All Articles in Development

Tweetie 2.0 is one hotly anticipated Twitter client update, and developer Atebits has finally let the lid off just what features users can expect:

• iPhone 3.x only
• Full persistence
• Full offline mode
• Drafts manager
• Send drafts to Birdhouse
• Link Twitter contacts to Address Book
• Threaded conversations
• Nearby integrated with imbedded maps
• Geotagging support
• Saved searches to sync with Twitter.com and Tweetie Mac
• @people picker
• Recent hashtags
• Multiple attachments manager
• Peek gesture for replies
• Landscape support
• Profile editing
• Improved gesture shortcuts
• imbedded email
• New-style re-tweet support
• Refresh all on launch
• TextExpander support
• Read it Longer and Instapaper integration
• Go-to-User, searches autocomplete
• In reply TwitLonger
• Reply chain list view
• Short URL preview
• Tweet translation
• Block/follow from multiple accounts

And — wait for it — Atebits claims it’s kept Tweetie’s trademark iPhone-like UI concept:

Every single one of these features fits naturally into the user interface, none adds unnecessary complexity. It’s arguably even simpler than Tweetie 1, all while being vastly more powerful.

While Tweetie 2 for Mac will be a free upgrade, Tweetie 2 for iPhone will be offered as a new app for $2.99. It’s in its final beta now, with plans to submit it to Apple this week. After that, all that’s left is the approval process.

RedLaser [$1.99 - iTunes link ] scans barcodes, identifies the item your scanning, and then presents Google Product Search and Amazon shopping results for that item.

Sound familiar? It should, it was one of the few things we really lusted after when Google demoed the original Android G1 almost a year ago. Go into Barnes & Noble, see a book you like, snap the barcode, and instant price comparison. Boom. You can decide whether you need to buy it immediately or if you prefer to to order it and wait a little.

Both the iPhone 2G and 3G lacked the autofocus and short range macro clarity for that task, and while the iPhone 3GS made up for that in large degree, RedLaser is going the extra mile and enabling barcode scanning without using the autofocus. So, yes, it works fine on all generations of iPhone.

Doesn’t sound like it was easy — Apple rejected the application’s use of the camera 6 times before iPhone 3.1 rolled around and they got the big, green light to start scanning. It will no doubt be appreciated by users.

The features break down as follows:

• Scans UPC, EAN, and UPC-E
• You can email a list of products
• Automatically localized for currency (USD, EUR, GBP) and regionalized Amazon stores (.com/.co.uk/.de/.co.jp/.fr/.ca/.cn)

In our tests, it worked well (though getting our hands to hold the iPhone steady enough was a challenge — need to cut down coffee intake!). If you try it out, let us know what you think!

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Snapture [$1.99 on sale - iTunes link], as can be seen by that little price and link notation right there, has gone from a must-have Jailbreak-only app, to a new home in Apple’s very own iTunes App Store.

For those unfamiliar with Snapture, it takes the iPhone camera experience to another level, such as taking photos by tapping anywhere on the screen (or lifting you finger off the screen), variable image sizes, pinch-to-zoom up to 5x, 8 direction alignment level and rapid-fire multi-shot (3 to be specific) functionality. (Yeah, color mode and taking pictures with the volume buttons didn’t survive the cross-over, but a satisfying amount did).

If you want to get a lot more out of your iPhone camera, give Snapature a try and let us know what you think!

More screen shots after the break!

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According to developers, Apple has sent them out the following note:

We are pleased to introduce the App Store Resource Center, a single destination designed to make it easier for you to find details on everything you need to know about distributing your app on the App Store — from how to prepare for app submission to managing your app once it’s been posted.

Make sure you also check out the News and Announcements section of the iPhone Dev Center for tips on submitting your apps to the App Store, turnaround time for app review, new program features, and guidance on everything from development and testing to distribution and marketing.

Is this one more sign of Apple making tangible improvements to the App Store review process? Developers, let us know!

[Thanks anonymous tipster!]

Novell has announced MonoTouch, which will let developers write C#/.Net applications for the iPhone and iPod touch and compile them ahead of time, instead of the usual just-in-time method specifically prohibited by Apple’s SDK.

Now, I’ll state my bias at the outset — I’m no more a fan of .Net than I am Flash, Silverlight, or Java. Code interpreters are historically more taxing on hardware and are far, far greater security risks than true native applications (most exploits target code interpreters these days). However, Monotouch compiling these ahead of time likely mitigates most of those factors.

That said, when TiPb first spoke with developers after the App Store announcement, many of them told us that, not only did they enjoy learning variant languages like the iPhone’s native Objective-C/Cocoa, but didn’t seem to be having too much trouble picking them up.

That said, no doubt there is a large, maybe even huge pool of .Net developers with no interest in stretching their programming portfolio yet still want to take advantage of the huge mobile platform the iPhone provides.

Bottom line, if they make great apps, and those apps work great on the iPhone, then more power to MonoTouch. Hopefully it easily earns back the $999 per year Enterprise subscription.

[Via InfoWorld. Thanks Fassy for the tip!]

Palm rejected NaNplayer from their App Catalog. That’s the first time that’s happened for their new webOS platform, but it’s something those who follow the iTunes App Store have seen happen with much more frequency.

Now, to be fair, the iTunes App Store currently sports 75,000 apps, and according to Apple’s response to the FCC, handles 8,500 submissions a week. We’re not sure the App Catalog has cracked 100 yet, so the comparison is apples to orchards at this point. We’d expect Apple to have flagged 1000x the apps Palm had. What makes for a clean break in the two case models, however, is how Palm handled the situation.

Chuq Von Rospach, developer community manager at Palm, jumped on the PreCentral.net forums and… communicated. Quickly, cleanly, and with an admirable degree of transparency.

Now, on the iPhone side we’ve seen Senior Marketing VP Phil Schiller fire off an email or two to high-profile blogs addressing their concerns about the App Store, and the aforementioned FCC response, but an actual, engaged individual whose sole focus is to work with the developer community, provide support, assuage concerns, and be a pseudo-public symbol of this intent to do better? And who says Palm is okay — nay, happy — for the app to continue life as homebrew (their version of jailbreak)

Can we have one?

Chuq, like Palm CEO Jon Rubinstien (slated to be the first guest on the new Engadget Show) and many Palm engineers and PR folks, used to work for Apple. Perhaps Palm is giving them a break from Apple’s culture of secrecy and they’re taking a liking too it. Perhaps Apple can give some current employees a break from that secrecy as well.

Right now disenchanted iPhone users are trying out Palm, Android, and even Nokia devices and not finding them up to Apple’s usability and polish snuff, but that won’t last long. Apple needs to get their App Store community perception problems fixed as fast or faster even. Better still, get developer satisfaction levels up to customer satisfaction levels.

Sure these aren’t on the general consumer radar at all. Indeed, the amount of people given Apple’s 50 million install base is almost statistically irrelevant. But as we’ve said before, these are the people who tend to influence others, and while the actual App Store problems are likely still going to take a while to crack, the perception problem is one far more easily — if uncomfortably for Apple — handled.

And it likely doesn’t even need an open letter from Steve Jobs to do it.

Learn that Name for the iPhone, coming soon to the iTunes App Store for $2.99, beat out 14 other apps and walked away with top honour at the Startup Weekend’s 54-hour coding marathon. Oh, and did we mention the event was sponsored by Microsoft, held on the Microsoft campus in Redmond, and was the only app NOT built on Microsoft’s platform.

Said organizer Clint Nelson upon naming the top vote getter:

“Awkward.”

Yeah, that’ll do it.

Last week we linked to an AdMob estimate that the iPhone and iPod touch App Store could represent a $2.5 billion a year economy, which based the estimate off usage stats for their mobile ad network, and a survey of 1000 iPhone, iPod touch, and Google Android users. But not so fast, says Cult of Mac along with developers from Polar Bear Farms, App Cubby, and the Yankee Group.

$2.4 billion divided by the 65,000 apps in the App Store is $37,000 per app, per year. And while some developers earn that, many do not.

They figure it’s closer to $250 million to $500 million, or roughly one fifth to one tenth the size.

AdMob is sticking to their original numbers, however, according to the methodology shared again with GigaOm.

To us, it just seems like they’re all guestimating how big that really, really big pie is — just stupid, or goram ridiculous.

[Thanks Icebike for the tip!]

According to developers Bjango, Apple is now telling developers to remove the “Free Memory” function — the ability to clear data from RAM without force quitting or rebooting — from their iPhone (and iPod touch) applications or those applications will be removed from the App Store.

Bjango, who makes iStat [$1.99 on sale - iTunes link] had to do just that for their latest version:

Stat’s Free Memory function was removed at Apple’s request. This decision was completely out of our hands. Please note that all other apps with Free Memory appear to have been removed or updated without their Free Memory function too.

After eliciting feedback and considering their options, Bjango went ahead and removed the feature. (Bjango advises users who want the feature to NOT UPGRADE their copies, and reminds Mac users with Time Machine how to downgrade to the old, “Free Memory”-enabled version if necessary.)

To rub salt on their wounds, negative reviews are now piling up for iStat in iTunes, of course, despite Bjango explaining Apple requested the removal in the app’s “What’s New in This Version” section.

What Apple’s rationale may be (if Phil Schiller deigns anyone with another email) is unknown.

[Thanks Scott for the tip!]

Bing Community Blog has announced that Microsoft is “sprinkling some Cocoa” on their Bing. (No laughing!):

The Bing iPhone and Mac SDK is available for download on CodePlex, open source under the Microsoft Public License (MS-PL).

The SDK provides:

• The ability to easily query Bing from within your Cocoa or Cocoa Touch application.
• Perform both synchronous and asynchronous queries.
• Search Bing for Web, Image, Video, News, and Phonebook results.

We hope that you’ll be able to make some great Cocoa/iPhone apps that harness the power of Bing!

Happy Bing-ing!

Of course, the iPhone’s default search is Google, with Yahoo! as an option, and Bing will soon be powering Yahoo! search, so it’s ipso de post facto (pardon the Latin-ish) it’s already there, but still it will be interesting to see what kind of iPhone apps come of — and leverage — this. We just hope it really makes an awesome “BING!” sound whenever a query hits the index…

[Via Macworld]