Google “leaked” their tablet concept for Chrome yesterday. The video depicts an even larger format, a 24″ screen laying flat on your desktop.
Apple is clearly #1 in the App universe. I love writing code for their wonderful devices. The recent, mocking attacks from the Twitterverse and Blogosphere remind me of a famous quote:
“For over a thousand years Roman conquerors returning from the wars enjoyed the honor of triumph, a tumultuous parade. In the procession came trumpeteers, musicians and strange animals from conquered territories, together with carts laden with treasure and captured armaments. The conquerors rode in a triumphal chariot, the dazed prisoners walking in chains before him. Sometimes his children robed in white stood with him in the chariot or rode the trace horses. A slave stood behind the conqueror holding a golden crown and whispering in his ear a warning: that all glory is fleeting.”
Last fall Ben Preuss called me from ThinkNerve. Ben runs a fantastic little studio in Brooklyn, partnering with Hollywood boutiques, producing dozens of Flash widgets and microsites. I’ve always been an admirer of his work.
Ben had an iPhone project called “Flame it!” and wanted to know if we could help. The idea was silly but fun: transform your breath into a fire-breathing dragon. Sounds simple enough. Today we submitted it to the App store. Shortly we’ll submit the native French and German versions.
Yet, when all was said and done, the App had to be written in OpenGL, CoreAudio, C and C++. The menus were all custom, maintaining the look and feel of the movie. Listening to your breath, processing the audio, then controlling the stereo sound and flame in real time required a bit more work than I originally thought. The audio engine is custom, as you’re recording, playing and animating sounds in a real-time loop with less than a 10msec delay.
After I got audio working — suspending correctly, resuming without hanging, and handling sound effects in real time — I had to create a new particle engine for the flames, inspired by the fabulous work of Particle Illusion. It should be able to play all effects from their library of thousands, some of which were used in 2012 and other Hollywood films. So fun. As the movie draws closer, new flames and particle engines will showcase the unique character of the starring Dragons. You can even use a multiplayer mode, flaming particles across a local WiFi network in real time using UDP.
My tabulicious tool for creating iPhone Tab Bar icons continues to draw traffic. Users were asking for the ability to resize the icon, as the standard 32×32 dimensions can get crowded. You can now select from multiple sizes, from 30×30 to 128×128. Thanks for the feedback! Keep it coming.
The Apple Tablet is finally here! My inbox is already filling with entrepreneurs wishing to jump into the fray, filled with ideas in sports, finance, and media. Just this morning I was talking to an editor at APress. They have a slew of great books coming shortly to help us along.
Throughout this incredible growth of the App market, I’ve been taking notes on all the different players in the market. Someone, somewhere will create the Wordpress for Apps and become incredibly rich. Bespoke development will give way to turnkey, customizable Apps for the masses. 150k apps? Its but a drop in the bucket. There are 8 billion web sites, growing every day.
Here are some of the players in the market, and what they strive to do. I hope you enjoy this list as much as I enjoyed putting it together. Guaranteed they’ll all be offering versions for the Tablet in the coming weeks. Stay tuned.
uBuidApps: Build an App for $99. An app is a screen with “buttons,” where you tap a button to open another window.
WP Touch by Brave New Code: turn your Wordpress blog into an iPhone-friendly site. Slick. I use it here and for all my customers.
iSites: Build an App for $25. Apps are essentially newspapers, with formatting inspired by the New York Times and Wall Street Journal. Newspaper content is pulled from an RSS feed.
AppMakr: Build an App for $199, or $499 if you want to submit it to the store yourself. These are all “tab-bar” apps, one tab each for your Twitter feed, YouTube videos, Blog posts, etc. Choose your feeds, use a stock design, away you go.
Mother App: Build an App for $99, or split ad revenue 50/50. These are tab-bar Apps that feed off your Twitter and Blog data stream. They also offer a hobbled HTML reader, which turns HTML into iPhone apps… almost like a microbrowser.
My App Builder: Build a multimedia app for $29 per month. Templates are available for bands, authors, audio books, plus the emerging standard feeds for Twitter, Blogs, and RSS.
Seattle Clouds: Build an App for as little as $9.99, but expect to end up with a developer account for $499. Nearly a dozen templates are available, including a real estate agent, restaurant, band, as well as the standard feeds from Twitter, Blogs and RSS.
SwebApps: Build a “button” style app for $50 per button. The main screen is a set of buttons, like the iPhone apptop. Press a button, launch a screen. Adjust colors, fonts, graphics. All editing is done online in a Flash application, and buttons feed off RSS and lists hosted by them for $25/mo and up.
I love apps. Amazon announced a private KDK (Kindle Development Kit) today available to the big boys, like Electronic Arts. Over time they’ll let more developers in as “space becomes available.” But…
The Kindle is dead. Black and white apps? No real operating system? Limited developers? Please.
Jeff Bezos had a wonderful idea, first virtualizing infrastructure with Amazon Web Services, then virtualizing his product with the Kindle. I see the Kindle venturing to the island of broken toys, replaced by software running on tablets from Google and Apple. Amazon will prosper with a terrific book store, great customer service, and unparalleled logistics. I just don’t see device design as a core competency.
I saw Larry on American Idol last night. Sixty-two years old, break dancing, standing in front of America singing “Pants on the Ground,” a rap about kids who wear their pants too low. I warn you. The rap is addictive.
“I have a horrible feeling this song will be a hit,” – Simon Cowell.
Maybe the real battle in 2010 will be Android vs. OS/X. I keep wondering if Google will rebrand it as Mobile Chrome. Regardless, I’m glad Google is finally coming out with the gPhone and letting Andy Rubin go nuts.
The growth in Android apps sure is compelling (see above, taken from Mashable). Its all over the Web this week. 2010 is going to be an interesting year for the mobile market. On the one hand, we’ll have an open store for the Android, much like the early days of Atari (if you built it, they’d pretty much sell it). On the other, we have a closed iTunes store with quality control, like Nintendo. Atari lost that battle in the 80’s as the low quality of games hurt the brand image. Nintendo came out of the gate slower, but thrived on high quality. Will history repeat itself?
Both will prosper as brands will be eager to reach their customers, directly, twenty four hours a day, on the go. Apps will be everywhere, apps with real time information, geo location, gorgeous graphics and human-friendly interfaces with haptics and sensors galore. I look forward to writing software for both
His sample code is elegant, demonstrating a common design pattern for implementing 2D and 3D games. Ben’s explanation of a particle generator on an iPhone is particularly engaging. Particles are simple sprites with textures pulled from an atlas. A Particle Emitter generates sprites within a defined 3D region, like the back end of a tiny space ship. The Particle System is an embedded OpenGL game loop, animating and destroying sprites with every tic. The demo system uses basic physics (velocity, size), a handful of textures, and OpenGL color transformations. Commercial systems are more complex yet follow this pattern.
Apparently Ben was also using Cheetah 3D, a compact 3D modeling package for the Mac, written by a scientist in Germany. While not Maya or 3DMax or Poser, it has many of the same features for a killer price. You’ll want Rob Bajorek’s model exporter, too.
And the Iron? You’ll have to ask Ben. Its the logo from his site. Maybe it has to do with clean code, ironing out all the kinks.
