There have already been a lot of reported issues, but add one more.

The Langalot iPhone app didn’t pass the App Store review because “The iCal icon you are using for the Practice Log is an Apple trademarked image.” I could understand it better if we did use the iCal icon or doctored up the iCal icon, but this is the icon in question:

I don’t think you have to use a loupe to notice that the app is not using the iCal icon:

But from previous experience, this isn’t worth any time trying to fight. I wasn’t even crazy about the icon to begin with (got it from some free icon set). It just slows down the process of getting the app approved.

I took the langalot iphone app out into the wild for four days of testing. It worked great! I had data roaming off the whole time and when I got free wi-fi, I would synch up the app. I doubled the number of saved words and spent a lot of time studying the new words while immersed in the language at the same time.

The application that I whipped together to provide offline dictionary access was also indispensable. I used it almost exclusively instead of my Franklin electronic German dictionary. I could look up a word and save it without any internet access (the regular langalot app requires internet access to search for words and sentences). Then when wi-fi was available, I synched it to the langalot servers and then the new words and sentences were saved in my account. We’re definitely going to release it, just need to package it all up and make it work for more than one user and language. We’ll call it “Langalot Street” or something along those lines…it doesn’t provide any of the learning or messaging of the full app, but when you’re on the street in a foreign country or in a classroom and don’t necessarily have internet access, it will let you look up words and sentences and save them offline. And we’ll add a few other features to make it an even better tool.

The immersion experiment with Langalot was a success. It definitely gave us some ideas on tweaks that will make it even better!

In other news, the new site design is up at xblabs.com.

Inspired by BERG and thus HDL, we’re going to post weekly updates.

The biggest event of this week was that we submitted the Langalot iPhone app to the app store. Hopefully it will be approved soon as the major reason for starting the langalot project was to have it on a mobile device. Interested? sneak peek

I’ll be testing it out in a foreign country this weekend, along with an alpha version of an offline langalot dictionary app.

Now we’re catching up on lots of loose ends and getting more code out the door. The India BigPatents site should be mentioned as well as we released a new design. There are several more changes coming soon.

It’s dark in NYC way too early now…

Photo by extranoise

A lot of people worry about getting health insurance, especially when they go out on their own and start a small company. At least in New York State, it’s really not that big of a deal. It’s a pain in the ass, but it’s a lot better than other states. From what I know, New York has a law that insurance companies cannot deny you coverage. The only downside to this is that being young and healthy doesn’t reduce your premiums. Everyone pays the same (high) rate. In other states, I’ve gotten so-called “emergency” health insurance that basically will only help if something big happens but is useless for periodic care. It has an extremely high deductible. But these plans don’t exist in New York for individuals, so you have to at least get an HMO.

There are a few options. If you don’t make a lot of money (yet), you can get a reduced rate through Healthy NY. There are eligibility requirements and I did go through this at the beginning, but then for a variety of reasons, after about six months it ended in a bureaucratic mess that was too difficult to fix, so I abandoned it. But if you qualify, it’s definitely the cheapest.

If you’re a freelancer, you can join the Freelancers Union. They provide a lot of different health plans (and dental, life, disability). You have to be eligible (no W-2s, show invoices for $10K in past 6 months), but I’ve heard good things about it and the rates look pretty good.

You can find a health insurance broker. I tried this once with mixed results. They all felt a little slimy. One of them wanted me to enlist a family member as a partner in my company and not provide them health insurance to somehow get a reduced rate. Another one wouldn’t stop calling me after I contacted him (via email) once. It didn’t work out for me, but I gather that this is a common method for many small businesses to find a health insurance plan.

Or, you can just buy health insurance as an individual. I went through ehealthinsurance. It’s fairly painless and mostly online. It’s not the cheapest, but it also isn’t astronomical.

Hopefully one day this post will be obselete…

The XB Labs blog is back…powered by Jekyll.

1. @joehewitt: The man behind the Facebook iPhone app and Three20.
2. @cabel: Cabel Sasser, a co-founder of Panic.
3. @wilshipley: Wil Shipley of Delicious Monster/Delicious Library fame.
4. @buzz: Buzz Anderson, programmer of Birdhouse.
5. @rentzsch: rentzsch, indie developer (Textcast) and organizer of C4 conference.
6. @brentsimmons: Brent Simmons, author of NetNewsWire.
7. @fraserspeirs: Fraser Speirs, programmer of FlickrExport and Darkslide.
8. @chockenberry: Craig Hockenberry, twitterific creator.

And a few extras!

1. @ccgus: Creator of Acorn and Voodoo Pad.
2. @danielpunkass: Wrote MarsEdit.
3. @ddribin: rentzsch’s partner on Textcast.

(thanks to sisyphus for adding the extras)