“My decision to stop iPhone development has had everything to do with Apple’s policies. I respect their right to manage their platform however they want, however I am philosophically opposed to the existence of their review process. I am very concerned that they are setting a horrible precedent for other software platforms, and soon gatekeepers will start infesting the lives of every software developer.”

Creating a ‘middleman’ as Joe mentioned, is something that developers would quite easily get frustrated with. Instead of developers being able to fix it themselves, they have to work through a middleman (in this case Apple).

Rules, restrictions and a review process do not really make it a developer friendly medium to sell applications. Meanwhile the web is ‘still unrestricted and free’, if Apple made it difficult for one of the world’s biggest iPhone app developers, imagine what it would be like for all of the others? Hence why Joe Hewitt has decided to return to his roots as a web developer.

“I am returning to my roots as a web developer. In the long term, I would like to be able to say that I helped to make the web the best mobile platform available, rather than being part of the transition to a world where every developer must go through a middleman to get their software in the hands of users.”

The Facebook iPhone app (currently the most popular application in the history of the iPhone) has had some major bugs-namely one I noticed whilst using it myself. When users try to view a friend’s profile page, each users profile reads “User has no recent posts”.

FaceBook has responded in regards to this issue:

“this is the result of a backend Platform API issue, not the iPhone app. We are pushing a fix shortly.”

Joe Hewitt’s departure from Apple iPhone application development marks the first major boycott from Apple’s App store as a result of its approval process. The store has been surrounded by controversy about their inconsistent and arbitrary approval process for developer applications; with everyone from Nine Inch Nails front man Trent Reznor to search giant Google getting caught in its web.

If boycotting Apple’s iPhone for application development becomes a trend it may create many opportunities for both Microsoft and Google to claim market share with their own mobile app platforms. For now however, it’s just one developer (albeit a fairly well-known one) leaving the world’s most popular mobile application development scene.

Thanks to Apple’s prodigious marketing of their iPhone smartphone, and the global financial crisis ushering people to reach for their pizza coupons rather than their dinner jackets, both iPhone and pizza sales have gone up spectacularly since the beginning of the financial crisis.

Domino’s Australia has made an ambitious first attempt to finally marry the two in a free iPhone app suitably named “Domino’s”. Make no mistake; this powerful little app can have hot, fresh pizza delivered to your door within half an hour.

I can just imagine the App Store tagline-  ”Hungry? There’s an app for that.”

The true beauty of this app is the level of customisation you’re allowed for your order; everything from half an’ half to a completely custom built pizza! And all with a butterfingers-friendly and deliciously smooth user interface.

It’s not without its marketing prowess either – turning the iPhone sideways renders a more complete photo of the pizza in question, adhering to the age old tactic of placing the product in the customers’ hands. You’re also given the opportunity to track your orders from point to point, mimicking the logistics tracking paradigm – which for some people functions as a way of building up a sometimes illogical anticipation for product delivery.

You can type in those all important coupon codes and even select their special deals; and of course choose delivery or pickup. It’s a truly twenty first century pizza ordering experience.

This app is one of the first of its kind in Australia. Domino’s major competitor Pizza Hut launched their own app in the US, and with the immanent release of their localised Australian Pizza Hut iPhone App, it could spell the end of the clumsy automated voice recognition their phone-order customers put up with today.

Judging by the broad fascination of Aussies with all things iPhone and all things pizza, I would suggest that it may well take off.

Services such as GeoCities offered the world a web as Tim Burners-Lee had designed it – all of a sudden anybody could stake their claim to their very own corner of the World Wide Web, without the need for in-depth technical know-how, and all for the cost of a dial up plan.

In a world predating Twitter, where the word blog was largely unknown and to own a dot-com was to merely buy into a corporate fad – Geocities gave a voice to those who were previously muted responders, forever blurring the lines between media producer and media consumer.

Within a few short years it became home to millions of tech-savvy users worldwide. It was a place to write down your thoughts, host useful and individualised information on topics of interest and upload countless scanned images, creating a loosely bound collage which peered into the lives of everyday people. It was your very own hyperlink to share with friends and family; and with enough effort – it became your own personal hangout online.

As the web entered into the 2000s and the first emergence of social media and media sharing began to gain popularity. It marked the beginning of the end for the now humbled free D-I-Y website. Services such as MySpace, Flickr, YouTube and blogger offered everything people wanted out of Geocities, with many times the user friendliness, and with the sole object of encouraging social interaction.

With the emergence of these outlets the web changed drastically. People are still uploading the same media, they still stake their claim to the World Wide Web, but this time it is distributed more liberally – and instead we began calling more than one place ‘home’. You’d write your thoughts on your blog, keep up appearances on MySpace, host your photos on Flickr and eventually upload your videos to YouTube and organise your social life on FaceBook. You would link them all together and create your own personal web within an infinitely larger network – not having been exposed to a single line of code.

But it’s all too easy to forget what sites like GeoCities had shown early internet users. Many a budding web designer sought their career after fumbling about the HTML which drove their GeoCities account; and many more went on to realise the internet as a medium to reach out and be heard; to connect and organise and arrange the social artefacts of our lives. So a sincere farewell to GeoCities – one of the most successful online amateur content communities and a thank you for guiding the evolution of the World Wide Web.

Well, the brilliant minds at Google have developed what the IT and media crowds are pegging as the next big thing – “Google Wave”.

A few people have described it as “turning email on its head” and Google spokespeople describe it as E-mail developed for the users of today-rather than 40 years ago (when email was first developed).

So let’s take a look at what Google Wave is all about!

A wave – in essence – is always moving, ever changing and never still; it is truly dynamic. What Google has done is to turn emails, which are considered ‘static’, into something that’s more dynamic.

For all intents and purposes Wave is a glorified IM/Chat program (such as MSN, Yahoo Messenger and AIM). The major difference being that it mixes IM & chat with emails, and has potential for rich media such as large file videos/pictures and the ability to communicate with new ‘fads’ such as downloading and updating one’s twitter status’.

Here’s an example of how the whole ‘Wave’ process works. Here’s a brief example of how it can work for you [from Mack Collier’s website “The Viral Garden”].

“I can create a Wave that’s 5 paragraphs, and send it to Beth. Beth can then go in and break up the Wave and reply to each paragraph. I can then reply to each point Beth made.

Now let’s say at this point we decide that we want to bring Amy and Jason into our Wave and get their ideas on what we’ve been talking about. First, they are going to see a Wave that’s probably confusing as hell, because it will be my original 5-paragraph Wave, which was then broken into 5 parts (where Beth replied to each paragraph), and then I replied to each of Beth’s replies. So it looks like a complete cluster to anyone that joins the Wave at this point.

But Google Wave would give Amy and Jason the ability to ‘replay’ the wave and see how it was created. They could first see the 5-paragraph wave I wrote, then see Beth break it down into replies for each paragraph, them my replies to her replies. So it’s less confusing”

Source: http://moblogsmoproblems.blogspot.com/2009/10/my-first-date-with-google-wave.html

One hundred thousand (that’s 100,000) public invites were sent out on 30^th September this year and don’t worry too much if you weren’t one of those lucky ones. You can sign up with this link below or wait for someone to contact you/wait for the wave to reach you eventually!

https://services.google.com/fb/forms/wavesignup/

Both Google’s press release information and the experience of beta users reveal a lot of excitement but in varied cases it seems to be a lot of hype about something we can potentially (and currently) do without. It is however an application that may become a standard amongst other e-mail providers such as Live hotmail and Yahoo Mail – so that’s where the value lies. However unless there are a few improvements between now and the launch date, I will stick with the old, static, snail (e)mail.

It came to my attention as I was feeding an addiction I’d like to call ‘JB disease’ that Australians are able to purchase media such as CDs and movies/concerts/TV shows at their whim, thanks to their availability and accessibility – which has skyrocketed in recent years.

To acquire your new favourite sitcom you could simply go down to your local store and purchase a shiny new copy, buy it online through stores such as iTunes, or download it through ‘other means’.

But the question is: which is actually the better option?

Currently prices on virtual stores such as iTunes sell the same season of Heroes for roughly $10 less. However, when you include costs such as an internet connection, computer upkeep, electricity and the potential for your hard drive failing or computer crashing, there is a lot more at stake than a cost of $60.

Furthermore, how long does it take us in Australia to download a whole season of a television show? A bare minimum of a few hours for most of us and possibly a month for those stuck on the old 56k modems (although if using 56k I’ll assume that you have bigger issues than fast broadband to deal with).

This is becoming a major issue in Australia – internet speeds are too slow. Some of us are still paying an exorbitant price for our internet and have a small ‘cap’ on your downloads for the month. (That is being currently being resolved with the federal government’s broadband scheme rolling out as this was being written).

However if you were to go online and order the same TV series (add postage and handling costs) or go to your local store to buy it on DVD, it may cost a few dollars more but the only other costs you have to deal with are just transportation to the store.

Having a tangible copy which includes extra features has many benefits that don’t just stop at the end credits. Your brand new copy of the TV series will not have to deal with crashing hard drives, internet bills, download speeds, download caps and the like. You can simply place your disc in the DVD or Blu-Ray tray; close it up and away you go.

The DVDs are there for whenever you want to watch them, on a machine that by now any movie-watching Australian would have in their living room – the now humble DVD player.

Until download speeds are one par with that which many countries in Asia (such as Korea and Japan) have access to, downloading a movie or TV series is not something many Australians will be doing for a while to come. It may be a while before my JB calling turns into an iTunes calling yet!