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.
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When we were approached by the Oregon Research Institute to build a classroom survey for the State of Oregon using portable devices, we immediately thought of the iPhone. The slick interface and ease of use seemed like a natural way to encourage kids to interact with the device and get them to complete the surveys. The per unit cost for the iPhone was a bit too high - so we settled on the iPod Touch instead. The devices are functionally similar and both run Apple’s iPhone OS.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Ars Technica has an interesting report on iPhone market share. According to Net Applications, which boasts data from “160 million visitors per month”, the iPhone now makes up almost 2/3 of the mobile browser market. This number may be a bit skewed, but given that Google’s Android app store is only about 5% as large as the iPhone’s, it’s definitely in the ballpark.
Naysayers have been predicting the decline of the iPhone for quite a while, but Apple is still making steady gains - even with the buzz surrounding the G2. With the amazing new features of iPhone OS 3.0 unveiled today, I wonder what these numbers will look like in the near future? Just two more weeks until CTIA 2009 and the HTC Magic…
Many authors and thinkers have posited the benefits of a digital currency backed by gold. Currencies backed by gold have been historically stable and not as subject to inflation as currencies that can just be rolled off the printing press at will. For many years I’ve been fascinated by the notion of such a currency and by partnering with GoldMoney, I’ve been able to help bring that idea to life.
GoldMoney has patented a process by which small units of gold and silver can be securely exchanged electronically. By taking this system into the mobile space, we are able to offer individuals and businesses a chance to make real-time, face-to-face financial transactions in units that have intrinsic value. This should not be underrated. By using the GoldMoney system there’s a huge reduction in counter party risk: You no longer have to rely on your bank to stay solvent - or on your government’s ability to borrow money. GoldMoney holds physical metal in secure vaults located in London and Zurich. All of the metal is audited quarterly by a third party and is insured by Lloyds of London. It’s as close as you can get to having your own personal Fort Knox.
I’ve always loved the Astronomy Picture Of The Day - so when the opportunity arose to collaborate with the APOD team, I jumped at it.
Bringing APOD to the iPhone had some challenges. Many APOD images are quite large, so we developed our own Objective C libraries to allow them to be quickly scaled up and down using only the iPhone’s limited processing power.
APOD frequently includes detailed descriptions along with its pictures, however our focus with the app was the beauty of the pictures themselves. This led us to create a relatively lightweight interface that gives the picture the most screen real estate possible. A user can explore the pictures - either in sequence or by jumping to the posting date. Pictures can be saved to the phone or shared with friends via email links. We also provided the ability to clear the image cache in case the user gets carried away.
We built APOD for the iPhone as a free app, supported by ads from Admob. Yes, we know ads take up valuable screen real estate. That’s a good point. But it’s a complex trade off: We want to build free apps, but we need to cover costs. We could charge for the app, but that would take unfair advantage of the many photographers that have allowed APOD to post their copyrighted pictures over the years.
The middle ground we’ve chosen is this - The app is free. Copyrighted images don’t display ads, but instead link back to the photographer’s credit on APOD. All other images display ads and 50% of the proceeds are donated back to the APOD project to support their awesome work. We feel pretty good about this arrangement and hope you will too. Enjoy the app!
If you’re an iPhone user, you can click this link to download the app: 
For everyone else, I invite you to visit our APOD Product page.
When I was a kid I had trouble remembering dates. I’d successfully keep them in short-term memory long enough to get through an exam, but they were retained rarely longer than the time it took to set the pencil down once the test was complete. Sadly, it took until I was in my first year at college before I came to the conclusion that there may be some merit in actually retaining the information needed to pass the tests I took. My search for solutions led me to the concept of Mnemonics.
Most people have a basic understanding of what Mnemonics are. When I was six years old I learned the order and colors of the rainbow by remembering the name Roy G. Biv, where each letter represented a color. In music class we learn Every Good Boy Does Fine and FACE for the lines and spaces on the treble clef. In both cases we have a simple phrase that represents information that might otherwise be difficult to recall.
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