WWDC 2009
Here’s another WWDC roundup. Although there’re already very good ones out there I decided to try and tackle things that seem to have been neglected so far. Since this was only my third WWDC I might see things from a different perspective than those die-hard Mac developers who’ve been attending the conference for +10 years. Gruber already pointed this out, but the past 3 years have been rather iPhony: 2007 was on the verge of the first iPhone release with everyone demanding a SDK. 2008 introduced this very SDK and already drew lots of developers who were bright enough to see the potential of the platform. This year, then, marked an even stronger iPhone theme as the platform grew and assimilated *lots* of developers very very quickly. The growing of mobile development wasn’t the only visible change however. I’ll try to address another two visible moments of change: (1) Jumping at the Apple momentum and (2) a changed audience.

(1) Apple has steadily improved and refined its brand. Most current consumer ratings place the Apple brand at the top of the list. Our modern society introduced and needs brands as a method of reducing the complexity that the free market as well as globalization bring along. An unbelievable huge amount of slightly differing and ever updating products for any kind of problem can’t hardly be understood and processed by a single person. We’re using mechanisms like journalism / reviews, peer information / opinion leaders or brands in order to artificially limit the range of choices we have to process for coming to a purchase decision.
Brands are especially interesting as they allow to overshadow primary product dimensions: A great brand makes up for product features, product price or product support. If we have a no-name product, we scan for technical features or price. If we have a branded product, most people don’t.

This means that jumping the Apple brand bandwagon sounds like an excellent opportunity to improve sales without improving products (covering problems, so to say). This is why WWDC was almost overshadowed by companies and people trying to feature their products in context of the Apple brand momentum. Around Moscone there were literally tons of people handing out flyers describing interesting up to weird services. There was a truck featuring a big advertisement for a flight simulator game that drove around Moscone all day all week – talk about saving the frakin environment. I even got approached by a 11 year old (or what) advertising his iPhone App Review club or something. And apart from that, there was the weirdest thing of them all: The iPorn Party; a desperate attempt to get developers into a strip club and (sucessfuly!) land articles for a small porn portal in the main Apple related media. The idea of a porn company trying to improve its perception by advertising in the context of WWDC – a conference geared around Mac Development – would have sounded very very awkward just two years ago.

(2) There was a tangible and visible change in the actual people attending WWDC. Sure, there were still the regular geeks with funny hats, witty (in a technical fashion) shirts and (not seldom) interesting beards. But more than ever before, there were two new types of attendees: Women and business people. I think two years ago I could count the attending women by hand. This year there were far more. As someone on Twitter wrote: This was the first time that, in a WWDC session, two girls were sitting next to each other. Probabilistic factors hadn’t allowed for such an event to happen in previous years. Not that I want to conclude anything from the looks of a person, but many of them were good looking too, and dressed in a way that, if you’d see them on a street, wouldn’t let you think they knew how to fire up XCode (please bear with me here, I’m not in any way misogynic).
Apart from this, there were lots of business people around. Wearing suits, sometimes even walking around with Thinkpads and Windows.
I conclude from this, that the iPhone halo has put the conference in a light, that will bring along fundamental changes. For next year I expect more business, and all in all a more heterogenous audience. The Mac & iPhone are strongly moving away from a niche or geek market to big money.

Summarizing just like shit attracts the flies money attracts the big business. Let’s hope they don’t corrupt the very nice Apple culture with their processes, calculations, economics and no fucking clue for interface design.

So after a small hiatus the first serious StyleMac iPhone application is out. OweMe, the Money Lending Manager has been created with a lot of attention to detail and based on a specific problem: I often experienced the situation that I lend someone a small amount of money (say $5) and forgot about it later on. On the other hand it just as often happened that I lend money from someone and forgot about it too – until I got a disappointed or even enraged call.

That’s where OweMe comes in. A slick and easy to use interface helps in quickly jotting down all these small amounts of money one owes or lends from time to time. I’ve been testing the application for about 4 weeks now as I wanted to make sure it works as advertised before I submit it to the App Store. And I’ve already used it a dozen times. It really, really helps me in keeping track of all the small amounts of money I tend to get or give. I wouldn’t want to miss it on my iPhone.

Features:

You can find more information on the OweMe Website. The direct iTunes App Store entry can be found here.

Palm’s Andrew Shebanow (former Adobe) on Cocoa on iPhone versus JS on the Palm Pre and it’s effect on application quality and developer interest:

I do think he’s right in that many developers will want to target both plattforms. In this case the Cappuccino Web Framework seems to be godsend. It doesn’t feature everything that Objective-C 2.0 and Cocoa on the iPhone offer, but it should seriously ease transitions. Actually, if I was 280 North, I’d try to add the Palm Pre Javascript extensions to Cappuccino as quickly as possible in order to attract that horde of iPhone developers on their gold rush.

I for one am happy that I can target Mac OS X, the iPhone and Web Applications with one framework (more or less) and one language (more or less). Sometimes it drives me crazy to jump between PHP/Symfony, Python/Django, JS/Prototype/Ext and Objective-C/Cocoa.

Looks like serious, and much needed, iPhone competition. Basic history (and The Windows) tells us that a healthy marketplace is not only good for the consumer, but also for the innovative motivation of the producer.
The Pre looks slick. Albeit the technical side looks good, it’s far more perplexing because this is Palm, who didn’t get their act together for the past 5 years or so.
Let’s wait, if the device will be like the demo – or another Storm. The lack of price and avaibility information makes me a tad skeptical.
Also, since all applications seem to be written in Javascript, I wonder if it’ll be possible to develop more sophisticated applications, like 3D games, audio engines or Google Earth.

But let’s wait until it’s out. For now, it looks great. Good, innovative ideas, and, most important, it’s Palm.

So. After several months of not having enough time to write any code, I finally managed to fix the remaining bugs and publish my first application on the iTunes App Store. If it wouldn’t be for work and university, the app would probably have been online months ago. But one has to set priorities, and thus it took me a tad longer than expected.

A dedicated website for the application is here, and the direct link to the iTunes Store Page can be found here.

Happiness is build around the concepts of Dolf Zillmann’s Mood Management Theory and further research in the area of mood modification through media. The basic and empirical verified (in many many studies) idea is that the exposure to funny, sad, frightening or suspenseful media can modify our mood in specific ways (that is, funny or sad, f.e.).
Build around this idea, Happiness aim is to enhance one’s mood in a very positive way through the exposure to nice imagery and the sound of laughing people. There’re different options which allow to optimize the usage behaviour.
While this is certainly not a complex application, it taught me nontheless a lot about the whole iTunes Application Store experience.
The App is really cheap (almost a bargain!), and I’d love if those of you, who own an iPhone or iPod touch, could try it and give some feedback, so I can enhance the app.

Apple is tendentially silent if it comes to numbers. They usually offer broad totals but neglect to give detailed insights into the actual distribution and structure of these numbers. This isn’t much of a problem with most of their products. Sure, it’d be nice to actually know just how the Mac Mini sells, but it’s not important information. The App Store, however, is different. People who develop software for iPhone or iPod touch invest time and money into a specific application. The more these developers know about their target audience, the better. It’s much easier to develop good selling software, if one knows what the potential buyers might like. There’re different ways of gathering this information. One has always been sale statistics. Knowing which product did well helps tremendously in figuring out what people might like. But since Apple doesn’t offer this information with the App Store, people had to rely on estimates, as a substitute.
Now Google released just these numbers for their Android App Store. And although it just got online, they still offer a good insight into the potential interests of buyers. The demographics and segments might differ, but I still think it should be a good starting point.

Link to the corresponding pdf.