software – Page 5

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 … 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:

Developing apps using Cocoa (using the standard Cocoa controls)
Game development (or developing stuff using OpenGL, collisions, non-standard controls)
The Business of Apps (or realising that getting your app on the App Store is 10% of the work)

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?

Capture the Flag

Today I started a discussion on 38Minutes called International Capture the Flag ARG. With a radius of 10 km, you should probably aim for 20 flags and maybe up to 10 players. With a radius of 5000 km, you’d probably only want 20-50 flags and maybe 100 players. The idea is that games can work … Continue reading “Capture the Flag”

Today I started a discussion on 38Minutes called International Capture the Flag ARG.

With a radius of 10 km, you should probably aim for 20 flags and maybe up to 10 players. With a radius of 5000 km, you’d probably only want 20-50 flags and maybe 100 players. The idea is that games can work globally – the only needs would be a GPS-enabled smartphone (smart enough to run the client). Players should be divided into teams and the web site for the game should provide an overview of the flags in real time.

It’s not an FPS, it’s just a Capture the Flag. you go to the location and hit update. The client tags your location and sends it to the server. Bing, you have the flag. Note, the flag location is just going to be based in LONG/LAT so some locations might be harder to achieve than others (ie, middle of a private estate, in a hospital). The GPS location needs to be fuzzy – because GPS not work so well indoors 🙂

If two people update in the same time period (say, 5 minutes?) then the flag should go GREY on the map until they’ve timed out (5 mins?) and one goes back to reclaim it.

To be honest, this is a casual game. The server would host (and maybe send out) daily reports on the number of flags captured

Alternate Reality Games really give me a buzz. I’m not 100% sure how they make money (it could be the dreaded advertising).

Simon Meek asks: What are you thinking the pay off will be? And where will the community needed for it come from?

I haven’t worked a lot of that out yet. A lot of this I’m assuming will come from good design, a great interface and the expansion of local games. To sweeten the pie, wouldn’t you dedicate any sales of the client (yeah, sell it, why not?)

The game only works if you convince others to play and only gets interesting when there’s lots of people doing stuff so updates need to be relatively frequent (ooh, tie it into a Twitter ID which broadcasts updates, I like it!). By itself it should be relatively viral.

Knockoff or Innovation?

Fraser is responding to the number of apps out there which: permit the viewing of photosets on Flickr permit the location element of photosets to be exploited I don’t, however, think it’s fair to consider these apps to be ‘knock-offs’ because the concept was trivial when you took into consideration the number of location-aware services … Continue reading “Knockoff or Innovation?”

Fraser is responding to the number of apps out there which:

permit the viewing of photosets on Flickr
permit the location element of photosets to be exploited

I don’t, however, think it’s fair to consider these apps to be ‘knock-offs’ because the concept was trivial when you took into consideration the number of location-aware services that you could build.

It’s not the first time I’ve seen this sentiment from ‘pioneers’ in the App Store and I daresay it will not be the last. I don’t think it’s fair, however. Would you consider the iPod a knock-off of other MP3 players (due to the result of the Creative lawsuit it would seem that a U.S. Judge thought it was.)

Look at the number of tip calculators, dice rollers, list managers? Are they all knockoffs of the first one?

The Gaming Market: time to break in?

Following on from earlier posts, it would seem that casual gaming on the iPhone is going to be big – and big for the consumer as opposed to the publisher. There are some incredibly fluid and fun-looking games like Rolando as well as the traditional games like MahJong. And if you like the idea of … Continue reading “The Gaming Market: time to break in?”

Following on from earlier posts, it would seem that casual gaming on the iPhone is going to be big – and big for the consumer as opposed to the publisher. There are some incredibly fluid and fun-looking games like Rolando as well as the traditional games like MahJong. And if you like the idea of using your iPhone like a steering wheel, there’ll be a hundred games like it – I’ve seen about 20 by now – and it makes the one or two which have an on-screen steering wheel seem innovative in comparison.

Market Size in terms of Potential Customers
If you went by market size, the mobile market as a whole would seem incredibly lucrative with a billion handsets being sold every year (or some equally incredible number). Only 10% of these are smartphones and the memory and resources on some of the non-smartphones mean that casual gaming is limited to mini-golf, snake and tennis games reminscent of the console games of the 1980s.

The PC industry similarly is massive with worldwide PC shipments for 2008 estimated to be nearly 300 million units (according to Gartner) but a large percentage of these will not be participating in the gaming market as they are put to work as ATMs, information monitors, shop tills and overpowered typewriters. The PC industry also has high expectations on the quality of games and for those people who want simpler games – it’s a flooded market and realistically you’re competing against Solitaire which is on every Windows PC known to man. That said – the cost of development tools has dropped considerably so that it is accessible to the hobbyist – look at Unity, XNA or any of a hundred other game engines and game development applications.

The handheld gaming market, dominated by the Nintendo DS Lite with 51 million units shipped (and the original DS shipped 20 million) and the PlayStation Portable with 37 million units shipped, would also seem to be massive but this is an expensive market to try to break into.

After that, the Console industry would seem most lucrative due to the numbers of units sold (the Wii has shipped 24 million from November 2006 to March 2008, XBox 360 has sold 19 million from November 2005 to March 2008 and Playststion 3 has sold 13 million from November 2006 to March 2008) but the costs for making games in those markets can be incredibly high (as we have discussed before) and you need separate toolkits for each console – driving the cost of development up.

Market size can’t, therefore, always be an indication of the number of potential customers – it has an effect, certainly but, as an example, the Nintendo DS market of 70 million has a potential customer size of zero if you can’t afford the costs of building a development team, training them and purchasing the tools required for game development on that console.

I attended an InvestNI event a couple of years ago where the consensus from a paid market research company was that the gaming market at the time was stagnant. It was too hard to break in due to the costs and the lead that other companies and other countries had was too big to break. I thought at the time it was probably not far from the mark especially where the mainstream consoles lie.

In contrast, newer handhelds like the iPhone, though with only 6 million shipped (and millions predicted for the next 6 months) has a much higher potential market size. This is because:

The tools for building are readily available and free (though there’s a Â£50 charge for the certificate)
Due to the App Store distribution, the customers are accessible and many of them are looking for new software to load
The hype machine is already built.

The proof is in the pudding. We have companies coming out of the woodwork to provide applications – whether these be games, IM apps, clients for their online services or just utilities. Unity (mentioned above) has also announced they will be making their game engine capable of creating iPhone games.

This is good, of course, because competition lowers prices and the consumer gets the break here. It’s a new platform, probably with 20 million potential customers by year end.

It’s hard to comment on the shakeup that Android and a new Open Symbian operating systems will bring to the market but it’s definite that the market is changing from the stagnant episode of the last few years.

Stop trying to make an iPhone killer. Srsly.

Corvida from ReadWriteWeb writes: The launch of the 3G iPhone is a little over a week away. With all the promotion that Apple and AT&T are getting, other carriers and mobile handset developers have been releasing touchscreen phones like crazy. From Blackberry to LG, there are tons of touchscreen handsets that will hit the market … Continue reading “Stop trying to make an iPhone killer. Srsly.”

Corvida from ReadWriteWeb writes:

The launch of the 3G iPhone is a little over a week away. With all the promotion that Apple and AT&T are getting, other carriers and mobile handset developers have been releasing touchscreen phones like crazy. From Blackberry to LG, there are tons of touchscreen handsets that will hit the market this year in order to take ground from the iPhone. However, they’re missing something very important. It’s not about the touchscreen guys, it’s mainly about the mobile apps.

When the App Store launches, there will be a huge number of available applications and the rumour goes that more and more will be accepted over the next 6 months, due to an alleged backlog in processing of accounts which means there will be more and more new applications as time goes by.

Competitors are scrabbling to release ‘iPhone killers’ which is affording the iPhone a position of ascendancy already, despite having less than 10% of the smartphone market and a miniscule percentage of the mobile phone market as a whole. The lack of wisdom and foresight in the mobile manufacturer markets is turning to Apple’s favour just like the MP3 market did before them – competing on paper, in terms of technical specifications and not bringing anything new to the table is just foolish.

In terms of real competitors we have Windows Mobile and RIM’s BlackBerry. Both of them have a unified platform for application distribution and an installed base. Symbian, while having a massive installed base is somewhat hobbled by their manufacturers who have fragmented the code base by diverging into their own proprietary versions. Nokia’s recent acquisition of Symbian and creation of the Symbian Foundation highlight that Nokia and SonyEricsson are obviously aware of the issue there. Add Android into the mix (and possibly the obscure LiMo) and you’ve got a whole smorgasbord of activity happening in this space.

In recent experience with ‘new’ phones, the interface is still where they need to work the most. Working with the Nokia N95 8 GB and the SonyEricsson K960i – the UI is sluggish, the browser isn’t bad but it’s centuries behind the iPhone. And Samsung’s Instinct? Watch the videos – while it may be able to download the pages quickly enough, the responsiveness of the UI is just woeful. There’s a pregnant pause every time you launch an application which contrasts most roughly with the iPhone. And everything they’ve done to beat the iPhone will likely be defeated in 10 days time. Fantastic guys, way to move the industry forward!

This sluggishness is important. A phone is not like a desktop computer. It’s limited in resources in ways the desktop never is. Applications are not launched and left to run for days on end. Every application is started and quit several times a day in the life of a smartphone. And of course, during the 2008 WWDC Keynote a lot was made of the Windows method of managing performance.

Ridiculous no matter what way you look at it. And this is a third party application that costs $7.95. How’s that for value?

Stop trying to create an iPhone killer. Just try to make an insanely great phone. Seriously.

Convergence

Jyri Engestrom, whose company, Jaiku, was bought by Google, talks about social ‘nodal points’. â€œSocial peripheral visionâ€ lets you see whatâ€™s next. If you are unaware of other peopleâ€™s intentions, you canâ€™t make plans. â€œImagine a physical world where we have as much peripheral information at our disposal as in WoW.â€ Not just â€œboring update … Continue reading “Convergence”

Jyri Engestrom, whose company, Jaiku, was bought by Google, talks about social ‘nodal points’.

â€œSocial peripheral visionâ€ lets you see whatâ€™s next. If you are unaware of other peopleâ€™s intentions, you canâ€™t make plans. â€œImagine a physical world where we have as much peripheral information at our disposal as in WoW.â€ Not just â€œboring update feeds.â€ Innovate, especially on mobiles. We will see this stuff in the next 24 months. Some examples: Maps: Where my friends are. Phonebook: what are people up to. Email: prioritized. Photos: Face recognition.

Hands up who heard about ‘Convergence’ in recent years with regards to devices. When I was in Nortel, I was sent a heap of promotional ‘research’ videos about where Nortel thought things were going. Hand held communicators with video, contextual avatars, the ability to switch displays and incoming calls from device to device, display to display. A pocket device which handled communication, driving instructions, meetings, traffic reports, entertainment. In 1997 this was science fiction – and I wish I could find those old MPEGs. In 1997, Nortel was building science fiction, these days they seem to be building golden parachutes.

A decade later and convergence is here. We can do all sorts of magical things with our phones – and the race is on to see which devices will win out but, in the end, it’s all about the software. Some technologies are a certain win – Location Based Services for instance, are going to be insanely popular for games, social networking, media and resource tracking. We’re only seeing the tip of the iceberg at the moment.

In contrast, something that seemed to be a win back in 1997, video-conferencing, has been very slow to take off and I see a lot more people recording or live-broadcasting video to distribution services than I do for point-to-point communication. This may be an issue with devices or it could be an issue with infrastructure. When I had a mobile with a facing camera, I never used it because I didn’t know anyone else who had it or who would be interested in an expensive video conference session. I’ve used video with iChat or Skype a lot because the quality has been very good but tried to use it on my Nokia N800 several times and found it thoroughly dissatisfying.

We need to think about what people really use their mobile phones for.

Talking to each other
Sending SMS/texts to each other, sometimes with a picture attached (MMS)
Email
Web Search/Sports headlines/Updating facebook/Cheating at pub quizzes
Playing a game while waiting for something/filling the time while clock watching.

and we need to consider what will be important for them in the future.

In a couple of weeks I’ll be upgrading to a new iPhone 3G and I’m happy with the convergence it brings. For me, the software is important. My partner, however, is vacillating between the new iPhone and going back to a Nokia slide-phone. She prefers the keys and the form factor of the Nokias though she loves her current iPhone.

I find the difference in preference to be interesting. We’re both going to be moving to a 3G phone of some sort.

Is your app going to be a money spinner on the AppStore?

From waffle.wootest.net I seriously hope Gruber did not mean what he said, or that I am reading meaning into it where there is none. My app ThisService, which I wrote principally for him by request, has to date made less than $100 through donations. Is John suggesting that it is junk, or that junk that … Continue reading “Is your app going to be a money spinner on the AppStore?”

From waffle.wootest.net

I seriously hope Gruber did not mean what he said, or that I am reading meaning into it where there is none. My app ThisService, which I wrote principally for him by request, has to date made less than $100 through donations. Is John suggesting that it is junk, or that junk that is free should be accepted?

I think the point here is being missed by all and sundry. If you’re seeing your app as a money making venture as opposed to free, then you’re going to need to use the App Store and that means accepting terms and conditions. It’s not just Apple who has a limit on the size of cheque they will send – Google does it too with AdWords.

The point is – if you’re looking to make a couple of hundred dollars out of the App Store then you are approaching it wrong. The App Store will have a few very specialist applications that may sell a couple of hundred copies but that’s because they’re in a very specific niche. And if they price them at a dollar then yeah, it’s going to take that number of sales before a cheque is printed.

Did anyone seriously think that Apple would send you a cheque for $0.70 every month because some user decided to buy it that month?

That’s not Apple being mean or giving indie developers a raw deal – it’s just the combination of ‘rules’ plus stupid pricing. And this storm in a teacup is typical of Mac user hysteria.

And the DRM rant?

Well, some people want to protect their wares from being copied. Go figure. You’ll get fights on both sides of that issue. If you don’t like it, release for the JailBreak community.

Virtual Notes

Mike Elgan at ComputerWorld gives software developers the chills worldwide as he describes ‘virtual sticky notes’: Researchers at a variety of labs, at both universities and private companies, are working on technology that enables people to create messages and associate them with a specific location. Those pursuing leadership in this technology include Microsoft, Siemens, Cornell … Continue reading “Virtual Notes”

Mike Elgan at ComputerWorld gives software developers the chills worldwide as he describes ‘virtual sticky notes’:

Researchers at a variety of labs, at both universities and private companies, are working on technology that enables people to create messages and associate them with a specific location. Those pursuing leadership in this technology include Microsoft, Siemens, Cornell University, the University of Edinburgh and now in the news this week: Duke University.
…
“Virtual sticky notes” are messages and other content that people can’t read unless they’re standing in the right spot. The idea is that a phone’s GPS determines the location for both poster and readers. The concept turns the physical world into a kind of 3-D Internet.

It’s not just the big companies, there are half a dozen lone developers and micro-ISVs who are working on something similar.

The moment I heard about the Core Location possibilities in the iPhone, the moment I realised how big this was going to be. Location-Services are going to be the hit technology of the next eighteen months. And if you don’t believe me, well…you’re an idiot. Geeks have been lusting after a reliable match-up between virtual space (cyberspace, whatever) and meatspace (the real world) for decades (I first read about it in 1993 in a roleplaying game so you can appreciate how long geeks have been wanting this). Now we have devices with GPS and internet capabilities that will allow that to happen.

Mike describes some scenarios such as writing a restaurant review after stepping out of a restaurant and posting it to the the ‘Virtual Note’ server which can be retrieved by the next person who stands there and opens the ‘Virtual Note’ application.

Whether this is used for private messaging or public messaging, it’s also open to abuse. Rather than phone booths containing cards for illicit services (admittedly I’ve not seen these in Belfast), you might end up with virtual notes which only really occupy virtual space and not meatspace. What’s to stop and unscrupuluous business owner or advertiser from swamping a competitor’s physical location with bad reviews? What’s to stop criminals from leaving an enticing breadcrumb trail that brings our curious geeks into a mugging incident because the criminals know they have some saleable technology with them.

Worse still, we’re talking about virtual overlays of the real world here so places that are heavily visited will become swamped with messages; both personal and commercial, public and private.

This is why exclusivity might be needed. We need to be able to segregate this traffic so that we only see the traffic from the people we subscribe to. This would be, a good goal for Twitter 2.0 (or maybe Google is going mash up Jaiku and Google Maps to give us exactly this for Android?)

There are other avenues of fun – leaving a breadcrumb trail for someone to follow armed with a GPS and your ‘sticky notes’ software. And what if the ‘location’ isn’t enough data. What if you required the GPS location as well as a necessity to point your camera in a certain direction in order to do a fuzzy pattern match from a photo you just received. Sounds like fun.

Now, imagine if the overlay technology was built into glasses.

Mike says this will all be due to three things:

GPS Electronics in phones
Social Networking
Google’s Android

I can believe the first two but there’s no way that Android is currently a major contributor to this – there’s only an unfinished SDK and no shipping phones. We’re going to see compelling applications in this space long before this (considering it takes 6 months to build an application and Android is probably 6 months away from initial release) probably shipping for iPhone and Windows Mobile. Mark my words.

I wouldn’t be surprised if we see something like this already. Socialight already has channels which can accept location-based notes, Loopt already allows you to look through the history of friends locations (though it relies on SMS messages) and this will be something that we see added to other existing social network services.

Looking at OU courses

I’ve been looking at OU courses this morning, most notably B44, the BSc Hons in Computing and Design. I’m not even going to start talking about how the course materials require Windows. That’s an entirely different debate. I’m wondering whether I, with 12 years of industry experience, all of it in computing (and with 3 … Continue reading “Looking at OU courses”

I’ve been looking at OU courses this morning, most notably B44, the BSc Hons in Computing and Design.

I’m not even going to start talking about how the course materials require Windows. That’s an entirely different debate.

I’m wondering whether I, with 12 years of industry experience, all of it in computing (and with 3 years of teaching IT part time) really need to do the Level 1 course which will teach me how to:

keep in touch with your tutor and your fellow students
find resources on the world wide web
gain experience of generic software tools (such as spreadsheets)
use online and computer-based learning materials
work collaboratively with other students in your local tutor-group.

I’ve asked the question. It seems to leap from that to the level two course ‘Object-oriented programming with Java’ which assumes:

knowledge of, and facility with, basic programming concepts such as sequence, selection, iteration and data types
a general familiarity with the basic components and working of a computer
study skills appropriate to Level 2 study.

Seems like quite a leap (and yeah, I’m sure I fulfill those requirements too).

And if Apple uses the App Store for Evil?

Ian Betteridge wonders if the iTunes App Store will create a monopoly But what happens if Apple’s market share grows to the point where it has a monopoly – 70-, 80- or even 90% market share? That might take ten years, but it’s certainly not beyond the realms of possibility, and it’s certainly something that … Continue reading “And if Apple uses the App Store for Evil?”

Ian Betteridge wonders if the iTunes App Store will create a monopoly

But what happens if Apple’s market share grows to the point where it has a monopoly – 70-, 80- or even 90% market share? That might take ten years, but it’s certainly not beyond the realms of possibility, and it’s certainly something that Apple would like to have.
At that point, does Apple’s control over third-party applications become an abuse of a monopoly – something that is, of course, illegal in both Europe and the US?

There are a lot of ‘ifs’ in that prediction of doom.

We have to face facts – we had a large and aggressive abuse of monopoly in the US and the EU and the governments did sod all to stop it and, were it not for consumers and the general downturn of the market, the monopoly abuse would be worse today.

Apple can decide to do this but they’re unlikely to start in ten years. We need to see what applications have been denied before we start worrying about whether Apple’s vetting team (which they refer to as a QA team) is going to do things that are bad for the ecosystem.

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