More links, this time from the Sydney Morning Herald, who report that 3rd Party developers will eventually gain native access to the iPhone - including EA Games (Need for Speed 700 anyone? Yawn…).
When Apple updated the iTunes software used to activate the iPhone, curious hackers who looked under the hood quickly found lines of software code indicating that games will be eventually run directly on the iPhone rather than in the browser.
For the moment, I’m just going to dub my iPhone Application Mobishop (a portmanteau of Mobile and Photoshop [since that is essentially what it is {and Mobiphoto sounds a bit silly (and I like nesting brackets)}]).
I’m kind of skipping ahead a bit by doing my minisite now (since we don’t have any major assignments due at the moment). I’m using WordPress to run it with a custom theme (which needs a bit more work still), but you can view the Mobishop Minisite 1 right now.
Tomorrow I’m giving my first presentation for my iPhone application - which at this time has no name. (Perhaps I can call it “The App with No Name”).
I’ve now decided to target general iPhone users - that is, those who aren’t particularly technical minded. They just want a good program that works.
More details tomorrow.
Should have posted this a while back, well actually Devslashtux should have posted this a while back but he didn’t.
Anyway, the Bird Goes ‘Round galleries are back and working again after a long down time.
Devslashtux fixed them which we are most appreciative of, we just wished he’d actually told us.
So everyone can once again see the marvellous adventures of the mystical flightless bird.
Thanks to some more research in Japan, your iPod (and iPhone) can be controlled by clenching your teeth. Perfect for those times where you just don’t want to have your iPod out in public! Never mind the headset laden with infrared sensors.
From the article, researcher Kazuhiro Taniguchi says:
He says “I just thought it’s inconvenient” to have to use your hands to switch on iPods or phones, especially on packed trains.
In the laboratory, grinding right teeth can play and halt music on an iPod while clenching left teeth makes it skip to the next track.
(http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2007/08/21/2010485.htm)
This might be a development someone wants to integrate with their iPhone application?
To figure out my target-audience properly, I’ve decided to find some data on the demographics of iPhone users/potential buyers.
Most of the info I have found is from a single source, the iPhone Buyers Analysis - a rather pretty single page PDF by a US market research group. Given that Apple are holding their own sales data close to their chest, I’ve had to be more creative in my demographics gathering.
Some claims I’ve seen during my Googling include:
I think this goes on to prove the old Homer Simpson quote: “Oh, people can come up with statistics to prove anything. 14% of people know that.”
But the summary is, if you’re a rich, college-educated, current iPod owner, slightly overweight, in either California or New York and you don’t like your current telco, you are a potential iPhone owner! Yay! That doesn’t help me in the slightest!
This was a rather interesting article found on Technorati.
Apparently, bills for iPhone customers are huge. Really huge. Amazingly huge… I think you get the idea. AT&T seem to think that listing every single data connection for your account is necessary. And on an account with unlimited data usage, there are a lot of connections!
The first bill for a writer at Ars Technica (who are clearly representative of normal everyday iPhone users *cough*) recieved a 52 page (double-sided) bill in the mail…
Perhaps this could be a new iPhone application I could create - if AT&T (the official iPhone telco) made the bill data available online, it could be turned into an application which could easily navigate the data using multitouch 
Also, what kind of a company creates an four-letter acronym (GPRR) to represent a four-letter acronym (GPRS)!
Opera are making a nice little jab at the iPhone in this video. It pretty much mirrors what a few of you have already said in your blog posts.
While I’m posting videos from YouTube, there is a review from the New York Times by noneother than the (more than slightly strange) David Pogue…
Hi all,
If anyone actually reads my blog, any ideas and suggestions related to my idea (see My Idea Thus Far and Beaten Again for info. about my image editing program). Just leave ideas in the comment form and they’ll get e-mailed to me.
If there is sufficient “interest” in the idea, I’ll continue to develop and refine it. If not, it’s back to the metaphorical drawing-board - possibly a gesture based Wii app…
Some more specific questions I have currently (if you need inspiration):
If the answer to any of these is yes, I’d be interested to hear your opinions!
Cheers
Create a mobile compatible, image editing tool. Kind of analogous to Photoshop or The GIMP - but for a small screen.
Given the limitations (currently) of writing a native iPhone application, the application would be slower/less capable than if it could run natively on the hardware.
The largest problem would be the speed and reliability of the mobile network. Given the 1G iPhone’s lack of high-speed data transfer (EDGE doesn’t really cut it) the app may well be painfully slow to use. This would really affect the usability of the application and limit it to nothing more than emergency editing (i.e. you can’t use anything else). I think this would be a problem over any sort of mobile wireless access (Wifi is fine, but it’s still a LAN) since those networks have both relatively low bandwidth and rather high latency. Wether the application would still be responsive enough to be “usable” would be quite a challenge.
But for the moment, I’ll assume a 3G or 3.5G iPhone will come out for our ‘lil Southern Land - even so, the issue of 3.xG network coverage will be important.
Currently on my 3G Nokia, I find 3G deadspots in many places around Sydney, including:
Probably the best way to combat this would be an offline application (again, forcing it to run natively) which can upload content via the network when it becomes available - ideally, it can do this in the background.
The interface really makes or breaks any mobile app. Most cellphones have really crappy interfaces hiding really useful options below a set of nested menus.
Trying to create a compelling and easily usable interface is certanly a challenge on a mobile platform. To compound things, creating this application to run on any capible phone would drastically increase the potential market. But, the downside is that you then have loads of possible input devices and screen-resolutions etc…
There are a bunch of reasons why this at least would be theoretically possible. Technologies like:
Ignoring all of the problems I’ve thought of… here is a rough list of what a person would do to use the application.
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Middle of Nowhere - go for it!