One thing I didn’t touch on in my earlier posts about the WWDC Keynote today was the App Store and the addition of the Enterprise features to the iPhone.
First the App Store.
This is something that’s been in the works for awhile and is shaping up to be a very important part of Apple’s strategy. The App Store will allow developers to offer software applications to iPhone/Touch users with installation as simple as buying a song from iTunes. Judging from the demos of a few games and apps today, there are some pretty polished products waiting in the wings to be unleashed. Games from companies like Sega, with Super Monkey Ball (watch the demo linked in the middle of this page) prove that the iPhone could be a worthy contender against other handheld devices like the Nintendo DS or Sony PSP.
Dedicated apps like the auction browsing one demoed from Ebay and the music making app, Band were impressive as well….although these kinds of apps have been available on Installer for jailbroken iPhones for months, albeit not necessarily from the source company as in the Ebay case. A location based social networking app, Loopt was also demoed but reminds me of Twinkle that I covered previously which is arguably better since it’s using Twitter as the base social network. I’ll reserve judgement until I play with it myself though.
It’ll be interesting to see how stable and reliable these will become when they are legitimately available via Apple although some will be at a cost, like Monkey Ball which will be $9.99. I guess that price is okay considering a DS game would be triple that but it makes impulse purchases less likely than if it was priced in the $5 range. It’s unknown if demos will be available to download before purchase which may clinch the sale.
A very welcome feature of the App Store, unlike the iTunes Wifi Store is that as long as the app is under 10mb, you’ll be able to download it over Edge (or 3G) instead of having to use the desktop iTunes/sync method or Wifi. So if you’re on the go and want to check out that new app that came out, most likely you’ll be able to do it no matter where you are. The update notification will be nice too.
Okay. On to the Enterprise stuff.
One of the biggest things that needs to be done in order to help the iPhone penetrate the corporate world is offering integration with Microsoft Exchange Activesync servers which Apple will soon be offering. Corporate (push!) email on the iPhone will be a dream for many Blackberry toting people although I can understand the reluctance to give up the tactile keyboard for some of the people. When I had my Treo I thought there is nothing that could replace a physical keyboard for me but I’ve adapted to the touch keyboard quite well so they shouldn’t fear it. I wouldn’t hold my breath either for a bluetooth keyboard add-on. Apple doesn’t roll that way and neither should you.
Another interesting item as part of the Enterprise rollout is that the supported email attachments has expanded to include Keynote presentations. This means you can email your presentation to the phone (would be nice if you could sync or retrieve via browser) and then plug in the av cable to the iPhone and then plug that into a projector to display your presentation. Will be interested to see how that functions and if you lose anything in the process like transitions or video playback if they are included in the presentation.
Good for the Enterprise but sad for the employee will also be the ability to lock down the apps on a company deployed iPhone. I understand that this is a necessary evil but still don’t like it. I guess a locked down iPhone is still better than a Blackberry. Custom application downloads will also be available to the Enterprise via their intranet.
I wonder how Rogers will try to entice companies away from their competition using the iPhone now that it can compete against the Blackberry.
While the 3G iPhone was the ‘big deal’ announced at the World Wide Developer’s Conference today, Apple also announced some other things. One of those things was ‘Mobile Me’ which is basically a rebranded and upgraded .Mac service offering using the cute me.com domain. This time it includes a lot more features for iPhone/Touch users.
Upon checking my .Mac email after the keynote, I got this:
Dear .Mac member:
Today Apple announced a new Internet service called MobileMe - taking the best of .Mac and adding a host of new features. As a current .Mac member, your account will be automatically upgraded to MobileMe in July. For a closer look, watch the MobileMe Guided Tour and read below for an overview of your new service.
Mac integration you know and love. With MobileMe, you’ll continue to enjoy features that take advantage of seamless integration with Mac OS X and iLife - Back to My Mac; access to your iDisk in the Finder; Mac-to-Mac syncing of Dock items, preferences, and more; iWeb site publishing; and photo and movie sharing directly from iPhoto ‘08 and iMovie ‘08.
New web applications for when you’re away from your Mac. MobileMe features a suite of web applications at www.me.com that have the familiar look and feel of the applications on your Mac. Because these web applications stay in sync with your Mac and other devices, you’ll have the same information wherever you go. Here’s what you’ll find at me.com:
Mail, the anchor of the new suite, is even better with a refined interface.
Contacts has a new three-pane interface, contact groups, maps integration, search, and photo support.
Calendar is a brand-new web application that feels just like iCal, featuring multiple calendars, click-and-drag event creation, and more.
Gallery lets you manage your collection of shared photos and movies from anywhere. You can now upload photos, rearrange their order, and set sharing preferences, all from a browser.
iDisk now has the familiar look of the Mac OS X Finder. It features drag-and-drop filing and an easy new way to share large documents, by sending an email with a link for downloading the file.
Account lets you manage settings such as storage allocation.
To use the new web applications, make sure you have one of these browsers: Safari 3, Internet Explorer 7, or Firefox 2 or later.
Push email. Push contacts. Push calendar. In addition to Mac-to-Mac syncing, MobileMe now keeps your iPhone, your iPod touch, and even a PC in sync. MobileMe pushes new contacts, calendar items, and bookmarks to your Mac or PC, and over the air to your iPhone or iPod touch. For example, if you add a calendar event on the web, the change will automatically be pushed to your Mac and iPhone. New email will be pushed to your iPhone in seconds, eliminating the need to check for messages manually.
As a MobileMe subscriber, you can continue to use your mac.com address for email. You will also be issued a me.com address with the same user name that you can use if you prefer. The choice is yours.
Double the online storage. To give you plenty of space for your email, photos, and other files, MobileMe doubles your storage from 10GB to 20GB for an individual subscription.
We’ll be sure to update you when the new service goes live. In the meantime, if you have any questions about the upcoming transition from .Mac to MobileMe, please visit the MobileMe FAQ.
Sincerely,
The MobileMe Team
I only have a .Mac account because I got it dirt cheap…otherwise, I wouldn’t have it because it’s very overpriced for what you (currently) get. I have been using it to sync my MacBook Air and my iMac address book and calendars which then update my iPhone when I dock it.
One big thing that Mobile Me is offering me is the ability to sync this wirelessly. I’m still not sure it’s worth the $99US price tag as that feature should have shipped with the 1.0 iPhone. It remains to be seen if you can ‘roll your own’ server setup and do this yourself as many people have with the .Mac type services.
The other parts of Mobile Me look nice but I’ll have to wait and see once I’m upgraded in July to see how compelling they are to my normal usage. The fact that they are integrated into almost everything Apple makes might make it harder to not renew next year. Push email adoption will also depend on the data plan pricing for the iPhone in Canada as well.
While I was in Texas for SXSW a few weeks ago, Apple released the software developer kit (SDK) for the iPhone to anyone that signed up as a developer. Amidst the craziness that is Southby, I managed to sign up (actually just upgrade my existing developer profile to include the iPhone program).
Unfortunately my hotel internet connection was unbearably slow so I wasn’t able to download the SDK - over 2 gigabytes of developer goodness. Since BarCamp Austin was going on at the same time as SXSW, I heard about an iPhone DevCamp which motivated me to duck out of SXSW over lunch and head down there to get the scoop. I was able to get the SDK files via thumb drive and spend a little time with some cool people talking about what this all means to potential iPhone developers. It was also my first chance to see the iPhone simulator in action, called Aspen.
Later that weekend, I did manage to install the SDK and poke around a little with the simulator, called Aspen. I still haven’t gotten much further since then other than playing with the Hello World app and a few other samples that Apple provides but that’s what long weekends were meant for.
A neat little musical app demo called Kalimba:
As you can see from the above screenshots, the simulator allows you to rotate the screen virtually, just like a real iPhone. I don’t think I’ve broken any agreement with Apple in posting this stuff but I’m going to leave it at this while I dig into things a little deeper this weekend. I’ve got a few ideas for some apps that I’d like to take a crack at developing and so far the tools Apple has for developing are pretty slick…but I’m not really an application developer but have a few friends that are so we figure we can pull something together with our ideas and combined skillsets.
If you want to actually distribute your apps to iPhone users, you’ll need to apply for the $99 developer program which I haven’t done yet….I’m going to wait and see if I can come up with anything useful using the SDK before I put some money done on this since it’s really more for fun than anything grander at this point in time at least. Duane’s also got a few thoughts on the SDK you might also want to check out.
At some point in June (rumoured to be at WWDC but possibly later in the month), version 2.0 of the iPhone firmware is supposed to come out which will facilitate the apps created by developers with the SDK. June is shaping up to be an interesting month of iPhone related things with the rumours of a 3G version of the hardware and maybe even a Canadian release? I don’t know if I believe that rumour but it would make sense…but we’ve been saying that since last June when the iPhone was originally released.
I really wanted to do a proper, long and detailed wrapup post for SXSWi but I’m not going to because there was just so much going on and it’s still digesting in my mind what transpired in Austin. That and I’m really tired due to a day at the airport, flight delays and BBQ withdrawal.
So in no particular order, here’s some thoughts on what happened in Austin over the past week:
- this year was way bigger than last year - lots of people guessing on the numbers so take this with a grain of salt but it’s ’supposably’ 50% bigger than last year. So that puts it somewhere between 5000 and 10000 geeks in one place. This was especially evident since previously, you’d always run into people you know but this year, I know there were people I knew in Austin and yet I never managed to see them in the halls/panels
- I wished I made it to the I Can Haz Cheeseburger panel - they were actually giving out hamburgers to the audience
- 12 sessions per time slot does not work
- 10am panels are very hard to attend
- there needs to be more technical panels. Of all the ones I attended, only two could be considered (by me) technical and they were incredibly well attended - as in standing-room-only-geeks-sitting-in-the-aisles-fire-hazard kind of well attended. Of course since there was 12 sessions in every timeslot (plus other stuff in and around the convention center), it’s entirely possible there were more technical sessions.
- the panel rooms need to be reworked (again). Nothing sucks more than having to go from room 18ABCD to Room C - it’s like walking to Surrey from North Vancouver. I’m all for the walking but when you consider that a panel ends at say 11am and the next one starts at 11:30am, it doesn’t give you much time to actually talk to the panelists afterword, or with friends about the panel before you have to start hoofing it to the other end of the convention center to get a decent seat for the next session
- Twitter stayed up during the whole conference which is a huge deal since it was probably the number one web site talked about (yes, even more than Facebook and the infamous interview). Impromptu ‘Tweetups’ happened everywhere and were awesome. Your twitter name should be printed on the badge next year (everyone just wrote it on theirs this year)
- Internet access generally seemed better this year…except at my hotel which crawled. The convention center’s wifi was much more robust this year and they had a 802.11n access point which was great. Also more and more venues had free wifi so it made using Twitter and checking Google maps a breeze. My prepaid AT&T sim also got a good workout and thanks to some flaky hotel access, ended up costing more than it should have - see my $12 flickr photo for one example:
- Apple should have sponsored a shuttle to the Apple Store…there was a convoy of cabs there from the convention center on a daily basis.
- Canadians showed up in force this year. Not just the 20-30 Vancouverites I knew were going either….great folks from across this great land came down and had a great time
- Once again, the Raincity Studios crew had the best, most coveted t-shirts (read about it in the L.A. Times) and hosted the best party at the Iron Cactus. My second favorite shirt (after the Space Invaders RCS shirt) is the “Hacking is not a crime” shirt I picked up from the MAKE booth
- in Austin (and probably just for SXSW) the term ‘Ranch’ can mean many things. What I didn’t expect it to mean at the Pure Volume Ranch (home of the huge Digg party among others) is dirt floors covered in wood chips and port-o-lets. Moby and Kevin Rose didn’t seem to mind.
- Finally had a chance to visit the Salt Lick BBQ in Driftwood, Texas (outside of Austin)…been coming to SXSW for three years and always heard about it but never had the chance to make it out there. It lives up to the hype
- you can buy iPods at the Houston Airport from a vending machine
- iPhones were everywhere and mine at least was indispensable during the trip. From the wifi that was available everywhere, to the Google Maps locate me feature, it was easily the most used item I brought. Using the sched.org tool to make a customized calendar of sessions/events/parties to attend, it was easy to see where to go next or what our options were if we decided to change our minds.
- I was able to get a tag for my camera that I should have exploited more. Strangely, I saw all kinds of cameras (not just DSLRs) with the tag, including a tiny little lipstick-sized webcam. There also seemed to be some discrepancy as to who should get a tag as Peter was denied just minutes after I got mine.
- If you don’t like Rockband, be glad you weren’t at SXSWi….every second booth in the Trade Show had it setup and many events used it as a focal point
- Adobe had a sneak peak of their new Adobe Media Player in a bar with a live band and a skateboard halfpipe. Nothing kills a party faster than trying to demo your software on a projector in the middle of a bar AFTER a decent local band played while skateboarders used the halfpipe in front of the stage. Still surprised about the presentation’s inappropriateness and the fact they thought they had to explain RSS feeds to a room full of geeks. The Media player actually looks decent (if not a little iTunes-ish) but they really need to work on the promotion side of things and figure out who the people that attend Southby are
- Most heard/overused word/phrase I heard this year: ‘Fail!’ or used in a sentence: ‘Epic Fail!’. #2 was ‘iPhone’. #3 was “I’ll have another Shiner Bock”.
- There wasn’t as many MacBook Air’s there as I would have expected. Consensus from those I talked to about it was they were hoping for more from Apple - or technically less as they wanted a true replacement for the 12″ Powerbook in screen size (or even smaller). It definitely got a lot of looks and was asked to hold it many times. There were a ton of eeePC’s in attendence which was cool to see.
- I managed to head over to BarCamp Austin between sessions at the convention center and sit in (briefly) on the iPhone DevCamp. As if the fact there was too much concurrent content at SXSWi, the fact that an awesome BarCamp AND iPhone camp was going on at the same time. Too much to do, not enough time to take it all in.
- As if you aren’t already tired of me talking about the BBQ, all the food was amazing…well except maybe not that late night pizza from 6th street
- as I write this post, there are over 12,000 SXSW related photos on Flickr. I have about 200 in there.
That’s pretty much it for me and this post…as I said at the beginning, there is still a lot of digesting to do (bbq and otherwise) so I may add to this once I’ve had time to take it all in.
See you next year, Austin!
There is a lot going on over the next little while around town and elsewhere. Here’s just a few of the events you should check out.
Tonight (Sunday, January 20th for you slow feed readers)
Watch Rebecca (aka Miss604) on CBC’s Test the Nation where she (and a few other locals) ‘represents’ on the Blogger’s team. I think I can actually get away with saying “You go girl” and not look like a tard in this case. I’m sure she’ll find a way to live blog via her iPhone. My TiVo is set to record so expect some video highlights of Becky beating some flight attendants with her brain.
Creative Thinking Hacks - Tuesday, January 22nd
I’m really going to try to attend this talk at VFS by Scott Berkun put on as part of the VanUE group.
Launch Party Vancouver 3 - Friday, January 25th
I missed the first two parties and won’t be missing this one…hosted by Strutta.com, I keep hearing about how much fun they are and a lot of my friends will be there RSVP on the Facebook group or their site if you’re interested in meeting up with a lot of the local tech community.
Third Tuesday - January 29th
The monthly event just keeps getting better and better (thanks to Tod and Tanya) and this month is no exception with Brian Oberkirch’s talk on Social Media and Brands.
Vancouver Blogger’s Meetup - January 30th
Another monthly meetup that I’ve missed the last couple but will be attending this one….if you blog, or want to blog, you should come out too. Lots of great people to talk with.
Privacy & Security Conference - Feb 6-8th (Victoria)
Due to some projects I’m involved in lately, I’ll be attending this conference in Victoria for the first time. The agenda looks very interesting and the speakers are very impressive.
Northern Voice - February 22-23 (UBC)
Great little local conference I finally discovered last year (this is the 4th year) for people interested in blogging….it’s also not just for geeks. I met a lot of great people last year and look forward to seeing many of them again and meeting new friends this time around. Tickets are very affordable but that is also why they always sell out so get yours as soon as possible.
South by Southwest Interactive - March 6-11 (Austin, Texas)
Easily my favorite tech conference held each year in Austin, Texas. This will be my third trip to the Lone Star state and look forward to meeting up with friends again as well as taking in all it has to offer. It’s also one of the least expensive tech conferences and there is arguably no better place to meet and interact with the brightest people in the tech world. If you haven’t already booked a hotel expect a long commute as all the good ones were booked months ago…I had the foresight to book mine last September. It’s worth the trip for the BBQ beef brisket alone and the Raincity Studios folks put on the best party during the event.
These are just a few of the things on my plate for the next little while…hope to see you at one (or more) of them.
A friend pointed me (via Weblog Tools) to a very cool new plugin for Wordpress called WPhone that lets you manage your site from your iPhone or iTouch. You simply download and unzip it, get it onto your site and activate it in the Admin console. Then just login with your Mobile Safari browser (make sure you check off the “Use mobile admin interface” option on your login screen.
Here’s a few screenshots of the plugin in action on my own iPhone:
The log in screen and the ‘Go’ screen
Managing Posts screen and the Dashboard
Creating a post (this one!) and the Plugin screen
Very cool stuff….might have to try liveblogging with this setup ala Miss604.
or something like that.
Just a reminder to check out my submission for a SXSW Interactive 2008 panel/presentation….every vote helps make it happen!
Get the full scoop here! Thanks for your support!
While you’re at it, why not give Anne and Sande a vote too! They have two sessions up for voting and which look interesting.
As SXSW 2007 was winding down, Frank and I were discussing the possibility of presentating at next years conference. We even talked to a number of panelists to get some insight into the process (special thank you to Jonathon Snook for the extended chat at the Iron Cactus!).
Once we got back home, we gave a number of presentations to various groups around the office to share the wealth of information we got from attending. This was also a good primer for us to see if we could give a presentation to larger groups as well as being the first time we had presented together.
We *think* we came up with a good topic to have a panel on and were able to get the submission in before the door closed (just barely).
Here’s the pitch we sent Hugh (the conference organizer):
Developers are From Mars and the Business is From Venus
During project development, the lines of business and web developers can often have differences of opinions due to the different ways these groups approach projects. Tensions can end up occurring amongst team members as unreasonable demands are made by the lines of business and developers provide excessive time frames & costs.
Find out how to iron out the differences between these two groups and see what career opportunities lie ahead in hybrid positions.
Frank Sandrin and John Biehler are both Web Analysts from one of North America’s largest auto insurers, the Insurance Corporation of British Columbia. They share their thoughts on how to bridge the gap between these two worlds and also provide some insight on what the future holds for job positions that federate the groups.
The panel details are somewhat abbreviated in the panel picker so this will hopefully give you a little more information.
If you are planning on attending (or even think you want to attend), I’d love it if you visited the SXSW Panel Picker (direct link to our panel) and voted for Frank and I (it’s in Frank’s name) as there are more panel submissions (683!) than available session slots (120) so every vote counts!
This year, anyone can vote too, not just alumni or registrants. You do have to register to vote but it just takes a minute.
The Panel Picker is currently getting hammered so try again if you have any trouble connecting.
The 2007 BarCamp Vancouver is over and it was a lot of fun. This was my first BarCamp and wasn’t quite sure what to expect.
Friday night was the ‘bar’ part of BarCamp which comes before the main event all day Saturday. Got to meet and talk to a ton of cool people, some of whom I’ve only known via their online presence so it nice to actually chat over a drink with everyone…although it was unbearably hot in there.
You can check out this episode Tod Maffin’s Todbits.tv video show (direct video link) which he broadcast live from the bar….I make a brief appearance around the 8 minute point with my iPhone.
I stumbled home after the open bar closed up and got a good night sleep.
Saturday morning came pretty fast and I decided once I arrived that I’d try my hand at giving a presentation. The spirit of BarCamp is that everyone that attends should contribute to the event. I knew from the night before at the bar that there was a lot of interest in the iPhone and specifically how it can be used in Canada, not to mention the hacks that I had done to it - this is after all a pretty geeky crowd.
So I threw my name into the ring (actually onto a post-it note on the board).
You need to give your presentation a title and choose a room size (small, medium or large). I titled mine “Hacking the iPhone in Canada” and chose the small room. Then each potential presenter has 30 seconds to pitch their idea to the crowd and they determine where it should fall in the schedule and helps decide the room based on level of interest. When it was my turn to pitch the session, I just said my name, held up the iPhone and was barely able to say my session title, there was more than a few ‘ohs’ and ‘ahs’ from the crowd and then Kris said I was done and that I’d be in the large room. I figured it would be a topic of interest but was actually surprised at the level….well, maybe not surprised….I know how I was after seeing/using one the first time.
Now I had to put together a presentation (or least flesh out the idea beyond a title) in short order. I decided to just put together a Keynote presentation of the screenshots I had taken of the various apps and hacks and would just wing the speaking part.
Once again, Rebecca did a great job of liveblogging the event so check her site for the play by play of the other sessions. I spent most of the morning splitting my attention between preparing for my session, taking some pictures and soaking up the morning presentations.
I was glad to finally get to meet and chat with Lee Lefever on Friday night as I’ve been a big fan of the amazingly clever Common Craft videos he does with his wife Sachi. Lee gave a talk about the process they go through making the videos and some behind the scenes stuff. They should totally put out a dvd of all their shorts. His session is particularly interesting to me as I’m working on some similar video projects trying to help explain some of the complex insurance systems to others outside my team at work.
My session was on right after lunch and it was pretty well attended. I basically detailed the steps I went through to activate and use it along with the more recent hacking parts which definitely interested more than a couple of people. I expect at least a few new iPhones in the Vancouver area soon - let me know if you get one and need help or just want to geek out with our iPhones (this means you Robert and Tod!).
(Thanks for the pic, Duane!)
The session immediately following mine was PhotoCamp put on by Kris. I was actually worried that the schedule would have my talk happen at the same time as Kris’ as it was the session I most wanted to see.
I didn’t know that Duane was going to talk about his HDR photos and it was cool to see him go through the steps to end up with his great shots. Check out his HDR tutorial to see what I mean.
Next up was David Drucker’s talk on Effective Animation in User Interfaces which was very interesting. He compared different approaches Apple and Microsoft took in designing some of their on screen effects as well as a number of third party applications. Great discussion from the other attendees as well. I had dinner with David after BarCamp and we talked about different ways for him to post his presentation online (with lots of embedded video) so when it’s available, I’ll link it here (or you can/should subscribe to his site feed).
The last block of the day was all about Facebook. First Phillip Jeffrey gave a talk on customizing Facebook, privicy issues and related topics from the audience. Then Greg Andrews spoke about developing applications for Facebook and the upcoming Facebook Developer Garage which i might be attending if I’m settled enough from my upcoming move.
After BarCamp ended, David and I had dinner and then I met up with John (who had to work so missed BarCamp but was rockin his shirt from last year in support) and Rebecca to finally catch The Simpsons Movie which was a great way to wrap up a couple days of geeking out. Of course, we had to have a post-BarCamp/pre-movie beverage:
Thanks to all the organizers and sponsors that make great events like this happen.
As usual I have a pile of photos of the event and you can view the Flickr stream of everyone’s photos with the barcampvancouver07 tag.
Shaun Inman has posted a great tutorial on how to hack your iPhone so that you can easily install third party apps, play around with the NES emulator, take screenshots and generally do things that were never intended on your iPhone. Shaun has done an amazing job describing every step and linking all the necessary files you need to do this on an Intel Mac. Even if you don’t have one, you can still use a friend’s Mac to do it without trashing your synced music/videos/email/etc.
The best part is that once you follow his (very detailed) steps, you now have secure FTP access to your iPhone so you don’t have to mess around with Jailbreak or other apps…for the time being at least.
Here’s a few more screenshots I took after hacking my iPhone:
You may notice that my list of ringtones has a few extra sounds that don’t ship with the iPhone. I added them using iFuntastic which is a really slick app for changing the graphics and sounds on the iPhone as well as a file browser. I used this before I followed Shaun’s steps to give me ftp access to the iPhone.
Now, using an FTP client, adding new things to the iPhone is drag-n-drop! There is a new app that allows you to install apps over wifi now too! I just have to figure out how to deal with more apps than available slots on the iPhone’s home screen.
Thanks to Erica Sadun over at TUAW (and of course all the developers working on the various hacking tools) for doing some great coding - you’ll see her work on my home screen with the Voice Recorder app and the screenshots themselves were done with her Screenshot app.
It’s cool stuff like this that really shows the potential of the iPhone. Look what these guys were able to put together pretty quickly: 2 way video-conferencing on the iPhone! It’s still under development but they’ve even figured out how to deal with the iPhone’s camera being on the back!
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