With iPhone OS 3.0, Apple added an age rating system for applications. This not only allowed parents to set appropriate application access for their families, but also opened up the potential for developers to release applications with more adult-oriented content, until Apple received “numerous complaints” from users asking for the “Wobble iBoobs” app to be… →
Surgeworks' Blog
Intel Moblin + Nokia Maemo = MeeGo
Intel’s Mobilin and Nokia’s Maemo, two Linux-based mobile operating systems, will be merged into one platform. Intel and Nokia said the MeeGo platform will extend beyond smartphones and will be flexible enough to scale to larger devices like full-fledged computers or in-car systems. The first devices running MeeGo, including a new phone from Nokia, are… →
Nokia's Symbian goes open-source: market share dropping, still dominates the market.
Nokia, the world’s largest cell phone maker, launched Symbian OS 10 years ago. It established the market for smart phones and helped propel Nokia to its market dominance. More than 330 million cell phones running Symbian OS have been produced by a number of makers, including Nokia, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, Motorola, LG, Sharp, Fujitsu, and… →
Starting with Titanium and Android
Appcelerator Titanium is one of the 3 cross-platform mobile frameworks (the other 2 are Rhodes and PhoneGap). Similar to PhoneGap, it exposes devices capabilites through Javascript and you write your app using HTML, CSS and of course, Javascript. What really sets Titanium apart is its user interface API: you can use Javascript to create table… →
Microsoft on the verge of releasing Windows Mobile version 2.0
OK… sorry about the inflammatory title, but it really does feel like MS has been coasting since it came out with its first mobile software release. I’ve used Windows Mobile on two Dell Axim revs and two cellphones. Instead of feeling like each new OS revision was an upgrade, it just felt like the same… →
Windows 7 Phone Series: Microsoft is doing something "new" and "original"?
Just four months after Windows Mobile 6.5 hit the market, Microsoft has officially introduced Windows Phone 7 Series, the new multitouch-capable mobile operating system designed to defeat Apple’s iPhone. We were all looking at the iPad and suddenly, Microsoft comes with this new, impressive, and I would dare to say “original” take on the mobile… →
Is Apple looking into licensing the iPhone OS?
Could Apple bet on the App Store revenues and licensing revenues and give away the iPhone OS to third parties? Will we ever see a Motorola or HTC built phone running the iPhone OS? Will we ever see inexpensive chinese phones running it?… Let’s see what that would mean to Apple.
Code blocks with optional arguments in Ruby 1.8.x
Ruby 1.9 has some cool new features. One of them is the ability to define default values for the arguments passed to code blocks, like in the following example: pow = proc { |a, b = 2| a**b } pow.call 3, 3 # 27 pow.call 3 # 9 This is very useful, for instance, when… →
How long will it take to understand Rails 3 in and out?
According to David Heinemeier Hansson, you will never understand it all. Case in point? David himself. That was the gist of his answer to how a new change to the way rails 3 renders actions in the browser would be handled for older browsers. DHH gets involved in the parts he cares about and doesn’t… →
How to get 5 star reviews from your iPhone app's happy users
Analyzing how users are prompted to review iPhone apps, it seems that our apps are more likely to get negative reviews. Here’s why: a user is prompted to rate an app when he deletes it. When the app is deleted, it is pretty safe to say that the user was not satisfied with it, so… →
Free iPhone apps monetization: ad supported iPhone Apps Revenue with AdMob or AdWhirl
Free apps get downloaded zillions of times: a lot more then commercial apps. There are plenty of different estiamtes on the ratio between free and paid apps. In our experience, free apps can get even more then 10 times the downloads then a similar paid app priced over the 0.99 USD tier. We’re speaking of… →
Apple iPad: could be cheaper, really!
iSuppli Corp. reported that the multi-touch 9.7-inch display on the iPad could cost around $80, while its custom-designed A4 processor would cost about $17 per unit. The 16GB of memory is estimated to cost about $29.50. Total parts cost would be $219.35… well below the starting price of $499 for the 16GB iPad. Manufacturing costs… →
iPhone hidden features: Bluetooth headset support and Voice Control
This is the first of an article series about features our iPhones have that are not-so-obivous until you find them and try them once. All these features are explained somewhere on the web, and most of them are well detailed on Apple’s website, but, if you’re like me, you’re not going to explore that website… →
Core Data Story: an introduction to iPhone SDK database abstraction technology
So, what’s Core Data anyway? :) Core Data helps you to save model objects (in the sense of the model-view-controller design pattern) to a file and get them back again. This is similar to archiving technology but Core Data offers much more than that. Amongst other things it…
iPhone Christian Prayers App in the Top 10 for Reference apps in Italy
Prayers is an easy-to-use, multi-language Christian Prayers database. It represents the ultimate reference to Catholic Prayers for iPhone and iPod Touch. The native iPhone app is in the top 10 of the Reference Category in the Italian App Store, and in the top 100 apps for the Reference Category in Spain and France.