With the Internet-crushing hoopla surrounding the release of Apple’s widely anticipated iPad, not much attention has been paid to the exciting additions Apple has made to the iPhone OS to support it. Here we’ll explore some of these changes and discuss what they mean to publishers and application developers alike.

Apple designed iPhone OS 3.2 to support the iPad exclusively - so for now, the iPad’s slick new features are not available on the iPhone or iPod Touch. We’re hopeful that some of these features will slowly migrate over and Apple will release a combined iPhone OS for all devices. Luckily for those of us with large app collections, iPhone apps written for older versions of the iPhone OS should work fine on the iPad.

iPhone OS 3.2 provides applications with several new options for presenting content and receiving input from the user. As expected, Apple has introduced a new set of Human Interface Guidelines to go along with these changes. Below are the features that immediately grabbed our attention.

Popovers

A popover is a floating view that resides above the main application interface. They are designed to eliminate the clutter that might otherwise occur in applications with complex controls. You can see an example below:

The primary benefit of the popover is its unobtrusiveness. It appears only in response to specific user actions and can be dismissed when the user taps out of its bounds. This style of UI design will lead to interfaces that can become as complex as necessary for users that want to dig more deeply - but remain ultra simple for those who don’t. Popovers can also contain split views, discussed below.

Split Views

The split view is an interface element that allows developers to manage side by side content views. Typically, this would consist of a list on the left, with an action area on the right that changes based on the list item selected by the user. By itself this is not particularly innovative - applications have been designed this way for years. But by placing split views into popovers, Apple is treading new ground by enabling developers to create user interfaces that focus on quick access - and this is quite innovative. Think of it like a table of contents that can be accessed from anywhere in the application without changing screens. An example of a split view can be seen below:

As the iPad still does not support Multitasking, the benefits of the split view are confined to individual applications. We’re hopeful that as the hardware behind the iPad becomes more powerful, Apple will enable multitasking across applications. Someday, we’d like to see our favorite Mac application - Quicksilver - inspire a new generation of mobile device interfaces.

Custom Input Views

Until now, user input on iPhone OS based devices has been limited to a simple keyboard - and that could only be used with text fields. iPhone OS 2.2 gave Japanese iPhone users access to Emoji, an enormous set of emoticons popular in Japan. The interface is very similar to a keyboard. It can be seen below:

Apple’s new custom input views give developers the ability to take this sort of user input mechanism to the next level. Not only can new types of keyboards be created - developers don’t need to be confined to the keyboard model at all. We see this leading to innovative speech-to-text and gesture based input interfaces.

Gesture Recognizers

Gesture recognizers allow developers to determine what gesture a user is making on the touch screen. Before iPhone OS 3.2, developers were forced to create their own systems to handle gesture and tap recognition. This led to many apps behaving differently when the user dragged, pinched, or pressed the screen for an extended period. With the release of the iPad, Apple has (finally) wrapped the common gestures into an easy to use library. They’ve also included the most commonly used gestures from across all of Apple’s own products. This feature, along with custom input views, will likely lead to a new generation of iPad gaming apps.

External Display Support

The iPad can be connected to an external display device using a set of proprietary cables. Once connected, the external screen can be used by the iPad to display content. While the iPad itself is limited to a 1024×768 display size, the external display does not appear to be quite so limited. The external display functionality is used by the iPad version of Keynote - but without multitasking, this functionality can’t really be taken very far. Users won’t be able to watch movies on a big screen while they surf the web on the iPad, for example.

Core Text

In order to support iWork on the iPad, Apple has included a high performance text processing library in iPhone OS 3.2. This allows developers to include custom fonts and to create text layouts that go far beyond just a simple text document. In addition, developers can now extend the copy-paste widget itself. The current copy-paste widget is shown below:

By allowing developers to control how this widget behaves, Apple has opened the door to the creation of new kinds of markup. Users could use this control to make the selected text bold - or share it with their friends via Twitter or Facebook. Excitingly, there’s also a spellchecker with user submitted entries.

File and Document Support

Applications that want to share files, can now do so via a simple mechanism - a shared documents folder. When the iPad is plugged into a computer, this shared folder is mounted like a drive on the user’s desktop. An application can also register the types of files it supports, allowing apps to be automatically started when a file of the given type is opened by the user. This will be handy for users that receive many different kinds of email attachments. There are also indications that users may be able to upload files using Mobile Safari.

PDF Generation

Apple has made available native PDF generation capabilities for all applications. Users can now save application data, emails and other text or web content into a PDF file - presumably to be shared or emailed later. This will be a huge feature for applications where the user does a lot of data entry - such as a diet tracking or time tracking app.

Summary

The iPad is clearly the next generation in the iPhone/iPod product line and is aimed squarely at the growing e-reader market. Whether it will be enough to revolutionize the publishing industry the way the iPod revolutionized the music industry remains to be seen. The feature set is compelling, although the lack of Flash support - not to mention the lack of a full OS X operating system - is a significant drawback and may deter widespread consumer adoption. Still, the “Mom factor” might turn out to be the iPad’s greatest strength.

From the developer perspective, it’s refreshing to see Apple continually making available to the community at large the tools and libraries they create for their own apps. Despite the relative lockdown compared with other devices, the iPad promises to usher in a new wave of mobile innovation.

Note for the adventurous: Someone has apparently devised a way to simulate a number of iPad features on the iPhone - and even give it multitasking capabilities. If you try this and it works for you, let us know.

The notion of the iPod as a classroom tool is rapidly gaining traction. Unsurprisingly, Apple encourages educators to make use of their technology - and a number of prominent educators are actively discussing the pros and cons of classroom use. A recent issue of the “ezine” iLearn addressed many of these issues in some detail.

We’ve done our best to address the concerns of educators in our survey system while maintaining scientific rigor. Each device is checked-out to a particular user - who must enter a PIN code each time they begin a survey. User management is provided by a central web application accessible via the Internet. At random intervals, the device prompts the user to answer a series of questions. We built in support for Multiple Choice, True/False and Fill In The Blank question types, all of which can be authored via a simple web interface on the central server.

On the back-end, the server provides a number of administrative, authoring, and data analysis tools. Our goal with these tools was to create an easy to use interface for scientists and administrators while maintaining scientific best practices. To this end, all personal data is encrypted both on the devices and on the server. Data cannot be altered once collected and the reporting engine generates reports using only anonymized response data.

The response from the field has been overwhelmingly positive so far. Kids really like the idea of having an iPod on their desk, teachers like having an easy way to engage with tech-savvy students, and scientists like having a survey system that the kids will actually use.

For our part, we hope this technology will help improve the learning experience for everyone involved.

I was invited as a member of the Promise Neighborhood Research Consortium where I hold Concentric Sky’s seat on the steering board. The PNRC is an NIH funded consortium with a mandate to extend the mission of the HCZ to communities around the US. Concentric Sky is the PNRC’s primary technology partner.

The conference was well attended. There were over 1,400 people present and another 400 people on the waiting list that could not get in. 104 neighborhood organizations were present from around the country and I had the pleasure to speak to a large number of community representatives.

Several Obama Administration officials spoke at the conference, including:

• Arne Duncan, Secretary of Education
• Melody Barnes, President’s Domestic Policy Advisor and Director of the Domestic Policy Council
• Jim Shelton, Assistant Deputy Secretary for Innovation and Improvement, U.S. Dept of Education
• Adolfo Carrion, Jr., Director, White House Office of Urban Affairs
• Ron Sims, Deputy Secretary, U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development

The presentations focused on several key themes with a central message: focus on outcomes, evaluate approaches, make continuous improvements based on real measurements, and create long lasting partnerships with communities.

The most exciting thing for me was the interest in innovation - a willingness to look beyond what has been tried before and to look forward to evidence-based outcomes. This is very much in line with the PNRC, where I’m leveraging Concentric Sky’s strong understanding of data and social relationships to create new tools for tracking metrics and increasing community involvement.

Since returning from the conference, the PNRC has connected with other Federal agencies, such as Dept. of Education and HUD, to collaborate on their Promise Neighborhoods and Choice Neighborhoods Initiatives.  We aim for our technology tools to be brought to bear on an even wider scale. Where possible, we hope to spur innovation by making some of our tools Open Source. Our collective goal is to build a successful technology model that can be extended to poverty stricken communities around the world.

With the support of the Obama Administration and the AARA, we are well on our way.

Our friends at Google contacted us last week to invite us into the AdSense for Mobile beta program. AdSense is one of those subtle technologies from which Google derives most of its revenue. I’ve always been curious about its inner workings, so I signed us up right away.

After some discussion, we settled on Astronomy Picture of the Day for iPhone as the best candidate for the program. Google is looking for high traffic applications from which it can derive usage metrics before going live with the new system. APOD for iPhone generates millions of screen views from around the world, with the majority coming from North America.

We reviewed the SDK and set to work. The first thing we noticed was how differently Google thinks about content than our current ad partner, AdMob. AdMob provides a simple interface where the developer can choose to enable/disable ads by genre and can filter ads based on keyword or URL. The controls are coarse, but useful. Google, in contrast, prefers to have a target page on the Internet that can be crawled for keywords.

Having the content on the Internet gives Google a key advantage over other ad networks. The domain hosting the target page can easily be correlated with Google’s massive traffic and search databases, allowing Google to use factors such as PageRank to serve up the most relevant ad content.

This is great news for developers - fine-tuned keyword control and the ability to make updates programmatically are must haves in our book.

But what it means to advertisers is not so clear. On the one hand, SEO techniques might have some influence over which ads get displayed for which products. This would be a huge boon to the largest advertisers and development companies. On the other hand, disreputable domains and SEO “black hat” techniques could cause far more damage to a brand than was possible before. This means advertisers must choose development partners even more carefully.

The second thing we noticed was the amount of polish that has gone into the AdSense for Mobile SDK. It was solid, self explanatory, and super simple to integrate. We had it in place and online in less than a day. Comparing this to AdMob and our other partner Pinch Media, we were impressed. Even the AdMob SDK - known for it’s simplicity - took longer to integrate.

After a bit of testing with Google’s beta network, we decided the system was solid and submitted the app to Apple. Apple’s app review process has always been kind to us, so we hope to have the updated app in the iTune store towards the end of the week. We’ll post an update when the app becomes available.

[UPDATE] After a bit of back and forth with Apple, the update finally made it into the App Store today, 11/5.

The website is designed from the ground up with a social media focus, integrating Facebook, Twitter and a number of other Web 2.0 technologies. The audience is quite large - the site is in the top 10,000 websites in the United States by traffic and receives millions of hits. The social media footprint is also sizable - 313,289 Twitter followers, 131,253 Facebook Fans and numerous integration points with distributed social networks.

The project took about 5 weeks, which is breakneck speed for something this big. When assessing the initial requirements and timeline, we were really forced to think outside the box. Hard work might not be enough to get the site live by the deadline. How could we speed things up?

Although there was an existing site, we opted to re-architect from the ground up in order to take advantage of newer technologies. It may sound surprising, but this actually saved us a lot of time. After considering several web frameworks, we chose Django. It’s an environment that we know well and we were confident it was up to the task.

We began with a multi-server architecture, so the site could scale easily, and deployed the servers behind our own custom load balancer at Media Temple. We tried several different caching strategies, but settled on memcached in Apache as it let us handle the most users per server.

The structured content model we chose also saved us a lot of time. The new site layout was complicated by the existing website, which was really a number of separate websites bound loosely together. In order to overcome this, we created a simple content model and began migrating over the content, organizing as we went along. We scripted as much as we could, but with 30,000+ pages, there was a lot more done by hand than we would have liked.

With such a large amount of content, searchability was essential. For this we built a custom technology stack based on Solr, Lucene and Haystack. Then, to keep all the previous links pointing in the right direction, we created a customizable scheme of Django regular expressions and Apache mod_rewrites.

And, of course, all of this can be controlled from a robust admin interface.

We were working with an external design team, and found great synergy combining their design sense and our love of slick UI tools like jQuery. The Michael Moore folks were also a pleasure to work with. They had a lot of thoughtful improvement ideas as the development process rounded up.

Once the site was assembled, we ran some heavy load testing and were pleasantly surprised with the results. Our hard work and good architectural choices had paid off. A little browser compatibility testing, add water, and Voilà! Instant website.

To say it was an interesting project with some significant technical challenges would be an understatement. This was an all-out effort by some of our top developers to do the near impossible. It can be hard to accommodate such tight timelines, but our team rose to the task. Great job, guys!

The term “Web 2.0″ returns nearly 100 million search results on Google. But what is it really? Can you look at something and say definitively that it is Web 2.0? And does it matter? In this post we explore these questions in some detail - but to properly frame the discussion, we must start with a related question. What was Web 1.0?

A Brief History of the Internet

In the early days of the Internet, everything was text. There were no browsers as we think of them today. Using the Internet was a lot like using the Linux command line - extremely powerful, but not practical for the majority of people. There were a number of early systems - such as Gopher, WAIS and Hypertext - and each had its following. But everything changed with the introduction of Mosaic in 1993. Using Hypertext became a point-and-click operation, and the World Wide Web was born. The other systems faded away.

The Mosaic browser was eventually superseded by Netscape Navigator. Netscape sought to use its dominance in the browser market to establish a market for its server products. In Netscape’s estimation, control over the standards for displaying content on the Web would give the company the kind of market power enjoyed by Microsoft in the PC market. This fact did not escape Microsoft which soon introduced a browser of its own - Internet Explorer. And so the browser wars began.

Netscape was the very definition of a Web 1.0 company. It sought to build the “Webtop” ( as opposed to the Desktop ) and use that to push content to Internet users. This one-way flow of information is the defining feature of Web 1.0. Many Web 1.0 companies were built around the idea of web content as the outcome of a large up-front investment. A lot of these companies still struggle to adapt, even today.

The seeds of Web 2.0 were planted in the collapse of the dot com bubble, when such upfront investment was no longer easy to find. Young entrepreneurs sought to build businesses that not only leveraged data, but created it.

The Conversation

To a large extent, the shift from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 was caused by a change in the way Internet users interacted with each other. Personal web pages, once popular on free sites such as Geocities, became blogs hosted on services such as Blogger. Blogger provided simple identity management and allowed users to comment on each other’s pages. It focused on what users wanted to do most - communicate.

As Internet users began to communicate directly with each other, companies that survived the dot com bubble - such as Ebay and Amazon - reinvented themselves around the idea that users themselves could be leveraged to create valuable web content with very little overhead. Many Web 2.0 companies are formed around this same model.

Of course, the best example of the Web 2.0 shift is the rise of the social networks: Friendster, MySpace and Facebook. These networks focused exclusively on making it easy for users to interact with each other and include their friends. Facebook took the lead by offering a platform that let freelance developers create small applications and widgets that could be shared among many users. Just as the users were creating the content, the developers were making Facebook a more engaging experience.

Today, such multi-directional information sharing has become the expected norm. Interoperability is key and nearly all social networking services are now interconnected. Users can post Flickr photos to Facebook with the iPhone and get comments sent back to them via Twitter. New services that do not interoperate begin to lose relevance almost as soon as they are released - thus the trend towards SaaS - Software as a Service.

The diagram below illustrates this point, mapping popular websites and services onto a map of the Tokyo subway. It’s an insightful metaphor.

This distributed conversation between users and services, along with the parallel trend of user centered design, is the essence of Web 2.0.

So What’s Next? Web 3.0?

Although the term Web 2.0 itself is the matter of some dispute, we can build a clear enough picture of what comprises Web 2.0 to begin discussing the future and Web 3.0.

As information becomes more accessible, it is also becoming more highly structured. Having a well defined structure allows units of information to be manipulated like variables in an equation. Projects such as Google Wave, Wolfram Alpha, and the Semantic Web seek to make the web computable, or in other words, machine readable.

Humans can easily carry out a task such as searching for a lower priced DVD because the information needed to make decisions is designed to be readable by humans. Once knowledge becomes computable by machines, tasks like this can be accomplished without human direction. Tim Berners-Lee, the scientist credited with inventing the World Wide Web, said it clearly in 1999:

I have a dream for the Web [in which computers] become capable of analyzing all the data on the Web – the content, links, and transactions between people and computers. A ‘Semantic Web’, which should make this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines. The ‘intelligent agents’ people have touted for ages will finally materialize.

Today that vision of the Semantic Web is closer than ever. If current trends continue, the primary outcome of Web 3.0 will likely be great strides towards Artificial Intelligence.

Summary

To return to the original question, it’s not easy to say definitively whether something is Web 2.0 or not - but it’s not that important. What is important is that a generalization can be made about projects that share the common themes of Web 2.0: information sharing, interoperability, and user-centered design. Projects that share these themes are moving forward into a future of more accessible information. Projects that don’t will find it increasingly hard to keep up.

Nearly everyone uses email and instant messaging on the web these days, but imagine if you could tie those together with a wiki - and then add real-time playback functionality, on-the-fly language translation and drag-and-drop file sharing. Google Wave does all this and a lot more.

So far the only way to use the product is via Google’s own client at wave.google.com, however this access is restricted to developers who signed up after the Google I/O conference. Luckily, we have access and have had a chance to review the project in detail.

Let’s start with the basics and define a few terms. A wave is a threaded conversation. It can include just one person, or it can include a group of users. Waves may contain wavelets which are just smaller conversations. The actual message content is contained in blips. The diagram below explains this relationship a little more clearly:

In this diagram a group of people are sharing a conversation while two of the participants are having a private side conversation. Everyone’s messages to each other are in the form of blips, which can be seen by all participants in a wave or wavelet. In this way, Wave is a bit like a chat room.

With this in mind, we can begin to examine the user interface. The Wave Inbox can be seen below:

Wave features a left-hand sidebar for navigation and below that a list of contacts. The middle column is the Wave Inbox. This has a similar look and feel to Gmail’s inbox except it features the faces of all contacts who are involved in each wave. There is also an indicator to let you know about new content in the wave.

Clicking on any of the wave threads in the middle will open a pane to the right that shows the contents of the wave. This is where it gets interesting. If, for example, one wave is a message from a friend and you want to reply to it, there’s no need to draft a reply email. You can just start typing below your friend’s message and they will be alerted the next time they come online. If you’re both online, you can chat with each other in real time.

All the participants in a wave can not only see and reply to each other’s messages, they can also edit them. In this way a wave is like a wiki entry that can be modified by several people at once in real time. And when new participants are added, they can use the “Playback” feature to watch the wave grow and develop from the beginning.

Individual waves can be embedded into simple web pages and also accessed via gadgets - in Facebook, for example, or in a desktop widget. The Wave interface lets users know when content they are editing is public or if it is only viewable by the wave participants. This design opens a number of interesting possibilities.

But there’s more - participation in a wave can be automated with robots. A robot can reply to messages and generate new content based on what happens in the wave. For example, a Flickr robot could pull all of a user’s Flickr photos into a wave when that person joins the wave, or a stock price robot could look up a stock price every time a stock ticker symbol is used. Google even has a spell checker robot that not only suggests correct spelling while you type, it actually tries to put your words into context to make sure you’re using the right terminology.

Behind the scenes, Wave’s functionality is made possible by moving around small pieces of XML. These are transferred in real time between the participants using Google’s Wave Federation Protocol. To encourage experimentation, Google has open sourced the protocol and published their APIs.

Google is using several protocols to streamline communications between the different elements of the system. Communication between Wave servers is done with XMPP, while communication with remote robots is done using JSON. The big picture is illustrated below:

The key thing to note here is that the communication between the end user’s system and the Wave server is still proprietary. This will definitely limit the adoption of Wave in the enterprise space.

In addition, all of this data moving in real time has significant performance implications. Google has created a new data serialization technique called Protocol Buffers to address some of these concerns, but we’ve not yet explored it fully. There is much discussion in the development community around the pros and cons of this model, but to be fair, Wave is still in its infancy and the way Google is engaging with the development community is very encouraging.

To summarize, Google Wave seeks to combine a number of past and current communication techniques into a unified platform that will greatly simplify the creation of structured user content. It is certainly very impressive - and if it gains traction with Internet users at large, it could have a profound effect on the future of the Internet.

Not surprisingly, there are several ways to answer this question. One way to think of the size of the Internet is to count its users. China recently announced that they have reached 298 million users - a number just shy of the entire population of the United States. Using this same methodology to count all Internet users, we can estimate that there are about 1.6 billion Internet users - or put another way, about 24% of the world’s population.

Another way to look at the question is to count the number of unique pages on the Internet. Microsoft’s new Bing search engine, for example, counts over one trillion web pages - that’s 1,000,000,000,000 unique URL’s - which would require the average person six hundred thousand decades to read. Not a small endeavor.

Google, on the other hand, reached the 1 trillion benchmark about 12 months ago. Compare this to 1998, when Google had indexed a mere 26 million pages. So, relative to today’s total world population, there are about 150 web pages per person. Of course, many web pages contain the same or similar content making this measurement technique less than ideal.

Yet another way to scope the Internet is to count the number of accessible domains. Domain Tools counts domain registrations and shows a total of about 110 million active domains, including all .com, .net and .org TLDs. The Internet Systems Consortium uses a slightly more accurate measurement - the total number of allocated IP addresses which serve up domain names. The most recent ISC Domain Survey shows a total of about 700 million domains, as illustrated in the chart below.

But even this method has its flaws. While the total number of IP addresses is technically limited to about 4.29 billion, several techniques ( such as NAT ) are used to expand this number in ways that are hard to track. Though useful, it can be hard to put the ISC’s numbers into perspective.

Other measurements exist, but are equally hard to pin down - for instance, the total amount of data accessible via the Internet, or the total amount of Internet traffic.

So, the short answer to our opening question is - it depends on how you look at it.

One thing we do know for sure is that the Internet is getting bigger. Mobile traffic alone is expected to soon reach levels that test the current Internet infrastructure, while simple web traffic is projected to expand 50-fold by 2015. Initiatives such as IPv6 and Cisco’s Smart Grid seek to keep up with - and even accelerate - this growth.

The rise of cloud computing is another major contributor to the Internet’s rapid growth, with thousands of new virtual machines coming online daily. Growth projections are quite positive for cloud computing in 2009. Even the US Government has jumped on the bandwagon, recently announcing plans to offer cloud computing services of its own.

While we can’t give a single measure for the size of the Internet, its growth is easier to model. Several models have been proposed for this over the years, including neural networks and genetic algorithms. Interestingly, a group of researchers recently predicted that the growth of the Internet conforms to Moore’s Law and will double every 5.32 years. We’ll know if this model is accurate in just a few short years.

No matter which measurements or models are used, the growth of the Internet will present numerous opportunities for business. A 2008 survey by the Pew Internet Project offers some exciting predictions, some of which are already materializing.

One prediction in particular that we have our eye on is the growth of the mobile space. We see a number of fascinating intersections between the growing mobile space and Social Media - not to mention emerging technologies such as Google Wave.

As we watch all of this unfold, we’ll be working closely with our clients to take maximum advantage of these intersections - and to get the most leverage possible from the new directions in which the Internet will take us all.

We attended Google I/O this year and were pleasantly surprised to see that it’s fast becoming a playground for innovation and a place for serious collaboration among developers. I attended a number of interesting sessions, and of course the Android lightning talks. I left the conference this year very excited about some of Google’s initiatives, particularly Google Wave.

As mobile app developers we noted that Google seems to be embracing the Android operating system as part of their core mobile / hand-held development strategy. This sort of focus will be important if Android handset makers are to successfully take on the impressive new features of the iPhone 3GS.

What really showed me Google’s commitment to Android developers is that they gave away a new Android phone to all conference attendees. This phone is the aptly named Google Ion, a customized HTC Magic. (There’s no official page for the Ion yet, but CNET has a good review here.)

The HTC Magic is a serious step up as the G2 of Google Android Phones. It is a major improvement over the G1 in a number of ways - many of which resemble the ever popular iPhone. Though the G2 doesn’t size up in some areas including screen size, platform maturity and market penetration, it goes beyond the iPhone in two distinct ways:

1. Unlocked out of the box, which allows users to choose the carrier of their choice, as opposed to being bound to the AT&T network.
2. Open Platform -  By using Android as the operating system, the G2 allows for serious development innovation outside of the control of any one entity. This lets the development community dictate the scope of what’s possible.

We picked up one of the Ion’s at the conference. Here’s a pic:

It’s a lovely little phone and came with 30 days of free, unlimited data and voice. Here’s a great unboxing video from AndroidCommunity.com. We look forward to porting a few of our applications over to it and taking it for a spin.

It’s clear that Google’s movement into the mobile space is ushering in the next wave of handset development. Several other Android phones are slated for release in 2009 as well as netbooks that utilize Android as their primary Operating System. A Google OS on the desktop may not be far behind.

This is yet another development that brings the mobile and desktop spaces into closer orbit. 2009 is shaping up to be a very interesting year indeed for mobile applications.

JavaOne is happening this week. One of the primary highlights is the Java Store - recently announced on Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz’s blog. The Java Store is the largest developer-to-consumer software distribution channel to date and shows great potential. It is a powerful entry into the market and could be a game changer in both the desktop and mobile spaces.

Adobe clearly dominates the Internet-enabled desktop market with Flash. However, because of its use on smartphones, Blu-ray DVD players and other devices, the Java VM is actually installed much more widely. Sun has long realized this advantage and has sought new ways to monetize the ubiquity of Java. The success of these efforts has been mixed.

Sun’s new strategy seeks to leverage JavaFX, a re-envisioning of the Applet. Applets, you may recall, fell into disuse because of a dispute between Microsoft and Sun which led to Microsoft releasing a competing - some would say crippled - virtual machine of their own. This was very confusing for end users and was one of the primary factors in the early growth of Flash on the desktop.

JavaFX is an attempt to regain that ground - and it brings a lot to the table, notably with respect to building Rich Internet Applications. For instance, JavaFX apps can seamlessly move into and out of the browser environment - crossing a boundary normally closed to Flash. In our opinion, Sun’s key to success on the desktop will be making the most of these advantages - and paying close attention to the experiences of Android and iPhone developers in the mobile space.

Java, via Symbian OS, is well established in the mobile space - far more even than Apple’s iPhone OS. Yet, there are recent reports that the iPhone OS is actually overtaking Symbian OS on the web. With both iPhone and Android developers expressing various frustrations, an app store that delivers on Sun’s “Write once, run anywhere” philosophy might actually be able to turn things around.

Sun has a vibrant development community of its own and is well positioned to please developers looking for a way to innovate freely. The sheer breadth of potential customers will be a major draw - and there’s certainly no shortage of Java developers in the world. If Sun can provide a clear app submission process and simple payment mechanisms, the JavaStore may quickly overtake its competitors.

Here, the story takes a local turn. Our friends at Sun approached us a few weeks ago and asked Concentric Sky to prepare an application to be showcased when the JavaStore debuted this week. This was of course very hush hush. As one of just a handful of companies invited to participate, we were flattered and immediately set to work.

Due to the relative newness of JavaFX, we actually got to spend some time working closely with Sun engineers to troubleshoot the JavaFX platform. This was a lot of fun and really quite rewarding - almost more fun than writing the app itself. We look forward to working with some of the exciting new features coming out in version 1.2.

Our app is really quite simple. It’s a port of our iPhone app Astronomy Picture of the Day. We added some functionality that’s been on the APOD roadmap for a while - the ability to translate the photo descriptions into 6 languages on-the-fly. To do this, we’re leveraging Google’s handy Translation API. Look for this functionality coming soon to the iPhone version of the app.

Our experience with the app submission process was actually quite pleasant. The process was a bit new for everyone, but the requirements were clearly outlined and we actually got to speak directly with real people. There’s a lot still to be worked out, but Sun seems genuinely open to developer input. That makes us very optimistic.

Here’s a picture of our app on display today in the Sun booth at JavaOne:

The photo choice is quite appropriate.

As more information comes out about the JavaStore developer experience, we’ll be posting here - so stay tuned.

We’ll be following the rest of the conference with great interest, keeping an eye out for new directions and emerging trends. If we run across any interesting tidbits, we’ll Tweet them.