mikolas

About iPhone Software Development

September 2, 2008 – 21:10

I’ve been now playing with Apple’s iPhone SDK for a week or so after joining the developer program. My first impressions are quite positive, given that I’d never before written a single line of Objective-C or having any deeper knowledge of Cocoa and other relevant frameworks on OS X.

After doing a few ports of GPL libraries and playing around with the UI framework, I can only say that the SDK is the best mobile SDK I’ve ever used so far. My previous experiences are from MIDP (sucks), Windows Mobile (sucks even more) and Symbian (ultimate horror) so my expectations were not that high. However, Apple’s take on mobile programming is simply elegant and pretty straightforward to learn.

My only complain is my personal dislike for Interface Builder. Somehow, I’ve always been more inclined to make user interfaces programmatically, simply because that way one has total control on what is happening. With Cocoa Touch, making UI via code is pretty simple, as long as you read the documentation first and get your hands into the MVC model under the hood. Still, I think I’ll give IB a chance if I get my brain around it :-)

Given the ease of development (well, relative ease compared to other mobile terminals), it is not hard to see AppStore gaining more momentum. 12 months from now, one should have a target audience of 50 million customers or so. So it is not that impossible to sell a few thousend copies of an application if it fits some customer need. I for one will be trying out how the distribution model works for some niche applications and hopefully make a few bucks in the process.

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Microblogging vs. Hyperlocal News

August 22, 2008 – 10:51

Once again, Steve Outing had a thought provoking article about local news. Pretty much the same idea has been lingering in my mind for a while, not least because I’m an active user of Jaiku. The things I think play in favor of microblogging against local news are quite simple: microblogging is a natural web medium whereas local news is not. The differences, I think, are both technical and mental. Now for a quick list of issues first came to my mind:

Mobile, location aware, microblogging: systems like Jaiku automatically know from where you’re blogging. Your presence stream by definition is hyper-local. Multiply the amount of users in a given territory 24/7 and you have more local representatives able to publish events, realtime, than any news organization
Flickr & YouTube: with current mobile handsets it is dead easy to upload videos and images to 3rd party services. You can attach these to your presence stream effectively becoming a multimedia reporter on the go. While the quality might not be as good as for professional reporters, at least I’d rather see events unfolding in realtime, not after all the interesting has happened.
Technology investment: none. Just use existing services.
Aggregating a local news portal: use Yahoo Pipes for regional filtering and a piece of PHP to put the RSS streams together and you have a graigslist of local news. With virtually zero investment.

I could go on and on, but you should get the point: while traditional media organizations tend to build everything themselves, with upfront investments, large staff and slow time-to-market, we who have been doing web services, even before last bubble, would do it differently.

Also, notice the focus on mobile. I bet that mobile will be the next web 2.0 during coming 2 to 4 years. The reason is simply the flexibility of new smartphones with good web browsers, GPS, 3G/HSDPA and the like. In fact the future is already here, but people don’t pay attention as we still lack the services and the existing ones are still a bit hard to use.

PS. An excellent (IMHO) example of building hyperlocal news service the microblogging way is Finnish news service called Vartti (part of SanomaWSOY corporation which is also my place of employment).

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Of Interest: Cosmic Variance: Blogoplexus ::: Some worthwhile science blogs listed by Cosmic Variance. (0 comments)

New Firmware for Sony Reader

August 12, 2008 – 16:06

Sony PRS-505 Reader

Image via Wikipedia

Sony has released a new firmware revision for their PRS-505 Reader. The most notable features are support for Adobe Digital Editions and PDF text reflowing. The latter is most interesting for me, as I tend to keep lot of scientific publications on my reader and those are mostly in PDF format. Now that the Reader is able to nicely reflow the text, you can magnify the font to a more readable size and the reading experience is actually excellent.

If you still have not tried any of the electronic reading devices, I definitely urge you to do it. Once you realize that it is possible to carry around gigabytes of books in a single lightweight device, there is no turning back.

And what am I currently reading? The list is as follows:

The Black Hole War by Leonard Susskind

Albert Einstein: His Life and Universe by Walter Isaacson

Several academic publications on quantum mechanics.