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My brother at Mac-Sys sent me this picture of his journey to work… Related posts: Mac-Sys is 9 years old Mac-Sys starts blogging! Ten Apps I Want… Snow Leopard: the next version of Mac OS X – due 2009
My brother at Mac-Sys sent me this picture of his journey to work…
From @semaphoria insight into the new gig: building a small/nimble agency that will help clients bring useful, delightful and smart iphone apps to market. This was ReTweeted by Raven Zachary who has defined his company as iPhone intelligence. Raven is the founder of iPhoneDevCamp and was the project director for Obama ’08 For iPhone and … Continue reading “iPhone as a ‘prophet’”
From @semaphoria
insight into the new gig: building a small/nimble agency that will help clients bring useful, delightful and smart iphone apps to market.
This was ReTweeted by Raven Zachary who has defined his company as iPhone intelligence. Raven is the founder of iPhoneDevCamp and was the project director for Obama ’08 For iPhone and he provides a diverse set of services for clients relating to iPhone Strategy and Product Development.
There’s a groundswell of support for iPhone as a platform but critics of the platform have been many. It’s too restrictive for some, too cumbersome for others – but I feel they miss the point. This isn’t about taking Apple’s platform and promoting it to prominence, it’s about the promotion of mobile as a computing platform as well as a communications platform. It’s been said repeatedly that the iPhone itself is a great device but a rubbish phone – and yet it’s selling nearly 20 million (not including iPod touch devices) – this alone tells me that the market is demanding more than just communications from their mobile devices. They want internet services, location services, friend services and all sorts of other value adds.
To my mind this makes the iPhone a prophet rather than a messiah. It’s showing us that there’s an immense amount of interest in the iPhone as a mobile computing platform and this will extend to a halo effect where other smartphones will be brought to the same level – whether it’s Android Market, Blackberry Market, Microsoft Skymarket or other similar clones. The same services will likely need to run on these other platforms once they gain enough momentum and they need to be INTEROPERABLE.
“Bernstein Analyst Announces iPhone Nano, iPhone Touch” is a classic example of an industry analyst disappearing up his own ass and using Google Keywords to decide what to write about. ” The other 83% of mobile handsets are largely sold without data service, except possibly text messaging. To more effectively address this part o fthe … Continue reading “Analyst nonsense..”
“Bernstein Analyst Announces iPhone Nano, iPhone Touch” is a classic example of an industry analyst disappearing up his own ass and using Google Keywords to decide what to write about.
” The other 83% of mobile handsets are largely sold without data service, except possibly text messaging. To more effectively address this part o fthe market, we believe Apple should offer an iPhone that does not require the user to sign up for a data plan.†Sacconaghi estimates that adding such a device to the iPhone line-up could potentially add $7 billion in revenues and $4 billion in gross profits annually (assuming a 3 percent market share).”
Of course, all of this is made up. It’s not even projections. It’s nonsense.
It misses the fact that the iPhone platform is all about the software. The iPhone is pretty much a dinner plate of a hardware device – it’s long, it’s wide and it’s not that pretty. But the software is golden.
And it’s the same sort of argument that Apple should license Mac OS X for white box PCs. Changes the experience, aims at the low end of the market. It’s a stupid argument and it didn’t work last time round.
Tonight was the Tuesday Night Cocoa group meet. Half a dozen hairy blokes sitting in the Mac-Sys Ltd offices with instructional PDFs up on a projector and open books in front of them. I’m very keen on this – this is a small cadre of fellahs, some of whom work in Mac-Sys and some … Continue reading “Tuesday Night Cocoa”
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Tonight was the Tuesday Night Cocoa group meet. Half a dozen hairy blokes sitting in the Mac-Sys Ltd offices with instructional PDFs up on a projector and open books in front of them. I’m very keen on this – this is a small cadre of fellahs, some of whom work in Mac-Sys and some of whom don’t, taking the time of an evening to fix issues with their coding projects and leaving with homework which they’ll work on during the week. To a degree I’m envious but I’mr eally glad I was able to help them get this started. |
None of the guys there had any coding experience and yet they’re tackling the iPhone SDK in their spare time. They’ve buzzed me a couple of times in the last week or so with compile errors which they couldn’t debug (simply due to their lack of experience) but tonight they didn’t need to ask once – the previous nights and afternoons they have put into this have started to pay off.
It’s a great example of grassroots doing it for themselves – this is what I love about the current industry – people doing it without asking permission – whether they’re running a code class for the iPhone, running a coffee meetup for tech-heads just because they’re in the right place and the right time or knocking brains together to create a mashup of two useful services – it’s great.
Kudos to them and I can’t wait to see what they’re working on next.
Today I was challenged about this web site. “It’s not very welcoming”, they said. It’s true. You go to the main domain site and it states curtly “Your IP has been recorded”. This is true of course, your IP address has been timestamped somewhere on my server which means I know when you were there … Continue reading “you want to start something?”
Today I was challenged about this web site.
“It’s not very welcoming”, they said.
It’s true. You go to the main domain site and it states curtly “Your IP has been recorded”. This is true of course, your IP address has been timestamped somewhere on my server which means I know when you were there and I can likely track you down to your IP pool at the very least.
But that’t not all.
“You want to start something? sounds like you’re picking a fight”
Well, that’s because I am.
I’m what they generically call an “angry blogger”. You only need to look at my tag cloud to see that. I call people names. I swear. I shout. And my tone is challenging at best, aggressive most of the time and down right insulting at it’s worst.
But that’s not really what it means.
Do you want to start something?
Start something. Start a blog. Start twittering. Start using RSS. Start filling in your FaceBook or LinkedIn profile? Start connecting. Start a new business. Start talking to people. Start paying attention. Start looking outside. Start listening. Start losing that weight. Start learning a new skill. Start reading more. Start thinking more. Start playing games. Start a community group? Start a web site. Start an open forum. Start getting involved. Start something.
I’m feeling frustration over the current state of play with CoWorking in Belfast. Things move slowly as you begin to involve people, organisations and bureaucracy. And the difficulties of navigating the various personalities leaves me wanting to just the whole thing into the “TOO HARD” basket this week. Dealing with estate agents and landlords is … Continue reading “CoWorking…”
I’m feeling frustration over the current state of play with CoWorking in Belfast.
Things move slowly as you begin to involve people, organisations and bureaucracy. And the difficulties of navigating the various personalities leaves me wanting to just the whole thing into the “TOO HARD” basket this week.
Dealing with estate agents and landlords is a struggle – they’d rather have empty space than a client with reduced rent.
I think this week I’ve got a little too much on my plate. I want to focus on the things that excite me (iPhone Dev Days) and less on the things that don’t (wrangling a lease for a place I’ll likely never get to actually work in).
Apparently swapping makeup is a big deal and one of the problems is that the existing sites tend to be very US-centric and US folk don’t like to ship internationally. So, @dressjunkie asked me to do something about it and as she’s my wife, I resolved to help her. For the last couple of weeks, … Continue reading “slapswap.com launched…”
Apparently swapping makeup is a big deal and one of the problems is that the existing sites tend to be very US-centric and US folk don’t like to ship internationally. So, @dressjunkie asked me to do something about it and as she’s my wife, I resolved to help her.
For the last couple of weeks, pj has been spending a couple of hours here and there helping me out with a little addition to a PHPBB installation that I set up for a ‘cosmetics swap site” centered around the UK.
Tonight slapswap.com went live.
Okay – it’s a PHPBB but it’s around a community that, without dressjunkie, I’d never have any contact with. But, despite being ‘only’ a bulletin board, it’s the embodiment of a social network.
I’ve just updated the Digital Circle blog with a heap of new events in the calendar – some of them will have their details posted during the day today (delayed publishing in WordPress rocks!). Some of them are: Web 2.0 Expo Future of Web Apps, Dublin 2009 Digital Media Breakfast, Belfast, 5th Feb at 8 … Continue reading “Events events…”
I’ve just updated the Digital Circle blog with a heap of new events in the calendar – some of them will have their details posted during the day today (delayed publishing in WordPress rocks!).
Some of them are:
In order to get notifications of these, you really should be following @digitalcircle.
Anton Mannering writes about an iPhone Dev Camp happening in Belfast and Dublin. “The intrepid guys up in the North have been kicking around the idea of an iPhone DevCamp for hose interested in learning how to develop for the platform. … Matt Johnston of the Digital Circle brought this to my attention and is … Continue reading “iPhone Developer thingies”
Anton Mannering writes about an iPhone Dev Camp happening in Belfast and Dublin.
“The intrepid guys up in the North have been kicking around the idea of an iPhone DevCamp for hose interested in learning how to develop for the platform. … Matt Johnston of the Digital Circle brought this to my attention and is one of the main motivators in making it happen.”
We’re going to get some of the people kicking off some meetups in the two regions – aim of which is to raise awareness of the event and also give us some idea of the coverage. This sort of thing is gaining momentum behind the scenes and therefore we want it to go ahead without a hitch.
At the moment it looks a bit like this:
| POSSIBLE AGENDA | ||
|---|---|---|
| 9:00am | Welcome, and overview | |
| 9:15am | Keynote speaker | |
| 10:00am | Programming Talk 1 – Developing for Cocoa. Someone builds an application live on stage. On the Projector, we can see what he’s doing. Obviously limited to some simpler projects. | Basic Game Development for iPhone – someone goes through the basics of setting up a background, showing accelerometer code, collision code. Keywords: Unity? 3D? 2D? Must bug the UNITY team about this. Spoke to Chris McClelland about the QUB interests in Unity. |
| 11:00am | Coffee and bio break | |
| 11:30am | Programming Talk 2 – Developing for iPhone. Someone builds an application live on stage. | TILT – More on the controls needed for games. |
| 12:30pm | The App Store – Some devs with experience of the Apple App Store talk through their experiences | The Business of Entertainment – Games and entertainment are selling hot on the Apple Store – from the complex Super MOnkey Ball to the simple ‘sound grenade’. |
| 1:00 pm | Lunch | |
| 2:00 pm | Show and Tell Any developers attending take ten minutes to walk through their projects. If they wish, they can open the floor to answer questions and take suggestions. |
Making it special – adding in location based services or even just a high score page on the net for your game. |
| 2:45pm | Coffee and bio break | |
| 3:00pm | Getting your App to the iPhone for development and distribution | |
| 4:00pm | Prize Draw (e.g. books, Pragmatic Programmer gift vouchers, iTunes gift cards) for stuff happening that day – prizes from sponsors. And I think this would be a good opportunity to launch an All Ireland iPhone Competition to run over the next few months. | |
| 4:30pm | Random chattering until home time. | |
It’s not set in stone of course and I kinda want there to be three tracks:
Before then, let’s get together and have Belfast and Dublin Meetups to pave the way – a quick show’n’tell, a quick demo. What do you say?