The Blog of an African NERD

Recommended watch for iPhone Developers

If you are developing for the iPhone and trying to do amazing things, this is one video from Apple's Developer site you should watch. It is titled "Leveraging iPhone Location, Acceleration, Orientation, and System Information"

In a common sense world, the next iPhone should be a QWERTY Smartphone

Common sense dictates that the upcoming iPhone should be a QWERTY Smartphone with an actual physical keyboard. In my opinion, the current iPhone virtual keyboard borders between a complete bust to manageable, depending on how much time you are willing to give to adjust to it. As a Treo user, even though I have adjusted quite well to the virtual keyboard, by and large it still is a pain and I don’t think current enterprise smartphone users will have the time and patience to get used to Apple’s virtual keyboard.
After all, there is a reason they call them “Crack”Berry. Have you ever seen a BlackBerry user typing rapidly to respond to an email just before a plane takes off? Try that as a relatively new iPhone user and you end flinging the damn iPhone in frustration. Enterprise users don’t care about the razzle dazzle interfaces of the iPhone. They need to get their work done fast and the iPhone virtual keyboard is just a huge hindrance. The auto completion feature that is supposed to make up for the typing inaccuracy sucks half the time.  In fact, the main reason I still keep my Treo apart from key 3rd party apps is because of the physical keyboard.
I find it hilarious how Apple executive Phil Schiller threw in his enterprise presentation
“for those of you that don’t know, typing on the iPhone is awwwwwesome”  When in reality, half the time, typing on this thing stinks( my opinion )

While Apple’s new enterprise features look impressive, they run a high risk of totally flopping because of the lack of a physical keyboard. Plus, with all the recent defections of a few former Apple executives and employees to Palm, you would think Apple has blood in their eyes and are just chomping at the bits to bury Palm for ever( If I were Ed Colligan, I’d be scared to death at this prospect). All these lead to a super thin Apple signature designed qwerty smartphone.
Now of course, we are dealing with hard headed Apple here with more than enough arrogance to think they can shove a virtual keyboard down the throats of enterprise users.

The state of iPhone development

This is what iPhone development and testing is like these days. Well labeled Jailbroken( JB) iPhones. I wonder how many of these we will need.

Thoughts on the iPhone SDK

After announcing the iPhone, His Highness( Steve Jobs ) once said
"You don’t want your phone to be an open platform....You need it to work when you need it to work. Cingular doesn't want to see their West Coast network go down because some application messed up."

With comments like these, it was a bit hard to fathom what we witnessed from the launching of the iPhone SDK on March 6th. Talk about a 360 degree change in policy from a company known for being hardheaded and standing it’s ground.

At first glance, am very impressed with the SDK, but then am probably still stuck in the Mr. Jobs’s reality distortion field and once our developers fully dive into the SDK will we know just how legit this all is. Regardless, March 6th for the mobile developer community was probably one of the most important days in history. For one, it marked the culmination of the efforts of a never say die developer community that did whatever it took to get apps on the iPhone despite Apple not wanting us too. Once Apple realized it could not prevent the avalanche of 3rd Party apps, it was forced to release a public SDK.  I have had many discussions with many of the iPhone Jailbreakers and hackers form the 13 year olds to Mr. ziphone and believe me, what all these folks have accomplished is a large reason why you saw what you saw on March 6th.

The launching of the SDK also marked a new sign of hope for developers. With the Palm OS dying anyway and nothing exciting on other Platforms, things are looking bleak. This new iPhone platform provides a viable avenue for 3rd party developers like us to make good money while developing some of the most amazing apps you will ever see.

So what does this mean for us here at Gx5/Efiko Software?
Well, we have had a great run developing Palm OS apps. We were fortunate to have best sellers that include UltimatePhone, TreoMemo and TreoWeather. Until the rebirth of the Palm OS, we have stopped new development for Palm devices and pretty much now have our sites set on the iPhone( and android by the way). Unlike the limitations of the Palm OS, the iPhone provides us a free canvas( knock on wood) to do some of the most creative things we could ever have imagined and we can’t wait to get started. Actually, we have already started, we are now just doing it the official way.

Back from Ski Vacation

Just recently got back from skiing up in Stowe Mountain  with a great group of friends. Had a lot of fun. I did something new this year that made skiing even more fun. I decided to take my iPhone with me up the slopes and use the ipod feature to listen to music as I came down the slopes using a dedicated James Bond playlist. Being a big James Bond fan I guess I was fantasying being this. Well it way way much better than I thought and flat out cool. Here are some pics.

Thoughts on Apple allowing users to put custom ringtones on the iPhone using Garageband

As the Project Manager for iPhoneRingToneMaker, I really take pride in that we were part of the reason that forced Apple to do this. While we were not the first to release a custom ringtone solution, we were the first to release a commercially viable custom ringtone making product that was drop dead easy to use and allowed users to create as many custom ringtones as they wanted. Then iToner came along and many other developers came up with some neat ways to get ringtones on the iPhone. All the above got Apple’s attention and they proceeded to release updates that essentially foiled the functionality of iPhoneRingToneMaker, iToner and other methods. However, Apple did not realize that it is really hard to kill a mosquito and within weeks, we and these other developers had found ways around the roadblock Apple had put up.
Things were fast becoming a cat and mouse game, with Apple releasing updates( sometimes hurriedly) and us burning the midnight oil trying to get iPhoneRingToneMaker working again.
Then all of a sudden, Apple itself starts allowing users to put custom ringtones on the iPhone using Garageband.
So did Apple throw up the white flag and realize they can’t stop us all from finding ways to put custom ringtones on the iPhone? I would say no. Upcoming updates will show if Apple is still tenaciously intent on foiling custom ringtone apps or if they are tired of playing this cat and mouse game. One thing has been clear though. iPhoneRingToneMaker and iToner have been huge successes with tens of thousands( could be in the hundreds as I don’t know iToner’s numbers) iPhone customers purchasing these apps and should Apple intentionally foil them, there could be another heavy dose of animosity and complaining by iPhone customers towards Apple, further alienating many of these customers, who are still simmering from the iPhone 1.1.1 debacle.

With Apple allowing users to now put custom ringtones with GarageBand, it means we need to innovate, get creative and introduce new features that make the ringtone experience better.  We have started doing this with the latest release of iPhoneRingToneMaker, which now allows you to shuffle your ringtones.  This is a pretty cool thing if you have many ringtones and you just don’t know which one to pick. This is only the beginning. Barring any new cat and mouse games with Apple, we should hopefully be introducing even cooler things you can do with ringtones on your iPhone.

In summary, without iPhoneRingToneMaker, iToner and other tricks by other developers, Apple would have had a free run at making a bazillion amount of dollars from selling ringtones at the expense of giving users the freedom to put any ringtone on the iPhone, while feeding us this baloney about why there needs to be drm on ringtones.

Here comes iClueless

As the Project Manager on this application, I want to give a big shout out to our developers who worked round the clock to get this done within two weeks.

Who needs Apples Wi-Fi store?

Why is everyone wooing and aaahhing over the iTunes wi-fi store on the new iPod and iPhone. That store is lame. And the Starbucks integration? come on. Do you hear all the lame ass music they play in Starbucks, those hip hop discriminating suckers.( IMO)
You watch, in a few months from now, some college kid coding all night and full of that red bull will deliver us a wi-fi store 100 times better than Apple’s Wi-Fi store and it will probably allow you to purchase drm free music from other stores. Amazon might be a good one.
So now you see why Steve Jobs wants to lock the iPhone. To prevent stuff like this. So again, screw Apple’s updates, Stick with iPhone 1.0.2 and download App Tapp and I can promise you will will get everything Apple will add to the iPhone and it will be 100 times better.

Bye Bye iTunes, Hello Amazon Music Store

For those of you like me, who are sick of Apple/iTunes drm hell, Amazon just announced a beta version of their DRM-Free Music Store. For the first time since the days of Napster, am actually excited about downloading music again. Learn more about it here.

iPhone 3rd Party apps on the rise

One of our main web guys has been loading his iPhone with all sorts of fun stuff. Whether Cupertino likes it or not, the 3rd party software market on the iPhone might be on the verge of explosion. Heck, at this rate we will be joining the party. Keep in mind, the iPhone is not even 3 months old and look at what developers with no official SDK have come up with.