KEY POINTS:
I had the pleasure of going to Sydney to meet two people from Cupertino last week. That was Stan Ng, Senior Director of iPod Product Marketing, and Christi Wilkerson, iPod Product Marketing Manager.
Cupertino is the Californian headquarters of Apple, of course. Stan and Christi showed me some really cool apps and a couple of games that will be released soon (which I will talk about in more detail in another blog) and we talked about the impact the App Store has had on the iPhone, iPod touch and the world, not to mention Apple's financial performance.
In Apple's last quarterly earnings report, iPod sales were cited as growing 16 per cent, which is impressive for a recession, but iPhone 'and related products and services' grew 417 per cent.
So for this, my hundredth Mac Planet blog, I'll look at apps and the App Store. In the process, let me remind readers that the iPhone is, by far, the most popular mobile-phone gaming platform in the US.
Sure, it has only just over one per cent of the global cell phone market (that was Apple's target for 2008, for the record) but out of the top 10 models of phones used for downloading games in the US, four are iPhones.
This is according to market research company comScore (reported by Macworld). Contrast that with cell-phone maker Nokia, which holds a staggering 38.6 per cent of the world market, yet is hardly represented at all in game downloads figures.
This is not to say Nokia doesn't make a damn good phone. It patently does. What it points out is the power of the applications and games available for the iPhone, and the power of the App Store.
Why is this? A computer in the traditional sense engages with sight (the monitor), sound and touch (keyboard/tablet/mouse etc), not necessarily in that order of importance. So basically (and generalising horribly, as appears my fate) application writers have to engage those senses and make applications work across them, enabling you to write, do maths, create and manipulate graphics and all the rest of it, with audio feedback as appropriate.
This relatively simple set of input and output parameters has led to the incredible wealth and range of computer applications across the planet for Macs - and for PCs and Linux boxes and all that. They sing, they dance, they entrance, they do the books, contact people, organise lives, do maintenance ... and they can look very different from one another, even when ostensibly designed to undertake very similar tasks.
Then Apple put motion sensors into laptops. This was so the hard drive would, in theory, spin down and park its read/write heads safely between the laptop leaving your grasp and banging into the floor, safeguarding your data - in theory, anyway. I'm too scared to test it. Anyway, a ringing little chime (Sosumi?) must have sounded in someone's head somewhere in an Apple lab ... and the Universe expanded.
That's because at the same time (this is all my supposition; I'm sure the actual process was much more organised) Apple engineers were busy streamlining OS X to get it into a little device, all of which resulted in the iPhone and iPod touch application platforms of today.
So how did the universe expand? Because the small profile and portability and, dare I say it, the genius of Apple's designers has meant that an iPhone/iPod touch (and the iPod nano, to a lesser extent) has more parameters for software developers to cater to than a standard computer has. An iPhone and iPod touch senses physical touch directly, sure, through the glass screen - but they also react to motion and tilt.
Apple famously launched the App Store in iTunes at around the same time as the iPhone 3G and iPod touch came out, giving developers access to both an online marketing and dissemination tool (along with 70 per cent of all profits of any apps sold through iTunes) while giving consumers instant access to any applications that appeared in the App Store, as long as they were connected to WiFi or 3G networks or via their computers.
Now, tilt and motion detection may not seem much. But in the realms of application design, it really is. And - perhaps surprisingly - even Apple did not realise how much that meant at first.
Stan Ng admitted that the incredible diversity of the types of apps and just how they use the new features of the iPhone/iPod touch stunned Apple - a stunning that was gratefully received, I might add.
And yes, that's a tribute to the ingenuity of application developers.
And if you're wondering if any of these marvellous apps will be available soon for your non Apple mobile device ... Currently, they're still playing catch up. Microsoft Corp is apparently planning a series of new programs and services for mobile phones in response to Apple Inc and other rivals.
The offerings are said to include 'an online bazaar' for distributing software to cellular phones that run Microsoft's Windows Mobile operating system, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Personally, I think there's more to it than just online trading - I think it has a lot to do with having an ingenious device and operating system and a strong system for developers to access the tools and the means of dissemination.
But since Microsoft has standing in the mobile business community, the Corp may get some good traction there. Meanwhile, let's wait and see what others, including Google for Android, can come up with.
- Mark Webster mac.nz
