Posts Tagged ‘Android’

Two new iPhone apps from Appland

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Posted 15 Jun 2010 — by Dale
Category Appland

It’s always great when you see a new product from your team go live, and today was twice as good with two new iPhone apps from Appland hitting the App Store.

Celebrity Charts is a real-time chart of what the web is talking about when it comes to celebrities in the movie and music industries. Charts are created (using data compiled for us by our partners WeAreHunted.com) by looking at who people are talking about on relevant sites, blogs and tweets, and sorts them into a Top 10 chart that changes as the talk dies down or ramps up. Select a celebrity from the chart to see articles where they’re being talked about, what is being said on Twitter, as well as extra pics. Then to swap from movies to music, simply turn the device! We’re working on a widget/app version of Celebrity Charts for Android too, so watch this space for more news on that. Celebrity Charts is available for AU$2.49 for Australian customers only.

Fan.Cards is a fun new music discovery tool, giving you a way to collect and access all kinds of information on music artists from around the world. By collecting artist “cards”, you are gaining a window into rich media content such as pics, video, music tracks and info, specific to that artist. You can also find related artists and discover music that you may already like but never knew was out there. Fan.Cards is a free app, available globally.

We’ve got some ideas around future updates to these apps, as well as a whole pipeline of new ones coming out across various platforms. To stay up to date, you can follow visitappland on Twitter.

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App discoverability on the web – just Google it!

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Posted 03 Jun 2010 — by Dale
Category Mobile, Technology

I was having a conversation recently with a colleague around the improvements in Android around mobile to desktop syncing, and where things with Google search could trend with regards to apps. Well, it has begun! Rolling out from the US and then around the world, users of Google on their Android or iPhone devices will be able to find apps in search results that are indexing the Android Marketplace and Apple App Store.

This makes total sense as a mechanism for making apps more discoverable through existing channels for information discovery using the web, and I expect that it’ll have a significant impact on how apps are marketed as well. Check out the Google Mobile Blog for full details.

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Nice demo of Flash app on Win,Mac,Lin,Android,iPhone,iPad

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Posted 05 Apr 2010 — by Dale
Category Adobe, Development, Mobile, Technology

I’ve been watching the fall out of the initial iPad release over the weekend (was it really a coincidence that Apple decided to release the Jesus-tablet over Easter, bringing a class of devices back from the dead?) and the continuing stream of commentary and demos from my friends at Adobe, showing ported Flash and AIR apps running on various devices, including Apple’s.

There’s been so much said and thrown around regarding Flash’s relevance and performance on devices recently, and it doesn’t look like slowing down any time soon. And while I think most of it has been rethoric and chest-puffing, there’s some stuff starting to filter out that is beginning to put some coherent thoughts together rergarding Flash running across multiple devices using a single runtime (Flash Player 10.1)

One such piece is a video that Adobe AIR guy Christian Cantrell released (almost immediately) after the iPad launched . It demonstrates a single Flash app (a classic Reversi game) running on various devices from a common code-base (however using a short 20-line wrapper “app” to set some device paramters and load in the common game code). The devices included Windows, Mac, Linux desktops, the web browser, Motorola Droid (Android phone),  iPhone/iPod Touch and the iPad.  Watch it here:

From where I sit, despite what anyone thinks about Flash at the moment, that’s pretty cool. As I’ve written before though, I think you need to temper the technical brilliance of this with the need to create the best user experience for your application, and I don’t see that as working out to deliver 100% of your app the same across every device. The biggest winner out of this would have to be games – and games that don’t require much in the way of user input changes between devices. Apart from that, other application types are likely to require more definition on each screen it runs on, and more importantly perhaps, greater consideration for the computing power of each device.

But with that in mind, it’s fun to watch the ante being raised in this ongoing battle for the hearts, minds, and wallets of developers and content publishers!

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New Adobe DevNet resources and thoughts on “write-once”

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Posted 17 Feb 2010 — by Dale
Category Adobe, Mobile, Technology

There’s been a flurry of activity on the Adobe Developer Connection site recently due to this being the silly season for corporate announcements around mobile. Take a look at these articles and whitepapers to understand where the Flash Platform has moved to and how you will need to evolve as a Flash developer to make the most of this brave new(ish) world.

Thibault Imbert from Adobe has also authored a substantial document titled “Optimizing Mobile Content for the Adobe Flash Platform” which you can download as PDF here.

It’s great to see more and more resources being developed to assist Flash developers and designers make the jump to producing work for the small screen, but I’m mindful of the common misnomer that continues to be spoken about when looking at a “write-once, deploy-everywhere” approach to Flash development. Particularly now that Adobe AIR has been announced for devices, and the reality of a technical solution for dropping a single AIR file onto multiple devices, it’s vitally important to take a step back and remember that the user experiences for these multiple devices are very different. Read More

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N900 dual-booting Maemo and Android

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Posted 25 Jan 2010 — by Dale
Category Development, Mobile, Technology

Via Engadget: I’ve always admired developers who can delve right to the very core of devices and hack them to do their bidding. I’m not THAT technically capable myself, but love to see the results as sometimes, it pushes the actual industry into new directions that it might not have otherwise explored.

This may not be one of those moments, but geez I thought it was cool – a hack of the increasingly-popular Nokia N900 smartphone to run the default Maemo operating system from the internal device storage, and Android from a partition on the SD card.

In a week where Apples closed mobile platform is likely to get another shot in the arm, this is a refreshing post to remind us of the power of open platforms and the way they can change the game for developers.

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