SmartUnits accepted in Apple's app store

Today we've received an email with Apple's confirmation that SmartUnits was accepted in the app store and it's available for sale. SmartUnits it's a unit converter utility application for the iPod Touch & iPhone, with support for several different unit types, among them: Area, Data Storage, Energy, Kitchen, Length, Power, Pressure, Temperature, Time, Torque, Speed, Volume, Weight, Flow, Currency, Fuel Consumption, Acceleration, Angle, Luminance, Data Transfer, etc.

It's the first application we've published on the app store, it was our hello world development on the Cocoa platform meant to train us both in the technology and in the business model, and in this sense it was a great app since it allowed us to learn a lot. In retrospect a lot of time went into polishing the details, testing it internally and improving things, we are quite happy with the outcome.

Granted, it's a very usual type of application, the one thing we implemented we haven't seen around is the ability to customize exchange rates, targeting scenarios where you are traveling, you are staying in some hotel and you know the exact exchange rate they are selling or buying with, which is close to the one on internet, but not quite, in SmartUnits you have the ability to override exchange rates with whatever value you like. Of course, we would love to hear any feedback you might have.

By the way, if you need a utility for the iPhone to make conversions between different units, or query what exchange you'd get on that foreign currency I might just have the right thing for you... ;)

Augmented reality

Last year I read a very good sci-fi book by Charles Stross, called Halting State. It makes such an excellent display of possible applications of augmented reality that I've become fascinated with the whole concept since then. In this book characters arrive to costume parties where costumes are completely virtual, cops use googles with overlays of criminal information and while patrolling the streets can spot who has a criminal record because it appears as a tooltip on the person while it walks, etc.




Augmented reality has the potential to have a huge impact in the way we live, and the technology to make it happen it's getting there fast. By now probably the best known example is Google Googles.

Recently the Augmented Reality toolkit was migrated to Silverlight, which in turn is very likely to be supported in Windows Mobile 7 by the end of the year, makes you think it's not anymore something confined to research labs, it's getting mainstream everyday. There are already several applications available for the Android, and iPhone markets, that make some basic usage of this concept, based on geotagged information, the mobile compass, GPS and image recognition algorithms.

In a first phase mobile devices will be the doors to this worlds of overlayed information. The following is a basic example of this.



As this technology becomes widely available the greatest challenge will probably be to stop thinking in terms of 2D windows, and change the mindset to make full usage of the possibilities in order to come up with the ideas that will be the hits of the years to come.



(this post is the sixth in a series titled technology watch for 2010)

Smartphones platforms watch for 2010

While Microsoft has been using the term Smartphone for years, some people claim that the Smartphone era started in 2007 with the advent of the iPhone device, and we agree :)

The iPhone was THE game changer on the mobile arena, but it's been three years since it's release and the competition is starting to catch up. Finally looks like mobile OS are being left to the big software companies and hardware providers are trending towards sticking with the hardware part. It's a good sign the market is growing, stabilizing, and becoming more mature, less and bigger players. This is good news for content creators, means less and more stable platforms and API's, which make for a safer training investment.

Our technology watch for this year is with the following players: iPhone (of course), Google Android, and Windows Mobile 7.

Android got a lot press with the Nexus One release, and I've read several tweets saying good things about it, it's definitely within our scope of interest, and we may do some investment there, if only to compare it, and borrow ideas. It's also true that the app store replica is not quite working as expected.

Regarding Windows Mobile 7, we are very excited with the news that are being spilled all over that it will support both XNA & Silverlight as programming platforms, enabling us, and all the MSFT developers's community to reuse knowledge and skills with it. We will start playing with this platform as soon as it becomes available on a beta version (RTM is scheduled for april). If WinMo7 deliver's on time and scope, the forecast is an application store that will get populated fast, and to be honest we would love a piece of that pie.

(this post is the fifth in a series titled technology watch for 2010)

Walking towards a more visual based programming paradigm (Workflow Foundation)

Workflow Foundation is a lightweight platform provided by Microsoft as part of it's .NET framework, to implement process driven solutions on top of it (stressing the...on top of it part, it's a low level foundation technology). It provides a visual designer embedded in Visual Studio enabling drag n drop based programming of logic components. It represents a visual language on which we can build the nouns and verbs the business speaks in, and doing so while remaining inside Visual Studio which is a top of the line development environment. In other words a platform upon we could build our own domain specific visual languages, that could range from document management solutions to mash up engines.

In 2006 the first version of this technology was released and it was going to change the world, and while it didn't it introduced some interesting concepts and it represents a serious investment in a trend that we think is bound to succeed in the long run. Visual modeling of behavior for specific parts of the system, with scopes narrow enough to maintain the complexity levels low, has the potential to increase the abstraction level to a point even the business user is able to express meaning without having to go through an IT guy. In a similar way as the content management systems opened the doors to end user content generation, Domain Specific Languages will open the door for user generated behavior, and Workflow Foundation may have a role to play in that.

In a month the second version of this technology is due for release, along with the new framework version 4.0. We've been investing on this technology since the beginning, and it's encouraging to see that Microsoft is using it as the foundation for several products, such as: SharePoint 2010, Microsoft's CRM, and BizTalk.

We are already building on the new version, and even though it's been completely rebuilt loosing backwards compatibility with the former one, we understand the new object model is cleaner, and simpler to grasp, and simple is good :) We expect some features present in the former version not included so far in the new one, such as state machines gets supported in the near future.

Time will tell what the level of adoption of this new version will be, and this in turn will determine our strategy to use and/or complement it in the best way possible, probably extending it for specific domains and scenarios. Business processes automation problems are everywhere, and the demand for user generated behavior is rising, since the cost to implement solutions with this sort of features is falling.

(this post is the fourth in a series titled technology watch for 2010)

The RIA Wars (HTML5 vs Flash vs Silverlight)

While ten years ago the battleground was the middleware, and which platform was the best to build the N tier app whether .NET or J2EE, today the battle has moved to the "thin client". Today the question is more of the type: I want to build a system with a rich content interface, great user experience, supported on as many devices as possible, with a lifespan of several years, which way should I go? HTML5, Adobe's AIR, Microsoft's Silverlight, or HTML+AJAX?

According to Steve Jobs the world is moving to HTML5. To be honest we have to say we like Microsoft's Silverlight platform, and we would love to see extended support on mobile devices for it. It's a platform that will enable programming web and desktop apps with the same object model and flows naturally for developers with a background in .net development. Recent rumors talk about Silverlight being demoed (is that a verb?) on the iPhone by means of using HTML 5 video tag. This could be a sign of things to come, maybe in the future Silverlight to HTML5 will be an IIS feature. Check out this HTML5 sample.

Flash on the other hand is platform that's widely adopted on browsers, but it's getting no love on the iPhone/iPad world. There are some efforts to compile actionscript into Objective-C apps, but seems the reasons are more political than technical, and if the lack of support is confirmed in time, Flash will not stand a chance against HTML 5. But only time will tell.

(this post is the third in a series titled technology watch for 2010)

The Rise of the walking tablets (HP Slate vs iPads)

In January Steve Ballmer showcased a HP Slate running on Windows 7, while some weeks later
Steve Jobs unveiled the iPad. We can say the race is on.

A new niche of multi-touch tablet devices means a new platform to port what there's already out there, and a new platform for innovation. Applications families we envision as suitable to be ported, meaning they could see some sort of benefit from this type of device are:

• Occasionally connected systems. Anyone with a door to door, on site, information retrieval task to do. Call it insurance agent, survey man, or visiting doctor (granted the iPad will miss a camera for this sort of apps).


• Document Management, in particular document browsing apps for every CMS in town.


• Reporting clients. Imagine eye candy interactive charts, olap client style.

Some innovation fronts we think are good candidates are:

• e-Learning. Have little Jim scribble his homework on the new device, copying diagrams and everything from the whiteboard, without having to type it in, and then share his work with his online e-tutor in ... India?
  
• Photo & Video editing/retouching. Zoom in that pic with both hands, then change those pixels, nice. Video editing could work as well if the horse power were enough, or shared with a ad hoc server.
  
• Art apps. Try new electronic music instruments, have a whole synthesizer on the tablet, create, compose, mix and share.
  

The good thing from our perspective is that the two biggest players in this new market so far (HP Slate, Apple iPad) work with technologies we have good expertise in, placing SouthLabs in a good position to take advantage of this opportunities.

(this post is the second in a series titled technology watch for 2010)

Living la vida cocoa (Cocoa based platforms & markets iPod Touch/iPhone/iPad)

The app store already hosts more than 130k applications. It's a thriving environment with 3 billon+ downloads, and now a new member is born in the family called the iPad. This is very good news for us to learn that a platform we've chosen to invest in keeps growing, and creating new opportunities.

New opportunities in this niche we see it coming from two directions, first a trend towards corporate applications. By now every CEO, and marketing manager has caught on to the fact that iPhone means cool, and that if you want to be anybody in the biz world you've got to have presence in the app store, and if possible you have to provide an iPhone access to your service.

The second direction is called iPad as a game changer programmed with Objective-C. The whole iPad hype is worth a post on it's own, whether it will be a success as big as the iPhone is too early to tell, and beyond the point. Apple releasing a tablet means only one thing, this will be the year tablets will become hot & sexy. Which leads to the second point, the rise of the walking tablets.

(this post is the first in a series titled technology watch for 2010)