Tag: ios

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Recommended

Out With The Dodgeball, In With The Brightkite

While I have been a faithful Dodgeball user for over 4 years, it’s not been a service that has been taking strides to make me love it. The site exists now almost exactly as it did back then, save using Google Accounts after they were bought out in the spring of 2005. While it remains functional, it has been losing mindshare in the face of stiff competition. Yelp does reviews better; Twitter does messaging between friends better; Facebook handles connections between friends better.
The only place Dodgeball still had a hold on me is for checking in; announcing to your friends where you were.

That was until I saw this demo of the Brightkite iPhone application:


Brightkite for the iPhone from Brightkite on Vimeo.

I’ve been tangentially aware of Brightkite through their Twitter integration, but between the app and the service, any use I had for Dodgeball is essentially gone:

  • While Dodgeball was limited to 22 cities, Brightkite is US-wide. Ironically, this is because Brightkite leverages the Google Maps API – something that Google has failed to do with their own service.
  • Dodgeball is all-or-nothing with location data, while Brightkite has tiered access so that not all of your friends – or the world – get your precise location data.
  • Brightkite integrates with Twitter and FireEagle; Dodgeball essentially silos your data.

Consider Dodgeball’s coffin nailed shut. Brightkite.app is the sort of app I’ve been waiting for since the iPhone SDK was first announced.

Brightkite.app is available now.

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Recommended

iUseThis for the iPhone

It’s been just over two years since I started using iUseThis, a neat web tool for tracking OS X apps you use. A social network for software junkies, I suppose.

As part of iPhoneDevCamp, Marcus and Arne have launched an iPhone-centric version of the site, allowing people to track and comment on their iPhone apps.

This is one of those things that I didn’t realize I was missing until I saw it. While the App Store does have plenty of methods of app feedback (user reviews, popularity ratings), it does tend to be a bit low on the signal to noise ratio. IUseThis works better, with a del.icio.us or Digg like method of popularity. The more people that mark they use an app, the higher it goes.

You can find my app list on my profile.

(Before anyone starts marveling as to the number of apps I have purchased: dumping five years of spare change into an iTunes gift certificate via Coinstar makes all the difference in the world.)

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Debated

WWDC08 Keynote – Backgrounding

(I’m breaking up my thoughts about the WWDC keynote into multiple posts this year.)

Apple did, in their usual pretzel of logic way, address the big issue regarding application development: apps that need to function in the background.

In many ways, the proposal (a single connection to Apple’s server handles push notification from servers) does have many benefits, and I can practically recite them off of Scott Forstall’s slides. It will lead to better system performance, help save on battery life, and certainly streamline the networking.

But rewind back to the SDK announcement on March 6th. Remember this slide?

Not three months ago, Apple was touting how superior their Exchange support was to the Blackberry because you didn’t have to go through a server owned by a vendor to gain functionality.

The other shoe certainly seems to have dropped here. Apple is offering to be the intermediary for every app that needs backgrounding, much like RIM is for everyone who wants Blackberry email. With the number of issues RIM has had with their service over the last year, Apple is going to be under high scrutiny if they have similar outages.

Don’t get me wrong; this isn’t nearly as crippling as RIM’s reliance on their cloud servers. I’d rather lose my backgrounding for, say, an IM client than my email. But there are implications for developers, and I don’t even want to think about what this means for enterprises writing apps. I can only hope Apple makes their retention policy very clear.