40 Android Business Models
While trying to figure out how to get access to paid apps on the Android Market in Canada (come on, Google… you know you want to, the Canadian dollar is strong nowadays), I stumbled on a blog series listing possible Android business models. There is probably nothing revolutionary, but the ideas are short, sweet, and to the point. The best part is only the first one (”Model #1: Build the App, Sell the App to Individuals”) relies on being in a country with full access to the Android Market, so for the rest of us in less developed countries, the other models are worth a thought.
http://www.androidguys.com/2009/09/14/40bizmodels/
http://www.androidguys.com/2009/09/15/40-android-business-models-part-two/
http://www.androidguys.com/2009/09/16/40-android-business-models-part-three/
http://www.androidguys.com/2009/09/17/40-android-business-models-part-four/
http://www.androidguys.com/2009/09/18/40-android-business-models-part-five/
The iPad’s name is a joke
“I think the iPad is a bad name choice. How are people in Boston supposed to differentiate between it and the iPod?” — amusing Reddit comment. Looks like Reddit is far from the only place making the joke:
http://search.twitter.com/search?q=ipad+boston
And, of course, the infinitely more predictable iTampon:
Note that iTampon is trending on Twitter, while iPad is not. Although, to be fair, only roughly 1 in 10 tweets (over a highly scientific 5-minute real time search sample) mention iTampon.
/amused
iPhone App distribution without ad-hoc provisioning
Mobile Orchard has a great tutorial on how to distribute iPhone apps to other developers without jumping through the ad-hoc hoops. I haven’t tried it yet, but it’s good to know.
The Making of Prince of Persia
Posted by alex in Making stuff people want on November 21st, 2009
I just finished reading Jordan Mechner’s old journals from his time creating Prince of Persia - it’s long, but probably one of the most fascinating things I’ve read online in months. A real gem.
I loved the Prince of Persia games when I was a kid (who didn’t?), so it was great to get a peek behind the scenes at how it was made - I didn’t know, for example, that it was all basically made by one person. Some great posts:
Original source for the Prince of Persia animations
Rough animation test
More work on the animation
Shadow man
Sword fighting footage
Princess animation footage
Source code documentation
Even better, however, was the first-person view of something great being created: the passion, the excitement, the uncertainty, the highs, the lows, and the eventual satisfaction and recognition (followed, of course, by “what’s next?”). While not exactly the story of a start-up, it definitely read close to one - it might be one of the most motivational stories I’ve ever read.
So thank you, Jordan, for taking the time to make these journals available, and hope there will be more.
Wow. Flash CS5 will allow building native iPhone apps with ActionScript
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashcs5/appsfor_iphone/
Flash Professional CS5 will enable you to build applications for iPhone and iPod touch using ActionScript 3. These applications can be delivered to iPhone and iPod touch users through the Apple App Store.*
* Delivery through the App Store requires participation in the iPhone Developer Program and approval of the application by Apple.
This is going to be fun to watch. The iPhone is already a massive gaming platform - what will happen when you mix the App Store and Newgrounds?
Even more interesting to watch will be Apple’s reaction. They haven’t exactly gone out of their way to bring Flash to the iPhone - which this doesn’t do, exactly, but it’s a step in that direction. I can’t see Apple being very happy, but they can’t openly oppose it without taking a big PR hit - I expect to hear a lot of CS5 app rejection stories, though.
As always, some good discussion on HN.
How to get the contents of UIWebView on iPhone
Say you have a UIWebView in your iPhone application, maybe you have some JavaScript that changes its content, for whatever reason you want to access the content of the UIWebView… how do you do it?
It’s not immediately obvious from the API docs, but it’s pretty simple. Something like this should do the trick:
[myWebView stringByEvaluatingJavaScriptFromString:@"document.getElementsByTagName('html')[0].innerHTML"]
Doesn’t seem all that clean, but it’s the best I’ve found so far - if there’s a better way, I’d love to know.
Funny thing
Preparing an app for distribution on Android:
1. Click on File/Export
2. Select Export Android Application, click Next
3. Follow the steps in the wizard.
4. Done!
Android - binding to the Music app service to find currently playing song
For an Android app I’m working on I need to find out what song, if any, is playing in the background on the device. Turns out there’s no documented way to do this on Android - but it also turns out that using an open source platform is great. After a few hours of poking around I had a working proof of concept, and I’m sure someone more familiar with Android would’ve figured it out much faster.
IMPORTANT: I’m using an undocumented interface. While this works on Android 1.5R3 and T-Mobile G1 (HTC Magic), and likely on other versions/devices, there is no guarantee it’ll keep working in future releases - use at your own risk.
HNScore - another look at post quality on Hacker News
Posted by alex in Uncategorized on August 30th, 2009
I’m not the only one to notice that some of the most interesting posts on Hacker News generate few comments - and, conversely, some of the least interesting posts generate the most comments (see here, or here). Of course, you can’t generalize too much, but it seems like an interesting metric.
I whipped up a quick GreaseMonkey script to display the ratio of votes to comments. I made a few arbitrary calls: only show a ratio for stories with more than 4 votes, and display the score differently for stories with a ratio less than 1, between 1 and 5, between 5 and 10, and over 10.
Weight loss… or not?
Posted by alex in Uncategorized on July 14th, 2009
This banner ad on some random site really made me do a double-take:
I really have to wonder: did someone goof, or is it an insidious plot to make people notice the ad? If the latter, it definitely worked, although it’s not compelling enough to make me click.
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