iPhone

Rating apps when you delete them

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iPhone firmware 2.2, which is supposed to be released next Friday, Nov. 22, asks you to rate applications when you delete them. Does anyone else think this is a bad idea?

We’re going to see a lot more negative ratings when people have to rate an application before deleting it.

I’d estimate that not more than 1 out of 100 purchasers (most likely even a smaller percentage) rate applications in the store, so a lot more of those ratings will now come from people deleting the application. Since they’re deleting the application, most likely they didn’t like it for some reason. If they really like the application, they probably won’t be deleting it.

People who dislike an application are usually more vocal than those who like it and more likely to post a review, so even if 1/100 of the users hate an application you’ll see many more negative reviews since the people who like it don’t bother to post a review.

Should Apple pull the plug on the iPhone?

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Last year, John Dvorak said:

These phones go in and out of style so fast that unless Apple has half a dozen variants in the pipeline, its phone, even if immediately successful, will be passé within 3 months.
There is no likelihood that Apple can be successful in a business this competitive. Even in the business where it is a clear pioneer, the personal computer, it had to compete with Microsoft and can only sustain a 5% market share.
And its survival in the computer business relies on good margins. Those margins cannot exist in the mobile handset business for more than 15 minutes.

According to Steve Ballmer:

Now we’ll get a chance to go through this again in phones and music players. There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance. It’s a $500 subsidized item. They may make a lot of money. But if you actually take a look at the 1.3 billion phones that get sold, I’d prefer to have our software in 60% or 70% or 80% of them, than I would to have 2% or 3%, which is what Apple might get.

Who’s having the last laugh now?

Is Richard Sprague going to eat his words?

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A year ago Richard Sprague wrote:

I can’t believe the hype being given to iPhone. Even some of my blindly-loyal pro-Microsoft friends and colleagues talk like it’s a real innovation and will “redefine the market” or “usher in a new age”.

What!?!? Without even mentioning that the same functionality has been available on PocketPC, Palm, Nokia, and Blackberry for years, I just have to wonder who will want one of these things (other than the religious faithful). People need this to be a phone, first and foremost. But with 5 hours of battery life? No keypad? (you try typing a phone number on that screen, no matter how wonderful it is — you will want a keypad). And for all that whiz-bang Internet access, you absolutely need the phone to work, immediately, every single time. Will it do that?

So please mark this post and come back in two years to see the results of my prediction: I predict they will not sell anywhere near the 10M Jobs predicts for 2008. Okay, it’s possible there are enough Apple religious people to buy a lot of them at first, but even the most diehard Mac fans who buy one of these will secretly carry two phones. One to prove how loyal and “cool” they are, and the other to actually make and receive calls.

I remember the lessons I learned working with the Newton team many years ago. I was in Apple’s marketing department at the time and we did this big fancy user study which basically proved that nobody would buy the thing at the price and functionality we were building. So what did we do? We shoved it into the market anyway because it was “cool”. Cool is great, but you still need to make phone calls.

Now how did that work out?

I Can Has a new app

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I’ve submitted the official I Can Has Cheezburger iphone app to the app store. Hopefully it will be approved. I also removed the original LOLcats from sale, to avoid any confusion.

Unlike the original LOLCats, which searched Flickr for public photos, the new app uses RSS feeds from I Can Has Cheezburger and related sites, including FAILblog, Engrish Funny, and ROFLrazzi. It also has some user interface refinements, like a navigation bar that hides when you tap the screen.

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Using a WebKit view for help

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Since the F**KING NDA makes it difficult to find iPhone programming tips & sample code, I thought I’d share this little tidbit.

Sometimes the easiest way to display a help or information screen is a UIWebView. It’s very easy to display the contents of an HTML file stored in the application’s resource bundle.

    NSData *info = [NSData dataWithContentsOfFile: [[NSBundle mainBundle] pathForResource:@"info" ofType:@"html"]];
    [webView loadData:info MIMEType:@"text/html" textEncodingName:@"utf8" baseURL:nil];

However, if you have any external links, they will open in the same web view, which you probably don’t want. I found a very nice work-around to have any clicked URLs open in Safari. You’ll need to specify a delegate for your web view that implements the webView:shouldStartLoadWithRequest:navigationType method. The code is very simple.

- (BOOL)webView:(UIWebView *)webView shouldStartLoadWithRequest:(NSURLRequest *)request navigationType:(UIWebViewNavigationType)navigationType
{
    if (navigationType == UIWebViewNavigationTypeLinkClicked) {
        [[UIApplication sharedApplication] openURL: [request URL]];
        return NO;
    }
    return YES;
}

I Can Has… an offishul app

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My “offishul” I Can Has Cheezburger app is feature complete. Once I finish testing it I’ll submit it to the App Store.

This app is a complete rewrite from the original LOLCATS. Instead of searching for images on Flickr & Zooomr, which are often mislabeled and incorrectly tagged, it uses the feeds from ICanHasCheezburger, IHasAHotdog, FAIL Blog, and other related sites. I’ve also refined the user interface. It uses a button bar, which can be toggled on & off by tapping the image. You can switch images either by swiping or using the arrows. It has a built-in web view and lets you save pictures in the camera roll. I’m using TouchXML to handle the feeds.

I would like to pull the old LOLCATS app when I release this one, but as far as I can tell, there’s no way to do that. The old app got terrible reviews thanks to some idiot on Flickr who put a LOLCAT tag on a picture of a dead cat, which caused the application to show it. Even with that image gone, all of the reviews still mention it.

The old LOLCATS app was actually a proof of concept for a Flickr slideshow app, which I’ve decided not to develop since there are plenty of similar apps. I really like Exposure and I don’t want to compete with it. I will continue developing some apps for Zooomr, since nobody else supports it.

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