iPhone App Store is Revolutionary

I’ve been testing the iPhone 2.0 firmware for a while (we are actually working on some apps for it, but they got back-burnered because of site launches).

Besides the Exchange Sync, which really makes the iPhone my hub of activity, the iPhone App Store, which launched today represents a significant leap forward in mobile computing, and has sent the bar extremely high for all mobile devices in the future.

I have had most every smart phone since the Palm VII (which wasn’t a smartphone, but used GPRS for data). With each, the application landscape was fragmented between horribly designed websites (ie, handango, bbplay) and third parties. The install procedures were often convoluted (JAR files? CAB?) and the results often not worth the effort.

Picture 26.jpg

Ugly.

What Apple has done is make mobile applications easy to purchase, easy to install and fun to use, while creating a framework for applications that are truley useful and can seamlessly become part of every day life. With the advent soon of asynchronous hooks into the application, Apple has FINALLY given me my ubiquitous computing dream.

And this on my current 2.5G iPhone!

Just this morning, here’s my thoughts on the apps so far:

iTunes Remote - this could seriously give Sonos a run for its money if Apple had a subscription service. I love my Sonos, but if you could control remote airport extremes through this as well…. As it is, iTunes Remote + a PerceptiveAutomation app (if one comes out) would basically give Crestron a run for its money. Sonos should really get an app made for iPod Touch/iPhone soon.

Evernote - Not the best app, but it does bring in-the-cloud notes to a real level. I’m migrating everything over from Notae to this.

NetNewsWire - with the NewsGator sync, it lets me do location-free synchronization and reading of mobile RSS content. Perfectly executed.

Twitterific - despite Twitter’s problems, it does add a nice easy way to update and keep track of Twitter.

Mobile AIM - Works as advertised

NYTimes App - Newspapers might not be dead, or at least ones that remove the “paper” from their self description

Pandora - Kudos to Tom Conrad!

More to come!

2008
07/10
CATEGORY
life
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Asides

    Andreas Schlegel currently lives in Singapore. He likes to write programs that generate audio, visual, and physical output. He enjoys doing projects with syntfarm.

    via sojamo.de

    Posted via web from ethank's posterous

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    ["Five measures prove to be useful: A, the area of the isovist, which gives us a measure of size (in 3-D this is a volume); P, the perimeter of the isovist, which gives us a measure of the boundary length (in 3-D this is an area) excluding the horizon and excluding Q, which is a measure of the length (area) of the radial, component of the isovist boundary; M2, which is a statistical measure of the variability of the boundary’s distance from x; and M3, which is a measure of the asymmetry of M2." From Benedikt]

    If we dimensionalize the data from any given social framework online, could we apply isovistic theory to the quantification of perceptual awareness around a user in this textually augmented reality we now find ourselves?

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    Infra-mince, Duchamp declared, cannot be defined, but can only be described by examples, such as the difference in displaced volume between a clean shirt and the same shirt worn once, or the taste of one's mouth lingering in exhaled smoke.

    Infra-mince was a new way to think about physical and temporal dimensions (decades before Mandelbrot discovered fractals). Holes in some of Duchamp's artwork link the 2nd to the 3rd dimension. Sometimes he shot the holes out with bullets, echoing infra-mince again in the delay between the sounds of the shot and the impact.

    via everything2.com

    Add this to the isovism concept and you basically describe a social network.

    Posted via web from ethank's posterous

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    A single isovist is the volume of space visible from a given point in space, together with a specification of the location of that point.

    via en.wikipedia.org

    Isovism is an interesting concept when applied to the creation of a website. Quantifying the perception of space in a given point. How far can you see from your homepage for instance into the larger n-dimensional world a site creates?

    Posted via web from ethank's posterous

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    The new iPad has lots of space. The screen offers 1024x768 pixels.

    via tuaw.com

    What excites me the most about the iPad, I think, is that it takes paradigms and approaches and lets us expand them. Good art, whether visual or interface, comes from working against constraints imposed by the medium. The iPhone imposed very strict constraints and amazing new paradigms of interface design came out of that. These new approaches have bled their way into Mac OSX apps, Windows 7, etc. I expect the same to happen with the iPad.

    Posted via web from ethank's posterous

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    The funny thing is, if Adobe does not take the steps to make tools to address a future with HTML5, what we'll be left with is tools others create. And chief amongst those others will most likely be Apple. Flash's stance here reminds of Microsoft's during the creation of Blackbird and later their migration toward Visual Interdev and Frontpage. When you build the walls so high around your garden, the fall will just kill your plants.

    [From Flash, iPad, Standards – Jeffrey Zeldman Presents The Daily Report]

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    Rest in piece little buddy.

    [From xkcd - A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language - By Randall Munroe]

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    Idiotic. Copy paste wasn't missing because of an ideological reason. It was missing because it wasn't ready. Same with an SDK and an App-Store. Multitasking presents a usability challenge that I wager they are nearly set in addressing. I bet the camera is supply chain related (same with the iPod Touch). WIth Apple products, what is MISSING is the interesting part, as it usually leads to exposure to ideologies, challenges or works in progress.

    [From What We Learned About Apple Yesterday]

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    I wonder if they are also seeing concurrent apps running from the same device, and that's how they know? I imagine the Tablet will be able to run multiple apps in a grid of some sort, given the screen size.

    [From Apple Tablet: The Second Stage Media Booster Rocket ]

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    A pretty big deal I think, especially considering the move from entertainment companies from "impression" based metrics to revenue.

    [From Boxee Blog » Coming soon: Boxee Payments]

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