iPhone Developers: Util resources to design UIs
Today we are going to write about some helpful resources for all the iPhone developers out there 
iPhone Human Interface Guidelines: this is what Apple will use to refuse (among other things) your application so it’s a MUST to read it at least once Just in case you are in a hurry you can find a quick overview of the document here.
Apple launches the App Store Resource Center
If you want to know something about iPhone development you can just google around a bit or get into the huge and helpfull iPhone Dev Center. The documents you can find there are full of detail, so some of them are just too deep and you won’t probably need them, but there are some of them wich are a must (for example the iPhone Human Interface Guidelines).
This weekend Apple added one more section to the dev portal, and it’s one of those must-read sections. It is called the App Store Resource Center and there you will find 3 guides about the whole App Store process…
Editor’s Choice: Broadway Cafe
This week our Editor has traveled to Japan and has choosen one of the best 32 japanese iPhone apps: BroadwayCafe (see here the other 31).
Broadway Cafe is the classical restaurant simulation game where you have to assume the roles of a waiter, manager and owner, dashing around and taking customer orders, serving meals in time or doing the dishes. You can also take care of the interior design of the restaurant, its personnel, finances etc.
Wait a moment … are we featuring a Dinner Dash clone as our editor’s choice for this week? Yes.
I’m not a Genius … Fan
Ok, here we are again, talking about the App Store and how difficult is for small application development companies to make their applications visible. Of course, large companies do not have this problem, because they have marketing departments and huge marketing budgets.
In a previous post we where analyzing how the flood of new titles has created fierce competition among developers, and how most of the applications pass through the App Store unnoticed by users. In that post our recommendation to Apple was to borrow ideas from social networks like Facebook and MySpace (the have also a large number of applications, but small software developers have a real chance to get noticed).
Videocam, ‘first’ video recording app on the iPhone 3G
Sabec is the developer which will try to release this application soon, a video camera app working on a 3G. We say ‘try’ because it is uncertain if this application will be validated by Apple since the iPhone 3.0 update doesn’t enable video camera on the 3G.
The video shows the app in action, it’s not the final version so we guess the quality will be improved and sound recording added (doesn’t seem to record the audio, weird)…
The Network is the Mobile Phone … or Not?
A few weeks ago we had a blog post that claimed that the Network is the Mobile Phone. The idea behind that statement, following the Sun Microsystems motto “The Network is the Computer”, was that in the near future we could expect a new generation of web-based applications (or at least networked native applications) in our mobile phones. All the information and services would come from the network, and our phone would just have a minimal software to access to those networked services and data. However, it seems that things are not so easy …
iPhone/iPod Touch anti-phising explained
The anti-phising feature for Safari in the latest iPhone OS 3.1 had some strange behaviors identifying some sites as dangerous while in other iPhone/iPods not. The reasons were unclear until Loopt contacted Apple and asked them about this problem. The answer to this strange behavior makes sense:
“Safari’s anti-phishing database is downloaded while the user charges their phone in order to protect battery life and ensure there aren’t any additional data fees…
September 9th: Keynote review
That’s it, that’s all. The long wait is over now, Steve Jobs is kickin’ back again and it’s time to analyze what we watched yesterday: “It’s only Rock & Roll”.
iTunes 9
Almost everything that we talked about was true (iTunes 9 rumor mill) but we also got some new stuff we didn’t heard about before:
Loopt and AT&T broke the game rules
A location-based service (LBS) is an information or entertainment service for mobile devices that uses the user’s geographical position. There are many applications of mobile services, in a variety of contexts, such as health, work, personal life, etc. For example, thanks to LBS it is possible to discover the nearest banking cash machine, or the whereabouts of a friend.
There are hundreds of apps for the iPhone that provide location-based services, most of them combining these services with social networks. However, since third-party iPhone apps can’t run in the background due to limitations of iPhone’s SDK, it was not possible for those apps to update a user’s location in real-time.
More interesting AppStore statistics by AppsFire
AppsFire took a sample of 1,200 unique iPhone/iPod Touch users and gathered information about their apps through the AppsFire iPhone app. The important fact about this statistics is that they are from actually installed apps and it’s not a poll in wich the user answers a few questions, this is real data from the devices.
