Development

Apple doesn’t want other folks using multi touch on iPhone competitors. The position is understandable, Apple sees multi touch as proprietary intellectual property. The problem with relying on patents and such to protect your product is that someone will come along with something better. That something better might be on the way.

Some folks at MIT have put together a borgish looking device that responds to hand gestures and projects the screen onto a flat surface. They call the tech Sixth Sense and the device that takes advantage of it Wear Ur World. One supposes that naming things isn’t the strong point of MIT types. Taking a look at the thing and generating a mental image of the device after some industrial design will give you a distinct feeling that you might be looking at the next big thing.

via Cnet

You’ve got a great idea for an iPhone app don’t you? Of course you do, since you read iPhone Matters I can tell you are bright, witty, intelligent and very close to your ideal weight. Still you idea for an app is languishing because you see the development process as too convoluted. Not only would you have to learn some programming (which language) you’d have all those hoops to jump through to get your app into the App Store. And even if you get your app into the App Store what will you do with all the dough you make? Think of the tax implications!

Turns out everything is a bit easier than you think. A great article at The Enquirer titled How to become an iPhone developer in eight easy steps takes you through the process by reliving the process experienced by the guy who came up with iShoot. NIce read. Check it out.

You know you want your Gmail pushed to you. I mean the five minutes between auto checks is simply intolerable. What if you had some really important e-mail, perhaps something from a Nigerian prince who needs your help transferring billions of dollars, and the three minutes between the time the e-mail was sent and the moment when iPhone automatically checks e-mail was the difference between you getting in on the deal or not? Unacceptable.

Good news, over at Google Mobile Help an actual Google em;loyee endorses the notion that push e-mail is on its way to the iPhone.

The internet is full of stories about app developers who hit a home run and quit their day job to roll around in a vault of money, drive fast cars and cultivate a posse (in Silicon Valley a posse is called a startup). They are great stories and people love them, American dream and all that, but sadly, they aren’t representative of the vast majority of iPhone developers experiences.

The average story of iPhone development doesn’t have to be boring. If you want a great read by a iPhone App developer be sure to check out This is How Much One of my iPhone Apps Made by Matt J. Drake. Matt tells the story of BeerPad one of his average performing apps. The numbers are interesting and the information is useful and interestingly presented.

Appsamuck is a resource for new iPhone developers. They provided one new app per day with source for 31 days. I’m not sure when this began, but it is finished and all 31 apps are there waiting for newbie developers to pick over.

In their welcome, Appsamuck say:

Over the years, we have given many presentations on developing Mobile applications. One thing that we have heard time and time again is that people have a hard time writing their first mobile application. We think sometimes people have a hard time taking those first steps. It is easy to think that it will take too much time, and that it will be too hard. But that is simply not the case. But instead of telling people, we are going to show them how easy it really is.

The examples aren’t tutorials though, that is, there’s no explanation of the hows and whys of the code. But anyone with a bit of nous should be able to nut out what’s going on and find examples of methods they can apply to their own applications.

If you’re a new iPhone developer, Appsamuck is a must have in your bookmarks.… more...

So you want to develop apps for the iPhone but are not sure where to start. The iCode Blog is a damn fine place to start.

The iCode Blog is run by Brandon, an iPhone developer who provides useful real world tutorials (rather than Hello World nonsense), such as an excellent four-part one on coding up a to do list app.

Brandon says on his about page:
I became interested in iPhone development with the launch of the web applications and had Apple accept 3 of my web applications.  The Cost Per Square Foot Calculator, the Daily Calorie Calculator, and a Weight Watchers app that they later pulled due to copyright.

Since the launch of the app store, I have been spending countless hours learning and researching iPhone programming using XCode.  One huge issue I noticed is the extreme lack of iPhone Programming tutorials on the web.  The best I could find was some outdated Hello World tutorial on YouTube.  So, I have decided to create iCodeBlog to share the things that I learn along the way.

It’s always great when someone gives back to… more...

Some developers are having trouble getting apps approved for the App Store. Here is a particularly frustrating example that we reported on earlier.  What holds up some apps why others sneak right out? What can developers add to ensure their app slips quietly into the air of mainstream apps? How can a developer makes sure their app burst noisily onto the scene?

The answer seems to be: add fart noises. We’re not going to say that cyber flatulence isn’t the height of comedy but it sure does seem to be Apple’s definition of the funniest thing ever*. How can we be sure someone at Apple is endlessly cracked up by fart noises? Because Apple approved fourteen new fart apps yesterday. It is almost like the pressure to approve fart apps had been building and building until finally, after the approval of Pull My finger was complete, the pressure became too great to contain and approvals blew out loud and fast, creating a giant cloud of Apple approved fart apps. Anyway, one suspects that if Newber could switch calls between… more...

There’s been a mini storm going on in the iPhone development world. The problems go as follows: To have a hit app you have get on the popular app list. To get on the popular app list you have to sell your app cheap. Therefore it isn’t worth a developers time to create an app that will retail for more than a few bucks at most. The developers seem to be blaming Apple and The Register seems to blame the users.

Placing the blame on Apple for poor sales or on the consumers for wanting something cheap misses the problem. It isn’t that it is really a race to 99 cents or even that people are too cheap, the problem is who they are merketing the apps too. Right now the iPhone is huge but it is like that weird sumo baby that used to be on the cover of Weekly World News every so often. It is big but immature.

Since the iPhone is new to the scene and the… more...

Intuitively you know that iPhone hasn’t felt any real heat from the G1 but intuition s frequently wrong, things have a way of sneaking up on you and suddenly you’re like “Wow, I never realized that product X had come so far!”

So what objective measure can be used to judge the relative success of the G1 (and Android in general) against the iPhone. The oDesk Blog has some nifty analysis up of how the G1 is faring compared to the iPhone. The metric used? Number of job postings for developers. If you just glance at the graphs without reading the verbiage you might think that the iPhone is only doing a little better. That impression is misleading, postings for iPhone developers are an order of magnitude greater (scaling between graphs can be tricky).

With a disparity like that you can see why Apple isn’t exactly running scared of Android.

You here the stories of people making crazy money writing iPhone apps and you’re thinking “I wish I could get in on that action!” Who can blame you? But programming for the iPhone can be tricky business, even if you’re a seasoned vet. If only there was someone who had intimate knowledge of the iPhone and could write. It would probably help if this person had a Doctorate in Computer Science from a prestigious school. Hmmmm, let’s see what we need: Someone who knows everything about the iPhone, someone who has a Doctorate, someone who can write….
Bingo! Get your app writing on with:

The iPhone Developer’s Cookbook: Building Applications with the iPhone SDK

yep, that’s a book from Dr. Erica Sadun on writing apps for the iPhone. You can’t go wrong with one of her books on just about any topic you pick! So get that programming jones a fix and check out the book!