Archive for July, 2008

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15
Jul

developers developers developers developers

By Alex 0 Comments
Categories: iPhone

Yep, there may not be much MonkeyBoy gets right at Microsoft, but that was one: It’s all about the developers developers developers developers. So it behooves us to keep an eye on how iPhone developer interest is comparing to those other, lesser, mobile platforms!

Over at O’Reilly Radar there’s a fellow who’s taken a first stab at it. Unfortunately, his main metric of mailing list posts is utterly worthless, as anyone with the iPhone SDK is still under NDA, so can’t legally post anything about it on public lists. However, this graphic contrasting the sources and magnitudes of jobs for iPhone, Android, and Symbian development is worth some consideration:

Well, we’ll see how that chart looks in a year, won’t we now?

h/t: MacSurfer!

14
Jul

OpenGL ES tutorials

By Alex 0 Comments
Categories: Programming and iPhone

Here’s a heads up for any of you that are thinking of getting into writing games on the iPhone: the good folks at www.play3D.net who previously focused on tutorials for building OpenGL ES programs on other, lesser, devices have started switching over to The One True Phone™ — an excellent decision on their part.

Their tutorials on EAGL, models, textures, and so forth can be found here. Read, learn, and write awesome games!

13
Jul

DMG Canvas 1.0 final

By Alex 0 Comments
Categories: Programming

That slick new DMG Canvas tool for making .dmg installers we mentioned a while back is now out of beta. We’ve been using it as a scripted part of the release build process in Xcode ever since the beta was released, and it’s been working just fine for us, so we thoroughly recommend you go get it and use it too; it’s still free but they suggest $15 donationware, which is still a good deal compared to other solutions, we figure.

h/t: MacNN!

12
Jul

Flickr does geotagging!

By Alex 4 Comments
Categories: Blogging, Reviews, Website and iPhone

Our choice for niftiest feature in the iPhone 3G isn’t the eponymous 3G like most people’s is, hey WiFi is faster still and the original iPhone has that; it’s the GPS functionality. For quite a while now we’ve been intrigued by the possibilities of geotagged photos, but never got around to spending the couple thousand worth of gear or putting up with the annoying track log/timestamp reconciliation process that it would have taken up until now; and hey it would have been a waste if we had, because what do you know, the iPhone’s Camera app will do that now! Just allow it to when it asks, and it’ll embed the GPS latitude and longitude coordinates in standard EXIF format. Not altitude apparently, but oh well.

And we were even more pleased to find that there’s a readily available method to make some use of that info right now: it’s called “Flickr” which I imagine you are familiar with already! Just go into the privacy settings and allow it to dig into the EXIF tags and share your location information, and you’re all set.

Let’s take a look at what it does with this photo off our balcony we uploaded exactly as taken. Observe that over on the right it provides the links

Nifty, huh? If you click the map link above, you’ll get a full page version, but here’s the popup you get when you click it on the Flickr site:
So that’s nifty and all, yep; but we figure that there definitely needs to be a blogging client that takes advantage of Core Location and geotagging for giving one’s travelblogging that little extra frisson. Conveniently enough, the good people writing The WordPress for iPhone App are planning to open source it; so if nobody else steps up and adds that — hey we will before our next trip!
11
Jul

3G speed!

By Alex 0 Comments
Categories: iPhone

Not bad, not bad!

10
Jul

App Store is open!

By Alex 0 Comments
Categories: iPhone

Well, will you look at that; the App Store is open! Hmmm, let’s see … it’s probably still an NDA violation to show a screenshot of the store itself, but is it an NDA violation to show a screenshot of a device with apps installed from it? Well, let’s cross our fingers and hope it isn’t, shall we?

We’d go into more detail, but besides the NDA factor, there’s the all of a sudden rather pressing issue that, well, you see that “BrainJogging” icon above? You can not download that from the App Store … yet … and we need to be fixing that problem. Normal blogging will resume once that is sorted!

09
Jul

Rogers caves!

By Alex 2 Comments
Categories: iPhone

So all that Rogers-hatin’ angst has actually had an effect: Now both it and Fido have a slightly less limiting data option for you all, plus you can choose from their existing plans not just the iPhone plans:

Effective July 11, and as a limited time promotional offer for customers who activate until August 31, 2008 on a three year contract, a data-only offering of 6GB of data for $30 per month is being made available that can be added to any in-market voice plan…

New Canadian iPhone 3G customers will also have the choice to select from Fido’s existing voice and smartphone data plans and/or additional features to best suit their needs or from Fido’s specific value bundled iPhone 3G plans.

Although that’s more of a concession than we were really expecting, If you’re a big texter or really want to watch YouTube on your commute every day, this probably won’t do much towards satisfying you; but for those of us who use our cell pretty much only as a rather infrequently checked voice mail service and will be doing almost all our surfing over WiFi, this looks like enough flexibility to satisfy us pretty much completely, we figure.

[UPDATE] Heh. Missed this — Cavey McCave the CMO at Rogers flat out admitted that the online fuss made them cave, but only temporarily!

John Boynton, the senior vice-president and chief marketing officer of Rogers Wireless, said in an interview the promotional offer is in response to customer concerns … existing price plans for the iPhone will go back into effect Sept. 1.

“What we’re trying to do is satisfy a very small group of people, the early adopters,” he said. “When those customers are done, we’re back to our basic user.”

Translation: If we can get through August, the media fuss will die down and nobody will care anymore when you get pissed off. Alrighty then, shop now, people! 

h/t: MacSurfer, Ars Technica, engadget, iPhoneFreak, IGM, MacRumors, Reuters, 9to5Mac, …

06
Jul

Rogers rogered?

By Alex 0 Comments
Categories: iPhone

Well! Rumour has it that all that angst about Rogers’ iPhone tariffs has provoked a response — from Apple!

Blogger Daniel Smith claims multiple sources, including a senior Rogers representative, claim that Apple has diverted a significant amount of its initial iPhone 3G Canadian deliveries to Europe in retribution for the carrier’s steep rate plans, which at similar prices offer a third fewer minutes and limited data compared to AT&T.

Stores may be getting just 10 to 20 iPhones each and are being told to “exercise caution” not to promise ample stock on launch day, according to the rumors.

At the same time, Rogers is also claimed to be promptly firing the part-time staff that had been hired to handle an expected deluge of customers at some stores…

The interesting thing is that now that this story has hit all the MSM outlets, there’s going to be an awful lot of attention on release day on what if any the sales effect is. Sure, the geeks will whine to other geeks, and maybe 43,321 (and counting) of them will sign some whiny petition, but will there be any actual consequences to Rogers? ‘Cos bad PR, well, they’re used to that since their corporate motto is oderint dum metuant as far as anyone can tell, but actually impacting their sales, now that would be serious.

We recommend the best thing to do at this point is suck in your natural desire to get an iPhone 3G NOW! NOW! NOW! this Friday and hold off for at least a few days whilst watching the news to see how those 43,340 (and counting) petition signers react. If they’re all serious enough about their whining to actually boycott, and if Rogers is left with egg on its face from a botched launch, there *will* be plan adjustments there is no doubt. And if it sells out and there’s lineups anyway … well, you’ll have got a lesson in just how easy and pointless the online faux activism of those 43,366 (my, they do count up quickly, don’t they!) signers is, won’t you?

h/t: MacSurfer!

02
Jul

Extreme travel

By Alex 0 Comments
Categories: Miscellanea, Reviews and Website

Alright, this has nothing to do with iPhones, or programming, but it’s too cool to not bring to your attention. You like traveling? You enjoy a challenge? Well, here’s the ultimate extreme sport for you then — check out MostTraveledPeople.com!

Yep, this site makes traveling into a competitive sport, with constantly updated world rankings no less. Now, is that not, like, the most cool thing ever? And even better, it’s a sport that no one has actually won yet; of the current 673 places on the list — and members can vote to add more! — the leader (and site founder) is “only” at 630.

Since trolls are always up for a challenge, and hey this is pretty much as challenging as challenges get, we signed up immediately, of course. And we have a not too bad start, check out the map of 145 places down — 528 to go! — which is good to debut us at MTP rank #408. Let’s see just how quickly we can improve that, shall we?

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