Programming
24
Mar 10
iPad
I know I am late on this but I have been waiting to get a clear understanding of the device before making any comment. Now that I have access to the SDK and I have been playing around with the potential of this device (even if it is just in a simulator) I truly believe that we are going to see a different thinking in terms of application development.
Apple iPad
iPad isn’t the first tablet to hit the market. There were many tablet laptops in recent years. Most of them ran Windows and had a full scale OS behind them. Compared to those iPad doesn’t have a full multi-tasking behind it. Has a closed appstore. Has exactly one connector port. Zero USB connectors. Yet I still think that iPad is going to be a great device.
To figure out why iPad is going to be a great device, let’s think about it from a non-techy, non-developer point of view. Imagine a person who doesn’t spend 16 hours of their day in-front of a computer screen. They are the casual PC users. Most of their activities during the course of the day involve: checking email, chatting, surfing, playing games etc. For all these tasks iPad fit perfectly. Most people use their computers to work on stuff in Microsoft Word, preparing their presentation in Microsoft Powerpoint etc.
iPhone revolutionized the usability of smartphones. For the first time an average consumer could simply browse to a store and buy an application which automagically downloads itself, installs and ready to be used without using any cable or wires or instructions for the users on how to install it. Magical! iPhone wasn’t about the device itself. Yes multi-touch was amazing, yes the screen was good and yes it had an apple logo at the back but what really made it amazing was the Appstore. For the first time a developer could push their work to the consumer in straightforward manner. If you have ever tried to find a decent Blackberry application and then download it and then install it you will know what I mean. It was a painful experience. With iPhone it was a pleasure. All information safe and secure, I don’t need to pull out my creditcard for the purchase, it is already there all safe and secure.
Now as a developer I know that there are issues with Appstore. It isn’t a perfect world out there. So yeah I don’t agree with some of the things Apple does with Appstore. At times their approval process doesn’t make any sense. But from a consumer standpoint, it is exactly what I wanted.
Over the past couple of days I have been having discussions with the team on what would be a great iPad application. We have already decided to create a Champions App for iPad. But we wanted to see how we can leverage that big multi-touch screen to create creative applications.
I am excited. Very excited. This is just the beginning.
5
Mar 10
Our first iPhone application – Champions
The day is finally here. This morning our first internal application is out in public. Champions is a cricket application that gives you the power to get up-to-date game information quickly and easily. Our aim was to provide easy to use interface and a fun interactive way to see and follow your cricket.
So what does Champions do?
- Easy to read summary panels
- Games schedule
- Ball-by-Ball coverage
- Full scorecard
Why did we build this?
Frankly, there are a few cricket applications on Appstore that provide somewhat similar functionality but all of them lacked one thing – usability. I have written a complete review of Cricinfo’s cricket application on iPhone and you can read my frustration there. We wanted to build an application that will make cricket easy and fun to follow. So this is our first step towards that.
One of the main design decision that went into this application was the “summary panels”. We wanted to allow our users to quickly look at the game summary without scrolling or tapping too much. So we decided to create “summary panels” which give you a quick summary of the game and allow you to view full scorecard or ball-by-ball coverage of the game quickly and easily.
This is just version 1.0, we hope to add many features in our next release.
Give it a try and tell us what you think. If you like the application please leave a review.
29
May 09
Google Wave – What Does It Mean?
If you are a nerd, or a technology enthusiast, then you must have heard about Google Wave. I mean literally it was all across the web, from twitter to techcrunch (aren’t they both the same?) Anyways, if somehow you missed it here is a video that you must watch.
So what is wave? why am I talking about it? While the demo itself is simply amazing and the application looks like the next generation of Gmail evolution, what excites me more than anything is behind the scene technology.
If you are a web developer you might remember those good old days of web, when Javascript was a “client-side validation” scripting thingy. Now with the new and upcoming HTML 5 and Javascript ECMAScript5 coming to almost all browsers, we are seeing a new powerful platform. One that can help us built really high quality web applications.
So what’s all that special about HTML 5?
To get some context around this, let me recap what we currently use. Most of the websites (pretty much all of them) are currently on HTML 4 standard — which is a decade old standard. Web has evolved therefore HTML standard needed to evolve too.
So HTML 5 is being developed since 2004 and so far it is still being specd out. Which means that it will change over the next year or so before it is finalized, but the guts are out there now.
I won’t go into a lot of details about HTML5 in this post but would like to touch upon two things that really stood out for me:
1. Structure
How many times you have defined your HTML with class/id attributes structure it with header, footer, content, sidebar etc? HTML5 fixes this issue by providing new elements for representing each of these different sections. So elements like <header>, <nav>, <aside>, <article>, <footer> etc.
Makes it better for everyone to write and read the HTML code. Search engines can target your content and designers get to leverage it as well.
2. Video & Audio
We all have been embedding youtube videos for a while now. There is one in this blog post. HTML really didn’t have any way to allow embedding video and audio content easily into a website. So people had to use flash. So now in HTML5 we have an <video> and <audio> tags. Along with DOM API to manipulate and interact with the video and audio.
There is a lot more to the story. I will write in more details about the upcoming Javascript changes and what it means to us web developers. I am truly excited at the possibilities that it will bring to the web.