Since the search function for Apple’s mailing lists is pretty much useless, I’m making a note of the Reading PICT Images thread which contains numerous options for rendering PICT images in Java on OS X.

iUI looks like a promising library for making the development of iPhone webapps much simpler.  Worth keeping an eye on since there’s no barrier to entry for iPhone webapps unlike with native iPhone apps.

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.

…

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.