2 September 2007 – 3:58 pm
Since I haven’t visibly done anything for the last week (despite totally re-theming the site, posting assignments for other subjects and fighting off the flu), I’m whacking up a long and rambling post regarding the interfaces of Picasa and iPhoto. Enjoy 
As part of developing my Mobishop concept, I’ve decided to take a look at desktop applications that fulfil the same requirements – focussing mainly on the two leading applications, Apple iPhoto for MacOS X and Google Picasa for Windows and Linux. Hopefully, by looking at these applications, I can get some good insights for Mobishop.
Since I don’t have a Mac at home (gasp!) I’m limited to what is available at the uni, so I’ll be looking at iPhoto 6 (part of iLife ’06). Given Apple’s uncanny ability to totally change software between releases, iPhoto 7 (released a few weeks ago with iLife ’08 [which is a bit early]) is probably quite different.
I’ve broken this post into a few pages to make it a bit more slow-connection friendly, and to break it into more logical sections.
Read More »
I’ve replaced the CSS file for my blog, as my old one had some nasty CSS errors and thus was really awful to modify – and since I’m going to (with permission) to use WordPress as a CMS to run the whole site, editable CSS is really important.
The new theme is the Sandbox Essay style developed by Ian Stewart. Another free & open-source theme. Like my old theme, it is based on the Sandbox XHTML theme. Sandbox provides a semantic, standards-compliant framework which can be flexibly styled with CSS.
It’s a pretty good example of the power of CSS – nothing on the site has changed apart from the CSS file and a few background images (referenced in by CSS).
25 August 2007 – 12:39 pm
More links, this time from the Sydney Morning Herald, who report that 3rd Party developers will eventually gain native access to the iPhone – including EA Games (Need for Speed 700 anyone? Yawn…).
When Apple updated the iTunes software used to activate the iPhone, curious hackers who looked under the hood quickly found lines of software code indicating that games will be eventually run directly on the iPhone rather than in the browser.
Next up for the iPhone … video games?
25 August 2007 – 11:52 am
For the moment, I’m just going to dub my iPhone Application Mobishop (a portmanteau of Mobile and Photoshop [since that is essentially what it is {and Mobiphoto sounds a bit silly (and I like nesting brackets)}]).
I’m kind of skipping ahead a bit by doing my minisite now (since we don’t have any major assignments due at the moment). I’m using WordPress to run it with a custom theme (which needs a bit more work still), but you can view the Mobishop Minisite 1 right now.
Tomorrow I’m giving my first presentation for my iPhone application – which at this time has no name. (Perhaps I can call it “The App with No Name”).
I’ve now decided to target general iPhone users – that is, those who aren’t particularly technical minded. They just want a good program that works.
More details tomorrow.
Should have posted this a while back, well actually Devslashtux should have posted this a while back but he didn’t.
Anyway, the Bird Goes ‘Round galleries are back and working again after a long down time.
Devslashtux fixed them which we are most appreciative of, we just wished he’d actually told us.
So everyone can once again see the marvellous adventures of the mystical flightless bird.
Thanks to some more research in Japan, your iPod (and iPhone) can be controlled by clenching your teeth. Perfect for those times where you just don’t want to have your iPod out in public! Never mind the headset laden with infrared sensors.
From the article, researcher Kazuhiro Taniguchi says:
He says “I just thought it’s inconvenient” to have to use your hands to switch on iPods or phones, especially on packed trains.
In the laboratory, grinding right teeth can play and halt music on an iPod while clenching left teeth makes it skip to the next track.
(http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2007/08/21/2010485.htm)
This might be a development someone wants to integrate with their iPhone application?
To figure out my target-audience properly, I’ve decided to find some data on the demographics of iPhone users/potential buyers.
Most of the info I have found is from a single source, the iPhone Buyers Analysis – a rather pretty single page PDF by a US market research group. Given that Apple are holding their own sales data close to their chest, I’ve had to be more creative in my demographics gathering.
Some claims I’ve seen during my Googling include:
I think this goes on to prove the old Homer Simpson quote: “Oh, people can come up with statistics to prove anything. 14% of people know that.”
But the summary is, if you’re a rich, college-educated, current iPod owner, slightly overweight, in either California or New York and you don’t like your current telco, you are a potential iPhone owner! Yay! That doesn’t help me in the slightest!
This was a rather interesting article found on Technorati.
Apparently, bills for iPhone customers are huge. Really huge. Amazingly huge… I think you get the idea. AT&T seem to think that listing every single data connection for your account is necessary. And on an account with unlimited data usage, there are a lot of connections!
The first bill for a writer at Ars Technica (who are clearly representative of normal everyday iPhone users *cough*) recieved a 52 page (double-sided) bill in the mail…
Perhaps this could be a new iPhone application I could create – if AT&T (the official iPhone telco) made the bill data available online, it could be turned into an application which could easily navigate the data using multitouch
Also, what kind of a company creates an four-letter acronym (GPRR) to represent a four-letter acronym (GPRS)!
12 August 2007 – 10:55 am