iPhone Friday - April 24, 2009

Hey there and happy Friday! I'm glad that you all liked last iPhone Friday's wallpapers from NASA/JPL's Photojournal. And thanks to everyone for their kind words and requests for more. This set of fourteen wallpapers of Saturn and it's local heavenly bodies is for you - and everyone else. Cheers!

Apple's App Store: setting the bar for online app markets

Ben Charny of Dow Jones Newswire wrote an article on Apple's App Store for Smart Money stating that even though it accounts for less than 1% of Apple's revenue App Store is the driving force of iPhone adoption.  We will have to wait and see what happens in the coming months as RIM's BlackBerry App World, Nokia's Ovi (currently Download Store) and Android Market make their mark in this new space.

Also, as I stated in a previous blog entry, even though Apple's App Store has only been available for about 10 months, App Store is about to hit 1 billion downloads currently at 986,084,397 downloads.  Read the blog entry to learn how you can enter for free for a chance to win during their 1 billion downloads sweepstakes.

iPhone Friday - April 17, 2009

Hello and happy Friday. Todays wallpapers come from the wonderful Photojournal provided by NASA/JPL/Caltech. The images in the Photojournal are available to use, for the most part with attribution for the image, unless otherwise noted as a special case, which you can read on their Image Use Policy. If you have not yet been to the Photojournal it's a wealth of beautiful and somewhat erie images of our solar system - I suggest you go take a look.

Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space.
- Douglas Noel Adams

The eleven images in todays iPhone Friday are only a few from Saturn, Jupiter, their moons and or rings. I'll post more wallpapers from Photojournal later as I have many that I made for myself over the years. Enjoy.

Exploring the Objective-C Runtime

Mike Ash, a Cocoa and Objective-C guru, has started a series of blog posts in his Friday Q & A series exploring the Objective-C runtime and explaining the nuts and bolts of the machinery that powers Objective-C's dynamic nature. He's written three articles so far:

1. Intro to the Objective-C Runtime
2. Objective-C Messaging
3. Objective-C Message Forwarding

Cool and crazy stuff: I'm looking forward to reading more.

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Google Chart API is Cool

I've been working on an internal web application to track sales, which has given me a good reason to dive into Django. I've read some swooning reviews of Django, but have to admit that I'm somewhere between lukewarm and glowing in my opinion of it right now. It's a good framework but does have a modest learning curve. It took me a bit to get comfortable with how the various Django pieces fit together but I love the compactness of the code.

Since I'm writing a sales application, I needed a way to produce charts. I've played around with the <canvas> tag on a previous project, but really wanted something higher level. My boyfriend Jerry suggested I look at the Google Chart API. It's wonderfully simple: you build a URL like http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=p3&chd=t:60,40&chs=250x100&chl=Hello|World and use it in an <img> tag. Google renders up your chart as a PNG and sends it back to your browser, like this:

Google gives you a lot of chart types and formatting options, most of them well documented, though a few tricky option combinations could benefit from more verbose explanations. Fortunately it's pretty easy to experiment in the browser -- just tweak the URL and refresh.

My only criticism is the brevity of the URL parameters (cht is chart type, chxl is axis labels, etc.) and the various ways of delimiting multivalued parameters (data takes a comma delimited list, labels are pipe '|' delimited) can be trying to work with at times. Still, after a couple of hours of modest twiddling, I had a couple of Python functions to build URLs for a bar chart and pie chart, respectively and my sales app has two respectable looking charts on the home page. Google Chart API is definately worth taking a look at.

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App Store about to hit a billion download - offers free entry to win

With no press or fanfare Apple announced it is about to hit a billion downloads from the App Store - just a little promo. a count down, on their home page marks the pending moment. Along with a count down, currently at 948,497,512, Apple invites us all to "join the celebration" and possible be the single winner of their prize; providing you qualify. Clicking on the promo takes us to the 1 billion App Countdown web page.

You have to be 13 years of age or older and be a resident of one of the eligible countries. The official rules can be found here.

The one winner will receive a 17" MacBook Pro, an Apple Time Capsule, a 32GB iPod touch and one $10,000.00 iTunes gift certificate. Ten-thousand dollars... that's a lot of music, movies and apps to be sure. If I were to win I would have to pick up an Apple TV as well.

The best part of Apple's sweepstake is that there is no purchase necessary to enter. You can go to the 1 billion App Countdown page and click on the "Enter to with without purchase" link. Or you can download ANY paid or free app from the App Store and you are entered to win automatically. You are however limited to entering 25 times per day.

The winner the person to download an app or submission via the no purchase necessary form fight after the 999,999,999th app is downloaded. There are some additional situations that may occur in which a tertiary winner is picked, and you should read the official rules before entering.

The countdown is now saying 948,625,782 apps have been downloaded. That was 128,270 apps sold in the time it took me to write this blog entry. With less than 52,000,000 apps to be downloaded before we have a winner, this sweepstake will be over within a week. Good luck everyone!

comScore's Top 25 Apps

comScore released its ranking of the top 25 iPhone apps for February 2009, showing their estimate of the percent of iPhone owners that have downloaded each app. The winner is Tapulous's Tap Tap Revenge, with an astonishing 32% penetration in the US market, according to comScore.

Most interesting was the heavy concentration of games in the list -- 12 of the 25 are in the games category. Facebook, MySpace and AOL Instant Messenger apps also make the top 25 cut. If you consider social networking apps to be part of a broad entertainment category that includes music and games, the only serious apps on the list are Google Earth and Flashlight (and Google Earth is pretty much entertainment too).

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