SharePlus, an iPad client for SharePoint

Yesterday we've submitted SharePlus Office Mobile Client to the app store, in what was Apple's deadline for the first wave of iPad apps to be approved :)

In a nutshell, SharePlus is a native iPad client for SharePoint, Microsoft's popular content manager. Existing iPhone clients for SharePoint don't support browsing in offline mode, this is one of the features we believe could make SharePlus stand apart from it's iPhone app competitors, plus the fact that it's a native iPad app, being the device an eReader, it's better suited for browsing document libraries, and we believe there's a niche of higher management execs, with the profile to buy an iPad, that have all their corporate information, such as Documents, Tasks, Meetings, Wiki Pages, stored in SharePoint servers.

SharePlus connects to Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (WSS 3), Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS 2007), SharePoint 2010, and all editions of SharePoint Online.

SharePlus comes in two flavors, a Lite version, with online browsing capabilities, and a Pro version with offline browsing support. Lite version is free, while the pro version will be priced at 9.99 dollars for version 1.0. We expect to rise the price in a second version, with offline edit support to 14,99, or even 19,99.
Here's a screenshot:

We hope it's accepted, and available for sale by next saturday, in the first wave of iPad only apps.

Review sites to promote your iPhone application

As the iPhone market gets saturated being noticed in the iPhone community gets harder and harder. A living proof of this is the gazillion sites that have spawned offering iPhone app reviews (kinda makes you wonder, whether you should be developing apps, or creating sites to write reviews :S)

Anyway, I believe in time some sort of PAD standard format will evolve, and there will be utilities to broadcast requests to a list of relevant sites automatically, until then we're stuck with a very tedious manual process, of emailing and filling forms gracefully requesting our app to be taken into account.

The following is the list of review sites we've gathered so far:

iPhone App Review Sites in English

1. Mobile Crunch
2. 148apps.com
3. free app a day
4. app rater
5. iPhone application list
6. iPhone App Reviews
7. Apple iPhone School
8. What's on iPhone
9. i use this
10. App Store Apps
11. AppStruck
12. App Shopper
13. iPhone Footprint
14. Got Apps
15. Unique Apps
16. App Advice
17. iPhone App Index
18. Slap App
19. iPhone Coffee
20. App Store HQ
21. Appolicius
22. App Chatter
23. Daily App Show
24. App Safari
25. App Craver
26. Apptism
27. Art of the iPhone
28. iPhoneAppReview.com
29. iPhone Game Network
30. iPhone Game Reviews
31. iPhoneGames.com
32. iPhone World
33. Native iPhone Apps
34. Slide to play
35. App Theater
36. Touch Arcade
37. Modojo
38. Touch Reviews
39. Buy me an iPhone
40. Pocket Gamer
41. iPwn Games
42. The App Era
43. AppGamer.net
44. Touch My Apps
45. The Portable Gamer
46. Appversity
47. AppModo

iPhone App Review Sites in Spanish

1. iAplicacion
2. ipa iphone
3. Blogtitlan
4. Esfera iPhone
5. Actualidad iPhone
6. iMacos

Before you start filling forms and sending emails like a zombie, make sure you read mobile orchard's post on five tips for getting iPhone Reviews.

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)