If you are not using named_scope I don't know how you DRY.
Khang Toh
khangtoh
mainly about hacking ruby, rails, the iphone and some random thoughts at times
With the inevitable launch of the iPad, Apple has taken a big step in defining and also proving what they think touch computing should be like and how it will evolve over time. There are many haters and many lovers of the newly launched iPad and many have put down their thoughts on what they think the iPad is, will and should be. However, I think everyone is missing a huge detail and I really want to say this.
The iPad is just a first generation of its kind, much like the iPhone. Give it time and this class of computing device will evolve over time with better technology. But wait a minute, you are missing the big picture here - and that is what powers these devices. I'm not talking about the A4.
Read this ==> iPhone OS Apple iTouch OS.
Yes. The iPhone OS. From the iPhone to the iPad, generations of Apple's touch computing devices will be running the Apple iTouch OS. With the reveal of iPhone OS 4.0 in the next few hours, the iPhone OS has came a long way. It is a world-class multi-touch OS with a very usable UI framework. The SDK is superd, I've developed multiple apps with the SDK and the iPhone SDK is one of the best I've work with throughout my professional career as a software engineer.
Apple has always steer clear from the OS business, I mean the business of selling OS's for commodity computing, so why the change? First, I have no doubt that Android is slowly positioning itself to be the "open source" multi-touch computing OS in years to come. In a few years from now, we will see slate devices from all the major PC makers, HP, Dell, etc and MS OS , Android and iTouch OS will definitely be powering these devices. To win the war against Android and MS, I see Apple having to take the path least favorable and that is releasing the iTouch OS and working with device manufacturers. Ultimately, it would be of Apple's interest to bring the Apple appstore to all these devices, why wouldn't they?
Here's the thing. Twitter is going to reveal their advertising system to the world soon. The rumor out there is in March. Techcrunch has a written a whole bunch about this new ad system that Twitter will be launching. I think the Techcrunch post talks about the "conventional" way that a Twitter Ad will be like but Dick Costolo did promised everyone that Twitter Ads “will be fascinating. Non-traditional. And people will love it.”
Here's what I think the Twitter Ad system should be and if this is not, then Twitter should seriously take my advice. Twitter has pretty much embraced app developers from the beginning with their API approach. And I think that Twitter has the most "open", not as in standards, but a widely available and functional web API of any web/social sites. There are hundreds of Twitter applications/sites spawning every month and Twitter should absolutely leverage their great relationship with their developers and here's how I think they should do it.
If you think about a Twitter Ad, what sort of components can there be? It's really pretty straight forward since Twitter is just a really simple text messaging application and I think that's the beauty of Twitter. TEXT. No images, nothing. So an Ad unit on Twitter can really only be TEXT. So to cut the chase, here's my story.
Twitter will never show ads on their site, again the risk there is jeopadizing the user experience, blah blah blah. Twitter should pretty much distribute ads to their developers and this way developers are happy because they have a new way of monetizing their apps ( other than working with the shitty Google Adsense ). Think about it, all these Twitter client developers are currently monetizing ads in various way, AdMob (Google), Adsense (Google) and startup 101, Always be thinking of how you can grab that piece of pie from your competitor's mouth. So if the soon to launch Twitter Ad system does not have an API that developers can use to pull Ads into their applications, it's time to think about it, Dick.
So far I've just covered the Ad distribution part, but what about Ad format? How are Twitter ads going to look like? I've already dropped some hints on the simplicity of Twitter earlier, and so a Twitter Ad will comprise of the following - geolocations (to be query against), meta keywords (use to anchor urls), text and url's. Yes that's it. Developers will have the choice of implementing how they want a particular Ad to show. And I think that's the fasinating part of it. Giving that freedom of implementation to developers will put a layer of disguise over the Ad and it will probably help with gaining user acceptance.
What do you think? Am I on the right track? Fire your comments away!
I always have tons of ideas that would come and go, but recently, I have been doing a lot of iPhone stuff and so naturally ideas that popped up in my head are mostly iPhone related. The mobile safari is one of the best mobile browser I've used and without doubt the iPhone has one of the best mobile web browsing experience. Recently, I started seeing an increasing number of sites that support iPhone's safari browser native resolution, 420x320 or vice versa. However comparing to the vast majority of sites out on the internet, it's probably a really low percentage of sites that does support iPhone's format. My guess is around 1 - 3 percent of websites has built-in support for being friendly on the iPhone.
What's my idea?
An iPhone application that reformats CSS/HTML on the fly so it shows well on the iPhone screen resolution of 420x320 or 320x420. I've seen iPhone applications that uses the UIWebView API to implement a full screen browser with a bunch of features that were not available on Safari. In addition to just reformating CSS/HTML, it also recognizes domain names and so clicking on such urls would fire up any preferred native apps, for example TweetDeck if it was a twitter.com hyperlink or the Facebook app for Facebook.com. Opening 3rd party applications is possible if applications register custom URL scheme for their application and publish their schemes. That's just another example that you can provide a more utilitarian browser that not only renders content better but has these nice built-in feature integrations.
So how to make money?
There's actually a few way to monetize this. The first is obvious,
Love this , hate this ?
With everything, there's love and hate, so if you think this is brilliant, I would love to talk to you more personally. Hate this? Tell me why, I love to hear and see this from every angle.
Looks like Apple is making baby steps in making the app review process better. I logged into iTunes Connect and found a new link that shows the status history log. I'm not convinced that this helps in improving the app review process a whole lot.
So it's officially 100,000 apps in the Apple AppStore. Apple was happy to announce that and I'm sure developers don't share the same feeling. To me, it just means there are 90,000 crappy apps that no one cares about.
Having started a company trying to thrive on the success and genius of the iPhone for 5 months now, I still say that the Appstore to be a giant blackhole. Many have came up with theories and thesis on how to climb your way to the top but I feel no one has come up with that secret recipe yet. Today, I took a routine check on the top 25 apps. Sitting at #2 was Pocket Devil, a game that was branded as a copy cat of the very successful Pocket God. It has 2.5 stars for reviews and people are giving bad reviews telling others to not buy it. Despite that, it's still climbing up the top 25 list and now at the #2 position. That really got me thinking. Why? I have always thought that getting good reviews is essential if you want your app to at least have the chance of getting into the top 100s. But here's Pocket Devil with tons of bad reviews and it looks like they're on the way to the top spot. Apparently the copycat wins big. To date there's numerous flight control copycats and harbor master was one of the successful ones. It never did get into the top 25 but was among top 25 for games at a point. So with all that said, what am I actually trying to say here? With all that noise in the AppStore, it no longer matters how well your game or applicaion is. All it matters is getting your name out so everyone knows about. Good press, bad press, it's gonna help getting people to know about your app.As a software developer, the world of technology is evolving so fast. In less than 2 years, the iPhone has completely change the mobile device industry. Before, there was no device that only has a full touchscreen, multi-touch was no where close. With the iPhone as the current leader in this "class" of device, I'm not talking about mobile phone, Android was announced shortly and then the Palm Pre.
I made a career change from developing world class consumer electronics for brands like Sony, Bose and Samsung, to now developing games for the iPhone. I consider that a huge leap from embedded systems to game development. So here's a personal advice to any developer out there who is thinking of taking that leap, which platform should I go with?
Indeed.com has a nice job keywords trending feature and I used the keywords, iphone, android and palm pre, and guess what, the answer is pretty clear.
http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=iphone%2C+android%2C+palm+pre&l=
There is a growing trend that I've been seeing with the iPhone developer community and it's bothering me. Blame Apple this, blame Apple that. Playing the blame game. I've already done that a couple of times. There are valid ones that Apple did did a bad job in communicating with App developers and I've read horror stories on how apps are being held up in Apple's review cycle for months and later was rejected for a trival violation of their UI guide.
As a matter of fact, I've personally have had that experience with smackBOTS Challenge, our light version of smackBOTS. smackBOTS Challenge had gotten the notice of unexpected delay and went into limbo for 2 months. One fine day, I got a phone call from Apple's legal department and the Apple representative on the other side told me that the delay was due to the fact that we mentioned prizes in our App description and that's not allowed. He suggested we removed all references of any prizes in our description and he will forward the app review to the reviewers. 2 days later, smackBOTS Challenge was approved. I blamed Apple for this because it took them 2 months to communicate such a minute detail that was taken care of in a matter of minutes.
So alright, enough with my own stories but seriously, because of the way app reviews have been and the way that the appstore functions, developers everywhere are trying to push updates out as soon as possible. This practice is fine until app developers do that to the extend of sacrificing the quality of their apps, ie. releasing buggy software. So what prompted me this write all this rant? Well, another rant by Joe Stump that got posted on Techcrunch. Apparently, Joe has inside connections at Apple and he tried to work those connections to get more insights to why his app review was getting delayed. While it's great that Joe has his connections but imagine the number of developers like us, who did not. But I was happy to hear that his inside connections just referred him to email app reviewers instead and that's just being fair and not playing favors.
Entrepreneur working on my first real startup.
LeftRightStudios. We make awesome IPhone games.
smackBOTS (launched), KatchUp (almost released)
Simplebucket. The most simple photo hosting service ever.
Google thinks so too.
