Darkroom NotesSeason 6STIL.HUBPart 5 of 6
The words I couldn't write — hunting down a subtitle
The first subtitle read "Control your Mac from iPhone." App Review's objection was the way it used the word iPhone. Just swap the words — except the same words were living in the site's headline, in the social-share image, and in the opening seconds of the very video I'd filmed for review. Changing words, it turned out, was not a matter of fixing one place.
Until now, stories from inside the code. Today, from outside it — a story about words. In the receipt season I wrote about a word I decided never to write. This time it's the reverse: words I wanted, and couldn't have.
"Control your Mac from iPhone"
On the App Store, every app carries a one-line subtitle under its name. The STIL family has always put a short sentence of the same shape there — the receipt becomes an expense; speech becomes a record.
For HUB, I had prepared: "Control your Mac from iPhone." (In Japanese, literally "your iPhone becomes the Mac's control deck.") It said exactly what the app does, and it fit the family's pattern. I liked it.
The objection was one word
The first submission didn't pass. One of the objections was this subtitle: the way it used the word iPhone didn't follow the trademark guidelines.
The interesting part: "Mac" drew no objection. Referring to a product you support — the "for Mac" construction — is permitted. The problem was the iPhone side. This app itself runs on the iPhone, so wearing "iPhone" in its self-introduction could make it look like Apple's own product — that seemed to be the reasoning. A platform's name is borrowed property. And borrowed property can't go on your nameplate.
The new subtitle became "Control for your Mac." — in Japanese, "the Mac's controls, at your hand." The word iPhone went away, replaced by a word of my own: at hand. The family pattern survived; the borrowed word left the nameplate. These days I like the new one better. "At hand" carries the distance across a desk inside it.
The other homework
There was a second request: a demo video showing a physical iPhone and the Mac running the companion in the same frame. Fair enough — a two-device app can't really be reviewed one device at a time. I filmed the whole run, from first pairing through a full workflow, put the 3-minute-31-second video on my own site, and submitted it as review material.
Words don't live in one place
Now the real subject. Swap the subtitle, resubmit — that should have been the end. It wasn't.
"Control your Mac from iPhone" had been living outside the App Store too. In the product site's headline. In the text baked into the image that appears when the link is shared. And in the first forty seconds of the demo video I had just filmed for review, where that very headline filled the screen. A video accompanying a reply that says "we removed it from the subtitle" — opening on the removed words. That's not a fix.
So the real work turned out to be not correction but search. Where do those words live? The site, the images, the video, the store description. Find each one, replace each one; the video lost its first forty seconds to the cut. The site now matches the new words everywhere, headline through share image.
What it means to change a word
In the world of code, rename something and every place that refers to it turns into an error and tells you so. The world of words has no such mechanism. Where you used a phrase, you simply have to remember. And you mostly don't.
Changing a word is not fixing one occurrence. It's going out to find everywhere that word has been living. One day after resubmission, the app passed review — twelve days, counting from the first note of the idea.
Next time
The next post closes Season 6: the whole run of the phone becoming a deck at your hand — and then, the family's first-ever "free."
STIL.HUB is out on the App Store.
