Apple launched the App Store in July 2008 and has since revolutionized the mobile application industry. They have taken to the masses what used to be a niche market of Palm and Pocket PC software. Everyone now uses apps on their smartphones and 58 million iPhone/iPod Touch users are said to download 4 to 8 apps per month.
With 7 billion downloads in 2009, that’s a completely new ecosystem which has created huge opportunities for indie developers to strike rich in no time. Well that’s at least what a tiny bit of success stories, broadly relayed by the media, are trying to make you believe.
The reality of the App Market is very different and there is a steep long tail distribution concentrating most profits on a very small number of apps and developers. There are however still ways to produce quality profitable apps for the iPhone and I was given a chance today to address this topic during Buzzcity Developer Garage. Make sure to read more to view my entire presentation and download my slides !! Read more…
If you read my blog and follow my tweets, you might have noticed that I keep switching between my three favorite phones: an iPhone 3GS, a Nexus One and a Blackberry Bold 9700.
Three great devices. Three beautiful and powerful gadgets. But certainly three sources of frustrations with each their very own set of caveats and downsides such as the iPhone and the lack of multi-tasking, the Nexus and its poor touchscreen accuracy, as well as the Blackberry and its terrible browsing experience or app catalogue.
If your Telco has an affordable Multi-SIM option, it might be the end of your frustrations. Read more to find out how to seamlessly switch among your various phones without the hassle of removing the SIM card. Read more…
As some of you may know, I run a one-man show company developing iPhone applications. I started Bitsmedia in Singapore less than a year ago and have since been focusing my efforts on delivering quality applications to enterprise clients.
About 6 months ago, I received the first of what was going to become a long list of phone calls from the Forum Nokia team in India. They basically seem to be approaching every company in the world doing iPhone applications and begging them (including myself) to port our applications to Symbian and distribute them on OVI. Read more…
I work off an old 15″ Macbook Pro hooked to a nice big 24″ display. Boosted with 3GB of RAM (the older Macbook Pros could not handle more than 3GB) and a fast SSD drive, that setup is brilliant for what I spend most of my time at: coding! Mainly Xcode (I write iPhone apps for a living) as well as a bit of PHP here and there.
But when it comes to traveling, clearing emails at the coffeeshop or simply browsing the web from bed at night, I find my 15″ MBP a bit bulgy and heavy. Sure I did look at the Macbook Air and am still considering it everytime I pass by an Apple Shop. It’s a beautiful and sleek piece of art but I am still very puzzled by both its price and the lack of connetivity.
For about the quarter of the price of a Macbook Air, I therefore decided to go “hackintosh”. I bought a Dell Mini 10v and with a bit of patience (but no real technical skills required) got Snow Leopard (yes Mac OS 10.6) running beautifully. Here is how I did it: Read more…
In my previous post, I wrote about the real cost of running your own server on the Amazon EC2 platform. After signing up with EC2, I spent about half a day migrating my blog from WordPress.com to a self-hosted version of WordPress.org. I also migrated my very static html company website from Google App Engine to a standard Apache/PHP server.
If you are considering such migration as well, or simply interested in reading what it takes to do so, here is the process I went through…
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We all know Amazon as the leading e-commerce website in the world, selling millions of books. But did you know that for the past few years, Amazon has also been playing a leading role in Cloud Computing? Under the name of AWS (Amazon Web Services), the number one book seller offers a variety of cloud computing services such S3 (Simple Storage Service), CloudFront (a CDN competing with Akamai), Simple DB and RDS (online databases), etc… One of their most popular services is called EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) and provides “resizable compute capacity in the cloud”. It literally allows you to get servers on-demand. Build and scale your infrastructure as it grows. If Amazon advertises this EC2 service as a great way to save cost on scaling big infrastructure for high-demand traffic, it is also a great way for smaller setups to build as little as one server.
In less than half a day yesterday, I got my very own EC2 server up and running and migrated this blog from wordpress.com as well as my company website from Google App Engine. Make sure to read more to find out the real cost and read this other post to find out how I handled the entire setup.
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