Checking my logs earlier, it seems that today WorkMatter got noticed by someone at Apple. Most likely from my latest tweets. My HTTP logs are showing a few visits coming from Apple campus in Cupertino and interesting enough some other logs around the same time are showing visitors from British Columbia in Canada... which if I recall correctly is the place where a few engineers working on iWork are located.
The WorkMatter app rejection is less and less surprising when I think about it, and most likely Apple is going to release an iPhone client for it. The various visits I am seeing in the logs I think are a sign of it - especially a few days before WWDC. Sadly instead of playing a fair game, Apple is using the SDK agreement to avoid competitions. Technically -I am not a lawyer- WorkMatter should not be rejected because the reasons for the rejection are not really applying to such application:
"Applications may not use any robot, spider, site search or other retrieval application or device to scrape, retrieve or index services provided by Apple or its licensors, or to collect information about users for any unauthorized purpose. "
There is no public API allowing information from iWork.com to be used in the manner demonstrated by your application.
On the topic "robot/spider/site search or other retrieval application/scraping" WorkMatter is not using such third party service. WorkMatter simply is using standard HTTP calls (WebDAV call most of the times) and the application's user is perfectly aware that the app is accessing his own information. The user is granting access to the data like he/she does using a standard full desktop browser.
On the second topic about the "public API" : again this is not totally accurate. WebDAV is a public protocol and thus a public API that can be used. iWork.com is simply a WebDAV server -technically speaking it seems that iWork.com is an updated/forked version of MobileMe iDisk based on the headers you can see when looking at an HTTP transactions. So the protocol used by iWork.com is a public API, but it's true that Apple did not expose officially any API to retrieve or post comments.
[UPDATE 7:20pm] In addition, showing how much inconsistency the review process is, there is at least one application currently available on the AppStore named "Sales Report" which clearly scrape an Apple web site : the iTunes web site used by developer to track their application sales !
It is quite a surprise to see such application especially one that is so close to the AppStore. Any iPhone developer can tell you that there is absolutely ZERO, none, nada API to retrieve such information except parsing whatever HTML is being generated by the web application. This is clearly one app that violate the SDK agreement but seems to have happily found its place in the AppStore.
Anyway I have tested many times and had various friends test the WorkMatter apps and it was working nicely. Comments were retrieved and visible on the iPhone, it was a good way to check on the go any update on a shared document without the need of a full browser experience. Exactly the kind of application that make the iPhone such great platform.
Most likely when I have a little bit more free time I will be posting a desktop version that will provide an RSS feed of the documents shared on iWork.com so a user can subscribe directly to it. But again I will not be surprise that Apple will be coming with some kind of RSS feed too.