CubeCheater Updates

A couple of interesting things have been happening in the CubeCheater world recently.

First, I recently received a nastygram cease-and-desist from the Rubik's Cube company, which claims that CubeCheater infringes on its rights.  Apparently they claim rights to any and all "depictions" of Rubik's Cubes.

I obviously did not use any "Rubik" names or logos in the app, so I had thought it would be in the clear, especially since the app only solves cubes and does not simulate them. I don't know enough about intellectual propery law to know whether it's legitimate to claim rights to depictions of products, but there does seem to be some precedent for trademarking the "likeness" of a product.

Either way, there's no way I could possibly afford to fight it in court, so I didn't have much of a choice. I negotiated with the Rubik's Cube company, and we came to an agreement that I could keep CubeCheater alive as long as it was available for free.

So this week I made CubeCheater available for free on the App Store. In the few days since then, it's been downloaded about 25,000 times.

On a more positive note, version 1.2 of CubeCheater is now available, and adds support for many new languages!  CubeCheater is now translated into Japanese, German, French, Italian and Spanish. Fortunately the app doesn't have a whole lot of text so it was fairly easy to translate. Still, some problems did come up, such as most of the German text strings being too long for the buttons that I had calibrated for the English version. Eventually I got everything to fit.

Here are some screenshots of CubeCheater in Japanese and German: