Isomaly Apps http://www.isomaly.com Useful apps for iOS and mobile posterous.com Tue, 29 Nov 2011 04:14:29 -0800 Coding is the New Latin ? http://www.isomaly.com/coding-is-the-new-latin http://www.isomaly.com/coding-is-the-new-latin

BBC Technology , and with it the interwebs, has been buzzing with the realisation that Computer Science Education in English Schools is woeful, and that while in Scotland we have got as far as recognizing some of the deficiencies (see Ewan Macintosh and The Curriculum for Excellence) things are still far from rosy even north of the border. I profess to ignorance of the situation in Wales and NI.

The NESTA Next Gen report recognizes that Computer Science is intellectually fundamental, but spoils its point by focusing on arguing for very vocational "industry relevant" "specialist training". In other words, it argues as a special interest group asking for public support to make its life easier.

What Computer Science (NOT just coding) is, is closer to physics or biology. It picks apart the fundamentals of how computing systems work, and builds a coherent theory of how they work, and what you can and can't do with them. Once you know that, thehn you undertand what you can do by coding. For analogy, physics picks apart the physical universe and builds a coherent theory of how it works and what is or isn't possible (well, it's trying anyway). It also happens that Computer Science benefits tremendously from the underpinnings of diverse branches of mathematics to build its theories. And these theories aren't just intellectual frippery. They allow us to build robust, large scale computing systems, and to demonstrate with confidence that they do what we say they do. That's Software Engineering. A shout out here to Britain's presiding genius of the 20th Century, Alan Turing, who basically figured all this out about computers as a thought experiment, and then set about inventing and building them.

Lest the NESTA authors get cross with me, I completely agree that the fields of computer science and art and design are complementary, and that building great products in the modern age requires enormous crossover between these areas. But the fact that art and design can be appreciated and understood by an educated lay person making an effort, makes it easier to promote and support than a field which demands that you go away and study some ostensibly pointless maths for a long time before coming back and understanding how it all connects together.

So to the extent that the Latin analogy has merit, it is that the rigorous study of the abstruse has ultimately unexpected and wide ranging benefits in the everyday. I'm not convinced that Latin is particularly special that way, but that's the folkloric belief about it in the kind of places that study Latin.

Mathematics and Physics and Engineering. Oh my! Now we get it. These are subjects which in the UK are not fashionable. They are not the bread and circuses of X-Factor talent, nor the true routes to power and influence of The Law and PPE. So it's perhaps not surprising that young people being asked to stump up large sums of money to purchase a higher education aren't buying the rhetoric about how nice it would be for them to study very very hard to become trained workers with industry relevant expertise, when the rewards to them don't quite seem commensurate with the effort required.

So if this country wants to take on Silicon Valley, and become part of a thriving knowledge economy, it's going to need to rebalance itself in ways which recognise how important it is to support and sustain the people who find the subject sufficiently interesting to want to study it. That way at the margin it will produce sufficiently greater numbers of future generations of Computer Scientists and good Computer Science teachers (at all levels of the education system) which will make such a knowledge economy self-sustaining and self-replicating. And at present we are an awful long way from that societal shift.

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/985521/DSCF1385.jpg http://posterous.com/users/3syaVNJVztW9 Alan Paxton isomaly Alan Paxton Mon, 29 Aug 2011 01:41:00 -0700 A Busy Summer http://www.isomaly.com/a-busy-summer http://www.isomaly.com/a-busy-summer

The last few days have been spent attending the Turing Festival on Friday, and a quick trip to meet up with some OSM folks at State of the Map Scotland on Saturday.

Earlier in the summer, Sustrans release their iPhone App, which we were very pleased to develop on their behalf. The app distinguishes itself in using the Ordnance Survey derived Sustrans mapping; for many applications in the UK, the accuracy and clarity of OS mapping is unsurpassable.

Having built a framework for presenting OS mappings within iPhone apps, we're now very pleased to be working on a similar framework for Android, and our first customer project using this is planned for release later in 2011.

The Turing Festival has been covered widely, it's a valiant attempt to integrate the Scottish Tech community with the Festival of Festivals that is Edinburgh in August. I only had time to attend the business track on Friday, and while there were some excellent talks, as well as one that annoyed me immensely in its techno-utopian shallowness, it came off much more as a conventional biz conference event that happened at the same time as the festival than a "festival" per se. I think it would be hard to be more on a first attempt, but I'd love to see someone try. Could one address the work of Turing or Gödel in something of the way of Copenhagen ?

State of the Map is the annual gathering of people interested in the OpenStreetMap project. Over the last decade, this project has mapped large parts of the world co-operatively and openly, producing an array of data and tools which provide geographical insight and some amazing possibilities. The CycleStreets project and its smartphone apps are in large part possible because of the existence of OSM as both usable data and as a map for overlaying route images. Whereas the database that goes to build Ordnance Survey maps is proprietary, in OSM it is free in the sense of open.

 

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/985521/DSCF1385.jpg http://posterous.com/users/3syaVNJVztW9 Alan Paxton isomaly Alan Paxton Fri, 11 Mar 2011 06:04:25 -0800 Some wrinkles with XCode 4 http://www.isomaly.com/some-wrinkles-with-xcode-4 http://www.isomaly.com/some-wrinkles-with-xcode-4 So I've run across a couple of problems with XCode 4 that others may possibly care about.

The conversion process of a project would appear to turn off "Application requires iPhone environment" in the .plist file. With the result that you get told that embedded.mobileprovision already exists, when you attempt to copy an ad hoc distribution .app file to itunes. You need to re-enable that.

Second, it would appear that some build configurations don't pick up the right project dependencies. So I can build my ad hoc and release builds under XCode3, and yet they miss the output libraries for the subprojects under XCode4. In related news, I can't quite get my head around the new schemes, as it seems unfeasibly hard to just build an ad hoc build; it wants a complete scheme.

I'm sure some of these problems are just the result of my general ignorance. YMMV.

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/985521/DSCF1385.jpg http://posterous.com/users/3syaVNJVztW9 Alan Paxton isomaly Alan Paxton Thu, 10 Mar 2011 01:49:07 -0800 The Quantum of Appiness http://www.isomaly.com/the-quantum-of-appiness http://www.isomaly.com/the-quantum-of-appiness It's funny to see the term app having entered the general lexicon. The first thing that happens is that it loses any precise meaning. So I will try to dig into it along several axes.

From a purely technical point of view, an app is a piece of software explicitly installed on a mobile phone, usually because the user has found it in a, or the, store. There's lots of things here.

It's a piece of software. So's everything. but the clearest contrast is with a static web page which just presents a piece of data.

It's explicitly installed. So it's not like a link that you happen to follow, there's an awareness that the app is a separate thing.

And the fact that it comes from a store ? Well, things come from stores. You don't get non-things from stores, or if you do you get cross, even if your only investment was the time you spent. Conversely, you tend not to get things from places that aren't stores. The posh word for that is discoverability.

So once the magic has been established that there is a place to get things of value, and things of value come from a place, then the app and appstore ecosystem is all set. Let's ask, what do people not want from a store ? Answer, brochures. And to take it a little further, promotional material that is just that and no more. That's what websites are for. I google something, I get your website, I read what your site has to say. Now comes the interesting part. Your website tells me about a thing that I want. It is of value to me, whether or not it costs actual upfront money. How should I get hold of it ? Well, I trust the store, so when you send me to the store to get it, and this just works, I'm happy. But if your site tells me about a thing, and I acquire that thing from the store, and all it does is tell me about you, I'm sad.

So, things from stores need to be of value, and things of value are best got from stores. Got that one, Google ? Excellent.

Now comes the hard part. How to make things of value, or in this case, apps of value. I could say real programming languages, and leave it there. But I'm not writing for Computer Scientists, and much as I'd like to have a war about languages and tools, it's not the done thing here. So I will observe that it's perfectly valid and practical to build an app with web development tools, if those are the tools that you have to hand. What you need to ensure is that you are building enough value into the app that it clears the thing hurdle. From a technical point of view, if you're building something large and complex, it's a much better model to use a programming language together with appropriate APIs to access the data you need from the network. You almost certainly cleared the thing hurdle already.

Happy hacking.

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/985521/DSCF1385.jpg http://posterous.com/users/3syaVNJVztW9 Alan Paxton isomaly Alan Paxton Wed, 26 Jan 2011 02:54:00 -0800 RoutePics Promotional Codes http://www.isomaly.com/routepics-promotional-codes http://www.isomaly.com/routepics-promotional-codes
It's been a few days since i released RoutePics (AppStore link), my app for exploring GPSies routes and flickr photos on OpenStreetMap maps.

RoutePics has had it's initial new release bump, sold copies across the world, and I've received my spam from the "help to market your app better" snake oil salesmen. But I'm not ready to retire on the proceeds yet, so here's a few promo codes for any readers who'd like to try it out, or become brand ambassadors. Please comment here or tweet @isomalyapps if you use one, so I can take it off the list.

Enjoy.

---Alan

TWT6MY74X4MH
R3P7RFWHTMF9
NMAPHMK3RAXX
AMRL9FNXXTWE
P9AYJMENR9EA
TMPRMFWWRT7W
443J6HFXE4F3
JJF4JMHNJPH9

 

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/985521/DSCF1385.jpg http://posterous.com/users/3syaVNJVztW9 Alan Paxton isomaly Alan Paxton Tue, 25 Jan 2011 04:54:08 -0800 RoutePics Future Plans http://www.isomaly.com/routepics-future-plans http://www.isomaly.com/routepics-future-plans

We’ve just released the new RoutePics app.

We would like to improve and enhance RoutePics in future, in the ways that would best please our users. Which of these features would you prefer to see ?

  • GPS route tracking (in the iPhone) version, and uploads to GPSies, strava, Endomondo or any of the other route repositories ?
  • More control of how the photos are selected (e.g. by tag) rather than just selecting the most recent ?
  • More details of routes ?
  • The ability to track your position while following a route ?

If these or other features interest you, please review the app on the app store, comment here, or speak to us on twitter @isomalyapps.

 

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/985521/DSCF1385.jpg http://posterous.com/users/3syaVNJVztW9 Alan Paxton isomaly Alan Paxton Mon, 22 Nov 2010 04:00:00 -0800 CycleStreets featured on data.gov.uk http://www.isomaly.com/cyclestreets-featured-on-datagovuk http://www.isomaly.com/cyclestreets-featured-on-datagovuk

Data-gov-screenshot
We’re very happy to see CycleStreets, and the app which we wrote for them, featured on the front page of the official UK Government open data site. It’s a pity they’ve got a little confused between the CycleStreets website and the iPhone app. But all publicity is good publicity.

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/985521/DSCF1385.jpg http://posterous.com/users/3syaVNJVztW9 Alan Paxton isomaly Alan Paxton Fri, 22 Oct 2010 04:00:00 -0700 Why OpenStreetMap is better than Google Maps http://www.isomaly.com/why-openstreetmap-is-better-than-google-maps http://www.isomaly.com/why-openstreetmap-is-better-than-google-maps

My son was invited to a party in a part of the world we don’t know well, with instructions that the house (newly built last summer) was “not on the map.” Not on Google Maps, it wasn’t, but I tapped the address into the namefinder on my CycleStreets app, and the OSM-backed namefinder found it. Cue a stress free trip to party.

So my thanks to whoever surveyed new parts of Bonnyrigg recently, and once again to all the great folks who contribute to OSM. It’s an example of great technology which makes life that little bit easier.

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/985521/DSCF1385.jpg http://posterous.com/users/3syaVNJVztW9 Alan Paxton isomaly Alan Paxton Mon, 20 Sep 2010 03:06:38 -0700 I'm looking for a little bit of web design/build consultancy (paid) http://www.isomaly.com/im-looking-for-a-little-bit-of-web-designbuil http://www.isomaly.com/im-looking-for-a-little-bit-of-web-designbuil Let me explain.

My business is developing iPhone apps, which I've done for myself, for direct contract and for subcontract. My background is as a software developer, using old-fashioned things like programming languages. When I were a lad, a website was a bit of HTML markup with text in it. My current business website (http://www.isomaly.com/) is generated with some clunky 3rd party point-and-click system and hosted by the same system. It is about to get very out of date when my latest work reaches the app store (http://www.cyclestreets.net/mobile/), so I want to do something about it, and I want it to look good and convey the relevant information.

My problem is that there are more web frameworks and tools out there than you can shake a stick at. Although something like Django is very appealing as a piece of technology it has the complexity to do far more than I need, and I could spend lots of time I don't have learning it and playing with it, and still end up with something that isn't particularly visually appealing or effective. What I want is to talk to someone who knows their way through this minefield, and can point me in the direction of a system I can set up and manage myself with a small amount of effort. I'd rather not host anything myself, or pay the ongoing costs of something like linode, so my preference would be for a lightweight hosted solution or something canned that I can run on Google App Engine.

Most important to me is if I can be led through the basic conceptual elements of site design, helped to sketch out my site, and pointed at a solution that allows me to do simple structural updates, e.g. adding a new section/tab for a new app, updating the text for another app. So it needs to be database backed, driving the site from the structure, and being me I need to be able to conceptually grok and be able to access the underlying database. I believe that is more or less what the kids nowadays call a CMS.

If anyone thinks they are the person to help me, or knows who is, I expect to pay for this somewhere between an hour or two of someone's time over coffee pointing me in the right direction to half a day with the laptop getting the rudiments set up, leaving me to fill in the blanks.

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/985521/DSCF1385.jpg http://posterous.com/users/3syaVNJVztW9 Alan Paxton isomaly Alan Paxton Fri, 17 Sep 2010 05:03:34 -0700 Fun with the festivals innovation lab API http://www.isomaly.com/fun-with-the-festivals-innovation-lab-api http://www.isomaly.com/fun-with-the-festivals-innovation-lab-api The Edinburgh Festivals Innovation lab built a little API round the listings for the forthcoming Storytelling Festival. So for a wee bit of fun, I have written a demo app around it. I've provided a few screenshots. It is an extremely plain and simple interpretation of the listings, but for 3 hours work it does show that you can have something usable without too much work. Of course in the iPhone world, visual artifice is a given, and to release such an app to the app store would require quadrupling the development time with some design-y touches..

Search Listing Detail1 Detail2
See the full gallery on Posterous

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/985521/DSCF1385.jpg http://posterous.com/users/3syaVNJVztW9 Alan Paxton isomaly Alan Paxton Wed, 25 Aug 2010 01:59:53 -0700 What I Like About Working for Myself http://www.isomaly.com/what-i-like-about-working-for-myself http://www.isomaly.com/what-i-like-about-working-for-myself I've spent a fair proportion of my working life designing and implementing software systems. There's a rhythm to it, a process whereby for a week or two you get to think interesting thoughts about how to build a piece of software, then a chunk of time from a few weeks to a few months implementing it, then some other, never long enough chunk of time debugging, testing systematically and generally getting something into a fit state for customers to use. After that it's time to review feedback, solicit follow on requirements, prioritize them and start the same process all over again. Of course there's only a certain number of times you can do this before it gets uninteresting.

But, working for myself on customer projects, a new enquiry can give me the chance to spend half a day in the delightful phase of the metaphorical whiteboard and pens, building the conceptual structure for someone's new app. Of course, there's hard work to be done in implementation and delivery, but the scale of an iPhone or iPad app is such that you don't lose sight of the structure before it is finished. And it's always delightful to see something you've made pop up on your phone, or even better, on someone else's.

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/985521/DSCF1385.jpg http://posterous.com/users/3syaVNJVztW9 Alan Paxton isomaly Alan Paxton Wed, 09 Jun 2010 03:24:00 -0700 Cyclestreets iPhone App Beta http://www.isomaly.com/cyclestreets-iphone-app-beta http://www.isomaly.com/cyclestreets-iphone-app-beta

I'm going to be one of the people giving a 5-minute talk to Edinburgh Techmeetup tonight (http://techmeetup.co.uk/blog/). I will demonstrate the CycleStreets (http://www.cyclestreets.net/) iPhone app I've been working on for a while now, and which is currently in test, planning for a release during Cycle Week. On that subject, I would be happy if anyone would volunteer themselves as a beta tester; I can't offer much of a reward beyond an honourable mention on this blog, or maybe in the app credits ? Get in touch if you'd like to try it out. I'm already checked in to techmeetup (at http://www.getbloop.com/)

The slideshow is a demo of the app. The main features are

    A Cycle Journey Planner which is aware of cycle paths and lesser trafficed roads. Of course, the journey planner is part of the core cyclestreets service, and as far as the app is concerned it's a routing black box. But that's the point.

        You can use the GPS location to locate yourself on the map, and place a rout endpoint automatically.

        You can use the CycleStreets namefinder to look up towns, streets or postcodes and place a route endpoint there.

    Photomap. This is a cycle campaigning and information tool that maintains a database of geotagged photographs relevant to the cycling infrastructure. Using the app, you can see photomap photos on the section of the map you're looking at, and you can upload photos to photomap direct from your iPhone.

For those of you who are interested in this sort of thing, the app uses the RouteMe slippy maps library, accessing OpenStreetMap maps through the Cloudmade services. Although some of the features are not as slick as Google maps, it allows recent map tiles to be cached on the device, and generally does not suffer from tricky to understand licence niggles like the MapKit does. OpenStreetMap is a community mapping initiative, so if you're interested you can add insanely detailed mapping information for the POIs you know and love.


Img_0169 Img_0170 Img_0171 Img_0172 Img_0173 Img_0174 Img_0175 Img_0176 Img_0177 Img_0178 Img_0179 Img_0180 Img_0181 Img_0182 Img_0183 Img_0184 Img_0185 Img_0186 Img_0187 Img_0188 Img_0189 Img_0190 Img_0191 Img_0192 Img_0193 Img_0194 Img_0195 Img_0196 Img_0197 Img_0198 Img_0199 Img_0200 Img_0201 Img_0202 Img_0203 Img_0204 Img_0205
See the full gallery on Posterous

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/985521/DSCF1385.jpg http://posterous.com/users/3syaVNJVztW9 Alan Paxton isomaly Alan Paxton Wed, 12 May 2010 14:11:42 -0700 I succumbed to iPad fever http://www.isomaly.com/i-succumbed-to-ipad-fever http://www.isomaly.com/i-succumbed-to-ipad-fever And ordered a 64GB WiFi one, now that us benighted oldworlders are being sent a consignment. I had to think a bit about what I wanted one for, before I decided not to waste money on the 3G. If I need to I can get MiFi much cheaper, for the occasions when I'm going to be out and about without WiFi range. My use-case is that this is going to replace the oldest laptop in the house, with a much improved UX.

This analysis will inform my efforts to develop iPad software. I think there's a lot of opportunity blurring the boundaries between brochures and websites. Nothing fundamentally surprising there, but the UX of something like a tailored property portal app integrating touch has a lot to recommend it over a vanilla website, and the big screen makes it serve a different purpose from the rash of me-too whitebox property apps that have appeared from the likes of www.rightmove.co.uk

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/985521/DSCF1385.jpg http://posterous.com/users/3syaVNJVztW9 Alan Paxton isomaly Alan Paxton Thu, 08 Apr 2010 14:23:22 -0700 iPhone OS 4 launch signals new hardware soon http://www.isomaly.com/iphone-os-4-launch-signals-new-hardware-soon http://www.isomaly.com/iphone-os-4-launch-signals-new-hardware-soon The first thing that registered with me from reports of the next version of the iPhone OS is that the 3G won't support the new multitasking features. Does this mean that the 3G will not run the new OS, or just that the feature will not be enabled ? As for the features themselves, they're about what one would expect; strongly sandboxed to preserve the wipeability of apps - we can't have rogue apps jamming the machine, and not be saveable via the home key; Apple is dead right about that one.

Wassever. It further fragments the landscape for developers, what with iPodTouch, 3G, 3GS and iPad it's almost as if you have to have a basement room full of hardware to roll out an app that works on everything. Almost as scary as trying to guarantee that your Android app works on 16 different phones with 16 different screen resolutions. Methinks some of the first generation of iPhone developers may need to learn to programme with all sorts of old fashioned stuff like symbolic constants.

It's also a big giveaway that the hardware is going to get a decent refresh, pretty soon. You can't keep selling the 3G as the base model when it is already on the path to deprecation. So the 3GS becomes the base, and we get a 3GSuperDuper. But probably stuck with the old screen resolution; see that bit about symbolic constants, or cue lots of retrospective appstore evictions for apps that don't conform to the new screen size. A half-decent camera at last ? That depends whether a better lens would spoil the look.

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/985521/DSCF1385.jpg http://posterous.com/users/3syaVNJVztW9 Alan Paxton isomaly Alan Paxton Mon, 05 Apr 2010 13:37:24 -0700 What's the Story ? http://www.isomaly.com/whats-the-story-28 http://www.isomaly.com/whats-the-story-28 Richard Marshall (http://www.richard-marshall.com/wordpress/) made an interesting observation on twitter (and that's something unusual in itself); that the UK got the new Doctor Who on the same day as the US got the iPad, and that we got the better deal. I agree, and I think it's quite important why.

In the 1980s Disney spent a lot of time and wasted an awful lot of money buying distribution channels because they thought they needed channels to get their product to market. They didn't; they needed great stories, great content, and they finally figured this out and bought Pixar. Any distribution channel worth its salt must beg to carry Pixar movies.

So to return to the original observation, the new Doctor Who is the content, the iPad is just a distribution channel. The fact is, the new Doctor Who is much, much better than the stuff from 30+ years ago that I watched as a kid. Not just the production values, but more fundamentally the intelligence and inventiveness of the script and the characters. And thinking back to the books I had to read in those days, and comparing them to what is available to my children now, makes me rather jealous. So in the next few days I'll be off with the kids to see the film of the fabulous How To Train Your Dragon (http://www.howtotrainyourdragonbooks.com/), a series of wonderful stories told in that terribly old-fashioned and linear printed book form. The story transcends the medium.

Which isn't to say that the delivery mechanism is entirely incidental. A good one extends the possibilities for telling the story, and in our reflexive and self-referential world it can easily become a story in its own right. But it is not the story.

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/985521/DSCF1385.jpg http://posterous.com/users/3syaVNJVztW9 Alan Paxton isomaly Alan Paxton Fri, 12 Mar 2010 01:16:54 -0800 Creativity http://www.isomaly.com/creativity-297 http://www.isomaly.com/creativity-297 I've been reading Jaron Lanier's "I Am Not A Gadget." It's partly a deeply felt critique, partly heartfelt yell of rage at a lot of what the interweb is become. I recommend reading it, if only because it's the only place where I've seen philosophical questions asked about where we are all going with technology, how we can control it and what choices we are able to make about what happens. A much more interesting and human perspective than the along-for-the-ride techno-utopianism  of the high priests (wired, techcrunch, clayshirky). The second best book I've read recently (this is the best: Observer review: 1599 by James Shapiro | Books | The Observer).

Some of what Lanier says is interesting because it takes issue with the accepted wisdom in a lot of particulars. He contends that free models don't work in the long run because the creators of content don't make any money, to be creative requires money, and no good internet-based model has emerged to pay such people. Lanier is particularly concerned about musicians, but the argument applies more generally. So we start to ask questions about whether "free" and cloud sourced is inevitable and positive as the priests would have it, or contestable and of questionable benefit in Lanier's thinking. Well, there's more nuance in taking the second part..

It is of course more than a little arrogant of Shirky to claim that Rupert Murdoch doesn't "get it" when he attempts to erect pay walls around his media empire. You don't have to like Murdoch to realise he's a shrewd and brilliant operator willing to take big risks. But arrogance is the stock-in-trade of any priesthood. Well, if that's what he wants to think, he may have a rude awakening as the major publishers and Apple co-operate to build content that people are willing to pay for.

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/985521/DSCF1385.jpg http://posterous.com/users/3syaVNJVztW9 Alan Paxton isomaly Alan Paxton Tue, 16 Feb 2010 05:57:04 -0800 Lenten resolutions. http://www.isomaly.com/lenten-resolutions http://www.isomaly.com/lenten-resolutions On Saturday I read a book review in a printed journal. On Monday I ordered the book, and I am eagerly anticipating its arrival in the post in the next few days. Of course I could have instantly read a summary of the book's contents on the web, and gone back to watching twitter updates. But I'm getting more out of it this way, and I shall make some time when the book arrives to sit down and really read it.

Appropriately to my mind, the book in question is Jaron Lanier's "You Are Not a Gadget" (Amazon link not supplied). And really reading it seems like something one should do with a book. Like food (http://www.slowfood.org.uk/Cms/Page/home), information sometimes needs to be digested.

Apart from that, I've given up TechCrunch for Lent. Too much babble about too many new services and things that I really don't need. At the end of a working day I feel a lot happier having focused for a few hours and built something than if I've spent the day keeping on top of all the information.

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/985521/DSCF1385.jpg http://posterous.com/users/3syaVNJVztW9 Alan Paxton isomaly Alan Paxton Mon, 01 Feb 2010 08:49:20 -0800 What iSites says convergence of apps, app stores and the web #momo http://www.isomaly.com/what-isites-says-convergence-of-apps-app-stor http://www.isomaly.com/what-isites-says-convergence-of-apps-app-stor The subject of iSites (http://isites.us/learn) and other similar services came up at #momo Edinburgh today. This category of tools/services gives an interesting insight into how the future of apps and the web. Convergence is the term, methinks.

What do they do ? In effect, they allow you to bundle up collections of RSS feeds as categories in a "news" app. You define the look and feel, and the app talks to a server to learn the categories to display and the feeds to use to fill the categories. These are displayed in the familiar (to iPhone users) table and hierarchy views. The nice thing, in terms of the app store approval process, is that the app as it appears on the iPhone is fixed, and responds to all changes of the configuration data on the server with which it communicates.

Clearly, this is a restricted sort of niche, but it's a useful one nonetheless. And if you turn your head 90 degrees, you see that what you have really got is an, ahem, browser for the iSites format of feed aggregation. Take the obvious step and define an XML schema for the description of your iSites app.
Now look at the technology that those in the know are touting will kill apps, HTML5. That would be an XML schema for the description of web data, in one form or another.

So from the top down we have HTML5 doing everything in the browser, and from the bottom up we have iSites doing feed aggregation. My view is that a lot more of these kind of tools will emerge for broader application categories than just stream bundling. We will end up with a broadening of web programming into app programming, where the programming involves bringing the elements together in a declarative style; writing the AppXML. It has always been a bit of a stretch to see current web programmers transformed into Objective C hackers; the skill sets are just too distinct.

Now I just need to organize the 500 apps (sorry, shortcuts to AppXML pages) on my desktop (sorry, phone) and I can go home.

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/985521/DSCF1385.jpg http://posterous.com/users/3syaVNJVztW9 Alan Paxton isomaly Alan Paxton Mon, 01 Feb 2010 03:53:29 -0800 How reliable can we expect iPhone apps to be ? http://www.isomaly.com/how-reliable-can-we-expect-iphone-apps-to-be http://www.isomaly.com/how-reliable-can-we-expect-iphone-apps-to-be I pondered this question on Saturday when I discovered that my iPhone calendar contents had spontaneously vanished. I decided it wasn't just the fact that I had been in the not-to-my-taste Ocean Terminal that had caused this. Anecdotally there are a lot of stories out there about people losing data on various (Apple and 3rd party) iPhone apps. 

Thing is, developing software that doesn't do stupid things with your data in some weird corner case, and testing it like crazy to make sure it doesn't, are hard tasks. And in a world where there is a gold rush to get apps up on the app store first, and get noticed to earn your 100000 lots of $0.99 (less 30% or more), corners get cut. Some developers just don't know how to do all this stuff, and some just take the cynical view (or are made to take it) that they don't have time.

There's a long way to go before Joe Random phone user understands the value of the apps they use, or more accurately what goes into building them. But maybe as the market matures the lower quality apps will get weeded out, even the Apple ones, and some semblance of rationality will impose itself. In the meantime, back up your data.

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/985521/DSCF1385.jpg http://posterous.com/users/3syaVNJVztW9 Alan Paxton isomaly Alan Paxton Thu, 28 Jan 2010 01:56:05 -0800 What the iPad is really all about, and what it's not. http://www.isomaly.com/what-the-ipad-is-really-all-about-and-what-it http://www.isomaly.com/what-the-ipad-is-really-all-about-and-what-it Repeat after me, "Apple is a hardware company". Yesterday's financials, and the admitted non-profitability of itunes and the app store, just go to bear this out. Let's follow the money.

Apple wants to shift vast quantities of iPads and make a nice profit on them. And since they are not priced too high, and the costs are not too great, they probably can. The integrated A4 processor is bound to be a lot cheaper than paying Intel for PC class chips and GPUs.

Now, the last barrier to selling these things in the required quantities is to make people want them. Apple is too wise to flog some undifferentiated shiny stuff, because even though the fanbois will queue up to lick its matt aluminium surface, the public at large have a healthier scepticism. And this is why until now Apple has shunned the tablet sector. And the reason it has now finally decided to bless the sector with the fruits of its wisdom and brilliance.

The app store for iPhone has shown that the web is not the be-all and end-all of the user experience. The demand for apps has exploded because carefully written and well crafted apps provide a far superior and much more productive user experience than the browser, at least on a smartphone size screen. Apple is betting that it can do the same again on the iPad. This is not a certainty of course, but if things work the way they're planned, new UI elements in the SDK will allow developers to build immersive applications for everything you could possibly want to do on a tablet. The multitouch interface will integrate yet more deeply with the UI and the whole thing will just be an easier and more seamless extension of hand and eye than you ever thought you would see this side of the movies.

As an app developer I'm very excited by the possibilities this opens up. It's not that there's money to be made by selling apps directly on the app store, because there isn't. It's the feedback loop between the possibilities offered by the device and its UI, and the organisations who want a presence there, that will drive the dominance of the commissioned app market, and ensure that the iPad is unique. And Apple will continue to make lots of money selling hardware.

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/985521/DSCF1385.jpg http://posterous.com/users/3syaVNJVztW9 Alan Paxton isomaly Alan Paxton