My MacBerry

A new app from Amazon lets you take a pic of anything, and supposedly buy it from Amazon.  I’ll have to try this one and see how well it really works.  Oh, and the comments following the article are pretty interesting too.

http://gizmodo.com/5101308/amazon-iphone-app-lets-you-buy-anything-you-take-a-picture-of

It appears that SnapTell already does something similar, so it’ll be interesting to see whose works better.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/11/19/snaptell-instant-product-lookup-from-the-iphone-you-want-this/

This article linked below appears to be the beginning in a series of posts to analyze the App Store data and find out what types of applications, pricing, etc. correlate with the popularity and profitability of an app.  So far we know that the killer application category is games, of course.  Surprisingly, in spite of there being a level playing field for independent developers and big companies alike, the established gaming companies seem to be dominant in this category.  I’m looking forward to seeing what other inferences can be made from this data…

http://www.mobileorchard.com/price-and-popularity-the-iphone-app-stores-data-shows-whos-making-the-big-money/

It looks like Linux is finally running on the iPhone! A lot more work lies ahead for those guys to see if/when it’ll ever be a viable alternative to the iPhone’s own slimmed down version of OS X.  It would be good to see Android running on there at some point.  Kudos to the hard work put into it so far.

http://www.crn.com/software/212201156?cid=ChannelWebBreakingNews

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20081201-linux-iphone-port-could-pave-the-way-for-android.html

This article pretty much sums it up. The iPhone SDK isn’t compatible with free software.

http://www.linux.com/feature/131752

So at this point it doesn’t appear to be possible to develop your own app under a (L)GPLv3 license, nor use any (L)GPLv3 code in the process. Of course the GPLv3 is fairly new, so quite a few open source projects are still under the GPLv2, but even in that case, releasing code that uses the iPhone SDK APIs may be violating the iPhone SDK license agreement.

In any case, the iPhone uses its fair share of open source software, including those projects maintained by Apple (http://www.opensource.apple.com/darwinsource/iPhone/) and quite a few more from the community, which are listed under the Settings -> General -> Legal menu on the iPhone itself. Strangely, I can’t find a version of that document online; http://images.apple.com/legal/sla/docs/iphone.pdf doesn’t seem to be the same thing. I’ll have to investigate this one further…

As for my own personal iPhone projects, they’ve been put on hold for lack of time right now, but the licensing conflicts are definitely making me question how much time I want to put into writing software that’s locked up, with only Apple holding the key.

It appears as though there’s a huge uproar today over the fine print in the iPhone SDK about what applications are not allowed for the iPhone.  No interpreted languages, no plugin architectures, etc.  None of those great things we software developers have come to love to make our lives easier.

What do you really expect from the same company who still won’t let you run their OS on anything but their own hardware, even in a virtual machine?  (Though they have lifted the virtual machine restriction with Leopard server.)

I guess I can understand their reasoning.  They want to preserve the iPhone “user experience”.  It only has a 620 MHz ARM processor, so we wouldn’t want to waste those cycles to interpret code and drain our battery prematurely.  Interpreted languages aren’t always as fast as compiled code, and Firefox 2.x is a memory hog that I wouldn’t want to run on my phone just yet (I hear 3.0 has fixed lots of memory leaks).  I write software for embedded Linux, and as much as I love Python, I still use C in that environment for its speed and size, and I think Apple is trying to enforce the same kind of practice for the iPhone.

Is filtering all iPhone software through the App Store really the best way to do it?  Somehow I doubt it.  If Apple wants to preserve the “user experience”, they do need to realize that users like being in control.

Apparently developer.apple.com was hit pretty hard yesterday afternoon, but by later last night, the dust had settled. I was able to download the whopping 2.1 GB SDK, watch a few introductory videos, and write an application to run on the Aspen simulator. Woohoo!

Although I’ll confess I *had* already written a basic hello world app using the unofficial SDK, it’s really nice to actually have some documentation so I know what I’m doing. Lots of people put lots of time into this SDK, and it’s been worth the 8 month wait.

My first project will be an application for home lighting control — an iPhone app talking to a server on my Mac Mini which in turns talks to heyu to turn the lights on (and off). Although I like to work in the dark, it’s nice to have some light every now and then.