Apple is all about usability: Api usability
Posted by admin in Apple World, iPad on March 10th, 2010
For most of people Apple is synonymous to “easy to use”. It is because the most part of apple reputation is because of its easy to use products. From iMac and MacBook to iPod and iPhone and now iPad, they are all easy to learn and easy to use. Simple iMac design make it a perfect choice for the people that never touched a computer before and iPhone doesn’t need anything be said about.
But the end user products are not the only thing that is easy to use from apple. The notion of usability has influenced all other things from Apple including the SDKs and development environment. As an iPhone developer, I must say that the iPhone SDK is one the most easy set of APIs to program with. Everything is designed to be self explanatory. Don’t get wrong. It doesn’t mean that it has a good design from software enginneering point of view. I have developed using Java, C# and C++ using MFC. Java for example is design very nicely to be expandable not redundant. You can creat sophisticated designs using java but for doing many small things you have to do a lot and they are usually not nice and clean. As opposed to that, iPhone API is not that well designed for modifiability and extensibility but it is super convenient for writing typical apps. It does make. Lot of sense when a feature of an API is going to be used in 70% of the applications it should be very easy and fast to use that part. Most of the classes have all the methods that you need in a typical application.
As an example take the animation methods provided in UIView. It is not certainly good abstraction to provide thoise methods in UiView class as they already exist in Core animation API but they make creating simpler animations super fast and easy to implement. In this way more develpers are willing to use animations in their apps.
The things missing in iPad.
Posted by admin in Apple World, iPad on February 23rd, 2010
There are lots of things that people with to have on the iPad. Among them I guess the followings are more important.
1- front side camera: if the iPad is going to be used in business and should be able to replace a netbooks in many respects, it definitely needs to have a front side camera for video conferencing. Can you imagine how many more people will be attracted to this device with addition of only this single feature.
2- Stylus: yes you heard it right. As it might sound out dated, it has a lot of uses if iPad is going to be used in every day activity. Of course stylus doesn’t make any sense on a phone but on a tablet with big screen, come on. It’s got a large screen for reading document, who doesn’t want to be able to annote them or writing noted. Of course you can do that using your finger but it is a lot more natural to write using a pen. iPad can differenciate between finger touch and stylus and ingnore the finger touches when you are writing.
3- a mini USB port: well I am not very much in favor of this but lots of people are tired of adapters for every thing. Let me directly connect my camera to the device with a cable that is found everywhere.
iPad : is it worth buying?
Posted by admin in Apple World, iPad on February 10th, 2010
iPad(taken from apple official website)
The short answer is YES. Here is the long story.
The long waited iPad is finally here. My first impression was, well, it is a huge iPod touch, what is it really good for. But after a while I can see it is a great thing to have. It is absolutely a new category of device and this is one of the problems that caused the first negative impressions. Because when apple introduced its previous products, people knew how to use them. iPod was a music player people knew what a music player is good for. iPhone was a new smartphone which was a known category of devices. But this kind of tablet is not very known to people and I think this is one of the problems with the apple’s way of introducing it. Apple should show people the real world use-cases of this device.
There are many features that people say it lacks. One of the main things it is missing and I would also like to see in future versions is some sort of multitasking. But it is a new type of device, why we would like it to be exactly the same way a laptop works. No one asks for multi tasking on a playstation or a XBox despite they are very powerful machines. Because it is not meant to be used that way. Many things can go wrong if it proved the old fashioned multi-tasking. I as a developer would like to know that I can use some amount of memory for my application. I don’t want the user experience of my app to be changed based on how many of other apps are running.
The best solution for now is fake multi tasking now is to solve it in software. the applications should save their state before closing and restore it when opening. This gives the multi tasking experience to the user. It can solve 90% of the cases where multi tasking is needed. For the rest 10% such as playing radio in the background apple should come up with something efficient and useful.
So I think despite the first negative impressions it is a very good device and in fact it is a revolution. It might not be as exciting as iPhone because it has a lot of features in common with it. It is a device which we haven’t seen something similar to it yet.
Snow Leopard shows battery health
Posted by admin in Apple World on December 9th, 2009
Snow Leopard Battery Condition
Although Snow Leopard is known for its under the hood improvements, it contains a number of features improvement. Lots of these features has been addressed in the Apple’s official web site and many blogs. One of the great features that hasn’t been discussed is the features added to the battery menu. When you are charging your battery in Snow Leopard, it will tell you how healthy is your battery. Your battery may be in three different conditions:
- Good
- Replace Soon
- Replace Immediately
Hence, you know when your battery needs to be replaced. As you know, the new built-in batteries last 3 times longer than the previous ones.
Space Mission ( 3D shoot’em up ) is Ready for Sale on iTunes App Store – Promotion Codes
Posted by admin in iPhone & iPod Touch, iPhone and iPod Games on August 5th, 2009
Space Mission for iPhone and iPod touch is now ready for sale on iPod Touch and iPhone. Here is a list of promotion codes you can use to download the app for free. Please leave a comment with the number of promo code when you picked one. You can purchase the App from here on iTunes.
You can read more about this game in other posts of this blog.
Promotion Codes:
1. H6NTFF3NAW6W
2. MT499WM7NWW7
3. PHTNMFYENXHM
4. 64MNJPTXATEJ
5. 9HYE7W9H9KL3
6. HRXW4HHR7TJL
7. 9K49EEWA36WP
8. WRW493FKKLLP
9. FHWARK9RWHTL
10. 6W7MMTK3RY7N
11. 47LF6639PN9H
12. 64J6K36YPHTX
13. 3JLHYNT6YEF6
14. FLPR9YTPYFTX
15. KLX74WTYAWRA
Please don’t forget to leave a comment with the number of promo code that you picked. Thanks.
Video Review of Space Mission
Posted by admin in iPhone & iPod Touch, iPhone and iPod Games on August 4th, 2009
Here is a small video review of Space Mission game. It will be available on iTunes App Store in a few days. I would appreciate if you leave me your comments. When the game is released I will put a couple of Promotion codes on this blog. So check the blog soon to get a promotion code.
Space Mission Has been submitted to App Store
Posted by admin in iPhone & iPod Touch, iPhone and iPod Games on July 23rd, 2009
Space Mission has been submitted to App Store two days ago and we hope it will be available on App Store during next week. We will put a video demo soon. Here is a few more screenshots from different levels of the game.
New Macbook Pro 13″ – A great experience
Posted by admin in Apple World on July 23rd, 2009
I just bought a new Macbook Pro 13″ from Apple. It is quit a decent product. The unibody design is incredible. It feel so sturdy in hand and so light. The metal finish looks gorgeous. The screen is so bright so even though it is glossy it can be easily seen in places with high ambient light. I was first afraid that there is no anti-glare options for 13″ and 15″ models but It doesn’t make problems because it is so bright. But I really hope that we see anti glare options like 17″ model for the smaller models because it is more suitable for graphic design work.
The DDR3 memory affects the overall performance of the laptop in great extents. Even the 2.24Ghz model with DDR3 RAM is much faster than the old 2.4 model with DDR2. The other great thing is the battery life. It stays much longer and it really becomes handy when you want to take your laptop out without a charger. If you use it for productivity apps and put the display brightness to half it will definitely last for 7 hours. If you want to use it for more CPU intensive work I will work 3-4 hours which is still great.
I am pretty much convinced that I should go and get a 17″ inch as a portable desktop computer.
Space Mission – New Game Coming to iPhone
Posted by admin in iPhone & iPod Touch, iPhone and iPod Games on June 9th, 2009
We are almost done with our new game called Space Mission. It is a super fun flight simulation like game with very easy controls. You will enjoy playing it and hunting alien spaceships. We will put a preview video soon.
iPhone 3 is comming
Posted by admin in Apple World on June 5th, 2009
Finally we are approaching the WWDC 09. It is one of the most exicting events for the apple fans. We are waiting to see many things in WWDC this year. iPhone 3 is definitely one of them. The current iPhones will receive a major software upgrade, iPhoneOS 3.0. With this upgrade most of the missing features that the iPhone is blamed for will be added, such as copy/paste, push notification, more profiles for blutooth device ( including stereo bluetooth headphones). The device will get an upgrade too. I will definitely have a new improved camera. A faster processor. New 3G chip. More RAM. What I hope is an upgraded graphics chipset. The current chip is good but a new one with support for shaders and hence OPENGL ES 2 will bring a lot of potentials for creating new exiting games.
Video recording is definitely going to be added to the phone. But I hope it was not only for the new hardware and we all can have video recording with the software upgrade.
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