- Don’t Play Games With Me — slides from an excellent talk about games and gamification. (via Andy Baio)
- All Your Bitcoins Are Ours (Symantec) — a trojan in the wild that targets the wallet.dat file and transfers your bitcoins out. If you use Bitcoins, you have the option to encrypt your wallet and we recommend that you choose a strong password for this in the event that an attacker is attempting to brute-force your wallet open. (via Hacker News)
- FT Escapes the App Trap (Simon Phipps) — Financial Times dropping their iOS app and moving to HTML5, to escape the App Store commissions. As Simon points out, they’re also losing the sales channel benefits of the App Store. Facebook are doing similar. (via Tim O’Reilly)
- Artur Bergman on SSDs (video) — a short sweary rant he gave at Velocity, laying out the numbers for why you’re an idiot not to use SSDs.
"app store" entries
Four short links: 17 June 2011
Gamification Critique, BitCoin Trojan, App Store Abandonment, and SSD Rant
10 ways to botch a mobile app
Give your mobile app a better shot at success by avoiding these common mistakes.
With the aim of injecting reason and business know-how into the app development process, "App Savvy" author Ken Yarmosh outlines the top 10 reasons why apps often falter or fail.
Four short links: 25 May 2011
DoD Open Source Report, Kinect Javascript, Open Core, and Anti-App Store
- OTD Lessons Learned v1 (PDF) — Dept of Defense report on use of open technologies. Advocates against forking open source projects, and provides specific guidance for groups looking to use OSS so they can navigate the military’s producement policies and procedures in a way that’ll deliver the best chance of success for the project. Imagine if only the manufacturer of a rifle were allowed to clean, fix, modify or upgrade that rifle. The military often finds itself in this position with taxpayer funded, contractor developed software: one contractor with a monopoly on the knowledge of a military software system and control of the software source code. (via John Scott)
- depth.js — Javascript for Chrome and Safari that lets the Kinect interact with web pages. (via Javascript Weekly)
- A Liberating Betrayal (Simon Phipps) — Microsoft have told Digium (makers of Asterisk) that they can’t sell their Asterisk-Skype interaction module after July 26. Simon notes that this reveals the fundamental problem with “open core” approaches to open source business. The proprietary interests hold all the cards here. The community can’t just “rehost and carry on” because the crucial add-on is proprietary. Even if wasn’t, the protocol it’s implementing is proprietary and subject to arbitrary change – very likely to happen if anyone attempts to reverse-engineer the interface and protocol. Asterisk may be open source, but if you’re dependent on this interface to connect with your customers on Skype you’ve no freedoms – that’s the way “open core” works.
- Zero Install — Zero Install is a decentralised cross-distribution software installation system. Just hit 1.0. (via James Williams)
Four short links: 9 November 2010
A Prototyping HowTo, Decolumning PDFs, Real World Social Networks, and App Search
- How to Prototype and Influence People (Aza Raskin) — I’m fascinated lately by prototypes, mockups, tangible artifacts, and other design tools for conveying the essence and promise of something without having to build it all. This talk nails it.
- paper2ebook — Utility to re-structure research papers published in US Letter or A4 format PDF files to remove the 2 columns layout to make it suitable for viewing in an ebook reader. (via Olivier Grisel on Twitter)
- The Real Life Social Network (Slideshare) — presentation from a Google ux designer starts with a typical “social networking makes you lump everyone as a friend but people don’t think that way” set of slides, but by slide 70 it’s talking about research into how people think of their friends. I’d love to see a UI for a social network that got this right. (via Matt Zimmerman on Twitter)
- uquery — simple search engine for the iPhone/iPad app store. (via Marco Arment on Twitter)
Windows Mobile apps are more expensive than iPhone apps
The mean app price for the Windows market is nearly two times higher than the App Store.
The Windows Marketplace for Mobile now has about 1,400 apps spread across 16 categories. In this short post I'll provide some basic statistics and compare it with the grandaddy of app stores: the U.S. iTunes store.
Four short links: 21 October 2010
MySQL as NoSQL, Handmade SLR, Mac App Store, and Datamining Privacy Workshop
- Using MysQL as NoSQL — 750,000+ qps on a commodity MySQL/InnoDB 5.1 server from remote web clients.
- Making an SLR Camera from Scratch — amazing piece of hardware devotion. (via hackaday.com)
- Mac App Store Guidelines — Apple announce an app store for the Macintosh, similar to its app store for iPhones and iPads. “Mac App” no longer means generic “program”, it has a new and specific meaning, a program that must be installed through the App store and which has limited functionality (only one can run at a time, it’s full-screen, etc.). The list of guidelines for what kinds of programs you can’t sell through the App Store is interesting. Many have good reasons to be, but It creates a store inside itself for selling or distributing other software (i.e., an audio plug-in store in an audio app) is pure greed. Some are afeared that the next step is to make the App store the only way to install apps on a Mac, a move that would drive me away. It would be a sad day for Mac-lovers if Microsoft were to be the more open solution than Apple. cf the Owner’s Manifesto.
- Privacy Aspects of Data Mining — CFP for an IEEE workshop in December. (via jschneider on Twitter)
Popular iPhone games stay highly-ranked only for a few weeks
With 40,000+ Games to choose from, the list of Top 100 free and paid games are frequently scanned by iPhone gamers. In this short post, I'll share some basic statistics on popular games sold through the U.S. iTunes app store.
Four short links: 29 June 2010
Literary Mashups, Hardware+App Store, Wikileaks Criticism, Online Style Guide
- The Diary of Samuel Pepys — a remarkable mashup of historical information and literature in modern technology to make the Pepys diaries an experience rather than an object. It includes historical weather, glosses, maps, even an encyclopedia. (prompted by Jon Udell)
- The Tonido Plug Server — one of many such wall-wart sized appliances. This caught my eye: CodeLathe, the folks behind Tonido, have developed a web interface and suite of applications. The larger goal is to get developers to build other applications for inclusion in Tonido’s own app store.
- Wikileaks Fails “Due Diligence” Review — interesting criticism of Wikileaks from Federation of American Scientists. “Soon enough,” observed Raffi Khatchadourian in a long profile of WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange in The New Yorker (June 7), “Assange must confront the paradox of his creation: the thing that he seems to detest most-power without accountability-is encoded in the site’s DNA, and will only become more pronounced as WikiLeaks evolves into a real institution.” (via Hacker News)
- Yahoo Style Guide — a paper book, but also a web site with lots of advice for those writing online.
iPhone economics and lower barriers to entry
The power of the App Store is defined by more than direct revenue.
The App Store has exposed incumbents in the mobile industry to the same sort of asymmetric competition that has reshaped the media industry over the past decade. Developers are responding in droves to the economic incentives that lower barriers to entry create, as well as the fact that the App Store has generated $1 billion in royalty payments in just a few years.
Where do developers draw the line with Apple?
Two developers, one out of iPhone development and the other still in, examine the App Store.
Dan Grigsby and Dan Pilone have both developed iPhone applications. Both have concerns about development restrictions, too. But only one remains within Apple's ecosystem. Here, the developers examine the App Store from two viewpoints: one that's in and one that's out.