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Tags > iphone
The iPhone: Tricorder Version 1.0?
November 18, 2009
The iPhone, in addition to revolutionizing how people thought about mobile phone user interfaces, also was one of the first devices to offer a suite of sensors measuring everything from the visual environment to position to acceleration, all in a package that could fit in your shirt pocket. On December 3rd, O'Reilly will be offering a one-day online edition of the Where 2.0 conference, focusing on the iPhone sensors, and what you can do with them.
The War For the Web
November 16, 2009
It is becoming clear to me that we are heading into a bloody period of competition that could be extremely unfriendly to the interoperable web as we know it today. If you've followed my thinking about Web 2.0 from the beginning, you know that I believe we are engaged in a long term project to build an internet operating system. I've outlined a few of the ways that big players like Facebook, Apple, and News Corp are potentially breaking the "small pieces loosely joined" model of the Internet. But perhaps most threatening of all are the natural monopolies created by Web 2.0 network effects. We're facing the prospect of Facebook as the platform, Apple as the platform, Google as the platform, Amazon as the platform, where big companies slug it out until one is king of the hill. And it's time for developers to take a stand. If you don't want a repeat of the PC era, place your bets now on open systems. Don't wait till it's too late.
The Minds Behind Some of the Most Addictive Games Around - If you've wasted half your life playing Peggle, Bejeweled, Zuma or Plants vs. Zombies, blame these guys!
November 9, 2009
The gaming industry tends to focus on the high end products, first person shooters that crank out a bazillion polygons a seconds and RPGs which spend more time developing the plot in cut scenes than in actual gameplay. But for every person playing Borderlands, there are scores playing casual games like Bejeweled and Zuma. PopCap Games has been at the forefront of casual game development, with a catalog that includes bestselling titles like Peggle and Plants vs Zombies, in addition to the two previously mentioned. I recently had a chance to talk to Jason Kapalka, one of the founders and the creative director of PopCap. We discussed the evolution of PopCap, how the casual gaming industry differs from mainstream gaming, and the challenges of creating games that can be engaging, without being frustrating.
Announcing O'Reilly Answers - Clever Hacks. Creative Ideas. Innovative Solutions.
November 4, 2009
We're launching the beta of O'Reilly Answers, and I'm inviting you to be part of it. In brief, O'Reilly Answers is a community site for sharing knowledge, asking questions, and providing answers that brings together our customers, authors, editors, conference speakers, and Foo (Friends of O'Reilly). O'Reilly is at the center of an amazing exchange of knowledge sharing and idea generation, and we want you to join us in changing the world by spreading the knowledge of innovators.
Games Top the Charts in the iPhone and Android App Markets
November 3, 2009
While it might be true that the number of Book apps is growing at a faster rate, Games continue to dominate the list of popular U.S. iTunes Apps. Games accounted for about a fifth of all iTunes apps over the past week†, but the category continued to have a disproportionate share of the Top 100 charts, accounting for 52% of the Top Grossing, 56% of the Top Paid, and 50% of the Top Free apps.
Google Shrinks Another Market With Free Turn-By-Turn Navigation
By Brady ForrestOctober 29, 2009
Google has announced a free turn-by-turn navigation system for Android 2.0 phones such as the Droid. Read more about the features of Google Maps Navigation.
iPhone Killers, Blackberries and Chicken Parts
October 29, 2009
While a steady stream of so-called iPhone Killers are filtering into the market, Apple's momentum continues unabated. Inspired by his own experiences upgrading to the Blackberry Tour, the author ponders why so many solution providers confuse delivering a bunch of 'chicken parts' with producing an actual, living, breathing chicken. BlackBerry Storm, Palm Pre, the G2, and now Droid have all been touted as contenders to the mobile computing crown, yet the iPhone continues to kick butt.
The Right Stuff: Apple's Q4 Earnings Call
October 21, 2009
The Fourth Quarter was Apple's most profitable quarter ever. Yesterday's earnings call was about two things. One, the iPhone Platform continues to deliver the goods. Two, the continued impressive growth of the Mac, especially MacBooks. As such, it was about the power of the platform as much as it was about the device itself.
Josh Clark's Best iPhone Apps For Business Networkers - Keep Your Business Network Humming
October 16, 2009
"Once upon a time, everyone who was anyone had a social secretary, a person dedicated solely to maintaining the boss's personal network," writes Josh Clark, author of Best iPhone Apps. But those days are long gone. Indeed, it's time to meet your new social secretary: your iPhone. Clark reveals the 10 best apps for business networking in a new O'Reilly Insights on Forbes.com.
Flash to iPhone
October 16, 2009
Adobe, a long time player in rich internet applications wants be an active participant on mobile platforms, including the iPhone. Adobe engineers put their minds together and delivered a solution to work around the problem of the iPhone browser's lack of support for Flash. If the iPhone Safari browser will not support the Flash player, let's use the Flash tools to compile a native iPhone application (ipa) which lives directly on the device. This initiative now gives the opportunity for ActionScript developers to develop applications for the wonderful iPhone and iPod Touch devices.
Could Adobe potentially harm the iPhone AppStore
October 15, 2009
Adobe have spent a lot of cycles / years nudging Apple that Flash should be on the iPhone. Apple have firmly just said no, and despite the answer, Adobe keep expecting them to cave due to public demand. The problem with this logic is that Apple won't give in. Let's break this down into two parts: First, Don't poke the sleeping giant. Secondly, just because it's easy, doesn't mean its successful.
Mechanical Turk app on the iPhone Provides Work for Refugees
October 14, 2009
Mechanical Turk service provider CrowdFlower and microwork non-profit Samasource have teamed up to make their services available to iPhone users. Users of CrowdFlower's mechanical turk platform can now opt to send their tasks to iPhone users. The Give Work iPhone app takes tasks (created by real companies) and sends it to iPhone users who volunteer to complete them. Meanwhile, workers in a Kenyan refugee camp perform the same tasks using CrowdFlower's regular web interface. In essence, Kenyan refugees work to increase the accuracy of the results provided by the army of volunteer iPhone mechanical turks.
Four short links: 9 October 2009 - Negative Karma, Wal-Mart TQI, Idiot Airlines, and Native iPhone Apps in Lua
October 9, 2009
Don't Display Negative Karma -- Are you building social software that visibly rewards users for participation? It is wise to consider the concept of karma bankruptcy among users. If a user's score drops below an initial zero, they are more likely to abandon the account and start a new identity. Check out this fascinating article by Randy Farmer and Bryce Glass, authors of the upcoming book from O'Reilly, Building Web Reputation Systems. This and more in today's Four Short Links.
Should Apple Give a Rat's Ass that Developers Aren't Getting Rich off of the iPhone Platform?
October 8, 2009
Apple's iPhone Platform is a runaway success relative to just about any metric that you can throw at it, save for one. Where are the breakout successful developers for whom the platform is a 'True Wealth' inducing moment? On the one hand, it is humorous to listen to the woes of 'aspiring' millionaires quibble. On the other, there is a valid argument that Apple's push to drive volume and ubiquity via "cheap" comes at the potential cost of cultivating breakout, transformational apps that cost more, require a longer sales cycle, and thus, more evangelizing to find their beachhead.
Developing iPhone Apps Requires Xcode on the Mac
By Elisabeth RobsonOctober 8, 2009
I've had a few questions about the software I used in my previous screencasts. I created the app using Xcode for the Mac. Xcode is a developer tool, and if you want to develop iPhone apps, you'll need to download both Xcode and the iPhone SDK.
The iPhone as a Gaming Platform: Share of Top Apps By Category
October 8, 2009
As a follow-up to my recent post on the Top Grossing Apps list on iTunes, I examined three lists highlighted in the app store: the Top Paid, Top Free, and Top Grossing Apps. Believing that many users scan these lists, developers covet a spot on any of these Top 100 charts. In my previous posts, I've highlighted that Games is the largest† category, accounting for about 20% of unique apps. Let's take a fresh look at the numbers.
Review: Kerchoonz K-box Portable Speaker
October 7, 2009
Project Bar-B-Q is a great place to discover tomorrow's audio technology, so I was intrigued when someone on the mailing list mentioned the new Kerchoonz K-box portable speaker. Could "gel audio technology" really deliver unprecedented bass from a tiny box? The short answer is yes.
The Price of The Top Grossing iTunes Apps
October 6, 2009
In response to developer complaints that more expensive apps were getting buried at the bottom of popularity rankings, Apple recently introduced a separate ranking based on revenue. (The Top 100 Paid apps ranks apps are based on number of downloads.) In this post, I'll validate that compared to downloads, the Top 100 ranking based on revenues does contain pricier apps.
Four short links: 6 October 2009 - Birdwatching Technology, Transportation Data, Multitouch in Python, and Face Detection on the iPhone
October 6, 2009
Bird-watching Turns To Technology (BBC) -- BBC News reports on technical advances in bird watching used by a group of researchers to monitor a population of guillemots on Skomer Island, employing a CCTV like system adapted for use in the wild. This and more in today's Four Short Links.
Flash on Devices
October 6, 2009
Inside RIA's Rich Tretola reports on a treasure trove of links. Flash Professional CS5 will enable you to build applications for iPhone and iPod touch using ActionScript 3. These applications can be delivered to iPhone and iPod touch users through the Apple App Store.
Rebooting the Book (One Apple iPad Tablet at a Time)
September 23, 2009
The book business is under assault. Book sales have been stagnating for some time, Amazon is the industry's boogeyman, and more terrifying, book publishers have no idea how to market books in a world (largely) devoid of bookstores. Moreover, in the age of the always on, it's fair to ask, do people even still read anymore? Just as it re-envisioned the Media Player, the Mobile Phone and Mobile Computing, Apple is well positioned to reboot the Book with its forthcoming iPad Tablet.
iPhone, the 'Personal' Computer - Future of the Mobile Web
September 17, 2009
The iPhone is the first truly 'personal' computer; more personal to its owners than the PC ever was. Talk to iPhone owners (not to mention, the 20M iPod Touch owners), and this truth bubbles to the top again and again.
Best iPhone Apps: The Must-Have Downloads, Sept 17 at 10am PT - A Free Live Webcast Presented by Josh Clark
September 10, 2009
Join Josh Clark, author of Best iPhone Apps: The Guide for Discriminating Downloaders for a survey of the must-have apps to unlock your iPhone's potential. Along the way, you'll explore how the iPhone is changing our personal relationships to information and computing, as well as the qualities that make a great app. Attendance is limited, so register now! More Upcoming Webcasts: iPhone Forensics: Live Recovery of an iPhone 3G[s] Energy Literacy Cloud Security & Privacy 8 Steps to Microsoft Project Success Psychotronica: Abusing and Leveraging Intelligence from Social Networking Check out our Webcast page for on-demand videos of past webcasts and more upcoming live events!
iTunes Ate My Apps ... and How I Got 'em Back - Recover Lost iPhone Apps
September 10, 2009
Today I upgraded from iTunes 8 to 9, and when the new version launched, all my podcasts and iPhone apps were gone. iTunes had moved them (along with some of my music files) to a folder called "Previous iTunes Libraries." Somehow I managed to wipe them from my iPod Touch as well, but getting them back was easier than I thought.
Augmenting Reality with the iPhone - Acrossair's Nearest Tube will be one of the first "Terminator Vision" applications
August 27, 2009
With the release of the 3.1 iPhone OS, application developers will finally be able to develop augmented reality (AR) apps. In other words, Terminator Vision is right around the corner. I recently talked to Chetan Damani, one of the founders of Acrossair, about their new AR applications, Nearest Tube, and what's involved in developing AR applications for the iPhone.
The Most Popular iTunes Apps Aren't Always The Cheapest
By Ben LoricaAugust 27, 2009
While the most popular aren't always the cheapest, on average, the Top 10 Paid apps† tend to be cheaper than less popular ones (those ranked 45 to 55 or 91 to 100): The situation varies across categories and in this post I'll briefly examine a few of the larger ones. In both the Books and Games categories, the mean price...
Why is HTML Suddenly Interesting?
By Simon St. LaurentAugust 27, 2009
After a decade of quiet, HTML is a hot topic once again. While there is pent-up demand for new features, the conversation reflects a more basic change in the Web's landscape.
Burning Man Gets an API (and a Whole Lot More)
August 26, 2009
An API! SMS! Foursquare! An iPhone app! They are all coming to Burning Man this year. Will the festival be the same? The annual tech-art festival in the Nevada desert, starts on Sunday. Normally the attendees leave their phones and laptop behind, but this year that may not be the case. As I ride from Seattle to Black Rock City, NV I am getting SMS from friends on the playa. In anticipation of wifi and possible data connections Foursquare has rolled out Black Rock City as a city (@sfslim is already the Mayor of The Man). If AT&T's service doesn't work then attendees may be able to take advantage of OpenBTS's local SMS project. Most of the attendees aren't there, but the tech is already making its presence known.
Who's Winning the Smartphone Wars?
August 25, 2009
The short answer - Microsoft and Nokia are slipping, RIM and Apple are gaining. It's too early to tell with Google. This shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone. Last week, UK-based analyst firm Canalys, released its findings on smartphone market share based on Q2 2009 unit shipments (see "Smart phones defy slowdown"). Before sharing Canalys' findings, it's important to understand how an evaluation of market share and profits relate to the players involved.
Touch Traveler: London, Paris and only an iPod Touch
August 24, 2009
Recently, I spent two weeks vacationing in London and Paris with only an iPod Touch for communications and connectivity. Mind you, I am not suggesting that this was a wise thing to do, but it's what I did, and this post captures the good, bad and ugly of the experience. First off, the revelation (for me) was how much the Google Mobile Maps App on iPod Touch completely changes the equation when traveling. Moreover, Maps allows you to visually navigate in Real-Time (very different from the experience on my Blackberry), all the while push-pinning favorite destinations, and determining routes in just a few clicks. It is the consummate reality augmentation application for travel, a sort of "magic compass."
APPLE is EVIL, You're All Fanboys and other half-truths
August 20, 2009
There is a meme afoot. Apple is evil. Its arrogant ways and dependence on the cult of personality are to be its demise. Developers are said to be unhappy. And, Apple Secrecy Doesn't Scale. Google-ification is the way, the RIGHT way. The Apple Way can't possibly persist ad infinitum. But, you know what? It’s a crock. In the here and now, Apple's success is unparalleled, and the engine is humming better than ever on multiple vectors - products, margins, developers, profits and consumer engagement.
Four short links: 18 August 2009 - iPhone App Backstory, Cookie Resurrection, The Entrepreneuralism Lickmus test, and An Interesting Database
August 18, 2009
The Making of the NPR News iPhone App -- interesting behind-the-scenes look, with sketches and all. Station streams, however, presented a larger challenge. To begin with, NPR didn't have direct stream links for any of its stations, so we built a Web spider that identified and captured more than 300 iPhone-compatible station streams. After that first pass, we worked with our station representatives to manually test each stream. In the process they found enough new streams to double our database. All of these streams are delivered to the app from NPR's Station Finder API. This and more in today's Four Short Links.
Four short links: 14 August 2009 - EPub FTW, SQL Horror, Computer Vision Explained, and A Massive Dump of Twitter Stats
August 14, 2009
Page2Pub -- A group at the Rochester Institute of Technology's Open Publishing Lab has produced Page2Pub, a "pair of applications that collects content from the web and reformats it for publication across other a wide range of media." The beta version allows users to gather wiki and other web content to produce a version in EPUB, then render a print-ready PDF book. See also Sony dropping its proprietary format and moving to EPub. This and more in today's Four Short Links.
The iTunes App Store Rolls with the Travel Season
August 11, 2009
Sometime last week, the iTunes app store passed 70,000 unique apps (70K apps have appeared in the app store since it launched). One of the fastest-growing categories in the U.S. iTunes app store has been Travel, displacing Education to move into the top 5 largest categories. Welcome to summer vacation!
The App Store and the Long Tail Part 2: The Real "DRM" At Stake
By Andrew SavikasAugust 11, 2009
A few weeks ago I wrote about how the small number of sales from many different countries were adding up to more than the large number of sales from the US in the App Store for our books. Our success got me wondering why there's not stronger interest from other publishers, especially trade publishers, in iPhone apps (besides concerns about pricing and the approval process). Then as I was looking at rankings for some of the top paid book apps, I spotted a possible answer.
Playnice: The Unofficial Latitude for the iPhone
August 5, 2009
Last week Google launched Latitude for the iPhone as a web app. They were held back from releasing a native app by Apple's overbearing application approval process. However, this doesn't matter that much as all location apps are currently hamstrung by Apple's lack of background location updates. Luckily for iPhone customers there are developers out there trying to solve this problem.
iTunes App Store Incubation Period Increases In Most Categories
July 31, 2009
Over the last few weeks, media coverage of the iTunes app store often touches on concerns about Apple's approval process. Some apps drew enough complaints that Apple pulled them off the app store. With thousands of developers wanting to launch apps and Apple unable to come up with a more efficient vetting process, I'm revisiting an earlier post on the duration of incubation periods by category.
David Pogue's Top 10 Tips for the iPhone 3GS and iPhone 3.0 Software - The Latest Edition of iPhone: The Missing Manual is Here
July 29, 2009
The new iPhone 3GS and iPhone 3.0 software have arrived, and New York Times tech columnist David Pogue is on top of it with a thoroughly updated edition of iPhone: The Missing Manual. The latest edition covers all models with 3.0 Software--including the iPhone 3GS. Here are David's top 10 tips.
Would an Apple Tablet be an Ereader? Yes and No.
By Andrew SavikasJuly 28, 2009
Last Friday the latest round of rumors of an Apple Tablet swelled considerably after a piece from Apple Insider asserted the device is now on the 2010 product roadmap. The news sparked considerable interest among publishers, who apparently see this development as a "Kindle killer" that will upset Amazon's apparent dominance of the ebook ecosystem. It's understandable from the perspective of a publisher, but if this device actually exists, it's doubtful anyone at Apple sees it as an "ereader" any more than it sees the iPhone as "a GPS device."
iPhone Forensics: Live Recovery of an iPhone 3G[s] - A Free Live Webcast - July 29 @ 10am PT
![iPhone Forensics: Live Recovery of an iPhone 3G[s] - A Free Live Webcast - July 29 @ 10am PT](http://blogs.oreilly.com/blurbs/2009/06/04/jonathan_zdziarski.png "iPhone Forensics: Live Recovery of an iPhone 3G[s] - A Free Live Webcast - July 29 @ 10am PT")
July 25, 2009
In this webcast, Jonathan Zdziarski will demonstrate the latest forensic method to conduct a live recovery of an iPhone 3G[s]. He will also demonstrate how to remove the device's pass-code and encrypted backup password. Attendance is limited, so register now! More Upcoming Webcasts - Meet Experts Online: Creating Your Social Media Policy Hands-on: Step-by-step MySQL Clustering Setup Check out our Webcast page for on-demand videos of past webcasts and more upcoming live events!
Seeing Our Culture with Fresh Eyes
July 24, 2009
The other day, I read a novel called Prester John, by John Buchan, published in 1910. This story about a Zulu uprising in South Africa as experienced by a young Scottish immigrant is an entertaining read in the spirit of Rudyard Kipling or H. Rider Haggard: adventure in the furthest outposts of the British Empire. But what makes this book...
Can't Get Approval for your App? Sell the Source Code
By Andrew SavikasJuly 21, 2009
We just released 17 O'Reilly books as standalone iPhone Apps (The Twitter Book looks fantastic -- and as a bonus #hashtags in the text are clickable), and so I've been looking at various options for monitoring sales and popularity (AppViz, AppFigures, and MajicRank have proven quite useful), and was eager to find something I could use right from my iPhone....
The Mobile Broadband Era: It's About Messages, Mobility and The Cloud
By Mark SigalJuly 20, 2009
“Listen to the technology; find out what it is telling you.” – Carver Mead The DOS-era was marked by a certain style of computing. It was primitive, largely devoid of graphics, and for developers, an exercise in scarcity management. In fact, the scarcity mindset was so endemic to the time that it prompted Microsoft’s Bill Gates to sagely note that...
A Crowd-Sourced National Communications Census
By Carl MalamudJuly 20, 2009
The FCC is charged with creating a National Broadband Plan in 2010. But how can we plan for the future is we don't know where we are? Here, we propose a crowd-sourced National Communications Census.
The Promise and Peril of MobileMe
By Marc HedlundJuly 17, 2009
Anyone tried MobileMe? Last night, I signed up for the free trial, got it syncing between my laptop and iPhone, and was incredibly impressed by how well and quickly it worked. An appointment added on one nearly instantly showed up on the other -- so much better than having to fire up iTunes to have my schedule in sync. The power of the cloud! Or whatever. You know, useful.
News Providers are Embracing the iPhone
July 16, 2009
To mark another iPhone milestone (1.5 billion app downloads in a year), I checked our iTunes app store data warehouse. I was expecting the Books category to continue to register the fastest-growth but was instead greeted by an explosion in News (and to a lesser extent, Navigation) apps. News content providers increasingly need to have a strategy for delivering content to the iPhone and similar mobile devices. At least for the iPhone, many news organizations have done just that: during the week ending 7/12, there were over 1,500 News apps.
Developers Create Unofficial Find My iPhone API
July 16, 2009
The iPhone is correctly credited with bringing location services to the consumer. It started at launch with Google Maps. It kicked into hyper-drive with the launch of the App Store (there are now over 2800 location-enabled apps - via Skyhook). However, there is still a step to go, the iPhone needs the ability to share your location in the background to a third-party server. This has been done for them by a couple of hackers.
Apple has secretly released a Tablet Computer: It's called iPod touch
July 15, 2009
It seems that Apple is poised to launch its Tablet Computing entry later this year for a (rumored) price ranging between $500-800; wedging it from a pricing relativity perspective at about a grand less than a MacBook Air with solid state memory. But, perhaps the real story with respect to the forthcoming Apple Tablet Device is that Apple has already released a tablet computing device. It's called the iPod touch, and because it's often overshadowed by its noisier sibling, the iPhone, we sometimes forget that it has already sold 15M+ units.
O'Reilly Books Example updated: Show a different image for each book
By Elisabeth RobsonJuly 14, 2009
I got some great feedback on my first screencast - thank you! A few of you asked: how can you show a different view for each of the rows in the table view, instead of just showing the same view for each row? I can think of a couple of ways to do this. Here's a new screencast that expands on the previous O'Reilly Books example, with code samples.
Embarrassment of Riches: Managing a Mountain of iPhone Apps - Josh Clark Shares His Tips for Organizing Your iPhone
July 8, 2009
Guest blogger Josh Clark, the author of Best iPhone Apps: The Guide for Discriminating Downloaders, offers his tips for managing a mountain of iPhone apps. "A healthy collection of iPhone apps calls for an equally healthy hygiene regimen for your iPhone," says Josh. "Here are a few pointers for keeping your apps tidy and your data safe."
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