Nullable<Richard>

The truth is that TOP iPhone apps makes whole lot more money from mobile advertising than what Pinnacle Marketing reported.  AdWhirl is a startup. Their reports could be a little optimistic in my opinion. I NEVER clicked on any of those ads on iPhone app regardless free or paid. Nevertheless, the number is encouraging with top 100 in the Free Apps list make $400-$5000 a day, even at the low end that works out to around $12,000 a month. The following is the detail of AdWhirl report.

Adwhirl iPhone Advertising Snapshot

Unity demo is going to expire in a few days. I haven’t really playing with it much. I felt that Objective-C is still something that I need to know to build up the programming foundation. I ordered “Programming in Objective-C 2.0″ book, my first Objective-C book, from Amazon. I read through the first five chapters in about an hour. It contains very basic concept on OOP foundation and language features, such as loops and array, as well as basic instructions on using Xcode IDE. Note, the word is “basic”. I think the learning curve hasn’t hit me yet. So far so good, I guess.

One can’t really learn how to programming without actually doing it. And all I have done so far is reading. I also felt that I probably don’t have two years to learn everything about the language in order to get any commercial iPhone app submitted and approved. The new job will start in a week and is suppose to keep me busy for the next six month. Being a casual iPhone programmer was never my goal, which does require serious commitement. A new strategy is needed.

Never being an early adapter myself, I decided to try iPhone OS 3 beta 2 on my iPhone on the second day of the beta announcement. It didn’t take long to download the firmware and installation also went smoothly. I played around with new features like MMS, stereo bluetooth (nice!), voice recorder, and cut-and-paste. To my surprise, cut-and-paste is very welly done. Apple really took its time to do it right. You can and select any visible text on the screen and save to clipboard, and the text will be available to any other apps. You can even cut an image and past it to your email. Viola, multiple photos attached for your email.

Unfortunately, iPod function stoped working after a week of beta testing. Whenever I fire iPod, it just crashes to home screen. Great, I can’t listen to my favorite poscasts anymore. Sure enough, that’s the risk I’m taking with jumping on the lastest and greatest. Anyway, I figured I had enough fun with iphone OS 3 beta, and I could probably just wait for a month for the official 3.0 release. So I downgraded to 2.2.1 and now iPod is working again. I can be singing and dancing again.

Perhaps it derails from my original goal to start iPhone app development by learning Object-C, Cocoa framework and work my way up, eventually to be able to deliver iPhone apps in App Store. I’ve seriously looking into Unity3D as an alternative iPhone app development framework since it got my attention in my last post.

I’ve been playing with the IDE. The resources and online demos and tutorials seem to be quite intuitive and easy to learn. The most actractive feature to me is that the Unity framework supports both C# and Javascript as a programming lanuage. Recently Unity3D released the iPhone extension for the iPhone developer community. It generates XCode project at the end so can be loaded in XCode and compiled in Apple accepted format.

Unfortunately, Unity is not cheap by any standards. The latest version Unity 2.5 Indie costs $199 with basic features, and $1499 for the pro version. To get iPhone Basic, adds $399; or $1499 for the iPhone Advanced. To get everything it would cost $3000. The site only offers 30 days trials for the Unity Indie. You can’t even get your hands on the iPhone Basic without paying first. Another disadvantage is that Unity is made for making Games only, on both Windows and Mac. If you are not interested in making games this is probably not the tool for you. However, most iPhone apps are games, I believe.

More or less, knowing some Objective-C is probably a good idea. Unity is unlikely the holy grail neither. It should be interesting to see how this gaming framework would change the how iPhone app could be developed.

Update:

After contacting Unity Technology and expressing interests in acquiring a trial version of Unity iPhone, I was provided with the following URL to download the latest Unity iPhone. The file isn’t directly available on Unity website and it’s for Mac only.

http://unity3d.com/unity/unity_iphone.dmg

You can also download and install the latest version of Unity from the following URL:

http://unity3d.com/unity/unity.dmg

Is this the .NET programmer’s dream come true? Time to ditch Objective-C, or is it? Read on…

Mono, an open source implementation of the .NET runtime. It currently support C# 3.0 specification; means you can write C# in other platform other than Microsoft Windows. C# is also an EMCA standard developed by Microsoft. The latest C# 4.0 is still in the works.

“According to Novell’s lead Mono developer, Miguel de Icaza, several applications in Apple’s App Store are powered by Mono…” What? Are you serious? I do not understand what “Static compilation” means, neither “ahead-of-time (AOT). All I know that it is what made Mono possible to build Apple-approved iPhone apps. I thought it is nothing more than proof-of-concept initially; then I read the Miguel de Icaza identified almost 40 applications in Apple’s App Store developed in Mono C#.

THIS IS HUGE. It implies, whether Apple likes or not, that iPhone developer could potentially ignore learning Objective-C. That’s one giant hurdle down. This is C#/iPhone developer’s dream come true. I’m definitely keeping my eyes on this.

Open source Mono framework brings C# to iPhone and Wii

After seeing other iPhone optimized WordPress blog sites, I was eager to give WPTouch pluggin a try. If you haven’t done this with your WP blog, simply

1. visit bravenewcode.com
2. download WPTouch (currently version 1.8.1),
3. extract the zip file,
4. FTP to WP plugins directory,
5. then enable the plugging through admin.

That’s that!

See it yourself, please visit blog.zhengchen.com on your iPhone or iPod Touch.

Update:
There’s a mySql syntax error at the bottom of the mobile page (”SELECT * FROM wp_posts WHERE ID in() order by post_title asc”) It looks like a bug. Hopefully it will be fixed soon.

I haven’t made much progress. It’s not like that I’ve been slacking off. My heart sunk when I found the new iMac just came out with better specs and cheaper price the week after I got the new 20″ iMac. I can’t believe this is happening. Who would thought of that? I carefully examined return and exchange policy offered by B&H, which offers return within 15 days of purchasing. I so lucked out. it was right on the 15TH DAY when the new iMac released!

I’m returning the 20″ iMac, and getting the 24″ instead. So, patience. Continue reading up on those Cocoa tutorials…until the new iMac arrives.

The iMac is finally here.

The set up took less than five minutes. While patiently waiting to download iPhone SDK and XCode, there is enough time for me to play with the new toy. Well, mostly the Photo Booth. It is such a fun program. OK, mission accomplished! J/k…well, if I started this quest a year ago, there would be very limited resources on iPhone programming. Now, there are many freely available tutorials and guides on the Internet. The real question is what path I should choose to go down. Should I pick one iPhone programming book and stick with official Apple-labeled development tutorials; or should just read boardly (maybe blindly) till things start making sense?

The initial goal is to pick up Objective-C quickly and launch my first iPhone application in App Store. I don’t have anything in mind what apps to develop. I am, however, for sure that creating another Flashlight application is not one of them. There are already tons of tutorials on the Internet how to create an iPhone Flashlight app.