Mark's World » iphone

iPhone Developer Meetup

Mark Lise — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 06:21:28 +0000

Well, I just got back from the event and I’m now I’m sitting on my couch about to sum it all up.

About 14 people showed up to the event and everyone was contributing and the discussion never got stale. We talked about a lot of things: IUI, provisioning codes, 3-inches of love (don’t ask), appstore – and two ways of getting into it, disk IO, and even went through an exmaple app in objc.

An interesting thing to note came up which I wasn’t aware of; When filling out the tax information on your app store application, choose ITIN and use “nine zeroes” as the number. Apparently Canadian citizens are exempt and don’t need to fill out the huge forms asking you almost everything, stopping short of your blood type.

There was talk about how to deploy your app. App store or ad hoc method? If you go through the app store method, there were some obvious benefits – however if you’re just wanting to hack and release to a few (hundred) people or so, ad hoc was the way to go. Why? App store has a huge amount of gates (review process, etc) and Apple can essentially reject your application for a variety of reasons – “We don’t like it” might just be valid enough. If you go ad-hoc, you can deploy onto anyone’s iPhone, but you’ll need their iPhone GUID and bake it into your app first, creating a new binary for that user to download and only then will it install.

Something that irked me, interpreted languages are NOT supported on the iPhone! Now, I don’t know if this is something that will change in the future, but I have to think that it must. I can’t see, and I’ll loosely call it, “fun integration” with web API’s etc consumable by objc alone. I could do a lot of things really fast in script (fast as in development time), it would be laborious to code up equivalent in straight objc. I dare not speak about my work on an “unnamed” browser platform in C++.. linking times is absolutely killing me, but I digress.

Last note is the book of choice was “iPhone SDK Development
by Bill Dudney, Chris Adamson, Marcel Molina”. I haven’t seen it myself, but I might have to get myself a copy (currently available as a betaPDF). First time I’ve heard of a book being in “Beta”…

iPhone in Canada

Mark Lise — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 22:02:57 +0000

So there’s been a lot of talk on twitter and other blogs about the iPhone finally coming to Canada via Rogers. At least in an official sense. Lots of people already have the iPhone in Canada, but they miss out on some of the enhanced features that the AT&T subscribers down south have (along with data plan etc).

I’m indifferent on my feeling towards the announcement. It’s cool yeah, I’ve had requests from non-techies asking me “where do I get one?!” of which my reply is to direct them towards a $500 unlocked phone in the U.S. Some say that the iPhone in the U.S. is in part responsible for the data rates becoming affordable, I wonder if the same will hold true in Canada? I would think Apple wants us to believe that because it all goes towards a positive reflection on their brand.

The fact is, HTC and Bell have already beaten them to the punch but I don’t think their marketing to date has been successful. I currently have an HTC Touch from Bell on a $7/mth unlimited data plan and am loving it. Web, gmail, twitter, google maps, texting, camera.. it’s got it all. However, It seems as though I’m the only person in my town that knows about it! My only beef is they charge me roaming data when I travel to Vancouver. I suppose they gotta mess with you one way or another.

In any case, I don’t think I’ll be switching just for the sake of having one. Monthly data rates mean more to me than saying “I have an iPhone”. So dear Telus and Rogers: I’ll consider switching if you change your pricing, $15/MB is ridiculous. It’s not just about having an iPhone, the monthly costs have to be justifiable as well.

I look forward to the day where data rates are no longer the dealbreaker. Just like broadband cable did back in the day. Wow, was that only last decade?

DemoCamp Vancouver

Mark Lise — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 16:13:51 +0000

What’s best way to follow up DemoCampVictoria01? Go to DemoCampVancouver06 – Gaming edition. I saw a lot of familiar faces from the last time I was over; Boris, Brendon, Greg, and Roland just to name a few.

Parveen Kaler talked about iPhone game development, specifically the medium and what it means. He mentioned that the iPhone audience is fundamentally different, you can’t just port a game from one platform to it. ie: They are playing games in transit – on the bus to work/school, so developing a 50 hour game probably isn’t a wise choice.

Dustin Sacks from Sillysoft games had a great demo of his product, Lux Delux. It’s a turn-based strategy much like Risk. Being a former Risk player, I found it to be pretty interesting His company cares a lot about the users community and it’s quite apparent they have a solid base of customers. They even contribute back to the company freely with things such as AI (Artificial Intelligence) and other downloadable apps. He had a lot of solid ideas and content when doing his demo, so I hope to find the time to post in detail about this later.

One of the main points to come out of DemoCampVancouver06 “gaming edition” was that the future of games seems to be “free to play”. This basically means that anybody can grab the game without paying any fees – (via download or some other distribution channel). This begs the question, how do they make their money if the product value is essentially $0.00? The answer is selling premium services as value-add. For example: Say by default every time you die you lose your items. What if you had the option to add “For $2, keep my items when I get killed” – that I agree would be a great way to monetize the game .

This was a great DemoCamp to be at – I’m on the search to find similar stories in Victoria.