Symphonious

Brent has an excellent post up about his experience developing NetNewsWire for the iPhone and he manages to say what I tried to yesterday before I got caught up listing my frustrations with Mobile NetNewsWire:

I’ve always worked in public or semi-public: release, listen to feedback, release, listen, repeat forever. I worked this way for years UserLand. All of NetNewsWire was developed this way, beginning with the very earliest betas of NetNewsWire Lite back in 2002.

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Which is why I’m more than a little bit at sea with the iPhone development experience. Getting beta testers is a technical and legal challenge. And I’m used to having hundreds, not just a few. Discussing development and design issues with other developers is usually a valuable thing, but there’s an NDA in the way.

That’s basically what I meant to say. The iPhone development model, the secrecy and the timelines imposed by Apple have effectively prevented any of the developers from creating a truly great iPhone app. To create truly great apps you need user feedback. Apple itself has enough people internally that can try the iPhone and give that feedback, but the smaller developers can’t get that feedback without releasing publically.

Sadly, in my last post I only managed to get one sentence that actually reflected this, despite the fact that it was intended to be my main message:

Sadly, the launch of the app store for me demonstrated just how much effort Apple put in to polishing their applications and getting them right and just how important it is to get real user feedback during development.

Paul Kafasis has some good questions around how the iPhone App Store will work. I found the last one interesting though:

What about other pricing concerns?
Currently, we have a coupon system in our store, we can offer upgrade pricing for users who've purchased old versions, we can offer volume discounts for large purchases, and much, much more. All of these things, and more, help our bottom line. We'll want to do them with iPhone Apps, but will we be able to?

and the final comment:

The initial App Store launch is certain to have rough edges, as Apple just doesn't have any experience in being a software publisher for other developers.

Apple may not have experience being a publisher for developers, but it has a lot of experience being a publisher and it’s heard these kinds of questions, very loudly and very forcefully before.

I believe the answer was 99 cents.

Around the time of the iPhone’s initial release, I wrote:

It's this popularity of Java in the mobile phone world that makes the lack of Java on the iPhone seem so odd to me. I can understand Apple wanting to have complete control over the iPhone interface, and I'll concede that most of the existing games for mobile phones probably wouldn't translate very well to the keypadless iPhone, but it will be interesting to see if Apple can satisfy the great desire for cool little mobile games that today's teenagers, a key market segment for the iPhone, without leveraging the existing knowledge mobile games developers have in Java.

Turns out I was completely wrong. Teenagers don’t give a damn about those gimmicky little games on their mobile phones, they just use them because they’re there. The iPhone’s coolness factor and the built in iPod is all that matters. Even wandering around Australia (where iPhone’s aren’t yet available) with my iPhone, lots of people asked about browsing the web, the iPod etc but not a single person asked about games (and yes, I do know quite a few teenagers who were doing the asking but still nothing about games).

There’s two other aspects of that post that are quite interesting in hindsight:

If the iPhone takes off it won't be a problem, similar to how there are a huge range of iPod specific accessories, there will be - if and when Apple make it possible - a huge range of iPhone specific games and add-ons.

This one is panning out exactly as expected. People will make a lot of money selling games for iPhones - not because they’re essential things to have, but just because they’re there. It should follow roughly the same pattern as the rest of the market for mobile phone stuff where people make a killing selling high volumes of little stuff. That said, the iPhone application store should change the market place a lot - suddenly it will be easy to find the good stuff. It will avoid the scams where they advertise one game for $1 but it really signs you up to a subscription that adds up to $50/month.

Turns out I was also dead wrong about ring tones:

The other part that may be interesting is what happens to the ring tone market as more and more phones use standard MP3s for the ring tone and make it easy to load them onto the phone. The iPhone should nail this and Nokia and Sony-Ericsson are pushing their MP3 player capabilities. Nokia's even going so far as to note how easy it is to get music onto the phone in their Australian marketing.

Turns out the iPhone has the worst ring tone capabilities of any phone I’ve used in the past 2-3 years mostly because it doesn’t allow you to use any old MP3 you happen to have (and because the volume is way too quiet). The saving grace is that the iPhone happens to have the best default ring tones of any phone I’ve used - but still way too quiet. I’d be quite interested to find out how many ring tone sales Apple is doing through the iTunes Music Store given that it also avoids the subscription scam that most ring tones are sold through.

Automator is a cool little app that comes with OS X that makes it much, much easier to programmatically control the various applications on your computer (all the good ones anyway). It’s all done by dragging and dropping actions into a workflow - the output of one leads to the input of the next. In Leopard, Automator got a big upgrade so it can now handle loops and variables but most of the time you don’t need them.

One handy feature that’s not obvious though is that if you save your workflow as an application (File->Save then select Application instead of Workflow) you can drag and drop files onto it and they become the input to the first action. So to create a droplet that resizes images to 50%, just drop the resize image action into a workflow and save it as an application. Any image you drop onto it will be resized to 50% (overwriting the original - you might want to take Automator’s advice and add a copy task too).

This proves particularly useful when combined with the wireless printer/scanner I have since it can automatically open the scanned file in any application you specify. I now have a “Process Receipts” workflow that copies the file to my Ephox Receipts folder, adds the date to the filename, resizes it to 25% (seems to be the right balance of file size vs readability) and opens a new email in Entourage with the file attached and template text, ready for me to send off to the magical fairies that know what to do with that stuff (we call them Irene, Therese and Michelle). In the time I saved, I wrote this blog post…

So the iPhone roadmap looks very promising. The enterprise functionality is really impressive and places the iPhone extremely well as a mobile device for corporations. The SDK has a lot of power and seems to have access to pretty much everything you'd need (there's already an SDK for access to the dock connector). Even things like instant messaging and VOIP will be allowed, though obviously the carriers don't want to deal with all the traffic from VOIP so it's just wireless but that seems quite reasonable to me. I'm not sure I'd want to try VOIP over an edge network anyway…

The biggest problem I see with the SDK is the $99 entry fee. $99 is nothing to anyone with a decent idea for an iPhone app and the skills to develop it. Heck, if you don't have $99 to spare how the heck did you manage to afford an iPhone?? Still, once you plonk down that money you're very unlikely to release your application for free which means just about all the iPhone software is going to be payware. I like the concept of selling software and thus paying developers, I earn my living that way, but it's just so nice to have a bunch of freeware or opensource that you can just grab and try out and maybe it'll be great maybe not. Little ideas released for free make an awful lot of sense and make the world a better place (in a very techno-geek way). That's unlikely to happen with the iPhone.

That said, how hard would it be to set up a donation pot to buy access to the iPhone SDK for open source projects? Not sure how it would all work but it would be a great idea and if you don't donate enough the software really does go away so there's more than just altruistic incentive.

Bottom line for me, I can't wait to get the exchange functionality because I've been wondering what the best way to get my exchange calendar synced with my iPhone (I use exchange for work and iCal for home but iPhone for both) and I'm really keen to get an instant messaging client on the iPhone as well. I can live with AIM if that's all I get though most of the people I know are on MSN. Beyond that it's just a bonus so I'm really quite happy with what's come out.