The rush is on… come up with the first big 3rd party iPhone app. There are a few tools to help you get started:
Safari 3 (available for those on Windows too),
and
iPhoney (Mac only).
iPhone is an open-source browser simulator, and offers a very realistic canvas from which to develop and test your applications. I remember in the late 90’s when WAP was the next big thing, and I downloaded little Nokia phone apps to test WAP applications… it looks like we’ve come full circle…
I’ve been using text-editors to do my web coding since Al Gore invented HTML, biofuel, and the Blackberry. I’m likely to bust out Notepad, TextEdit, Eclipse, or Dreamweaver to get the job done, but I’ve never been thrilled with any of them. Now I’ve got a new best-editor-friend: Coda, from Panic.
Panic has been making great products for several years now, and I highly recommend any web developer to check out Coda. Good bye, Dreamweaver.
If you’re like me (let’s hope this isn’t the case), you’ve started a lot of projects and never seen them through to completion. I’ve given up on more ideas than I care to mention–many more than I can remember. A lot of them were whimsical, but every once in a while one came along that really might have been good. Enter “iRoadie.� It was July, 2004, and while listening to an iPod I wondered how cool it would be to add your own drumline or guitar riff to a song while you were sitting there listening to it.
iRoadie was my idea for a series of iPod addons that get you “squealing lead solos along with your favorite metal song in no time,� or “pounding the drumline to your favorite anthem…�
Usually, my projects start with a rough layout or graphical design. I made a mockup of the iRoadie in Photoshop, complete with an Apple-styled preview.
I registered iRoadie.com (which I’ve since let slip away), but never put anything up there. I really intended on doing something with this project, but have no electronic skill or any type of casting knowledge that would help me build the units. So, I found a cheap children’s electric drumkit/keyboard combon on eBay, and devoured it with a soldering iron and screwdriver when it came in. My initial goal was to just get the pieces of the drumkit working and playing through the iPod headphone port, but I didn’t even make to that point before the dream fizzled. And that fizzling is what ends most of my ideas. Maybe you can make it work for you…
Almost two years ago I launched a little side-project called PodAPic. Basically, I take user-uploaded photos and turn them into iPod ads (check out the gallery). It’s been fairly successful, and a tremendous learning process–especially with marketing and customer relations. I really haven’t updated the look of the site since the launch, so it was about time. The refresh includes the new “iPod Nano� styled ads, and, as an added bonus, all photos are now $4.99 (instead of $5.99 - $9.99).
In my logs I noticed that on the previous version of PodAPic, I lost a lot of people after they uploaded their pictures. I was allowing users to upload a photo, add a caption, select a color, and then submit the information and confirm their entries on a second page. From this page, they could submit their order to me. My traffic logs showed a lot of exits from this page, so to combat that, I used Noah Winecoff’s take on Lightbox techniques to get the user image and offer the appearance of keeping users on the same page. I think it’s a more effective approach, and I think I’ll notice a difference on order completions.
Check out PodAPic when you get the chance–and if you like it, link to it from your blog and I’ll do a free PodAPic for you.
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