So how am I meant to deal with the light blue blobs. I can’t ‘edit’ that text in any sensible fashion when what I really want to do is remove the space just after the * character. I end up just typing the whole thing which removes the point of autocomplete.
For the hard of thinking….
According to iLounge, Apple today sent out a mass e-mail with helpful development links and a more detailed message regarding their status.
“We have many more requests than we can serve during this initial beta period,” explains the follow-up e-mail, “so we must limit the Program at this time. We plan to expand it during the beta period, and we will contact you regarding your enrollment status at the appropriate time. We appreciate your patience.”
Okay? We done crying about it?
Probably one of the most anticipated software releases from Apple happened on Thursday 6th March. Apple released their beta version of the iPhone SDK, software development kit.
Steve Jobs, along with Phil Schiller and Scott Forstall, showed what we can expect with the new version 2.0 iPhone/iTouch firmware to be released in June. Phil Schiller kicked it all off by going through the enterprise additions to the iPhone. Here we see practically everything the was missing and then some. This as far as I can tell is going to make a reasonable sized dent in the Blackbury RIM market.
The real interesting bit of the presentation, well at least for me, was the presentation given by Scott. Here he gave a fairly detailed review of the SDK, I'll cover that in more detail in a later blog post. Let's just say that it was fantastic. Along with Scott was a few companies that were given a two week pre release of the SDK and asked what could be done with it. The results was really amazing.
First up was an Scott himself. Here he showed of a space shooter game in 3D using OpenGL|ES. The movement was very smooth and the shooting action solid enough to be enjoyable. One of the interesting points he made was the fact that it was also using OpenAL for sound. This gives a full 3D sound spectrum.
Electronic Arts was next up showing their iPhone version of Spore. Travis Boatman was responsible for this one.
In Spore you control a micro organism from the early dawn of life in the big soup bowl. You have to control your spore and help keep it safe and grow. The neat aspect of this game is the control mechanism. Spore uses the iPhones 3D axis accelerometers to control movement. At certain points in the game you have the ability to add custom parts to your spore to help it evolve. There are a total of 18 levels in this game and to think that all this was programmed in 2 weeks on an unknown software platform. This looks to be one great looking small game.
Salesforce.com represented the vertical markets. Chuck Dietrich showed what they had managed to accomplish in less than the two week period.
Salesforce are looking to bring their 63,000 plus applications to the iPhone. Chuck showed one of their sales applications. This Sales Force Automation application is used to store sales persons contacts, sales records, target levels, and a whole slew of other sales and marketing information.
Rizwan Sattar from AOL showed of their instant messenger for the iPhone. You have complete access it your buddy lists, check who is online/offline and set your profile. One of the neat features is the ability to change your buddy icon using the image picker built in the iPhone, or even take a picture with the built in camera.
Epocrates was something I wasn't expecting, actually I've never heard of the product in my life, but according to Glenn Keighley, over half a million health care professionals and 1 in 4 physicians in the US use it. Epocrates is a drug encyclopedia containing over 3,300 of the most popular prescribed drugs in the US. This database can be searched and photos available showing what the drug looks like. It can even show the doctor how mixing different drugs can effect the patient.
Last but not least was Sega with an iPhone version of Super Monkey Ball. Ethan Einhorn showed a very playable version of the game using the same control mechanism as EA's Spore above. The big difference here is it's a full 3D visual experience.
According to Ethan, he was totally surprised as to the power of the iPhone and he stated that it wasn't a cell phone game but a console game. They even flew in a graphic artist to help scale up the visuals because of the shear power of the device.
Steve Jobs finished up the presentation by describing how they are going to handle the distribution of iPhone Apps. The only way to get your app in front of every customer will be through their 'App Store'.
Apple will take care of hosting, distribution credit card handling and providing free update service. For this they will be take a 70/30 percent split, which for the most art seems quite reasonable. Other blog posts seem to find this a bit of a take on, but for what your getting I think its a good deal. If however your providing freeware or shareware applications then these will be hosted free of charge.
So, there’s three categories of applications which can be installed onto the iPhone without Jailbreak.
The last method changes things. It’s no longer just a case of just releasing source code, there’s the signing too. You’re attaching your identity to the code. A bit more than just running ports or apt.
But it does mean that for the select few who can install apps (been accepted into the Beta program, paid their $99, uploaded their CSR, downloaded their certificate), there’s a method of swapping test code and with a bit of luck a community will build.
For my part, I’d like to play with Kalimba on my iPhone!
Let’s say you’re a developer producing applications. Your livelihood depends on applications sold and you really want to get the best penetration for them.
How much would you pay for:
a) no need to set up a web shopping cart
b) no need to pay for bandwidth and hosting
c) greatly reduced need for marketing
d) reduced need to ‘package’ an app
e) listing on a web store that will be in front of about 7 million customers at launch.
Apple wants thirty percent (though they’ll host your free app for free). For this thirty percent, they’ll approve, list, maintain a reviews database, process payments and send you the income monthly.
Some people think this smacks of greed but I’d counter that it smacks of reality. If you’ve spent a lot of time working in software but not in the retail side then you have probably very little experience of the costs. We are agreed that Apple is a publicly traded corporation and therefore needs to turn a profit. We’re going to have to agree that the App Store will be a hot trick for software distribution.
So let’s look at the competition. Who else hosts software for download like this?
The obvious candidate is Handango.
From Electronista:
Small developers who sell less than $250,000 in gross revenue will see exactly half of their income stripped from each sale — up from 40 percent, Handango reportedly says. More profitable firms will see even more money siphoned away, with all businesses selling between $250,000 and $1 million supplying 60 percent of their revenue and all larger outlets conceding 70 percent. The notice will be made public within a few days and should see the new distribution agreement take effect by March 15th, the alleged source indicates.
Handango makes Apple’s 30% seem like a bargain.
On the other hand, Mobihand gives developers 80%. What do we get for that extra 10%? I’m guessing we get placement on the device itself. Mobihand claims to have the lowest rates in the industry for application hosting.
MobiHand will pay to Content Provider 80% of Net Receipts occurring at www.mobihand.com and 60% of Net Receipts at all other channels.
So, Mobihand will charge you 20-40% of the cost of your software for hosting the sale depending on how and where they bought it.
Even at 30%, Apple’s deal is no strings, no nonsense and is going to have the advantage that every piece of software you see there will work on your iPhone.
And it’s shitloads better than Handango.
At some point last night, Apple’s development servers fell over and died. These servers can hold 40 000+ concurrent download streams but there were so many people downloading the new iPhone SDK that the whole server became unresponsive. After several hours of trying, I finally got a connection at 11 pm and left the SDK and iTunes videos to download overnight, which they did. At the same time, I watched the video of the introduction of the SDK and demos from AOL, Saleforce and EA. As it drew to a close, so did my eyes.
Jason at 37signals sounds off on his vision for the iPhone.
“What we saw today was the beginning of two-decades of mobile domination by Apple. What Microsoft and Windows was to the desktop, Apple and Touch will be to mobile.”
Steve Job’s Fortune interview (which I covered here yesterday) talks about how bad it feels to not be able to capture market share even though you might have a much better product. The iPod shows that it’s possible to capture a market by crafting a good product. Apple’s history has been full of examples of how to lose a market in the past so it’s nice to see them taking the lead for once.
“A limited selection of shows from the iPlayer have been made available to UK residents on their iPhones. … At the moment only the BBC-produced ‘Whistleblower’ documentary seems to be working from the iPlayer website, with content being streamed-only via the iPhone’s built-in QuickTime player “
Only one iPhone application can run at a time, and third-party applications never run in the background. This means that when users switch to another application, answer the phone, or check their email, the application they were using quits.
This is a serious consideration when you’re managing things like editing documents or wanting to save progress in a game. There has to be some continuation - do you ‘journal’ progress? Are there spare cycles in the CPU to do a quick save every second?
According to Macrumors, the iPhone SDK will be announced on March 6th.
“Please join us to learn about the iPhone software roadmap, including the iPhone SDK and some exciting new enterprise features,” Apple said in an invitation sent to reporters.
Are we to assume Apple has licensed ActiveSync?
Are we going to see a demo of SAP’s iPhone client?
What about Sling? iChat? iPlayer? Over-the-air Calendar syncing? Push email? PDF Reader? File Manager? Skype?
Okay, tonight I sent out a document to a few friends. 1.6 MB sent out to my email server. Whoosh. Some of my friends have very limited mailboxes from their ISP. Some only 30 MB, some as high as 50 MB. Very few are unlimited. I used to be worried about emailing out attachments because no-one likes waiting for attachments to download.
But the message I sent didn’t just go to my email server. The email was sent, but the attachment was sent to my file server. This meant the document didn’t actually leave my network. In it’s place, there was a URL to my file server. The 1.6 MB didn’t go anywhere near my mail server and it only left the file server when the recipients clicked on the URL. As the file server was on my LAN, the transfer was quick and seamless.
For me, my file server is public so the files were sent out of my network eventually. If you’re part of an internal team and would never send attachments externally, then this would mean you could more easily secure your files as they never leave the network!
Anyway. I’m now addicted to Rickshaw.
Rickshaw began life as an idea to help some of Mac-Sys’s customers who were in need of a method of sending large attachments. Sadly the local broadband and email providers put hard limits on the amount you can send in a single email. This made life very difficult for some. The original name of the app was going to be “UnfURL” which, as you can tell, is incredibly unwieldy and would only really reach out to geeks like me. And what the heck would the icon be like?
Yes, this is a solution built to resolve a problem. How to send email attachments without clogging up email servers.
The consensus wasn't to go live with the new site straight away after all but to create a better impression on the public by waiting on the final design and within no time at all Jordan had worked his graphical magic and delivered the goods.
I was supplied with a .psd mockup and got busy with Photoshop. I hadn't used this app in a while and it took some time to relearn how to use it but I managed to cut things up and proceeded to get stuck into the CSS.
Again I had to revisit some skills I hadn’t used since I started my current day job and when I looked at my first iteration in Internet Explorer I nearly cried.
Areas of difficulty I had were mainly concerned with how different browsers implement the box model and I also had to jump through some hoops to get opacity working but the end result is a consistent look across Firefox 2.0.x on Windows & Mac, Safari 3.0.x on Mac and IE 6.0.x on Windows. I haven't had a chance to test it with IE 7 but I imagine it is as broken as it's younger sibling 
I've already been working on the release process so there's just a few minor tweaks to go and the new site will be available in production.
Pop on over to eirepreneur:
Gareth Coen and colleague Diane Roberts were inspired by the Enterprise Ireland bash during Paddy’s Valley to offer a similar event here in Ireland. Gareth, based in Silicon Valley, and Diane, based in Dublin, recently started a consultancy firm with the goal of helping bridge the gap between Valley and Irish tech start-ups.
If you want to know more, and save money, read on.
I remain sceptical about this approach, still likening it to trying to make Ireland into Hollywood by shipping a couple of casting agents over here but if you’re in charge of a tech startup and you’re running the kind of tech that would benefit greatly from a step onto the first rung of the ladder then you should register immediately using the secret code provided and enjoy.
