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…
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…
The New York Times on the iPad
It is now officially confirmed by Apple, the iPad will be in store by April 3rd in the US and shortly after in some other countries. As Steve Jobs himself emphasized during his January 27 keynote, the iPad is aimed to be the perfect device to, among others, surf the web from your living room couch. We now know that the iPad will not support flash, which might actually impact your browsing experience on some flash intensive websites. Other websites may actually detect the iPad as an iPhone (most WordPress blogs currently do) and present you with a page meant for a 3″ screen. But for most sites I tested, the iPad truly looked like the perfect internet tablet we have been waiting for.
If you can’t wait for another month and if you are dying to see what your favorite websites will look like on the iPad, read more and take a look at 15 screenshots taken from the iPad simulator that Apple was kind enough to provide iPhone developers with (I actually hope that I am not breaching the Apple SDK NDA by publishing these screenshots, after all, I am only revealing what Safari looks like on the iPad, which Apple already did to the whole world on Jan 26).
Read more…
If you have been a geek for 10 years or more, you probably know that Apple did not invent touchscreen phones and mobile applications (apps). For the rest of you, here is a bit of background information about apps, appstores and touchscreen devices that existed well before the iPhone, well before Apple managed to bring what was essentially made for geeks to the bigger and more profitable mainstream market.
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Because I know keeping all your different devices in sync can quickly become a hassle, I thought I would share with you the best method I have found so far to properly sync contacts, calendars and emails across multiple platforms.
Syncing Mac, iPhone, Nexus and Blackberry
If like me, you own more than one phone and/or more than one computer, and enjoy the freedom to switch from one device to another without troubling yourself and risking to miss some important data at some point in time, the rest of this post is for you. Most importantly this approach allows me to stay away from annoying duplicates and, worse, lost data.
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