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/

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

http://www.mobileorchard.com/developer-to-developer-iphone-app-distribution-without-ad-hoc-provisioning/

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.

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.

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.

1. Click on File/Export
2. Select Export Android Application, click Next
3. Follow the steps in the wizard.
4. Done!

Preparing an app for distribution on iPhone:

…
…
…
…there’s gotta be a comedy skit somewhere in here.
…
…
…although it’s not very funny.

I can’t wait for the new Android phones, and I sincerely hope they get a large enough chunk of the market. I don’t expect it to catch up overnight, but even if the iPhone only has, say, 4x the potential audience, rather than 37x the audience, it would be good enough to make Android viable for developers - I think many would gladly switch, even with a smaller audience. While the iPhone is a great platform in many ways, dealing with Apple has roughly the appeal of a root canal - a little competition can’t hurt.

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.

The default way to play music on the G1 is the Music app. Since it can play music in the background, it seemed likely there is some way to interact with the service it uses. This of course doesn’t help if the user is using some other music player, but it should be good enough.

First step was to figure out exactly what service that is - I used something like the following code to find out what services are running while I’m playing music:

		ActivityManager am = (ActivityManager)this.getSystemService(ACTIVITY_SERVICE);

		List<ActivityManager.RunningServiceInfo> rs = am.getRunningServices(50);

		for (int i=0; i<rs.size(); i++) {
			ActivityManager.RunningServiceInfo rsi = rs.get(i);
			Log.i("Service", "Process " + rsi.process + " with component " + rsi.service.getClassName());
		}

This prints up to 50 running services. The interesting line in the output is

process com.android.music with component com.android.music.MediaPlaybackService

OK, now to figure out how to interact with MediaPlaybackService. It turns out to be surprisingly simple.

First, get a copy of IMediaPlaybackService.aidl from the source code of the Music app, and include it in your Android app. The contents of this file are the methods we have access to in MediaPlaybackService. Of course, if the Music app on the device changes, and our copy of the .aidl file is inaccurate, we have a problem - hence the warning above.

Next, implement a ServiceConnection we can use to connect to MediaPlaybackService.

	private class MediaPlayerServiceConnection implements ServiceConnection {

		public IMediaPlaybackService mService;

		public void onServiceConnected(ComponentName name, IBinder service) {
			Log.i("MediaPlayerServiceConnection", "Connected! Name: " + name.getClassName());

			// This is the important line
			mService = IMediaPlaybackService.Stub.asInterface(service);

			// If all went well, now we can use the interface
			try {
				Log.i("MediaPlayerServiceConnection", "Playing track: " + mService.getTrackName());
				Log.i("MediaPlayerServiceConnection", "By artist: " + mService.getArtistName());
				if (mService.isPlaying()) {
					Log.i("MediaPlayerServiceConnection", "Music player is playing.");
				} else {
					Log.i("MediaPlayerServiceConnection", "Music player is not playing.");
				}
			} catch (Exception e) {
	    		e.printStackTrace();
	    		throw new RuntimeException(e);
			}
		}

		public void onServiceDisconnected(ComponentName name) {
			Log.i("MediaPlayerServiceConnection", "Disconnected!");
		}
	}

Finally, bind the service:

		Intent i = new Intent();
		i.setClassName("com.android.music", "com.android.music.MediaPlaybackService");
		ServiceConnection conn = new MediaPlayerServiceConnection();
		this.bindService(i, conn, 0);

That’s it! From here on it should be possible to use the MediaPlaybackService like any other service.

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.

I haven’t yet made up my mind whether this improves the overall experience… but it does provide some additional information, and clearly does what it’s supposed to do - highlight the stories with very high or very low votes to comments ratio. I’ll use it for a while before I decide how I feel about it. I suspect the actual value will vary from reader to reader.

A screenshot:

Download GreaseMonkey script

Update: added to GitHub

// ==UserScript==
// @name           HNScore
// @namespace      me.alexc
// @description    See ratio between story comments and votes on HN.
// @include        http://news.ycombinator.*/
// ==/UserScript==

var rows = document.getElementsByTagName("td");

for (var i=0; i<rows.length; i++)
{
	var row = rows[i];
	if (row.className == "subtext") {
		scoreNode = row.childNodes[0];
		commentsNode = row.childNodes[4];

		score = scoreNode.innerHTML.match(/\d+/)[0];
		commentsR = commentsNode.innerHTML.match(/\d+/);
		if (commentsR)
			comments = commentsR[0];
		else
			comments = 1;

		ratio = score / comments;

		if (score > 4) {	// arbitrary
			// Prepare ratio element
			ratioNode = document.createElement('span');
			ratioNode.innerHTML = ratio.toFixed(1) + " ratio. ";

			if (ratio < 1) {
				style = "font-size:6pt; color:red;";
			} else if (ratio < 5) {
				style = "font-size:7pt";
			} else if (ratio < 10) {
				style = "font-size:8pt; color:black;";
			} else {
				style = "font-size:8pt; color:black; font-weight:bold;";
			}

			row.setAttribute("style", style);

			// Insert before story score
			row.insertBefore(ratioNode, scoreNode);
		}
	}
}

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.