After narrowly missing the opportunity to acquire Instagram, it seems that Twitter was eager to try again; this time with one of the most popular paid camera apps, Camera+. Apparently, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey actually met with tap tap tap — the makers of Camera+ — to discuss an acquisition shortly after news of Facebook’s Instagram acquisition broke.

This news comes just two weeks after Twitter CEO Dick Costolo told the press that they would not be trying to acquire an Instagram competitor. It’s all the same, however, because negotiations didn’t end up leading to a purchase or even an offer. The main reason for the breakdown in negotiations was apparently location: Camera+ employees are located all over the world and were reluctant to relocate to San Francisco.

(via Bloomberg and MacWorld)

It looks like tap tap tap’s Camera+ added one too many features for Apple’s liking. When the app developers tweeted a secret workaround that enabled the volume button to double up to control the shutter, Apple pulled Camera+ from the App Store.

Just this week, developer John Casasanta wrote in a blog post that an upgraded version of the app originally intended to launch the feature, VolumeSnap. VolumeSnap would have also allowed users to use the volume control on iPhone headphones as a remote shutter control. Pretty nifty.

But Apple rejected tap tap tap’s new version, citing this as a reason:

Your application cannot be added to the App Store because it uses iPhone volume buttons in a non-standard way, potentially resulting in user confusion. Changing the behavior of iPhone external hardware buttons is a violation of the iPhone Developer Program License Agreement. Applications must adhere to the iPhone Human Interface Guidelines as outlined in the iPhone Developer Program License Agreement section 3.3.7

So tap tap tap left out the feature — at first. The app retained the feature, which was now hidden, but could be enabled by pointing the phone’s browser to a specific site provided by the developers. Read more…