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.

Are Apps the next gold rush?

Apps are on the cover of Business Week!

The article talks about the $1B App market and young companies like Zynga, Social Gaming Network, Tapulous that are minting cash. Little Zynga has exploded to several hundred employees, offering engineers perks like a Lamborghini for a day. Virtual goods, virtual gardens, social games, Dance-Dance revolution clones for your fingers, business apps, and more are rocketing to the tops of the charts.

But why Apple? Why didn’t this happen before now?

Apple was the first company to release a real, bonafide operating system on a mobile device. The OS includes a graphics pipeline, fun sensors (an accelerometer, magnetometer, realtime audio, realtime video, proximity), mobile networking, gobs of storage and computing power, and the ability to program in near machine language (C, Objective C). No other phone comes close.

These bite-sized apps are such a breath of fresh air when compared to PC bloatware and enterprise drudgery. Apple has made software and computing fun again! We’re happy to pay the buck or two for the pleasure.

North Highland Partners

Peter Drucker said it best. Every business starts with a customer.

Earlier this year I helped a customer build a few apps. Apps to me are the next wave of widgets. I’m pretty excited about the prospects of the iPhone platform, Flash 10, and cloud computing. Apps are seemingly everywhere, on the phone, the TV, my car’s dashboard, blogs, Twitter.

The customer’s CFO emailed me. “Where do I write the check?” I quickly incorporated, naming the company after the street where we built our first house: North Highland Partners. Today I put a placeholder at our domain northhighlandpartners.com.

In the last tech wave, we’d build the Powerpoint, craft a Web 2.0 slik sight naim, look for investors, attend conferences, send out fliers, get a logo, design t-shirts. We’d buy traffic, hook up AdWords and more. We hoped to be the next Four Square, Twitter, or Facebook.

In this economy Drucker rules. Start with what you do best, get a customer to pay for real value. Deliver quality. Cash the check. Repeat. Referrals will build when you deliver. Thirty days in, we crossed six figures in qualified opportunities. Last week we crossed seven. I was stunned.

The App wave is growing. Fast. Now, back to coding. We’ve got this really cool iPhone app for a movie that… well.. can’t say yet. Its under NDA.

AdMob released a somewhat controversial report, estimating that the iPhone and iPod together throw off $200 million per month in app revenue. Distimo, a recent analytics startup in the Netherlands, also showed off some impressive growth statistics for the iPhone in the August report.

OM Malik blogged about this in August. The comments were long, fast and furious from his readers. Several nay-sayers thought the numbers were ridiculous, claiming they were proud about not paying for software.

Maybe. Anecdotally, my daughters are always asking for a few dollars to purchase this app or that. Friends of mine show off screen after screen of paid apps. And that’s just a fraction of what they download for free. Click on the chart below, or Distimo’s logo above, for the detailed reports.

Tab bar Icons

Today I spent several hours pixel twiddling UITabBar icons. The iPhone UITabBar class requires icons to be in an unusual format, initially created for the Safari browser. Blogs were replete with recommendations. Use Gimp! No, use Photoshop and mess with channels! Image matte, alpha transparency, JPG, PNG, grayscale, etc. etc.

My head hurt.

I finally came across some neat utilities from my old friend ImageMagick. After some experimenting I created a script that would convert any image into a 32×32 icon. I was so happy when it finally worked! I kept getting square blobs, regardless of what I tried (gradients, multiple colors, image masks).

The script is now available. I call it Tabulicious. The page uploads an image, converts it to the iPhone format, and stores both in Amazon S3 for immediate download. Here are some hints:

• Use images with a clean background, preferably white
• The main character of your image should have darker outlines, and lighter colors inside.
• Vector art works better than photographs.

The Journal writes that “the iPod growth story is over, tough times are ahead.” I’m not so sure about that. The iPod touch and iPhone are full fledged computers. For $199. Several mothers I’ve talked to have purchased iPod Touches for just that purpose — to provide Apple computers to their kids for a couple hundred bucks. Apple has moved to another playing field altogether. They make the netbook, ThinkPad, and all the other Windows boxes look antiquated. The next wave of computing is in your hand, in the cloud.

I’ve been writing software on the iPhone. Objective C screams on the little processor and the local libraries and facilities are simply amazing. It blows away all the other mobile operating systems I’ve tried, and I’ve tried a bunch (Brew, J2ME, Symbian, Nokia, Blackberry).

I found an iPhone simulator written in Adobe Air while Googling around yesterday. Very cool. I hope Joe continues to evolve this simulator, adding support for all the standard controls in the Cocoa Touch environment.

One year, 50,000 applications, one billion downloads.  What a year!  Congratulations, Apple.

iPhone Font List

When working with text on the iPhone, the documentation doesn’t show you the list of fonts available on the device. I ran a little script and produced a listing of those found on a standard iPhone, version 2.1:

Family name: Hiragino Kaku Gothic ProN W3
Font name: HiraKakuProN-W3

Family name: Courier
Font name: Courier
Font name: Courier-BoldOblique
Font name: Courier-Oblique
Font name: Courier-Bold

Family name: Arial
Font name: ArialMT
Font name: Arial-BoldMT
Font name: Arial-BoldItalicMT
Font name: Arial-ItalicMT

Family name: STHeiti TC
Font name: STHeitiTC-Light
Font name: STHeitiTC-Medium

Family name: AppleGothic
Font name: AppleGothic

Family name: Courier New
Font name: CourierNewPS-BoldMT
Font name: CourierNewPS-ItalicMT
Font name: CourierNewPS-BoldItalicMT
Font name: CourierNewPSMT

Family name: Zapfino
Font name: Zapfino

Family name: Hiragino Kaku Gothic ProN W6
Font name: HiraKakuProN-W6

Family name: Arial Unicode MS
Font name: ArialUnicodeMS

Family name: STHeiti SC
Font name: STHeitiSC-Medium
Font name: STHeitiSC-Light

Family name: American Typewriter
Font name: AmericanTypewriter
Font name: AmericanTypewriter-Bold

Family name: Helvetica
Font name: Helvetica-Oblique
Font name: Helvetica-BoldOblique
Font name: Helvetica
Font name: Helvetica-Bold

Family name: Marker Felt
Font name: MarkerFelt-Thin

Family name: Helvetica Neue
Font name: HelveticaNeue
Font name: HelveticaNeue-Bold

Family name: DB LCD Temp
Font name: DBLCDTempBlack

Family name: Verdana
Font name: Verdana-Bold
Font name: Verdana-BoldItalic
Font name: Verdana
Font name: Verdana-Italic

Family name: Times New Roman
Font name: TimesNewRomanPSMT
Font name: TimesNewRomanPS-BoldMT
Font name: TimesNewRomanPS-BoldItalicMT
Font name: TimesNewRomanPS-ItalicMT

Family name: Georgia
Font name: Georgia-Bold
Font name: Georgia
Font name: Georgia-BoldItalic
Font name: Georgia-Italic

Family name: STHeiti J
Font name: STHeitiJ-Medium
Font name: STHeitiJ-Light

Family name: Arial Rounded MT Bold
Font name: ArialRoundedMTBold

Family name: Trebuchet MS
Font name: TrebuchetMS-Italic
Font name: TrebuchetMS
Font name: Trebuchet-BoldItalic
Font name: TrebuchetMS-Bold

Family name: STHeiti K
Font name: STHeitiK-Medium
Font name: STHeitiK-Ligh

Educational Awesomeness

Stephen Kochan recently published a good book on Objective C and the iPhone. Its a fast read, chock full of neat exercises to test your rapidly growing knowledge of the iPhone platform. I highly recommend it.

At the same time, I stumbled across a nice cheat sheet for Objective C today. Its a handy reminder for seasoned programmers who are new to the Objective C world. It makes a nice companion to Stephen’s book though I, too, wish it had more info on the iPhone.