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Posts tagged with "iPhone"

Help Fund A New Q&A Video Series With Startup and Solo iOS Developers

A few weeks ago Anthony Agius ran the ‘One More Thing’ conference in Melbourne, Australia. It was a conference in which a number of Australia’s top iOS developers came and gave speeches about their paths to App Store success to an audience of around 160 people. Some of the developers that appeared at the conference included Matt Comi of Big Bucket Software (The Incident, TV Forecast), Thomas Killen of Voxel Agents (Train Conductor), James Cuda of Savage Interactive (Procreate) and a number of others. Those speeches have now been posted online in full and for free, so if you’re a developer looking for inspiration or just interested be sure to check them out.

Agius hasn’t stopped there though, and has now decided to embark on a new project to make a 5-episode online TV series that features Q&A sessions with the speakers from the One More Thing conference. It is all inspired from a 60 minute Q&A session from the actual conference in which over 100 questions were submitted but time only allowed for 12 questions to be answered.

We want to develop an online TV show to support new startups and solo iOS developers. We will interview some amazing iOS developers about what it takes to do well in this industry, and some of the unexpected challenges that come up.

To make this a reality, Agius is appealing for donations to fund the project. To do it (as he says) to “the quality the community deserves” he is looking for $25,000 to cover all the costs from video editing, web design, motion graphics, flights, equipment hire and various other costs which he has roughly calculated. He is attempting to fund the project through ‘Pozible’, which if you are unfamiliar with is very similar to Kickstarter, and is offering various ‘rewards’ for funding the project which increase as the size of the donation increases - everything from a “twitter hug” to a name on the credits to a free Blu-Ray copy to adverts within the episodes.

So as you can see, it gets expensive to put on a high quality production! I don’t plan to make a profit off the show. Unless the project exceeds the funding target, I won’t make a cent. All raised funds will be put into the development of the show and promoting it. I just want to cover the costs to get it made, enjoy the experience, produce a show I can be proud of and create a valuable information source for those wanting to be indie iOS developers.

Below the break is a video of Agius explaining the project and you can read even more about the project on the Pozible project page, which is where you can also go to help contribute to the project. Video of the speeches from the ‘One More Thing’ conference can be found on Vimeo and you can follow Anthony Agius who co-founded MacTalk Australia on Twitter.

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Watchlater 2.0 Improves Video Collection and Adds iPhone App

Back in March I reviewed Watchlater, an iPad app that I described as “an Instapaper for video” in the way it allowed users to save videos for later viewing using a simple browser bookmarklet. Whereas nothing has changed concept-wise since the original release, the much-improved version 2.0 of Watchlater addresses pretty much every issue I had with 1.0, adding support for more video providers, a better interface, as well as a redesigned web app and iPhone version.

First off, Watchlater slashed the price of in-app credits (used as “minutes” to cache offline videos) to $0.99 for 150 minutes, and $2.99 to have an additional 300 minutes to cache videos from Vimeo, TED, FunnyOrDie, and many others (you can check out the full list here). Unfortunately, as I noted in my first review, YouTube videos still can’t be saved offline due to copyright issues, however the developers have worked on improving the way these videos are loaded in a new window, so that YouTube’s mobile player scales gracefully both on the iPhone or iPad. This is also true for Vimeo material, and I’ve noticed a general trend towards polishing the overall UI which includes folder icons on iOS, and a completely revamped web app that turns your video queue into something” nice” to look at.

Videos from iOS devices can now be moved around folders, shared on Facebook and Twitter or forwarded to Safari, whilst the web app allows you to edit and manage folders, “search the web and add instantly”,  or switch from list to grid view.

Perhaps the biggest change in version 2.0, iPhone app aside, is the inclusion of Twitter, Facebook and Google Reader as sources for your videos. The new “connect & collect” feature lets you automatically build a video queue based on videos found in your Twitter and Facebook timelines or Google Reader feeds – whereas the “normal” Watchlater experience requires you to manually use a bookmarklet to “curate” videos you want to save for later, this new functionality will aggregate all videos related to your accounts, with the downside being that perhaps you don’t want any kind of video to show up in Watchlater. You can delete these videos, obviously, but it’d be nice to have filtering options to make sure that only some videos get forwarded to Watchlater. Speaking of the bookmarklet, it now works much better with videos embedded on web pages, and it supports more providers.

Watchlater is my favorite app to collect and organize videos I don’t have time to check out right away. You can get the app for free on the App Store, and unlock minutes through in-app purchases. Read more

Sparrow Developers Working on “Sparrow for iPhone”

As revealed by Dominique Leca to Business Insider, the company he co-founded is now working on an iPhone version of Sparrow, which is in the very early stages of development and simply known as “Sparrow for iPhone” at the moment. For those not familiar with the Mac app, Sparrow is an alternative email client for OS that started out as a mix between classic email and Tweetie-like UI to deliver a fresh Gmail experience on the desktop, and eventually evolved into a powerful solution to access Gmail (including features like shortcuts, stars, and labels) as well as classic IMAP. The app got more social and better integrated with Lion, adding full-screen mode and a completely redesigned sidebar for navigating through your inboxes. Some people say Sparrow’s success is due to the fact that the app does email, but it doesn’t feel like email; Sparrow is sold at $9.99 on the Mac App Store with a lite version available, and a licensed version also up on the devs’ website.

We previously reported on Sparrow adding Twitter’s Loren Brichter to the team of advisors, raising $250,000 in funding over the last months; according to Leca, Sparrow has made more than half a million dollars since the Mac App Store release, although they don’t like the fact that Apple’s store for OS X apps lists both indie software and applications from Apple such as Final Cut Pro X, iWork, or OS X Lion.

In the interview, Leca also reveals they’ve started working on an iPhone version of Sparrow, aimed at enhancing Apple’s Mail experience with a different and faster UI, attachments from the compose view, and lots more. If we had to speculate on Sparrow’s focus for iOS, we’d say porting the Gmail integration that has characterized the desktop app to iOS would be a good idea.

Still, the problem for Sparrow is that Apple has always been reluctant in accepting apps that “duplicate functionality”, such as email applications. That’s why Google hasn’t released an official Gmail app for iOS yet, whilst Android has one. Apple does, however, accept third-party browsers for iOS, albeit they’re based on the same engine of Safari – they can’t use their own interpreters. This is the reason behind the lack of a real Firefox version for the iPhone – the Firefox Home that Mozilla ships is actually based on WebKit, like any other alternative browser for iOS. They’re basically skins on top of Safari’s engine, with different functions and interfaces. Same applies to photo album management apps, which are simply connected to the Camera Roll (and Apple’s Photos app) through an API. An API or similar technique doesn’t exist for email messages, thus the lack of third-party email apps for iOS. Much has changed since 2008 (for instance, Apple now accepts web app wrappers such as MailWrangler), but native third-party email apps still haven’t made it to the App Store.

Leca seems somewhat confident in Apple’s intention to start opening up iOS soon to approve apps like Sparrow for iPhone, which in order to work would have to feature its own email assets in order to directly work with Gmail, out of Mail app, with a different UI and compose view. From the interview:

BI: So do you think they’ll approve it?

DL: I think they will. They’re accepting third party browsers, so why not mail? This would be really inconsistent. Opera has a browser out there, and I think Mozilla has one coming too.

BI: So you think it’s only a matter of time until Apple loosens the chains?

DL: Yeah, I guess so. In regards to apps that compete with their own apps, I think iOS is sufficiently settled and I think people have been evangelized enough now so Apple will feel more secure opening it up.

The current iPhone mail app is just about perfect, but we’re just making things faster in terms of UI, and we’re adding a lot of small details for power users, like attaching images straight from the compose window.

We’re looking forward to Sparrow’s upcoming features on the Mac and mobile version, although I’m personally not sure as to whether Apple could really decide to let others sell email apps or real browsers in the App Store. Sure, the platform is mature enough to let users easily differentiate between Apple’s default solutions and standalone apps, but that would mean giving up a bit of control on the ecosystem, something that Apple has carefully nurtured in the past three years. I believe Sparrow would also be a great addition to the iPad – which I use regularly to manage and respond to emails – but, again, I don’t know why and how could Apple free developers from the ties of Safari and Mail in the near future. [Business Insider via MacRumors]