iPhone Friday - April 10, 2009

Hey there! It's Friday. The weekend is upon us. With it come good times, relaxing afternoons and more iPhone Wallpapers. As today is the tenth of April, I am presenting ten wallpapers of Chinese artwork and four from my Photography collections. First the Chinese artwork.

These are from the DoverPictura series of book offered from Dover Publications. I with the black and white EPS files, using them as a stencil then coloring them in with various gradients. I personally like doing four first, the seasons, as an opening exercise. Bellow there are six total; two of a deer and four of a medallion.

The following four from the Photography collection were taken in San Francisco's beautiful City Hall at a friends marriage ceremony. There was a lot going on that afternoon as you can see in the images bellow.

Okay, that's if for today. See you next week and have a great weekend!

Tips on Marketing Your Startup

While Kevin and I have been entrepreneurs for many years now, we're both very much techies in our respective areas -- programming for me, design and multimedia for Kevin. Things like PR, sales and marketing aren't our natural strengths and we're always looking to learn more about it. Good tips are always welcome, like Dharmesh Shah's recent blog post Startup Marketing: Tactical Tips From The Trenches.

While I would quibble with some of his points, I definitely agree with many of them, and the overall theme of his post is to get engaged in stuff, get out there and listen to what people are saying and add your 0.02 USD -- good advice for us techies who are stuck all day with our nose to the monitor (LOLcats doesn't count here ;-).

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Review: The first three lectures from Stanford's iPhone Application Development

Last week we informed you of Dan Stober's article on Stanford University's free course iPhone Application Programming. I've had the pleasure of watching the lecture and viewing the associated slides as PDFs from iTunes's iTunes U.

I subscribed to the podcast and sync it with my iPhone. Having the materials with me allows me to study on the go. It's a little bit of a mindgasm. I am quite pleased with the depth and quality of the information presented by Evan Doll and Alan Cannistraro thus far.

In addition, Stanford's website has a course information page with handouts, assignments, sample code and walkthroughs are posted. This makes the experience just that much more immersive and rich. It's like they said, "this is cool but how can we make it better." And they did just that. Thank you guys. I even enjoyed being "Rick-rolled" in the first lecture. (^_^)

Anyone who has experience in a similar OOP language and is interested in iPhone application development you would be a, dare I say it, a fool if you do not take the time to at least listen to the information provided. But, if you do not have experience developing applications using an OOP language I would suggest you pick up a book and start studying. Don did a very nice review of Erica Sadun's The iPhone Developer's Cookbook here. When you finish with the book subscribe to the podcast, download the associated materials and proceed at your own pace.

I'd also like to say, even if you're not really thinking about developing applications for the iPhone or iPod Touch or things Objective-C related but you are a software developer, you too should take a look. It's nice to have a data point; you'll never know what you might glen from it. And who knows, as my friend Carmen of Ignite PR says, you may just come over to the light.

Announcing Animals?

Kevin and I are very proud to announce that Animals?, our first iPhone application, is now available for sale in the iTunes App Store.

Animals? is a game of questions and answers where you think of an animal and Animals? tries to guess it. When Animals? guesses wrong, you teach it a new animal and a new question to ask.

Animals? was inspired by a very old computer game written in BASIC called Animal, originally developed by Arthur Luehrmann at Dartmouth College. I first came across Animal in the early 80's -- it was one of the sample programs that was included with Applesoft BASIC that shipped with every Apple II computer at the time.

We hope you have as much fun playing Animals? as Kevin and I had making it!

Click here to see our complete list of apps.

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Speed of iPhone OS Upgrades

AdMob has published a great chart showing how quickly iPhone users upgrade to the latest version of iPhone OS. The answer: about two months. Read more about it on the AdMob Blog.

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iPhone Friday - April 3, 2009

Good morning and happy Friday. iPhone Friday.

First, a not-so-random shout-out to France, Greece, Japan, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States. Thank you.

Second, the meat of this iPhone Friday blog entry - wallpapers. Last week we presented slides (and a video) on how-to save images from within the Safari browser on an Apple iPhone or iPod Touch. We quickly followed up with a set of four wallpapers from the Innersquare collection. Today we present to you four from the Innersquare collection.

Additionally, I’m including a set of four from our nature photography collection. Enjoy.

Last, if you have any comments or requests please post them. Participate.

See you next Friday. (^_^)

Stanford offers free course on developing iPhone software

In a posting by Dan Stober on the Stanford News Service, Stanford is running a 10-week course, iPhone Application Programming, in their computer science track starting April 1, 2009. Two days after each class, materials will be posted to the Stanford channel of Apple's iTunes U. Online viewers of the Stanford course will see the same lectures and slides as the on-campus students.

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