CharlesSieg.com

After taking almost a year off, I am back.  The explosive growth of Renkara Media Group has kept me very busy in 2008 and 2009 but I finally have a good team in place to keep things moving and am able to step back a bit and catch up on other things.

It now has its own blog at http://www.accelastudy.com/blog!

Apple reported today two little items of interest:

• They are getting a subsidy of $325 per iPhone from AT&T.  This is a premium of approximately $125 over what is normally paid for a phone by a telco.
• The also sold their 5 billionth song and are now serving up 50,000 movies per day.  That makes them the #1 online music store and the #1 online MOVIE store!

Add this into the mix with the iPhone 3G going into 72 countries, the massive improvements in Mac OS X, and the huge numbers of new Mac owners, and it is easy to see that 2008 is going to be an amazing year for Apple.  They are certainly demonstrating momentum unlike any company since Microsoft in its early days (think Microsoft Windows driving Microsoft Office sales, etc.).

I’m looking for Apple to extend its reach into other content, particularly news and books.  How much longer before we see digital newspaper and magazine subscriptions through iTunes?  How much longer before a digital device for reading that beats the Kindle?  People will always need news and people will always read books.  Everything will be digital soon so why not Apple for these types of content as well?

Sounds like Adobe has got Flash running in the Simulator but not on the device itself.  Could it be that Apple has yet to accept Adobe into the iPhone Developer Program?  Yikes.

A couple of other thoughts I want to share as the WWDC closes down:

• There are numerous rumors going around that the iPhone 3G will, in fact, be tetherable to your notebook computer.  Apparently, though, the data plan will cost more for tethering…weird.
• Weird rumors are floating around that there are still additional features of the 3G iPhone that have not been made public yet.  The level of certainty is variable but on the high end of certainty is that there is still an unannounced sensor of some sort built into the phone.  Another, less reliable, rumor is that the 3G iPhone does, actually, have a front-facing video camera.  That would be sooooo cool but I can’t see Jobs missing out on the opportunity to announce it at the WWDC.
• The new plastic back panel of the iPhone, which replaces a metal panel, apparently yields significantly better voice call reception.  This would be a big bonus for me as the iPhone’s reception in my home is less than ideal, resulting in frequent dropped calls and gaps in conversation.

I was thinking about the possibility of a late-breaking feature announcement for the iPhone and I could see it.  It would be an interesting tactic for truly escalating the iPhone 3G hype.  The phone is going to be a success no matter what.  Say that no mention is made of the camera until the day the phones are available.  I could see a mad rush of people - even more so than last year - lining up to get hold of one.  A feature like live video conferencing would simply blow people away.

As for myself, I gotta get one on the first day, I just haven’t figured out how to do it without standing in some intolerably long line.  I need to find the most remote, least trafficked Apple store or AT&T store that will have the phone and wait there.

Well, the WWDC is almost over.  Actually, for me, it ended yesterday afternoon.  I skipped all of the sessions today in favor of staying up very late last night doing real work.  I checked out of my hotel at noon and took a taxi to the airport and am now shacking up in the Red Carpet Club again, waiting for my flight at 6:30pm.

Again, I will throw out a little endorsement of the Red Carpet Club experience.  This one is even better than the Chicago one.  The food court is right outside if you need sustenance.  They give you a TMobile WiFi day pass for free WiFi while in the Club.  And I have electricity, a plush leather seat overlooking the runway, peace and quiet, clean restrooms, and lots of free, cold beverages.  All for $50.  Can’t beat it.

Anyway, the WWDC…it was a very interesting experience but not really what I expected.  I didn’t learn a whole lot.  I suppose if you are a total iPhone n00b and didn’t spend any time with the SDK over the last three months, then you probably saw a lot of amazing stuff and learned a lot at the WWDC.  However, if you are a hard core iPhone developer like me, developing through SEVEN beta releases of the SDK with their various changes, and touching on every major component, then you didn’t find a lot that was new to you at the WWDC.

I was glad to have attended the session on the App Store.  I am now set up in the App Store with my company info, tax info, and just have to associate a bank account to receive payments from Apple.  Oh, and I need to upload my applications, but Apple has not flipped the switch on uploads yet and I don’t expect they will until the week or so before the iPhone 3G release.

It was great to chat with Apple engineers about my memory leaks.  They are all cleared up and I learned some valuable lessons that I can use for months and years to come.  The 30 minute UI review of my iPhone application was a little less beneficial but I still got some valuable feedback that will probably lead to some UI tweaks.  I did find out that applications going to such lengths to present great UI are far and few between, which makes mine stand out a bit (all good!).

I was pleased to have been in some sessions around the graphics architecture and, in particular, Quartz Composer, which were amazing and will certainly push me in a new direction with some of my development efforts.  Quartz Composer, of course, is an existing part of Tiger and Leopard and, while getting some new power in Snow Leopard, is otherwise unchanged.

But as for actually “learning” new skills or techniques, there isn’t any of that.  The WWDC for me was basically a big demo of all of these features of Mac OS X and some directions on how to get more into the technology, should I be interested in learning more.  Which is okay, just not what I expected.

I’ll probably continue to go each year because I have a feeling that each year I will be more interested in finding out what new technologies are coming down the pipe.  There are some great changes coming in Snow Leopard, changes that in my experienced professional opinion will have dire consequences for Windows.  I have the Snow Leopard Developer Preview DVD and will definitely be installing it when I get home and starting to work with those new technologies.

I did find out that I am not the only developer that was having trouble getting accepted into the iPhone Developer Program.  Rogue Amoeba, a serious Mac software publisher, still hasn’t gotten accepted into the program, a neither have a lot of people who left comments on the post.  On the other hand, one of their developers applied as an individual and was accepted within 24 hours.  Many are complaining that the system of acceptance as a whole is broken.  I would tend to agree, particularly if some of the major players, who should have been accepted immediately, still haven’t gotten the green light.  In the end, I may never know why I got lucky and got my acceptance before the WWDC, but I suspect it had to do with having submitted a reasonably complete application to the Apple Design Awards.

I feel bad for those other developers who have not gotten accepted yet.  It means a delay of a week or two - depending on their applications - of testing, tuning, and, occasionally, recoding to get things right on the device.  And a week or two at this point can mean the difference between being in the store on Day 1 or being a late arrival.  No one knows how many people will hit the App Store right away but I can tell you that, personally, I will be visiting the App Store within hours of getting my 3G iPhone and will download every application I can find that looks interesting or useful, free or not.  So there will be something to “first-mover” initiative.

So, as I prepare to leave San Francisco, I look back on a productive week that has introduced me to some great features of Mac OS that I didn’t know about.  I look forward with excitement to the opportunities that the App Store opens up for developers like me.  I also recognize now that Apple has built up significant momentum that, for the first time in decades, mounts a serious challenge to the dominance of Windows for both business and consumer use.  The next few years should be amazing indeed.

My posting velocity on both CharlesSieg.com and via Twitter is decreasing a bit.  There are a couple of reasons for that.  One is that most of the stuff we hear during the daily sessions is covered by NDA and, while some people feel free to disregard that, I’m all about not biting the hand that feeds me.  So no sneaky posts from me. Private conversations with me, however, is another story.  Second, there is quite simply a lot of work to be done and work takes priority over blogging.  I’m at the conference all day and then I put in at least another 8 hours in front of the computer at night working on my code and trying out some of the techniques picked up during the day.  Last night, for instance, I went to bed at around 5am Pacific time…  Today I am taking a lighter day, getting back in sync with Illinois time and, hence, the break for a little blogging.

Yesterday’s sessions were mostly on the graphics architecture of the Mac and the iPhone.  I firmly believe that what sets one application above another - all other things being equal - is the presentation and look of an application.  It’s this graphics work that takes the bulk of time, actually, when writing an iPhone application.  Spend some time looking at how the Weather app works on the iPhone and you’ll see what I mean.  When you slide the current view but then let it go before it switches to the next, the view slides cleanly back into place with a little “bump” at the end.  It’s little things like this that the customer picks up subconsciously as “cool” and which take developers like me a ton of time in coding.

Now that’s not to say that animating views with Cocoa Touch on the iPhone is hard - it’s not - but tweaking them takes time.  Some animations are actually multiple animations chained together, choreographed like a ballet.  That’s what you see with native Apple applications and that’s what I strive for with my iPhone applications.  That’s also why all of the sessions I am attending this week are around mastering the graphics architecture and animation.

Let me give you an example.  The AccelaStudy application that I have built is all about learning vocabulary.  At this point, it looks like we will be releasing 6 applications on July 11th.  The first one is an application that will teach you over 500 new English vocabulary words, most of which have been used on the GRE, GMAT, SAT, ACT, and CLEP examinations.  These are words like apocryphal and voluble.  Words not often used in day to day conversation but which are used constantly in books, magazines, and other press.  If you don’t believe me, look here for apocryphal and here for voluble.  A lot of people buy various products to help them study these words.  There are decks of flashcards and little reference books and study guides.  All of them serve the same purpose and they all have the same issues: heavy, bulky, non-interactive.  It’s not like you can be standing in line at Chipotle, blowing off 20 minutes of your day, and whip out a deck of flashcards and start studying.

But with AccelaStudy on the iPhone, you can.  You can literally study anytime, any place.  Over 500 words in the palm of your hand.  And AccelaStudy is interactive - it helps you test yourself on what you have learned by building dynamic quizzes.

But back to my example…  When I decided that a vocabulary application like AccelaStudy would be a good idea, I surveyed the “competition” and this is what I found:

That’s a freeware app called “iStudy” which, at the time, required a jailbroken phone.  It looks like a nice iPhone application.  But it isn’t compelling, it’s not elegant or beautiful.  This is AccelaStudy:

Which one is the one you want to spend your time with?  AccelaStudy has great content but the bulk of development time was spent making it look great and making it very smooth and intuitive to use.  It has smooth transitions, rotations from front-to-back, and very intuitive finger gestures.

We are also releasing 5 foreign language products for building French, Spanish, German, Italian, and Turkish vocabulary.  Each of these products will have over 1,000 commonly used vocabulary words.  There are other products planned for later this year.

So, this brings up an interesting question.  How much should we charge for AccelaStudy products?  There is a lot of discussion about this at the WWDC.  Various media people are running around trying to get an idea of this also.  A Piper Jaffray analyst is saying that it looks like the average price of an iPhone application will be $3.00 or less.  The guy interviewed 20 people at random.  20 people out of 5,200.  And he certainly didn’t interview me.

So what he is saying is, that the average price of an iPhone application will be less than the cost of a gallon of gasoline in the United States.  I don’t think so.  A guy like me puts in over 400 hours minimum to get an application to a production-ready state.  This means developed, debugged (no memory leaks!), performance tested, deployed on hardware and tested again.  This means vocabulary data authored, proofed, proofed again, transferred into optimized binary formats.  This means graphics design, website support, marketing materials and website, and the whole interaction with Apple and provisioning profiles, etc.  Applications like iStudy above may be $3.00 or less.  They may even be free.  But any professional software development company is going to want a return on the significant investment put into developing an iPhone application.

But in the end, the cost will still be relatively low.  The application is going to be out in front of a massive number of potential customers.  The App Store is going out to 62 countries this year, with more to come.  There are 6 million iPhone users now, with Apple aiming for 10 million in 2008, and some industry observers predicting 25 million.  By the end of 2009 we will be looking at 50 million iPhones.  So it is possible to spread that return on investment across a very large customer base.

So back to the question of price.  You can go to Amazon.com and pick up a deck of GRE/GMAT flashcards for around $10.  There are similar vocabulary products that go up to $20.  These, of course, still have all of the issues of bulk, etc.  We will be charging $14.99 a copy for AccelaStudy.  After Apple’s cut, we get $10.50 per copy.  I think that’s pretty reasonable.  A vocabulary study product for less than what will shortly be the cost of 3 gallons of gasoline.  Puts a little perspective on things, does it not?

I’m tired so only the most important details:

• Existing contracts will be replaced by new 2-year contracts, regardless of when you signed up.  This is pretty much what happened last time.  It’s like this perpetual relationship with AT&T.  Every time an iPhone comes out, you’re stuck in 2 more years of purgatory.
• A $199 iPhone means subsidies which means you will only be able to buy the iPhone from AT&T, apparently.  No more purchases in Apple Stores, including the online store which is now pointing buyers to AT&T.
• The “unlimited” data plan goes up by $10 per month and Apple is no longer getting any monthly cut.
• There is no “no commitment” price now.  You can’t just walk into the AT&T store and plunk down $500 and walk out with a phone.  No 2-year contract, no phone.
• Since you will buy the phone in the AT&T store, you will also activate your phone there.  This plus the above point should eliminate completely the use of iPhones on other networks other than AT&T (at least in the United States).

They announced in the keynote that the iPhone SDK had been downloaded over 200,000 times.  Of those, about 25,000 people applied to the paid iPhone Developer Program.  Of those, they have accepted only 4,000 applications.  One of those was mine.  I’m feeling pretty good about that right now.

Most people are still stuck running their apps in the Simulator.  Let me tell you, it just ain’t the same.  Not even close.  Until you have your app running on the device, tweaked, memory-leak free, and optimized for CPU utilization and battery life, you ain’t got squat, just a hobby app that might as well be a toy.  I thought my app ran great in the Simulator.  Then I got my certificate and ran it on the device.  A hundred hours later I feel it is reasonably decent.  And still more work to do.  The next time will be easier, though.  No more n00b mistakes.  But that first time, it’s a challenge.

I made a bunch of predictions yesterday about what would be announced today at the WWDC keynote.  Here are the ones I got right:

• 3G
• GPS
• The App Store will not be ready on Day 1 (meaning today).
• Thinner design.
• A normal headphone jack.
• Increased battery life.
• New colors…I was thinking red, but for some ungodly reason they went with white…LOLWUT?

Several are as yet unknown:

• Tethering.  This was not mentioned in the keynote and I can’t find any posts to confirm it and the Apple website does not seem to mention it.  If the phone does not tether, a lot of people are going to be disappointed, and possibly more will be actually pissed.
• Full A2DP support.  Not mentioned, although they did say the audio support was significantly improved.  We’ll see.
• iPhone as remote.  Still possible through an application from the App Store but no official offering from Apple, as far as I know.

A few things were totally off:

• Front and rear facing video camera.  Totally false.  No video camera, period.  The iPhone continues to be the only modern mobile phone that completely lacks a video capture feature.
• More memory.  Apparently, no one needs more memory.  The two models offered are still the 8 GB and the 16 GB models.
• Flash on the iPhone.  Problematic still because of the lack of memory?  Not sure on that.
• OLED display.  No mention.  Zero.  Total fantasy of mine.