Fwd: [sfx: Discuss] Re: Out Now! "The Reading Game" app for iPhone

[Owen Densmore]

This relates to our evil empire thread: Tyler White, a designer/programmer at sfx has built a sophisticated iphone app and tells the tale below.  MANY interesting details about the app development process and the app vs web-app conversation.

On the app/web-app front, my main disappointment is yet another failure to gain a potential cross-platform development environment.  It would be nice, for example, for sfx to be able to have projects include a wide variety of phones, but if the cost includes customizing the phone apps for each environment (iphone, android, java mobile (non-smart phones), windows mobile, ...) we will simply drop back to browser based solutions in general, and pick-a-platform (likely android) for specific needs not available via web-apps.

Java tilted this windmill only to fail, at least in general.  AIR, I think, is the closest to a "rich client" .. i.e. what we used to call desktop apps.  It uses Flash and XML.  A mobile version could gain traction on android.

But how quickly the pendulum swings!  I was amused to see that on both my iphone and ipad the NPR app was built by a third party developer (bottle rocket, nice name!) who has quickly specialized in taking a web site and building a custom iphone app for it with many of the advantages Tyler discusses below.

    -- Owen


Begin forwarded message:

> From: Owen Densmore <[hidden email]>
> Date: May 30, 2010 9:01:44 AM MDT
> To: SFx Discuss <[hidden email]>
> Subject: Re: [sfx: Discuss] Re: Out Now! "The Reading Game" app for iPhone
>
> Tyler, this is fascinating .. thanks for the detailed response.
>
> This is also important to SFX future projects which will likely include more than laptops: phones and pads too, along with the whole ambient arsenal.
>
> One huge challenge is to have a development style that targets different technologies: iPad/Phone and Android for example .. thus the interest in PhoneGap.  Clearly that approach suffers in quality, as you found out.
>
> So thanks a bunch!  This is the first flashlight down a new, unknown alley and its nice to have a pioneer describe it so clearly.
>
>    -- Owen
>
>
> On May 30, 2010, at 1:38 AM, Tyler wrote:
>
>> Thanks Owen, I do have some interesting observations:
>>
>> 1.  75% of the programming occurred over just 3 days of the 6 weeks.
>>
>> 2.  Completing the last 3% of the app project took 15% of the total
>> time.
>>
>> 3.  Native Obj-C apps work much better than the PhoneGap-type apps,
>> html web apps.  Being a web developer before I became an app
>> developer, it was natural for me to investigate PhoneGap and the
>> prospect of creating a full-featured, media rich app using web
>> technologies.  The drawbacks became apparent within the first few
>> hours of testing.  These type of apps have to run in Mobile Safari (a
>> UIWebView), and although no web navigation bar is necessary, the
>> convenience of using html comes at the high cost of the UIWebView's
>> infrastructure, processing, and memory usage.  When I started playing
>> with advanced CSS styling like gradients, transparent PNGs, and
>> Javascript animations, things started to crawl and the experience was
>> choppy - the bane of an iPhone app.  I wanted my application to be
>> smooth, with fluid transitions and fades.  Most of this cool
>> functionality comes for free with Apples SDK.   I wanted it to be
>> lightweight and to run fast.  There are Javascript libraries out now
>> that try to mimic the iPhones UI like the navigation controllers
>> (UINavigationController), but they are poor imitations and are just
>> not the same quality as the built-in UI Cocoa elements.  Learning Obj-
>> C seemed like my best option.  Another reason for learning the native
>> iPhone language may have been that I was accustomed to using PHP and
>> MYSQL to process and store data.  Although the iPhone uses mySQL Lite
>> for data storage, the handheld device is not like a webserver (with
>> Apache and extensions) so using PHP/HTML/Javascript/CSS didn't seem
>> appropriate.  iPhone uses Core Data to interface with the Lite
>> database.  Another reason I went for Obj-C instead of HTML was that I
>> dearly wanted to play with the accelerometer, the microphone, and the
>> multi-touch surface.  Touches do not translate very well onto
>> traditional webpages (e.g. no rollovers, etc.).
>>
>> 4.  I found that this project, The Reading Game, used most of my
>> programming background, including my web experience.  The app is
>> mostly Obj-C, but I do use a web view to play the animated gifs (the
>> rewards) as the iPhone cannot decode animated GIFs for free unless in
>> the browser, the border and shadows on the reward are CSS too.  The
>> GIFs were different sizes and my solution was to use CSS to evenly
>> stretch them into a universal DIV.  I used string replacement to
>> dynamically change the local html to reflect the specific reward
>> image.
>>
>> 5.  The project was fun!  I had the an incredible time being
>> constantly amazed at what I was learning how to do.
>>
>> 6.  XCode has some amazing debugging tools like Instruments.  I was
>> able to track down zombies and leaks.
>>
>> 7.  Having a partner to give feedback throughout the process, from
>> concept to creation to deployment to marketing, has been very
>> important.  My partner does most of the concept, content, and
>> management.  We both do the marketing.  We both bring vastly different
>> skill sets to the table and together, we cover quite alot.
>>
>> During the process, I realized how important it was to have someone
>> who is not a programmer, who is not in the top 1 percentile for tech-
>> saaviness, to give feedback.  After a few late nights and countless
>> hours of working with code and graphics, my comprehension of the app
>> becomes very different from what other people see.  A sort of blind
>> spot in my awareness develops around "my baby" where I don't see the
>> subtle problems or confusions in the interface or flow.  It's great to
>> have someone keep the project in check by lending a fresh set of
>> eyes.  I would say that my partner, Lissa Reidel, has been the
>> instrumental factor distinguishing the quality of my projects before
>> and after the creation of Legend Apps.
>>
>> 8.  The iPad's larger screen and 10 finger detection opens a whole new
>> world of possibilities.  It's not an iPhone jumbo, it's an iPad.  I
>> hear the 3G is where it's at but I've enjoyed my 1st gen quite a bit.
>> It's battery life, 175 degree viewing angle, it's brightness and
>> portability makes bicycling and hiking with a computation device much
>> easier.
>>
>> 9.  We have several more ideas lined up.  Lissa wants a reading app
>> geared towards women, I say it should be for everybody, but then it
>> might be to broad.  Another idea, which doesn't have a name yet, but
>> is referred to as "Dare," is a constant feed of suggestions that could
>> make you a better you with an element of social networking and
>> realtime search.
>>
>> Another idea is a game, not sure what kind or style yet.
>>
>> Another is a music / painting / relaxing tool.
>>
>> 10.  I'm really loving experimenting with these new technologies.  I
>> never dreamed of any of this hardware when I was a kid and I had
>> always seen the future as mouse and keyboard.
>>
>> If you have any questions or feedback, please email me.
>>
>> Tyler
>>
>> On May 27, 10:53 am, Owen Densmore <[hidden email]> wrote:
>>> Boy, the art work is abs fab! Bast of luck with your new venture.
>>>
>>> It reminded me of a comment made yesterday at wedtech: apps are becoming hugely popular, eating into browser based webapps. I thought it was odd until I looked into NPR's and a few others. The experience is far nicer with apps.
>>>
>>> I'm not entirely sure why. In NPR's case, clearly they were far more immersive and even small things like not having the browser controls in the way help a lot on a phone's small screen.
>>>
>>> Any interesting observations or experiences? Did you look at PhoneGap?
>>>
>>>    ---- Owen
>>>
>>> I am an iPad, resistance is futile!
>>>
>>> On May 26, 2010, at 10:47 PM, Tyler White <[hidden email]> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Hello Discuss!  Please download my new app for the iPhone, "The Reading Game" -which is also the first app of my new company, Legend Apps.  Learning the Objective-C programming language, XCode, programming the app and designing the graphics took a total of 6 weeks.  I'm glad it's finally out!  Thanks!  If you have any questions or feedback, please email me at [hidden email].
>>>
>>>> http://legendapps.com/get-the-reading-game/
>>>
>>>> Now onto marketing... :)
>>>
>>>> Tyler
>

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

[scaganoff]

One seemingly superficial - but I think important - aspect of apps vs web is the touch UI. The big wow factor for me when the iPhone came out was the way you could shuffle through photos and albums with your finger. Even the other day using the Tweet App for the first time I discovered that you refresh the Tweet stream by drawing down the list and releasing it...the UI then does a little "Hookes law" spring rebound and refreshes. That really tickled my fancy!

After so many years of mouse and keyboard, the tactile newness of the touch interface is a big plus.

Regards,
Saul 

On 2 June 2010 03:30, Owen Densmore <[hidden email]> wrote:

This relates to our evil empire thread: Tyler White, a designer/programmer at sfx has built a sophisticated iphone app and tells the tale below.  MANY interesting details about the app development process and the app vs web-app conversation.

On the app/web-app front, my main disappointment is yet another failure to gain a potential cross-platform development environment.  It would be nice, for example, for sfx to be able to have projects include a wide variety of phones, but if the cost includes customizing the phone apps for each environment (iphone, android, java mobile (non-smart phones), windows mobile, ...) we will simply drop back to browser based solutions in general, and pick-a-platform (likely android) for specific needs not available via web-apps.

Java tilted this windmill only to fail, at least in general.  AIR, I think, is the closest to a "rich client" .. i.e. what we used to call desktop apps.  It uses Flash and XML.  A mobile version could gain traction on android.

But how quickly the pendulum swings!  I was amused to see that on both my iphone and ipad the NPR app was built by a third party developer (bottle rocket, nice name!) who has quickly specialized in taking a web site and building a custom iphone app for it with many of the advantages Tyler discusses below.

   -- Owen


Begin forwarded message:

> From: Owen Densmore <[hidden email]>
> Date: May 30, 2010 9:01:44 AM MDT
> To: SFx Discuss <[hidden email]>
> Subject: Re: [sfx: Discuss] Re: Out Now! "The Reading Game" app for iPhone
>
> Tyler, this is fascinating .. thanks for the detailed response.
>
> This is also important to SFX future projects which will likely include more than laptops: phones and pads too, along with the whole ambient arsenal.
>
> One huge challenge is to have a development style that targets different technologies: iPad/Phone and Android for example .. thus the interest in PhoneGap.  Clearly that approach suffers in quality, as you found out.
>
> So thanks a bunch!  This is the first flashlight down a new, unknown alley and its nice to have a pioneer describe it so clearly.
>
>    -- Owen
>
>
> On May 30, 2010, at 1:38 AM, Tyler wrote:
>
>> Thanks Owen, I do have some interesting observations:
>>
>> 1.  75% of the programming occurred over just 3 days of the 6 weeks.
>>
>> 2.  Completing the last 3% of the app project took 15% of the total
>> time.
>>
>> 3.  Native Obj-C apps work much better than the PhoneGap-type apps,
>> html web apps.  Being a web developer before I became an app
>> developer, it was natural for me to investigate PhoneGap and the
>> prospect of creating a full-featured, media rich app using web
>> technologies.  The drawbacks became apparent within the first few
>> hours of testing.  These type of apps have to run in Mobile Safari (a
>> UIWebView), and although no web navigation bar is necessary, the
>> convenience of using html comes at the high cost of the UIWebView's
>> infrastructure, processing, and memory usage.  When I started playing
>> with advanced CSS styling like gradients, transparent PNGs, and
>> Javascript animations, things started to crawl and the experience was
>> choppy - the bane of an iPhone app.  I wanted my application to be
>> smooth, with fluid transitions and fades.  Most of this cool
>> functionality comes for free with Apples SDK.   I wanted it to be
>> lightweight and to run fast.  There are Javascript libraries out now
>> that try to mimic the iPhones UI like the navigation controllers
>> (UINavigationController), but they are poor imitations and are just
>> not the same quality as the built-in UI Cocoa elements.  Learning Obj-
>> C seemed like my best option.  Another reason for learning the native
>> iPhone language may have been that I was accustomed to using PHP and
>> MYSQL to process and store data.  Although the iPhone uses mySQL Lite
>> for data storage, the handheld device is not like a webserver (with
>> Apache and extensions) so using PHP/HTML/Javascript/CSS didn't seem
>> appropriate.  iPhone uses Core Data to interface with the Lite
>> database.  Another reason I went for Obj-C instead of HTML was that I
>> dearly wanted to play with the accelerometer, the microphone, and the
>> multi-touch surface.  Touches do not translate very well onto
>> traditional webpages (e.g. no rollovers, etc.).
>>
>> 4.  I found that this project, The Reading Game, used most of my
>> programming background, including my web experience.  The app is
>> mostly Obj-C, but I do use a web view to play the animated gifs (the
>> rewards) as the iPhone cannot decode animated GIFs for free unless in
>> the browser, the border and shadows on the reward are CSS too.  The
>> GIFs were different sizes and my solution was to use CSS to evenly
>> stretch them into a universal DIV.  I used string replacement to
>> dynamically change the local html to reflect the specific reward
>> image.
>>
>> 5.  The project was fun!  I had the an incredible time being
>> constantly amazed at what I was learning how to do.
>>
>> 6.  XCode has some amazing debugging tools like Instruments.  I was
>> able to track down zombies and leaks.
>>
>> 7.  Having a partner to give feedback throughout the process, from
>> concept to creation to deployment to marketing, has been very
>> important.  My partner does most of the concept, content, and
>> management.  We both do the marketing.  We both bring vastly different
>> skill sets to the table and together, we cover quite alot.
>>
>> During the process, I realized how important it was to have someone
>> who is not a programmer, who is not in the top 1 percentile for tech-
>> saaviness, to give feedback.  After a few late nights and countless
>> hours of working with code and graphics, my comprehension of the app
>> becomes very different from what other people see.  A sort of blind
>> spot in my awareness develops around "my baby" where I don't see the
>> subtle problems or confusions in the interface or flow.  It's great to
>> have someone keep the project in check by lending a fresh set of
>> eyes.  I would say that my partner, Lissa Reidel, has been the
>> instrumental factor distinguishing the quality of my projects before
>> and after the creation of Legend Apps.
>>
>> 8.  The iPad's larger screen and 10 finger detection opens a whole new
>> world of possibilities.  It's not an iPhone jumbo, it's an iPad.  I
>> hear the 3G is where it's at but I've enjoyed my 1st gen quite a bit.
>> It's battery life, 175 degree viewing angle, it's brightness and
>> portability makes bicycling and hiking with a computation device much
>> easier.
>>
>> 9.  We have several more ideas lined up.  Lissa wants a reading app
>> geared towards women, I say it should be for everybody, but then it
>> might be to broad.  Another idea, which doesn't have a name yet, but
>> is referred to as "Dare," is a constant feed of suggestions that could
>> make you a better you with an element of social networking and
>> realtime search.
>>
>> Another idea is a game, not sure what kind or style yet.
>>
>> Another is a music / painting / relaxing tool.
>>
>> 10.  I'm really loving experimenting with these new technologies.  I
>> never dreamed of any of this hardware when I was a kid and I had
>> always seen the future as mouse and keyboard.
>>
>> If you have any questions or feedback, please email me.
>>
>> Tyler
>>
>> On May 27, 10:53 am, Owen Densmore <[hidden email]> wrote:
>>> Boy, the art work is abs fab! Bast of luck with your new venture.
>>>
>>> It reminded me of a comment made yesterday at wedtech: apps are becoming hugely popular, eating into browser based webapps. I thought it was odd until I looked into NPR's and a few others. The experience is far nicer with apps.
>>>
>>> I'm not entirely sure why. In NPR's case, clearly they were far more immersive and even small things like not having the browser controls in the way help a lot on a phone's small screen.
>>>
>>> Any interesting observations or experiences? Did you look at PhoneGap?
>>>
>>>    ---- Owen
>>>
>>> I am an iPad, resistance is futile!
>>>
>>> On May 26, 2010, at 10:47 PM, Tyler White <[hidden email]> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Hello Discuss!  Please download my new app for the iPhone, "The Reading Game" -which is also the first app of my new company, Legend Apps.  Learning the Objective-C programming language, XCode, programming the app and designing the graphics took a total of 6 weeks.  I'm glad it's finally out!  Thanks!  If you have any questions or feedback, please email me at [hidden email].
>>>
>>>> http://legendapps.com/get-the-reading-game/
>>>
>>>> Now onto marketing... :)
>>>
>>>> Tyler
>


============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

--
Saul Caganoff
Enterprise IT Architect
Mobile: [phone]
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/scaganoff

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

[Tyler White]

Agreed.. I would buy a 30" iPad, if one existed, for the touch UI alone.

Tyler

On Jun 1, 2010, at 6:15 PM, Saul Caganoff wrote:

One seemingly superficial - but I think important - aspect of apps vs web is the touch UI. The big wow factor for me when the iPhone came out was the way you could shuffle through photos and albums with your finger. Even the other day using the Tweet App for the first time I discovered that you refresh the Tweet stream by drawing down the list and releasing it...the UI then does a little "Hookes law" spring rebound and refreshes. That really tickled my fancy!

After so many years of mouse and keyboard, the tactile newness of the touch interface is a big plus.

Regards,
Saul 

On 2 June 2010 03:30, Owen Densmore <[hidden email]> wrote:

This relates to our evil empire thread: Tyler White, a designer/programmer at sfx has built a sophisticated iphone app and tells the tale below.  MANY interesting details about the app development process and the app vs web-app conversation.

On the app/web-app front, my main disappointment is yet another failure to gain a potential cross-platform development environment.  It would be nice, for example, for sfx to be able to have projects include a wide variety of phones, but if the cost includes customizing the phone apps for each environment (iphone, android, java mobile (non-smart phones), windows mobile, ...) we will simply drop back to browser based solutions in general, and pick-a-platform (likely android) for specific needs not available via web-apps.

Java tilted this windmill only to fail, at least in general.  AIR, I think, is the closest to a "rich client" .. i.e. what we used to call desktop apps.  It uses Flash and XML.  A mobile version could gain traction on android.

But how quickly the pendulum swings!  I was amused to see that on both my iphone and ipad the NPR app was built by a third party developer (bottle rocket, nice name!) who has quickly specialized in taking a web site and building a custom iphone app for it with many of the advantages Tyler discusses below.

   -- Owen


Begin forwarded message:

> From: Owen Densmore <[hidden email]>
> Date: May 30, 2010 9:01:44 AM MDT
> To: SFx Discuss <[hidden email]>
> Subject: Re: [sfx: Discuss] Re: Out Now! "The Reading Game" app for iPhone
>
> Tyler, this is fascinating .. thanks for the detailed response.
>
> This is also important to SFX future projects which will likely include more than laptops: phones and pads too, along with the whole ambient arsenal.
>
> One huge challenge is to have a development style that targets different technologies: iPad/Phone and Android for example .. thus the interest in PhoneGap.  Clearly that approach suffers in quality, as you found out.
>
> So thanks a bunch!  This is the first flashlight down a new, unknown alley and its nice to have a pioneer describe it so clearly.
>
>    -- Owen
>
>
> On May 30, 2010, at 1:38 AM, Tyler wrote:
>
>> Thanks Owen, I do have some interesting observations:
>>
>> 1.  75% of the programming occurred over just 3 days of the 6 weeks.
>>
>> 2.  Completing the last 3% of the app project took 15% of the total
>> time.
>>
>> 3.  Native Obj-C apps work much better than the PhoneGap-type apps,
>> html web apps.  Being a web developer before I became an app
>> developer, it was natural for me to investigate PhoneGap and the
>> prospect of creating a full-featured, media rich app using web
>> technologies.  The drawbacks became apparent within the first few
>> hours of testing.  These type of apps have to run in Mobile Safari (a
>> UIWebView), and although no web navigation bar is necessary, the
>> convenience of using html comes at the high cost of the UIWebView's
>> infrastructure, processing, and memory usage.  When I started playing
>> with advanced CSS styling like gradients, transparent PNGs, and
>> Javascript animations, things started to crawl and the experience was
>> choppy - the bane of an iPhone app.  I wanted my application to be
>> smooth, with fluid transitions and fades.  Most of this cool
>> functionality comes for free with Apples SDK.   I wanted it to be
>> lightweight and to run fast.  There are Javascript libraries out now
>> that try to mimic the iPhones UI like the navigation controllers
>> (UINavigationController), but they are poor imitations and are just
>> not the same quality as the built-in UI Cocoa elements.  Learning Obj-
>> C seemed like my best option.  Another reason for learning the native
>> iPhone language may have been that I was accustomed to using PHP and
>> MYSQL to process and store data.  Although the iPhone uses mySQL Lite
>> for data storage, the handheld device is not like a webserver (with
>> Apache and extensions) so using PHP/HTML/Javascript/CSS didn't seem
>> appropriate.  iPhone uses Core Data to interface with the Lite
>> database.  Another reason I went for Obj-C instead of HTML was that I
>> dearly wanted to play with the accelerometer, the microphone, and the
>> multi-touch surface.  Touches do not translate very well onto
>> traditional webpages (e.g. no rollovers, etc.).
>>
>> 4.  I found that this project, The Reading Game, used most of my
>> programming background, including my web experience.  The app is
>> mostly Obj-C, but I do use a web view to play the animated gifs (the
>> rewards) as the iPhone cannot decode animated GIFs for free unless in
>> the browser, the border and shadows on the reward are CSS too.  The
>> GIFs were different sizes and my solution was to use CSS to evenly
>> stretch them into a universal DIV.  I used string replacement to
>> dynamically change the local html to reflect the specific reward
>> image.
>>
>> 5.  The project was fun!  I had the an incredible time being
>> constantly amazed at what I was learning how to do.
>>
>> 6.  XCode has some amazing debugging tools like Instruments.  I was
>> able to track down zombies and leaks.
>>
>> 7.  Having a partner to give feedback throughout the process, from
>> concept to creation to deployment to marketing, has been very
>> important.  My partner does most of the concept, content, and
>> management.  We both do the marketing.  We both bring vastly different
>> skill sets to the table and together, we cover quite alot.
>>
>> During the process, I realized how important it was to have someone
>> who is not a programmer, who is not in the top 1 percentile for tech-
>> saaviness, to give feedback.  After a few late nights and countless
>> hours of working with code and graphics, my comprehension of the app
>> becomes very different from what other people see.  A sort of blind
>> spot in my awareness develops around "my baby" where I don't see the
>> subtle problems or confusions in the interface or flow.  It's great to
>> have someone keep the project in check by lending a fresh set of
>> eyes.  I would say that my partner, Lissa Reidel, has been the
>> instrumental factor distinguishing the quality of my projects before
>> and after the creation of Legend Apps.
>>
>> 8.  The iPad's larger screen and 10 finger detection opens a whole new
>> world of possibilities.  It's not an iPhone jumbo, it's an iPad.  I
>> hear the 3G is where it's at but I've enjoyed my 1st gen quite a bit.
>> It's battery life, 175 degree viewing angle, it's brightness and
>> portability makes bicycling and hiking with a computation device much
>> easier.
>>
>> 9.  We have several more ideas lined up.  Lissa wants a reading app
>> geared towards women, I say it should be for everybody, but then it
>> might be to broad.  Another idea, which doesn't have a name yet, but
>> is referred to as "Dare," is a constant feed of suggestions that could
>> make you a better you with an element of social networking and
>> realtime search.
>>
>> Another idea is a game, not sure what kind or style yet.
>>
>> Another is a music / painting / relaxing tool.
>>
>> 10.  I'm really loving experimenting with these new technologies.  I
>> never dreamed of any of this hardware when I was a kid and I had
>> always seen the future as mouse and keyboard.
>>
>> If you have any questions or feedback, please email me.
>>
>> Tyler
>>
>> On May 27, 10:53 am, Owen Densmore <[hidden email]> wrote:
>>> Boy, the art work is abs fab! Bast of luck with your new venture.
>>>
>>> It reminded me of a comment made yesterday at wedtech: apps are becoming hugely popular, eating into browser based webapps. I thought it was odd until I looked into NPR's and a few others. The experience is far nicer with apps.
>>>
>>> I'm not entirely sure why. In NPR's case, clearly they were far more immersive and even small things like not having the browser controls in the way help a lot on a phone's small screen.
>>>
>>> Any interesting observations or experiences? Did you look at PhoneGap?
>>>
>>>    ---- Owen
>>>
>>> I am an iPad, resistance is futile!
>>>
>>> On May 26, 2010, at 10:47 PM, Tyler White <[hidden email]> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Hello Discuss!  Please download my new app for the iPhone, "The Reading Game" -which is also the first app of my new company, Legend Apps.  Learning the Objective-C programming language, XCode, programming the app and designing the graphics took a total of 6 weeks.  I'm glad it's finally out!  Thanks!  If you have any questions or feedback, please email me at [hidden email].
>>>
>>>> http://legendapps.com/get-the-reading-game/
>>>
>>>> Now onto marketing... :)
>>>
>>>> Tyler
>


============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

--
Saul Caganoff
Enterprise IT Architect
Mobile: [phone]
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/scaganoff

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

[Steve Smith]

Dave Modl went to the SID (Society for Information Display) conference last week and got the skinny on emerging developments in Display technology...   I'll give a quick synopsis on what he told me and he might chime in here (he is on the list in digest form so sometimes misses topics) and correct me.

tyler wrote> Agreed.. I would buy a 30" iPad, if one existed, for the touch UI alone.

Touch was apparently as big as 3D.   Bill Buxton (now quite the gray hair apparently) from MS research described the last 3 decades of Touch/Gesture UIs (my first technical conference in 1981 NCGA/HCI he spoke and demonstrated touch/gesture UIs as a younger man).  I know of work at UNM that parallels some of the closer-to-commercial displays that Dave described where ever Nth Pixel is a sensor, (say 1/16) such that the whole display is a large, lenseless camera (much like a flatbed scanner), being able to detect objects (like your finger or hand) approaching or touching the surface.

3D TV (and therefore display) was big (BIG) including some auto-stereo systems.  He mentioned one in particular (3M?) that had the quality of having a single sweet 3D Stereo viewing position that degraded gracefully in the sense that from other positions a very good 2D view was available...   He also mentioned that passive stereo (usually polarized glasses) with flat-panels were still weak/ghosty.

Holographic:
Samsung(?) was promoting a 3D "Holographic" display which may very well be *holographic*.  I'm guessing from his description that it is about 50/50 likely that they've pulled something off at least in a research prototype sense.   If it is literally *holographic* it seems to me that it has to be a variation on the trick the Light Blue Optics is playing (www.lightblueoptics.com) where they trade time-domain for spatial domain.  Conventionally a film (or similar) hologram depends on having fine detail capture (think silver-halide grains) of the interference patterns of coherent light... and the active imaging systems available are way too low resolution to approach what is required for this.   What LBO does is to compute 20,000 variations of the interference pattern per second for a lower (~ 1Kx1K imaging element) and bounce coherent (laser) light off of it to get a "hologram".  In their case, the Hologram is not an image of Princess Leiah floating in front of you, but rather a hologram of the appropriate optical elements and the image from a 2D still or moving image to make a pico-projector with lots of interesting and valuable properties (including things like infinite depth of field and non-divergent projection frustums).  

I'm sure a lot more even than that was demonstrated/talked about but those where the highlights he shared with me that I remembered.

Go Ambient Pixel!

- Steve

Tyler

On Jun 1, 2010, at 6:15 PM, Saul Caganoff wrote:

One seemingly superficial - but I think important - aspect of apps vs web is the touch UI. The big wow factor for me when the iPhone came out was the way you could shuffle through photos and albums with your finger. Even the other day using the Tweet App for the first time I discovered that you refresh the Tweet stream by drawing down the list and releasing it...the UI then does a little "Hookes law" spring rebound and refreshes. That really tickled my fancy!

After so many years of mouse and keyboard, the tactile newness of the touch interface is a big plus.

Regards,
Saul 

On 2 June 2010 03:30, Owen Densmore <[hidden email]> wrote:

This relates to our evil empire thread: Tyler White, a designer/programmer at sfx has built a sophisticated iphone app and tells the tale below.  MANY interesting details about the app development process and the app vs web-app conversation.

On the app/web-app front, my main disappointment is yet another failure to gain a potential cross-platform development environment.  It would be nice, for example, for sfx to be able to have projects include a wide variety of phones, but if the cost includes customizing the phone apps for each environment (iphone, android, java mobile (non-smart phones), windows mobile, ...) we will simply drop back to browser based solutions in general, and pick-a-platform (likely android) for specific needs not available via web-apps.

Java tilted this windmill only to fail, at least in general.  AIR, I think, is the closest to a "rich client" .. i.e. what we used to call desktop apps.  It uses Flash and XML.  A mobile version could gain traction on android.

But how quickly the pendulum swings!  I was amused to see that on both my iphone and ipad the NPR app was built by a third party developer (bottle rocket, nice name!) who has quickly specialized in taking a web site and building a custom iphone app for it with many of the advantages Tyler discusses below.

   -- Owen


Begin forwarded message:

> From: Owen Densmore <[hidden email]>
> Date: May 30, 2010 9:01:44 AM MDT
> To: SFx Discuss <[hidden email]>
> Subject: Re: [sfx: Discuss] Re: Out Now! "The Reading Game" app for iPhone
>
> Tyler, this is fascinating .. thanks for the detailed response.
>
> This is also important to SFX future projects which will likely include more than laptops: phones and pads too, along with the whole ambient arsenal.
>
> One huge challenge is to have a development style that targets different technologies: iPad/Phone and Android for example .. thus the interest in PhoneGap.  Clearly that approach suffers in quality, as you found out.
>
> So thanks a bunch!  This is the first flashlight down a new, unknown alley and its nice to have a pioneer describe it so clearly.
>
>    -- Owen
>
>
> On May 30, 2010, at 1:38 AM, Tyler wrote:
>
>> Thanks Owen, I do have some interesting observations:
>>
>> 1.  75% of the programming occurred over just 3 days of the 6 weeks.
>>
>> 2.  Completing the last 3% of the app project took 15% of the total
>> time.
>>
>> 3.  Native Obj-C apps work much better than the PhoneGap-type apps,
>> html web apps.  Being a web developer before I became an app
>> developer, it was natural for me to investigate PhoneGap and the
>> prospect of creating a full-featured, media rich app using web
>> technologies.  The drawbacks became apparent within the first few
>> hours of testing.  These type of apps have to run in Mobile Safari (a
>> UIWebView), and although no web navigation bar is necessary, the
>> convenience of using html comes at the high cost of the UIWebView's
>> infrastructure, processing, and memory usage.  When I started playing
>> with advanced CSS styling like gradients, transparent PNGs, and
>> Javascript animations, things started to crawl and the experience was
>> choppy - the bane of an iPhone app.  I wanted my application to be
>> smooth, with fluid transitions and fades.  Most of this cool
>> functionality comes for free with Apples SDK.   I wanted it to be
>> lightweight and to run fast.  There are Javascript libraries out now
>> that try to mimic the iPhones UI like the navigation controllers
>> (UINavigationController), but they are poor imitations and are just
>> not the same quality as the built-in UI Cocoa elements.  Learning Obj-
>> C seemed like my best option.  Another reason for learning the native
>> iPhone language may have been that I was accustomed to using PHP and
>> MYSQL to process and store data.  Although the iPhone uses mySQL Lite
>> for data storage, the handheld device is not like a webserver (with
>> Apache and extensions) so using PHP/HTML/Javascript/CSS didn't seem
>> appropriate.  iPhone uses Core Data to interface with the Lite
>> database.  Another reason I went for Obj-C instead of HTML was that I
>> dearly wanted to play with the accelerometer, the microphone, and the
>> multi-touch surface.  Touches do not translate very well onto
>> traditional webpages (e.g. no rollovers, etc.).
>>
>> 4.  I found that this project, The Reading Game, used most of my
>> programming background, including my web experience.  The app is
>> mostly Obj-C, but I do use a web view to play the animated gifs (the
>> rewards) as the iPhone cannot decode animated GIFs for free unless in
>> the browser, the border and shadows on the reward are CSS too.  The
>> GIFs were different sizes and my solution was to use CSS to evenly
>> stretch them into a universal DIV.  I used string replacement to
>> dynamically change the local html to reflect the specific reward
>> image.
>>
>> 5.  The project was fun!  I had the an incredible time being
>> constantly amazed at what I was learning how to do.
>>
>> 6.  XCode has some amazing debugging tools like Instruments.  I was
>> able to track down zombies and leaks.
>>
>> 7.  Having a partner to give feedback throughout the process, from
>> concept to creation to deployment to marketing, has been very
>> important.  My partner does most of the concept, content, and
>> management.  We both do the marketing.  We both bring vastly different
>> skill sets to the table and together, we cover quite alot.
>>
>> During the process, I realized how important it was to have someone
>> who is not a programmer, who is not in the top 1 percentile for tech-
>> saaviness, to give feedback.  After a few late nights and countless
>> hours of working with code and graphics, my comprehension of the app
>> becomes very different from what other people see.  A sort of blind
>> spot in my awareness develops around "my baby" where I don't see the
>> subtle problems or confusions in the interface or flow.  It's great to
>> have someone keep the project in check by lending a fresh set of
>> eyes.  I would say that my partner, Lissa Reidel, has been the
>> instrumental factor distinguishing the quality of my projects before
>> and after the creation of Legend Apps.
>>
>> 8.  The iPad's larger screen and 10 finger detection opens a whole new
>> world of possibilities.  It's not an iPhone jumbo, it's an iPad.  I
>> hear the 3G is where it's at but I've enjoyed my 1st gen quite a bit.
>> It's battery life, 175 degree viewing angle, it's brightness and
>> portability makes bicycling and hiking with a computation device much
>> easier.
>>
>> 9.  We have several more ideas lined up.  Lissa wants a reading app
>> geared towards women, I say it should be for everybody, but then it
>> might be to broad.  Another idea, which doesn't have a name yet, but
>> is referred to as "Dare," is a constant feed of suggestions that could
>> make you a better you with an element of social networking and
>> realtime search.
>>
>> Another idea is a game, not sure what kind or style yet.
>>
>> Another is a music / painting / relaxing tool.
>>
>> 10.  I'm really loving experimenting with these new technologies.  I
>> never dreamed of any of this hardware when I was a kid and I had
>> always seen the future as mouse and keyboard.
>>
>> If you have any questions or feedback, please email me.
>>
>> Tyler
>>
>> On May 27, 10:53 am, Owen Densmore <[hidden email]> wrote:
>>> Boy, the art work is abs fab! Bast of luck with your new venture.
>>>
>>> It reminded me of a comment made yesterday at wedtech: apps are becoming hugely popular, eating into browser based webapps. I thought it was odd until I looked into NPR's and a few others. The experience is far nicer with apps.
>>>
>>> I'm not entirely sure why. In NPR's case, clearly they were far more immersive and even small things like not having the browser controls in the way help a lot on a phone's small screen.
>>>
>>> Any interesting observations or experiences? Did you look at PhoneGap?
>>>
>>>    ---- Owen
>>>
>>> I am an iPad, resistance is futile!
>>>
>>> On May 26, 2010, at 10:47 PM, Tyler White <[hidden email]> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Hello Discuss!  Please download my new app for the iPhone, "The Reading Game" -which is also the first app of my new company, Legend Apps.  Learning the Objective-C programming language, XCode, programming the app and designing the graphics took a total of 6 weeks.  I'm glad it's finally out!  Thanks!  If you have any questions or feedback, please email me at [hidden email].
>>>
>>>> http://legendapps.com/get-the-reading-game/
>>>
>>>> Now onto marketing... :)
>>>
>>>> Tyler
>


============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

--
Saul Caganoff
Enterprise IT Architect
Mobile: [phone]
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/scaganoff

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org