"iPhone" entries

Four short links: 10 May 2010

Four short links: 10 May 2010

Barcodes, Python's Innards, Informed Elections, and Data Literacy

  1. zxing — barcode library for iPhone, Android, Java, and more.
  2. Guido’s Python — how the compiler and interpreter see your Python programs. It wasn’t until I had this level of knowledge of Perl that I really know what the hell I was doing. (via Hacker News)
  3. UK Election Data — this was posted on the eve of the UK election and talks about the new data they had this election. There’s been a lot of talk about Internet use by candidates to whip up votes, and by government to boost citizens, but this is data that helps citizens decide who to vote for. Very cool.
  4. Why We Should Learn the Language of Data (Wired) — We often say, rightly, that literacy is crucial to public life: If you can’t write, you can’t think. The same is now true in math. Statistics is the new grammar. (via imran on Twitter)

Actually, half of all iPad Books are Fiction

Suggestions to my previous post inspired me to normalize our metadata1 for titles available through the U.S. iBooks app. A comment prompted me to rollup iBooks publishers into publishing conglomerates2: Comments from other readers gave me the idea to map the 100+ iBooks categories to the more familiar BISAC categories. Doing so means over half of all iBooks titles are…

A few weeks in, a third of iPad Books are Fiction

Measured in terms of number of titles, half of the over 46,000 (paid and free) books available that we detected as being offered through the iBooks app are from 6 categories1. Fiction & Literature alone account for close to a third of all available iBooks titles: The current set of titles is indicative of the publishers (and/or imprints) that Apple…

Five reasons iPhone vs Android isn't Mac vs Windows

Competitive lessons from the PC era don't always apply to mobile

It's human nature to look to the past to predict the future. That's why it's unsurprising to see knee-jerk conclusion that Apple iPhone vs Google Android will mirror the PC wars. Here's five reasons why this time, it's different.

Four short links: 22 April 2010

Four short links: 22 April 2010

Whitehouse Source, Hot Android on iPhone Action, Geomapping, Open Data Fights Fraud

  1. Whitehouse Released Open Source Code — four modules for Drupal with features the White House needed, including integration with the Akamai CDN.
  2. Android on iPhone — it’s like constructing an apartment building out of lasagne: an astonishing feat of engineering, even if it’s not ultimately useful for anything. (via waxy)
  3. A Practical Guide to Geostatistical Mapping — covers R, SAGA, Google Earth, and other tools. (via Flowing Data)
  4. Open Data Saves Canada $3.2B — interesting case of charities fraud, where official institutions were slow to respond but opening the data that revealed the fraud prompted action. Notable to me because the investigators as outsiders didn’t have power but the data gave power to the rest of the industry, who had a stake in making sure the fraud was fixed.

Cookbooks: The highest priced iPad book category

Just like the iTunes app store, the iBooks app on the iPad spotlights the Top Paid (and Top Free) books within each category. Here are some charts that compare the average price (by rank)1 across the major categories. The average price of the Top 50 titles across the major categories range from $7-$15. Cookbooks, History, Biographies are slightly higher priced,…

Grumpy old men, the "Inmates" and margins

iPad, iPhone and the future of computing

As the iPad descends upon us, it is fair to ask, "Is this the beginning of the end, or the end of the beginning?" Depending upon whom you ask, the conclusions vary widely. The yin and yang of openness vs. integrated raises a fundamental question that underscores the battle being fought in the simmering industry battle between Apple and Google.

Games & Entertaiment account for half of all iPad apps

98% of apps in the U.S. iTunes app store label themselves as "iPad compatible", but most were written for iPhones or iPods. One week into its launch there are about 2,300 apps that run only on iPads. Measured in terms of number of unique apps, Games and Entertainment account for about half of all the iPad apps.

Three lessons from the Chipotle iPhone app

How centralization, a defined use case, and a uniform menu shaped Chipotle's iPhone app

The iPhone app from Chipotle, the restaurant chain best known for its burritos, is an interesting mix of simple design, e-commerce functionality and location tools. Digging into the app's development reveals three aspects that could prove useful for businesses and programmers pursuing their own mobile paths.

Four short links: 2 March 2010

Four short links: 2 March 2010

Visualising Tweeted Data, Voting Licenses, Space-Time Mining, and Processing for the iPhone

  1. Visualising Time Series Data in Tweets — builds sparklines from Twitter Data tweets.
  2. GPL Inadequate for Open Source Voting Software — the GPL prohibits “additional restrictions”, but the US Government has requirements for its voting software that fall into that category. An interesting read. The solution will be a new open source license (sigh) but one that meets their specific and real needs. (via Glyn Moody)
  3. SatScanfree software that analyzes spatial, temporal and space-time data using the spatial, temporal, or space-time scan statistics. It is designed for any of the following interrelated purposes: Perform geographical surveillance of disease, to detect spatial or space-time disease clusters, and to see if they are statistically significant; Test whether a disease is randomly distributed over space, over time or over space and time; Evaluate the statistical significance of disease cluster alarms; Perform repeated time-periodic disease surveillance for early detection of disease outbreaks. (via ancodezambia on Delicious)
  4. iProcessing — a Processing.js port to iPhone plus application framework library that lets you write iPhone apps in Processing. (via cityofsound on Delicious)