Archive for July, 2008

iPhone App Development

Monday, July 14th, 2008

Now that the new 3G iPhone has been released into the wild, selling over 1 million phones over the weekend, a number of the NDAs, non-disclosure agreements, have been lifted, and we are free to talk about certain aspects of the iPhone and its development.

I am in the process of implementing an educational game for the iPhone, see below, and releasing it to the AppStore on iTunes.

The AppStore is Apples way of controlling how applications are purchased and transferred to your iPhone or iPod Touch. One great advantage of this concept is that you only have one point of call for all your application needs, though does involve the habit of, “Oh look, I like that”, purchase.

Another, slightly more controversial, approach is in Apple takeing all the cash generated from the AppStore and paying the companies once per month, allowing Apple to get interest on any money generated. It does however freely publish shareware applications for, free.

Individuals or companies looking to sell their product must select from a price band and get to keep 70% on the value of their app and Apple takes 30%. This is to help cover the cost of hosting your aplication and credit card transfers. I think it’s a great deal as it helps put the smaller companies and individuals in the same league as larger companies with hugh budgets.

I’ll keep you all posted on the development

Images of my current educational game, more on this later.
preSchool Screenshots

WWDC

Monday, July 14th, 2008

Well I actually made it to the big WWDC or World Wide Developers Conference this year in San Francisco. This was a very special year for Apple as it’s the first iPhone developers session for all us mad iPhone people.

It was really evident this year that Apple are focusing a lot of their effort on the iPhone as was seen in the Keynote delivered, as always. by Steve Jobs CEO of Apple Inc.

A large number of both companies and individuals from the Windows world were attending and what surprised me was the distinct disinterest in developing for the Apple Macintosh computer, iPhone was fine. In pointing out that the iPhone is in fact a very compact Apple Macintosh and runs the basic operating system as a full blown Macintosh was met with some distaste.

A lot of the sessions and labs at the conference is covered with Apples NDAs, non disclosure agreements. Only information published through the keynote is allowed to be talked about, and this of course includes the iPhone. Of note though, was the release of the new iPhone 3G. This has been much anticipated and with the current lack of purchasable iPhones on the market it is driving another craze almost as bad as the initial release.

New features on the iPhone is of course 3G and GPS. 3G technology is a lot faster that the current EDGE that was supported in the original iPhone. One downside of this is the heavy drain on the battery. Apple has given the user the ability to turn the 3G option off in order to help preserve battery longevity. The GPS feature allows your position to be determined by using satellite triangulation to get you current position and altitude. This technology should open up a wide range or applications especially the social networking group.