This is a platform that has code snippets that look like rails. An entire page for listing several firefighter rotations for example can be as simple as:

<div>
<h1 id=”pageTitle”>Rotations</h1>
</div>

<ul id=”rotations” title=”Rotations” selected=”true”>
<a href=”/app/Rotation/new” target=”_self”>New</a>

< % @rotations.each do |rotation| %>
<li>< %= link_to rotation.name, :action => :show, :id => rotation.object %></li>
< % end %>
</ul>

Now, contrast this with working in Cappuccino, a framework that uses a javascript dialect and framework inspired by Objective C and Cocoa. This code deals with a model object:

@implementation Segment: CPObject
{
    CPString name @accessors;
    int order;
    Template template @accessors;
    CPMutableArray media;
    CPMutableArray images;
    int startTime @accessors; // relative to 0 seconds, i.e. start of podcast
    int duration @accessors; // duration of segment
}

- (id)init
{
    if(self = [super init]) {
        media = [CPMutableArray array];
        images = [CPMutableArray array];
        name = "";
        duration = 10*60; // 10 minute default value
        startTime = 0;
    }
    return self;
}
@end

Cappuccino is virtually alone on the technical landscape as a javascript framework that does not encourage its developers to work directly with the DOM, making the illusion even more complete.

Developers reading these code snippets would think these two worlds were completely upside down. I’m writing in html in order to render pages on a mobile device and using something like Objective C to write web code.

Both these frameworks have their limits. Rhomobile is best with applications that are driven by remote data and don’t do a great deal with media, 3d, or other advanced features. Cappuccino works best in occasions where you can have a web page that loads once, has a rich experience for the user, and does not switch to another page until you are finished working with it. It also leaves the actual back end web services implementation open to be built using rails or whatever technology is a best fit.

It is fascinating to see these kinds of technology evolve and get applied in new ways. I enjoy participating in this evolution and making useful software along the way. I hope I’m not the only one seeing this striking contrast in the way we’ve done things and the ways we can going forward.

The Motorola Droid – coming November 7th, 2009 at 199$ with a new 2 years contract – is Motorola’s first Android powered phone and one of the first devices to feature Android 2.0 out-of-the-box. Verizon’s first Android phone sports a 3.7-inch capacitive touchscreen, 5-megapixel camera with dual-LED flash, GPS, WiFi, 3G data, microSD card and Android OS 2.0.

What follows is my first impression given by the videos I’ve gathered from YouTube and a couple reviews I’ve read. I’ll welcome your comments and especially any first-hand user experience!

The Droid is a pretty impressive device: Motorola is clearly putting its best effort in getting back into the game with this new smartphone. One of the main sales points of this device the media is doing buzz about is its Google Navigation app, which is like Tom Tom made by Google. It relies on Google Maps service and while this means it can’t work without an active network connection, it also means it supports all Google Maps features (such as Street View) along with all the features you’d expect form a dedicated GPS device. But don’t envy the Google Navigation app too much. According to AppleInsider.com, Google is porting the app to the iPhone. Therefore, let’s just hope Apple won’t be so blind to keep it in the reviewers limbo as it did with the previous app Google submitted…

I was impressed by the voice recognition quality you can see in one of the videos in my YouTube Playlist: it worked nicely even in a noisy room. What I wasn’t really impressed by is the physical keyboard and that sort of trackpad/joystick Motorola has added to the mix. If you owned any Motorola phones, you know they can do eye catching designs but they seldom get the best results in terms of usability.

In my opinion, this is a try-before-you-buy device. The physical keyboard looks like a great addition, however multiple sources reported it to be too flat and difficult to use.

The camera is better then the iPhone’s and the flash is great, but we still have to see the actual pictures and video quality — not to mention how fast the point and shoot can be. That’s the biggest show stopper with the iPhone’s camera to me (I never manage to catch the moment…”carpe diem”) and why I have a dedicated digital camera to take real photos and real HD videos (it’s the Panasonic Lumix ZS3 by the way)…

Now take a closer look at the videos. You’ll see the CNet Motorola Droid was very fast and smooth, but when you get to the PC Magazine’s one, the Android 2.0 powered phone has a hard time scrolling through the page and zooming in and out, returning a somewhat “clunky” experience. That’s still an amazing performance compared to all the smartphones out there but the iPhone.

I mean, you want to be an iPhone killer given they made an effort to have bigger numbers in all departments (bigger screen, higher resolution, better camera, replaceable battery, expandable memory…), you will definitely be compared to it. From what I can tell, the Motorola Droid gives the user a not-as-smooth experience compared to the iPhone and it does not cost less.

Today, you can get the iPhone 3G for much less (in Europe, you get it at 0 euros with a 2 years contract) and it’s not a poor choice. In my opinion, we’ll see much better Android 2.0 devices in 2010, featuring better design at a lower price tag so if you’re after a great mobile device to get this christmas, you should stick with the iPhone.

What we really missed at the time was the ability to quickly post-process and analyze Apple’s cryptic reports to understand how the sales were going. Apple is not providing simple data you need, like… totals. In any given moment, to find out how many units you are actually selling, you need to go through a custom spreadsheet or a database in order to get some real data out of it, and even that way, there’s a lot of complexity to be taken care of: multiple currencies, free updates, refunds, etc.

We envisioned a web app named “App Tracker” that would basically be Google Analytics for iPhone Apps Sales, but we never managed to have spare resources to assign to the project and finally the community caught up with an impressive line up of products to serve the purpose. Here is a quick list.

AppViz – a Mac OS X app that automatically downloads your iTunes reports and makes charts and graphs for you.

AppSales Mobile - Similar to AppViz, but its for your iPhone. It has one big drawback, it is oriented around revenue from paid apps. It will show download number for free apps mixed in with the overall report data, but it doesn’t include downloads in the line graphs, they are revenue only.

My App Sales – is another sales stats checker for your iPhone, but unlike AppSales it reports and charts both free and paid apps.

Heartbeat – a fully featured subscription website that features everything in all the tools above mixed with crash reporting, analytics, and a whole lot more.

AppStatz – another online, still in private beta.

AppStore Sales – a Mac app that helps tracking sales of your applications and tracking ranks of applications in AppStore tops.

AppFigures – a full web app that also features a free plan. The paid plan is very affordable. Here is a list of the main features: Interactive Sales & Download Reports in your currency, Automatic Daily Report Importing from iTunes Connect, Receive Sales Reports by Email, pp Rank Trending in Major App Stores – Updated Hourly, Read Reviews from All 77 App Stores World-wide in your language.

AppFigures has been my choice. I found it to be straightforward and fast to use. A giant leap from my spreadsheets. It is not yet bug free but the support is very responsive and solved my issue within a few hours.

I will also look closer at Heartbeat in the future. All other apps are less mature or less complete, and AppFigures e-mail reports make the iPhone apps not worth the effort to me (just my opinion).

Some additional tools you should check out:

MajicRank and AppRanking – These tools scan iTunes servers and figure out apps ranking in iTunes stores around the world. As well as top 100 free and top 100 paid, the app stores have top 100 free and paid for each app category.

Mobclix – they show app rankings on their site, with graphs. They are charting top 100 popularity free and paid combined, for the USA app store only.

If I missed any app or tool that is worth mentioning, please post a comment! ;)

This is very good motivation to invest real money in both iPhone native app development and marketing :)

Here is a collection of the known sales numbers for some of the top 20 paid apps…

#2. Koi Pond – The New York Times published just a few days ago reveals that Blimp Pilots’ virtual pond app has been downloaded an estimated 900,000 times giving the developers about $623,000 after Apple’s cut.

#3. Enigmo – Pangea’s puzzle game appeared early in the App Store. Enigmo sold 810,000 units between July 2008 and January 2009 (likely the bulk of sales). The price of this app has bounced between $9.99 and $0.99 making it difficult to estimate earnings.

#12. Pocket God – Another entertainment app that puts you in control of a small island of inhabitants, sold about 500,000 copies as of late March, and it has only been around since January. The developers earned about $350,000 so far.

#19. iShoot – An artillery game that made $800,000 in five months with over 380,000 downloads.

1. Negative impact on the environment, and the “disposable” approach very soon led to the problem of waste disposal, still unresolved;

2. Increasing the gap between rich and poor countries, and also between rich and poor people within the same country.

McNamara realized, and denounced the fact that 20% of the population was using no less than 80% of the world’s resources (Robert S. McNamara, U.S. Secretary of Defense from 1961 to 1968, president of World Bank from 1968 to 1981). Volunteerism was encouraged (ie Peace Corps) and other smaller initiatives, with a too limited scope and duration to produce tangible effects.

To ensure protection for the environment, in the early seventies the United States created the EPA (Environment Protection Agengy), but the first warnings about global warming were ridiculed. The E. P. A. was more involved on the deterioration of the ozone layer (ozone depletion) caused by the widespread use of fluorocarbons, and the need to assess the impact of supersonic commercial flights in the stratosphere (Concorde).The pollutants reside in the stratosphere for years, instead those from the troposphere are removed from the clouds and thunderstorms, in about a week It was nevertheless a significant step forward to realize that the man was able to introduce global environmental changes. However, the United States refused to sign the Kyoto Protocol, which scope was to fight global warming. The protocol required time and ways to limit the release of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

In 2006 came the warning cry of the British scientist James Lovelock, who in an interview to the newspaper “Independent” argued that the warming of the earth have now reached the point of no return, and that mankind would have a little less a century left. The impact of climate change within fifty years will make life possible only in a very limited portion of the planet, condemning billions of people to certain death. The prediction comes from a very original approach that observes all the external factors acting on the atmosphere, for example, the melting of the poles, resulting in a rise in temperature of the oceans, because the ice no longer reflects the sun’s rays.

Greenpeace, while stressing that the news for the environment in recent times were decidedly negative, appreciates Lovelock’s position as being excessive.

But it isn’t. Lovelock is a climatologist and has examined only the climate changes caused by man, and did not take into account the exponential increase in population, the huge mass of desperate people ready for anything, the rapid spread of weapons of mass destruction, the existence of dictators who pursue power by sacrificing the welfare of their people.

Global warming may actually trigger a chain reaction with disastrous consequences never seen before, and this already in the years 2030.

Now, it is a race against time.

This post participates in the Blog Action Day 2009

A public beta of Flash Professional CS5 with prerelease support for building applications for iPhone is planned for later this year.“We’ve done a lot of work to make sure that applications are quick and interactive, and give you the kind of experience that you would expect from Flash, as well as the kind of experience that you’ve come to expect on your iPhone,” said Adrian Ludwig, a member of Adobe’s Flash team.

Earlier, Adobe announced that Flash Player 10.1 was coming to most major smartphones including handsets from Research in Motion, Nokia and Palm. Apple wasn’t on that list. Adobe said in the past that it hopes to bring Flash to the iPhone, however considering the announcements, it is not likely to happen soon.

The Flash built iPhone applications currently available on the App Store are Chroma Circuit, Trading Stuff, Fickleblox, Just Letters, South Park, That Roach Game and Red Hood. All were created with a pre-relse build of Flash Professional CS5.

“What developers have to do is they have to go inside of Flash Pro and they have to export that project to a native application for the iPhone,” Ludwig said. “While you’re using Flash Pro to build these applications, it’s being converted from .SWF to .IPA.”

Watch a video presentation on the official Adobe Labs page.

From the technical point of view… a successful iPhone game needs to look attractive and be very playable in terms of performance and UI reaction. The primary challenge an iPhone game developer faces is to make sure those beautiful characters, objects, effects (or whatever else game designers invent) work fast and smoothly on a portable device with limited CPU power and even more limited battery capacity. Fortunately the iPhone and iPod Touch do very well by supporting hardware graphics acceleration via OpenGL ES. Thanks to this the iPhone platform probably has more graphics rendering capabilities then an average desktop computer had about a decade ago or at least comparable to that. This is quite a serious technology and eventually it is OpenGL ES what made iPhone game development grow up into a big industry.

In spite of OpenGL ES being mainly intended to be used in 3D games it is still possible to benefit from it greatly when rendering 2D graphics. In fact if we look at the App Store the vast majority of the games are 2D or pseudo-3D (i.e. they pretend to be 3D still using flat scene objects aka “sprites”). They all use OpenGL ES as the core of their game engines.

The game we at Surgeworks worked on lately was a 2D puzzle game called MATHO. The game was already selling on App Store in its first version. It was implemented by using standard UI controls — buttons and sliders. The gameplay was amazing and addictive but our client also wanted to make it look beautiful. After the graphic redesign, our choice was to write a new UI engine using OpenGL ES, add social features like global high scores and suggest other small improvements and tweaks to the overall already successful gameplay.

In the new game engine we removed all the standard UI controls and replaced them with custom drawn screens. A new event handling system has been implemented to make OpenGL sprites responsive to user actions. That way it became possible to bring alive all the great design concepts created by our artists.

For some screens we still needed to combine OpenGL ES graphics with some non-OpenGL stuff. After some tweaks this worked quite smoothly. In particular this allowed to integrate a scrollable web view into the game that shows useful “How to play” informations.

One important thing we needed to do to build a community of gamers has been to implement a global high score table. We decided to use a proven solution rather then develop it from scratch and after thorough evaluation we’ve chosen OpenFeint as a social platform. Integrating OpenFeint into MATHO was surprisingly easy. After inserting just a dozen lines of code we had a leaderboard and a friends list integrated. OpenFeint platform is customizable and includes even more features like public chat that can be also integrated easily. However we disabled some of them to better fit the game concept.

As a result we have a brand new, nicely designed version of the original game and we hope this new game will drive its success as well as being a pleasant surprise for players of the first MATHO edition.

But what happens next?

You try out the iPhone Native application and if you like it, you keep it on your device. You will never be prompted to submit your likely positive review to the App Store. Basically, you must love the application so much that you will think “wow, now I will go on the App Store and write a positive review to recommend this app to everyone!”

This is very rare in my opinion because what you are more likely to do is to tell your friends rather than actually leave a review through the iPhone and if you’re like me, you’ll never do that through iTunes! ;)

So, what happens if you don’t like the App?
Obvious: you’ll remove that. And what happens at that point?

YES! Here’s the thing!
Apple will ask you what you think of the app and propose you to rate it!

Bottom line: negative reviews are much more likely to be posted to the App Store than positive ones.
Does Apple take this in account when it shows the overall App rating on the store?

Application details

• The app description needs to be short and to the point. You can change the description anytime later.
• The app keywords cannot be changed unless you submit an update to the app. So pick the keywords carefully. I suggest you review the top 25 of each game categories, find some game that can appeal similar apps and tailor the keywords for that audience.
• Take amazing screenshots. Most people will skip the description and look at the screenshots directly. The main screenshot should depict the interaction with the app, not the splash screen.

Launch price

It is crucial to get the app in the top 25 apps for any given category and to create some buzz and positive reviews as soon as possible after the launch, to drive a sales surge that will get the app into a loop of sales (the more it is popular, the more it sells, the more people will see and buy it, the more it becomes popular)…

• For this reason, I suggest a very aggressive limited offer (1.99)—something that will get the downloads growing fast. You don’t need to specify an end date for the offer.
• I’m not going to recommend 0.99 as a starting price because people would download the app without understanding what it is, and this may lead to negative reviews.
• Have friends and family download and leave positive reviews to the app, but don’t give away your promo codes for this.
• Send your promo codes to the media. People that may review the app on YouTube and popular websites, bloggers and magazines related to your own niche — the purpose is getting attention and build a brand that will be recognized in your niche as you release new apps.

Keeping it up

Some ongoing marketing activity is necessary to keep the sales going. Keep an eye on the download stats. Apple’s own reports are terrible so you’ll need some post processing to get the data out of them.

• When the sales surge is up enough and before it goes down, it is time to raise the price.
• When and if the sales drop, you can make a new special offer.
• Keep an eye on the reviews. You should check for new reviews regularly. People may identify issues that you didn’t see during development, or they may point out any other thing that may require an action (fix and issue an update).

Finally, you should plan to release an update in 3 to 6 months. Whatever the update is about, people will see the app is alive. It will resurrect attention for the app in people that have it sitting there and not using it, and it will generate new buzz around the app in the app store. Remember you should expect a 2 weeks time span to get the app and the updates approved (or rejected).

Are you an iPhone developer?

Please share your experience with us by adding a comment below!

As the total number of iPhone and iPod touch users continues to grow, the rate at which applications are downloaded continues to accelerate. The App Store has seen an average of 4.5 million downloads per day. In the last 80 days alone, that total has accelerated to nearly 6.3 million each day.

“The rate of App Store downloads continues to accelerate with users downloading a staggering two billion apps in just over a year, including more than half a billion apps this quarter alone,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “The App Store has reinvented what you can do with a mobile handheld device, and our users are clearly loving it.”