Preparing to Write Your First iPhone App. You’ve seen the statistics and glowing success stories and you’re interested in writing your first iPhone app.
Good for you! If you’ve never developed content for a mobile device, or if you’re new to software development, learning iPhone development can be a fun and rewarding experience. In future articles I’ll be providing you with tips and tricks for getting your first application up and running. However before we jump into the code, let’s take a step back to consider the building blocks of your first app. Will it make sense to your audience? As in all things related to software development, the goal of your app will be to provide a solution to a set of end users. One thing you do know is that your audience is on the go. Think “Pocket Computer” instead of Mobile Phone As an experienced web developer, the first thing that comes to mind when I hear the term “mobile phone” is limited functionality on a screen that’s too small. Consider the differences between the iPhone and iPod touch.
Help. Network scientists at Harvard: Nicholas Christakis, Laura Bogart. If a campaign volunteer shows up at your door, urging you to vote in an upcoming election, you are 10 percent more likely to go to the polls—and others in your household are 6 percent more likely to vote. When you try to recall an unfamiliar word, the likelihood you’ll remember it depends partly on its position in a network of words that sound similar. And when a cell in your body develops a cancerous mutation, its daughter cells will carry that mutation; whether you get cancer depends largely on that cell’s position in the network of cellular reproduction.
However unrelated these phenomena may seem, a single scholarly field has helped illuminate all of them. The study of networks can illustrate how viruses, opinions, and news spread from person to person—and can make it possible to track the spread of obesity, suicide, and back pain. Network science points toward tools for predicting stock-price trends, designing transportation systems, and detecting cancer. Photograph by Stu Rosner. Who will own the Splinternet? Apple vs Facebook vs Google. In the last month I have become even more convinced that the Splinternet is real.
This is not just one of the most important trends to hit the Web in the last five years, it's a war. Facebook and Apple want to own as much of your Internet experience as possible. I've used the term "Splinternet" to refer to a Web in which content on devices other than PCs, or hidden behind passwords, makes it harder for site developers and marketers to create a unified experience. Here's what's happened since we first started talking about it three months ago. It got picked up in articles all across the Web. Shar VanBoskirk and I talked to 70 interactive marketers about it at our marketing forum. The more we talk to clients, the clearer it becomes that the two biggest splinters, Apple and Facebook, are at the center of the concern. Apple's iPad appears to be off to a great start. By syndicating its identity and "Like" function to other sites, Facebook is in its own way colonizing the Web as well.
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