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A nice video by design thinkers, Gravity Tank, that takes a look of what people feel about phone applications.

It makes a change to see real people talking about applications instead of just reading the data.
 

gravitytank // Apps Get Real from gravitytank on Vimeo.

Posted by Ed Cotton Most engineers tend to think ads are a waste of time because they believe their great products will sell themselves.

There's only one problem with this theory. What if you are trying sell an iPhone application?

The iPhone ecosystem is mighty crowded with 30,000+ applications for sale which means you not only need a great application, but also an ad campaign to go with it.

A new arms race has just begun and it looks like Birdhouse is leading the pack.



Posted by Ed Cotton While most of the leading applications on Apple's 30,000 plus store are games, the company is keen to inform us that there's lots of meaningful things you can do with your iPhone.



This ad? (below) does a great job at highlighting all the recession-busting applications that you can get for your phone.

It's a nice example of a brand not only connecting with the current zeitgeist, but explaining how their products can provide real utility and benefits to help.

Via Down The Avenue.


Posted by Ed Cotton While everyone yesterday was in awe of the long overdue announcement of cut and paste for the iPhone, I found myself fixated by the art of Jorge Colombo.

Jorge is no ordinary artist, he's an iPhone artist; someone who uses his fingers and a downloaded application to make art. It's debatable whether MOMA or The Metropolitan will ever stage an exhibition of his work, but that's hardly the point.

To me it demonstrates how far the iPhone has come in redefining the experience of mobile technology and shows just how un-phone like the device really is.



Posted by Ed Cotton There's a great interview in Mobilecrunch with one of the members of the iPhone Dev Team.

This is not a unit inside Apple responsible for updating the phone software, quite the opposite; it's a team of unpaid renegades who are tearing up the phone and hacking it to pieces. These are a group of highly motivated, unpaid folks who just love the challenge.

Here are some of the key points I took out of the piece.

1. Real time transparent communication is key

The group use IRC and file serving technologies to make sure all team members are kept in the loop

2. Intelligent groups can self-organize

The group has no need for leaders, each person is smart enough to understand their role and find one that matches their expertise.

3. The group is unified by a core motivation

"The same interest that I had with tearing apart my Speak & Spell as a kid, then my Tandy CoCo, then my Atari ST. I want to see what is inside and see if I can make it better. If I find something cool I tell other people about it."

4. The core motivation has an additional edge

The attitude of the Apple brand to the way in which it restricts the way the phone is used.

"Apple places restrictions on what you can run on the device. They impose draconian restrictions on the type of application that you can run, they don’t allow applications to run in the background and they even restrict the applications by subject matter or if they compete with their own applications."


Posted by Ed Cotton One thing I've been noticing recently with the iPhone, is how interested people are in adding very analog applications to their phones. Things that seem pretty mundane and basic and somewhat counter to the technological advances of our time. Many of the most successful applications simply take something solid and dependable from the real world and put it onto the phone- flashlights, pints of beer, flames from Zippos and clocks like the one you can see below.



A have a couple of thoughts on this.

1. It's almost as if we cherish these icons as perhaps relevant relics from the past and revel in the irony that we are installing them on an uber-sophisticated piece of technology. "Look what my iPhone can do"- and humanizing the technology.

2. There's value in show. Turning on an application and showing someone you have a lighter or a pint of beer has share and social value. They can be talked about and the obvious joke is that they aren't physical things or they have limited functionality compared to the real thing.

3. It's also about the emotive power of design in the physical world and our desire to hang on and keep a little bit of this. The first software for the iPhone had a calculator that was modeled on the original Braun, the latest version uses the classic HP scientific calculator, both are iconic and in the real world versions.

4. Perhaps if there's one weakness of the digital world, it's hard to experience the sense of "touch and "feel", these applications remind us of the power of the feeling we have in an analog world and an acknowledgment that it's something we are losing. 

5. It also serves as a reminder to designers that perhaps the most powerful applications aren't so high tech, but instead ones that stir up emotions and feelings inside us- such as nostalgia.

Clock via Core 77


Posted by Ed Cotton