buried with the tens of thousands of other broken, faddish, or weak attempts at applications.
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