The general idea was to share pictures instantly. And I mean instantly. I wanted something so simple, that a single tap could take a picture, upload it, transmit it across the intertubes, and show up instantly an another device. Any device. No reloading necessary. When I tapped again, take and transmit another picture, forming a slideshow. Voila. Instant picture messaging, across phones and devices.

I wrote iSlide Camera back in April, finally breaking into the App store in June. It was free for a few months and then kicked up to $3.99 in September 2010. I left it alone. It made enough for a few nice dinners out.

Yesterday I logged in, changed it to free. Signups rocketed. I came home from a meeting today and my servers were swamped. Now I’m busy ramping up more EC2 instances. My favorite picture was taken a few hours ago, apparently by two guys who also like instant photos:

Dave and Saeid, thanks for making my day. Its time to dust off the code and integrate several features that iSlide obviously needs. Coming soon…!

Apple's Barrel full of Apps

Well, that about says it.

My money says this chart will be dominated by Android in 3-5 years by volume.  Apple will dominate by revenue.   See the full story.

• a – aol.com
• b – Bank of America (!)
• c – Craiglist
• d – Dictionary
• e – Ebay
• f – Facebook
• g – Gmail
• h – Hotmail
• i – Ikea
• j – Jet Blue (!)
• k – Kmart
• l – MTA Long Island Railroad
• m – Mapquest
• n – NetFlix
• o – Orbitz
• p – Pandora (yay)
• q – Quotes
• r – Realtor.com
• s – Staples
• t – Target.com
• u – UPS
• v – Verizon
• w – Weather in New York
• x – Xbox
• y – Yahoo
• z – Z100
• 0 – James Bond 007
• 1 -Power 105.1 (huh?)
• 2 – 2010 calendar
• 3 – 311 Home in NYC
• 4 – 4chan (ugh)
• 5 – 50 Cent
• 6 – 60 minutes
• 7 – 7Zip open source zipping for Windows
• 8 – 8 Mile movie
• 9 – 92.3 NOW FM

My favorite is 0 for 007 Bond and W for weather.  Have we entered a new era of single-character SEO?

Justin Bieber on Mars in 1976

Photos reveal that Justin Bieber was, in fact, born on Mars. Here we see him standing next to the Voyager 3 spacecraft which landed on Mars on September 3, 1976. I thought you’d appreciate this original photo on the anniversary of this important voyage to another planet.

Now I understand why my daughter is crazed for the teen’s music. His influence is truly out of this world.

The pace of innovation in App land is incredible. Apps are appearing a week, or sometimes just a few days, after a story breaks. One of my favorites is “Ask the Octopus,” a comical take on the famous octopus that correctly guessed the outcome of the World Cup.

I’m equally amazed by the plethora of apps that control the flash on the iPhone 4, turning it into a powerful flashlight. My iPhone was barely out of the box with new developer certificates, loading my apps, when these iOS4 apps appeared in the store. Holy cow. What do these guys do? Code 24 hours a day, 7 days a week? Wild.

The Ingenious Vuvuphone

Thomas Edison is rolling over in his grave. Never before has the phone system been so abused. Welcome, Vuvuphone, the world’s first Vuvuzela Phone Call.

I’ve got about $30 of free credits on this thing. Click and send Vuvuzela’s to unwitting friends around the world. Squeal in delight as your friend hears an Italian sportscaster yell “Go-Go-Go-Goallllllllll!!!” followed by 30 seconds of the hideously addictive Vuvuzela.

iSlide Camera shares photos instantly with any device

I sure want it. In the meantime, I created a little hack now available for free in Apple’s iTunes Store. Its called “iSlide Camera.” Ok, ok, I’m not the best at naming these things. I’m open for suggestions.

The app is curiously fun. It all began out of my frustration with trying to share photos, live, with another person while talking on my phone.

I wanted the other person to see what I was seeing. I wanted the ability to snap a photo, then have it instantly appear on another person’s phone, be it a Blackberry, a mobile web browser, or even their desktop (assuming they were calling from home).

I went home and hacked something together, first on the iPhone, then on a few servers on Amazon. By combining the cloud with mobile devices, the service finally provides the utility I sought.

It works. The effect is remarkable. I was at a conference a few months ago, trying it out. I put my iPad on a desktop, opening Safari to my short URL at http://isli.de. I just let the iPad sit there. Then, one by one, I started snapping photo’s. The pictures changed instantly on the iPad, fading in seconds after they were uploaded from my camera.

“Is that an app?”

“Well, soon. Think people will like it?”

“Its fun. I’d buy it.”

I tried all kinds of names:

• Social camera
• Photo conferencing
• Photo time
• Instant Photo
• Photomatic
• Network camera
• Instant Slideshows
• iSlide

There weren’t a lot of URLs available from GoDaddy. I liked iSlide the best, then registered a play on the name, “iSli.de”. That’s pretty short. Now, when I upload pictures, I create a slideshow and give it a shortened URL, like http://isli.de/1.

One problem I had to solve was deciding when to start and end a particular slideshow. If I’m out shopping, I’d like the slideshow to change whenever I change stores. That got me to thinking about FourSquare, geo location, and checking in. I played around with the geographic APIs from Simple Geo, Four Square, and Geo API. The final service blends all three. When you upload a picture, I check your location, and try to find a place in FourSquare. If its a new place or later in the day (after 8 hours seemed best), I create a new slideshow for you. All subsequent photos then feed into this gallery. As an added bonus, the app will check you into FourSquare if its the first time today.

The app has to do reverse geocoding. That’s the process of taking a longitude and latitude and turning it into a descriptive location. Google provides a great service. But. You have to use the information to display a Google Map. I wanted it for slideshows, so that wouldn’t work. I ended up using a combination of my own Tiger Data from the US Government (all 8 million records in a SQL database) and several live services. Simple Geo is best for finding street locations. GeoAPI is best for finding specific, geometric areas and working across all the geo startups out there. Besides, its Twitter.

Oh, want to Tweet or update Facebook? Keeping the app simple, I let Foursquare do that for me. When you check into Foursquare, and if you’ve set up your account properly, both Twitter and Facebook will get a tweet and status update.

I hope you enjoy my iSlide Camera. I plan on adding a lot more functionality, better designed galleries, and more. Thanks to the beauty of iAds, the more people that use it, the more it pays for the infrastructure on Amazon (costing me about $300/mo right now).

Eric Wing put together this video to help promote our Beginning iPhone Games Development Book from APress. The video shows a live version of Ben Britten’s Asteroids Game in OpenGL. Note the use of sprites, particle effects, Core Audio, and more. The chapter I wrote on Quartz 2D shows how to write a similar version in 2D, without resorting to OpenGL. All the source code is included with over 700 pages of techie goodness.

The Android Fleet

Tonight I read that Android’s market share has outpaced iPhone in the US. Thought so.

Google wants to see an ad on every screen, just like Microsoft saw a PC on every desktop 30 years ago. A well engineered, free O/S is highly addictive to the carrier and mobile phone companies. They’re pumping out Android-based phones faster than Ford used to dump Taurus’s into the backlots of Hertz. Volume, baby, volume. Move those phones!

Yet Google is tackling an enormous technical challenge. The O/S must run on a myriad of hardware, software, network and devices configurations. That’s hard. We see the result in the seams, a lack of polish here, a rough edge there, all in the name of finding a lowest common denominator. What runs best across all these configurations? They need an army of engineers.

Apple is the yellow car, the purple cow amidst a sea of me-too clones. There are less than a dozen Apple configurations today. That’s a lot simpler than Google’s OS integration challenge. As a result, Steve can pour intense resources on getting all the edge cases right, polishing to the nth degree. The result is beauty, luxury, taste.

In the end, I bet Google makes more money and dominates the market. They’re the new Ford. Apple will be BMW — with a tad higher market cap. What do you drive?