utopia 365 - some of our clients
utopia 365 iPhone Development Services

Tuesday 21 July 2009

Palm pre webOS - go get your Mojo on - but, is it an iPhone Killer?



The Palm pre (US) (UK link here) has caused a minor stir and lead to inevitable comparisons with the iPhone. Just Google Palm pre vs iPhone.

So, is the pre an iPhone killer? No, of cause it isn't. Is it a rival? Well, maybe. Or, probably more likely, maybe not.

When you think about it, Apple created a new market with the iPhone. They haven't really taken over or dominated the 'smartphone' market per se. They haven't really impacted on the the Nokia masses and haven't really impacted on the Blackberry crew - 'smartphones' are very niche.

The iPhone isn't just a phone, it's a super phone with cool bits and bobs for the iPod generation. It wasn't made as a smartphone, it wasn't made to compete with Nokia, it was Apple engineered to appeal to exactly the same people that buy iPods and Mac's. Clever, and only Apple have the brand to do it - copy Apple and you loose. Microsoft and many others have continually failed when trying to do the same thing.

It is my belief that the reason the iPhone took of so was purely because Apple made it and iPod owners and the 'cool' people bought it, and more importantly craved it, lusted over it and actually used it. The success of the iPod should never be underestimated when looking to the success of the iPhone. Everybody that tells you they don't want Apple kit is either lying or in self-denial. Mac vs PC = Mac everytime, iPod vs Zune = iPod every time and sadly for Palm, iPhone vs pre = iPhone every time.

Although, credit where it is due. Palm appear to have a lovely phone on their hands with the pre. I've only 'seen' it in the developers simulator, but it has a nice looking and snappy feeling UI that I'm sure will appeal to a lot of people, and developers. Of course as things stand, developers are limited to coding web apps for the pre, but that's no bad thing for a new platform. Palm provide the Mojo SDK which allows developers to produce apps using web standards such as HTML 5, JavaScript (heavily Prototype although you can use other frameworks such as jQuery as well, which is a huge plus) and CSS. They give you widgets for most of the controls you'd want to implement and CSS styles and what not for implementing a proper pre UI with your app - I am actually really impressed, honestly. It's a platform that many web developers should be able to get into with a bit of tuition and practice - although, as ever, the pro's will always get the most out of it.

One big plus point for Palm is that they appear to be far more open and approachable than Apple are from a developers point of view. Working with Apple is often not a nice experience, and very often a hugely frustrating one. But in practice, developers troubles will have little impact upon consumers so it matters very little in the grand scale of things. We can't dictate what to develop for if nobody buys the said hardware.

We will certainly be keeping an eye on the pre and look forward to working with our customers on apps for it, but as an iPhone rival we feel it's unlikely that Palm can re-create the success of the iPhone and in particular the App Store - nobody else has.

I'm sure you'll be hearing much more from us about the pre and any pre developments we get into in the future, so please feel free to come back and visit us, or drop us a line if you want some work done.

Wednesday 15 July 2009

IE6 be gone...

It's no secret we want to see IE6 support dropped by everyone, but this little article gives us hope that the message is getting out (and we can hear the cheers around the world from other developers).

Have a read - surely you must agree?

http://u2w3.com/1b9db

Thursday 9 July 2009

Supercharge your SEO with 1 Tip!

SEO, no matter what people tell you and how much they charge is a dark-art! There are no guarantees as to how and when you will get listed in the major search engines.

Sucker?

Many of our customers frequently get 'spammed' by various organisations offering 'instant search engine results','get your site listed now' services if they part with their money. They obviously work (the requests) as these guys keep doing it, but thankfully the majority of people are able to spot something that seems too good to be true (with many replying to these guys saying "well how did you find me if I'm not in the search engines?").

Prove you're worth it

On research there really are a wide variety of rates being charged for SEO. Some are justified but my advice would be that if you take on SEO services then agree a reduced fee for 3 to 6 months. If they are confident in their results then in most cases they will oblige. After the trial you can pay regular fees - which can then justify £200+ per month charges.

1 Tip that works

There is 1 simple thing you can do though to enhance your SEO. Blog - but not just any Blog. We really push the use of Blogger (which is where this blog is hosted). Why? Because it's part of google and in most cases you can write an article and within a few hours it's listed in Google! SEO is all about getting your content listed to be found, so using Blogger is a win-win solution. Generally the search results from Blogger tend to be quite high in ranking. You can brand up the Blog to match your site and all the hard work of management and hosting is taken care of for you. You then get another avenue of links and traffic pointing to your site, all of which generally appears quickly in Google.

blogger.png

As mentioned it's no magic pill, but it helps and other than paying for any design branding the cost is free. Free SEO that works.

Friday 3 July 2009

Weekly Planner

As part of our local community work (that's just us trying to be good guys when we can) we're working on a nice little Weekly Planner / rota for a volunteer Community Responders group (hard working folk who give up their free time to provide essential medical response). You can view their website here.

It's taken us a little while to get round to it with work commitments and what not (sorry Sue if you're reading), but the result will be Weekly Planner by utopia 365 - and we think it's looking pretty good right now.

A lot of our work tends to be fairly bespoke, but we obviously use great development community products such as Ruby on Rails and jQuery all the time. Our plan is to give a bit back and release this into the development community at some point, probably under a Creative Commons licence, but we'll announce more about that soon.

Click image for larger version

Renaming an Xcode project

If you're anything like me, you always start off your lovely new iPhone project in Xcode by giving it a cool name with a space in it somewhere - quite why I don't know, but I always do.

That's fine for when you're working in your development environment, but before you submit your App to Apple you have to ensure there is no space in the executable name. One way of doing this (that I've used many times in the past) is to create a new project and then drag all your code and resources back in.

This got a bit tiresome, so I thought I'd write a little script to automate it - but before doing so had a quick Google.... and Monte Ohrt has the ideal solution, a bash shell script to rename Xcode projects.


usage:
renameXcodeProject.sh <OldProjectName> <NewProjectName>


You can find it here. Perfect.


 
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