Show. The Developers. The. Money.

Here’s why the App Store game is great for the handset manfuactures but useless for the majority of developer and entrepeneurs. From the NY Times on releasing an app into the iTunes store before Christmas.

 Mr. Barnard and his small team have built apps like Tweet Speaker, which reads Twitter messages aloud, and Mirror, which turns the iPhone screen into a mirror with the help of the front-facing camera. “If we can get that snowball rolling and get it right, we can ride the momentum,” he said. “We’re going to give it a shot.”

I’m sorry, but releasing an app should not be a “gamble” in any sane and proper world. Bah, humbug.

While it’s the “modern” way, part of me is disappointed to read about the silo-ing of applications that Apple is looking to enforce in the Mac App store. It is a natural step to mimic iOS (and another step on cross-compatibility), and it echoes the approach Microsoft will have on the Windows 8 store, but when you look back at the data storage on the Apple Newton, there’s a complete 180.

For those of you not aware, the Newton stored all your data in a “soup” of information. Think of it like a cloud of data in your PDA. And any application could interact with any bit of info  in this system-wide database. Now we’re back to having lockers of information on data rich devices.

Missed opportunities are everywhere in tech, but this one feels like one that could have really changed how people worked with their mobile devices.

Assume two applications from each of them, there’s another 1000 apps out there in the market, a lot more mindshare, and more positive noise from Microsoft. That single tweet from Brandon Watson offering Seattle Support to WebOS devs might have been the smartest post-HP move from anyone…

So a week or two behind schedule, but here’s the video from “The Ben Collins Appreciation Society",” the team I was involved with in this year’s Over the Air at Imperial College.

To recap, I had seen an early prototype of Parrot’s AR.Drone, and at the time I thought that I could do something impressive with the technology at the next Hack Day I attended. So with Over the Air approaching, Parrot popped over the commercial release of the AR.Drone in time for the event, and my brain got to work.

The result was two fold – to replicate some of the engineering challenges that Parrot had faced, and to create a version of Sony’s 3D racing game Wipeout. This was done through the judicious use of some iPhone and Android handsets, Telnet, a Wi-fi network, arudino boards, remote controlled Ferraris, racetracks and a whole lot of fun.

Here’s the (ahem) ninety second presentation of the Drone, the Cars, and the Paypal interface so you can rent out your R/C technology.

Find out more about the event at the Over the Air blog.

Should I be worried, amazed, or happy that my programming book “Rapid Mobile Enterprise Development for Symbian OS: An Introduction to OPL Application Design and Programming” currently has an Amazon ‘New and Used’ copy available with ‘Brand New, Some shelf wear‘

One of the things I stumbled over at 3GSM was the proof copy of “Rapid Mobile Enterprise for Symbian OS: An Introduction to OPL Application Design and Programming.” I’m still pretty sure that “The OPL Book” is a bit more descriptive, but I’m pretty sure that I’ll get lots of bonus points for getting every buzzword into the title. Should help in the google juice stakes as well.

But the book is here, in my hands, and wow! I don’t remember writing any of this stuff! I hope it’s good.

Publication still on course for early March 2005. Hoepfully my Hotel in San Diego will recieve a box of them for me to hand out at Etech…. Wiley… O’Reilly… you think anyone will notice?

And I’ll blame Rafe for the cheesy pic taken on the TGV home frm 3GSM. I photoshopped the moody Bill Hicks look you see, and Vikki shopped the shop here…

It’s finished.

For some time now, I’ve been working on the book you see on the left. There’s a huge impressive title, but I prefer my title… “The OPL Book.” It’s published by Symbian Press and Wiley, who are the same people that do the massivly complicated C++ and Java books. OPL isn’t like that. It’s written to be an introduction to programming, from scratch. Existing programmers can start at chapter three and should devour everything in a day or two. Non programmers should be able to get through it in two weeks (it start off assuming you have absolutley no knowledge of computers apart from how to turn it on).

I’ll sort out some example pages and more info here (and over at The OPL Diary) as publication approaches. For the moment you can pre-order Pre-Order the book on Amazon, or direct from Wiley Publishing. It’s due to ship in March.

And if you’re at 3GSM, there’ll be a chance to meet the author and preview the first few books off the production line.

Finally cracked the menu bug – now when you tap the UIQ menu, it actually shows the menu and performs the action. The beta build of this is now in the hads of the playtesters, and hopefully I’ll get their reports back, polish it over the Easter weekend and relase it to the world on Tuesday. There are still a few things I need to add in…

And while you’re waiting for Vexed on UIQ, check out Nick Kennedy’s OPL Patience and give this new OPL author a bit of support?

After some tinkering over the last 24 hours, the Symbian Diaries system as a whole has had some new featres added. I talk about them on the main site.

But not here – over at the OPL Diary (http://opl.symbiandiaries.com/). One article looks at how OPL for UIQ has been progressing over the last week or two, and the second (written by Steve Litchfield) looks at the conversion process of OPL apps onto UIQ, and some of his thoughts on OPL.

I’ve always hoped that a decent release with all the widgets would help OPL – and the initial rush for OPL on UIQ has backed up this thought. Now if only we can get the dialog widgets sorted in Series 60 and we’ve got a great base to really make a dent in the Symbian Smartphoen Developer Sphere.

Just posted the UIQ Event Core up to FreEPOC. It’s an ‘empty’ application for OPL, showing you how to do everythin properly and providing a good place to start OPL coding. And if you just want to see some OPL code doing more than Hello World, open the zip file and read the core.tpl Text File (which is the source code).

Forum Nokia are getting everyone to re-register (or they just want everyone to do their nice survey), so away I go to plough through it and come to the choice of development languages. Someone over there is switched on enough to make sure OPL is there!

You know if Carlsberg made programming lanaguges, they’d probably write OPL.
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Wireless Watch (via The Register) has an interesting quote in an article based around IBM’s Request for Java to be Open Sourced…

But even with these various changes, it remains difficult to get changes implemented through the Java Community Panel and the process has not encouraged the rapid accumulation of applications from small developers as languages like Psion’s OPL do through their open source models.

…Okay it’s not Psion’s OPL anymore, it’s yours (and ours) thanks to it being under LGPL, but thanks for the thought. I always wonder what would have happened if OPL had never been dropped, and the 5 years of lost development time had been spent nuturing all the authors we could have had, and the 100 or so active authors that would have been carried over from EPOC.

But that’s in the past, and we’ve got to play the cards that we have. It’s looking good, because throught the announcement of OPL for UIQ devices, I’ve had three old authors come back to OPL, ready to rejoin the fold. We may be about to turn the corner. Here’s hoping.

Viral marketing is alive and well on the Victoria Line! I’ve still got a numbr of the 16mb MMC Demo disks from ETech, which have Vexed and SameGame preinstalled on the (along with the OPL runtime), and I’ve taken to handing them out to complete strangers.

So if you’re on the tube, fiddling with a Series 60 phone, and someone leans over you and hands you an MMC card with the ominous impression that he’s giving you a free game, that’ll be me. It’s not a virus. It’s not going to eat away your time. And you’re not going to get stuck on level 30. Trust me

Just try to ignore Dave Green’s quote: “Ewan, we all know the first hit is free.”