Archive for Development
by Ewan Spence
July 10, 2008 at 1:17 pm · Filed under Mobile Applications, Apple, Long Tail, Design, Development, SDK
Ah yes, the much vaunted Apple Store, chick full of applications for your iPhone or iPod Touch, providing the user with a simple one click access to everything on offer. Is this the long sought for nirvana of mobile app distribution? Perhaps it is for Apple, but not for the developer community.
There’s no simple way of putting this, but the screen of the Apple iPhone will only show a fixed number of applications in the store. There is going to need to be some sort of filtering in place, to provide the top picks, the recommended applications, and those that get a burst of activity. Yes, simply having an application in the store will generate some sales (anecdotal evidence shows the mere act of registering a podcast for iTunes generates around 400 subscribers without actually doing anything), but that’s not going to be enough. These digital paths are paved with gold, remember?
Developers will still have to get people’s attention; they will still need to fight online to get their ‘Super Clock’ application noticed more than ‘Wonder Clock’ and ‘Time Flight.’ They’ll still need a website, they’ll still need to capture eyeballs, and that’s not something that Apple will have clear guidelines on – I’m sure we’ll have rotating weekly picks of apps (much as we do with podcasts) but the process of how these are chosen is going to be murky at best.
How long until we hear developer ‘A’ claim that Apple is favouring developer ‘B’ and giving them help, promoting them in the ratings, just because ‘A’ is in the Valley and ‘B’ is in Poland? Doesn’t matter if it’s true or not, it’s going to take very careful management of expectations and customer handling to navigate choppy waters – and the price drop on the iPhone rises up like the rocks of a Siren as to what can happen when it goes awry.
The more Apple become a services company with day to ay contact with the paranoid world, the less they become a distant faraway godlike visionary hardware company. This is going to be a very interesting period for the Cupertino company, and it’s interesting to me that they’re holding onto as much of the delivery chain as possible.
Developers write the app, submit the app, and then relaise that their influence becomes much more limited. They need to spend their marketing effort pushing Apple’s Store as well as their product – smart move on Apple’s part, having every developer shill their Store to their users (for which they’ll only take a small percentage of any software purchase fee).
What it does do is leave Apple as the sole distributor of pretty much every application that’s going to be written for the iPhone. Unlike Windows Mobile, where a .cab file can be hosted anywhere and downloaded from any URL to the phone; unlike a .sisx file in Symbian OS which again can be downloaded from anywhere; unlike .jar and .jad packages that are pretty much universal. Competition is a good thing, and having options at every part of the delivery chain is key. If Walmart doesn’t like a trucking company, they get another one.
Yet Apple has control of the last mile – from their server to the hardware. They’ve bypassed the network carriers. They’ve bypassed the traditional third party application stores like Handango. To a certain extent they’ve neutered the free (as in choice) route to market that developers have traditionally had to reach their customers.
The bottom line is Apple’s bottom line. They’re not giving up an inch more than they have to. So yes, the Apple App Store may look like a silver lined cloud, but the cloud may rain on some people’s perceptions of the company.
by Ewan Spence
June 2, 2008 at 9:13 am · Filed under Devices, Apple, Nokia, Design, Development
Don’t you just love it when you have to companies start moving in completely opposite directions? Especially when those two companies are rather important in the smartphone and messaging space, and they end up in the same place?
I’m talking about Nokia and Apple, which definitely aren’t N/A to the mobile space. Last week Nokia invited me to attend their S60 Summit, which was an opportunity for the Finnish company to talk about their future plans and thoughts on the space – and there was a lot of focus on their move into the widget space. Using their ‘web runtime,’ a framework devised fro the webkit root of their mobile browser, they are making development of web 2.0 enabling widgets as simple as putting together a page of html, some javascript, and a touch of CSS for the layout. This doesn’t leave behind the Symbian C++ or J2ME programmers, but opens up a huge number of new developers.
Time to change the names.
The SDK for Apple’s iPhone, along with the ability to use the iTunes store to distribute and sell native C++ applications that run on the phone is due to make a big impact this summer. People are itching to get access to the device, the extra onboard features, and to run “outside the browser.” Previously developers only had access to iPhone users by web based widgets, that ran on basic html, with a touch of javascript and CSS, in the browser. (Jailbreaking doesn’t count, just as running iPhone widgets on an N95 didn’t count either, m’kay).
The true balance point isn’t at the extremes of ‘all widgets’ pr ‘all native code,’ but somewhere in-between. The manufacturers have come around to that thinking, and are now going to be able to be compared on a like for like basis; both by developers looking at coding environments, and end-users looking at the respective software catalogues. Now the hardware on each side is pretty much defined for the next eighteen months beyond incremental steps (such as stepping up to 3G), the true battle of the hearts and minds is going to be in software.
Gentlemen, start your dev-kits!
by Imran Ali
May 17, 2008 at 2:42 pm · Filed under Mobile messaging 2.0, iPhone, Conferences, Development
A few hours ago, Raven Zachary announced the second iPhoneDevCamp, taking place at Adobe’s San Francisco offices during the first weekend of August.
Styled around the BarCamp unconference format, the weekend’s events will focus on the development of applications for iPhone and iPod touch, using Apple’s own SDK for native applications as well as web-based applications.
In Raven’s own words…
Attendees will include Cocoa Touch developers, web developers, UI designers, and testers, all working together over the weekend. Development projects will include both solo and team efforts. While some attendees will wish to work solo during the event, we encourage attendees to team up, based on expertise, to work in ad-hoc project development teams. All attendees should be prepared to work on a development project during the event. Attendees will be able to:
- Create new applications for iPhone and iPod touch.
- Migrate Mac OS X applications to iPhone and iPod touch.
- Test and optimize applications for iPhone and iPod touch.
Interestingly, iPhoneDevCamp2 will take place shortly after the much-anticipated launch of the second generation iPhone and, more significantly, the launch of the iPhone App Store. Providing attendees with not only the means to innovate, but also an environment within which to distribute.
Last year’s event was indirectly responsible for the upsurge in demand for unlocked iPhones. Let’s hope Apple is paying attention and looking to see unlocked handsets right from the get go.
by Imran Ali
March 26, 2008 at 1:43 pm · Filed under User Interface, Usage + Usability, touch screens, iPhone, Development, Books, Gestural
With an interminable three months before the June 2008 release of the iPhone SDK, jailbroken, hacked iPhones are still the preferred means of innovating for the iconic device. With this in mind, my O’Reilly-ian friends have just published iPhone: Open Application Development, a guide to writing ‘native Objective-C applications for the iPhone’.
The appears to be tailor made for the iPhone hacking community - from jailbreaking the AT&T/O2 lockdown to understanding the operating system, application structure, interface APIs (notably multitouch and accelerometer!) and multimedia operations.
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Incidentally, the subject of gestural interfaces is gaining some documented best practices thanks to the proliferation of iPhone and Nintendo’s Wii. I recently saw Dan Saffer speak about the design of gestural interfaces at O’Reilly’s ETech 2008 conference…the first chapter of his upcoming book on the subject is freely downloadable from the book’s official site. The sample offers some useful insights into the ergonomics and conventions of gestural UIs and an historical view of touchscreen technology.
by Imran Ali
February 4, 2008 at 5:35 pm · Filed under Events, Conferences, Development
This year’s Orange Partner Camp has been set for 14-16th April in the Portugese coastal town of Faro.
Each year’s camp rings together application providers, platform vendors, content producers, and software houses to learn from France Telecom and Orange, how to access the business and technology platforms of their now 167m global customers.
Personally, I prefer the free-wheeling unconference style of mobileDevCamp and iPhoneDevCamp as being more productive and open environments to create and innovate. However, by all accounts, Orange partners do extract a lot of value from Orange’s camps.
Perhaps Orange and the unconference community would be well served in co-hosting and connecting their events; building bridges and conversations between the most significant elements of the industry can only enhance each other’s standing and help to solve real user problems.
