Taptopia Blog

The plane just hit the tarmack a few hours ago and the sounds and sights of San Francisco are already soaking in. I immediately made way to the Moscone center and picked up my registration badge and began mingling with other excited attendees. It is going to be an exciting WWDC 2010! I am looking forward to the keynote address to be delivered by Steve Jobs.

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For those of you following Taptopia, you may have been wondering where we have been over the past few months. For those that guessed we're working on a new project, you're right...

We're excited to reveal APPCON - Mobile App Developer's Conference & Expo. The event is scheduled for August 24 - 26, 2010 and will be held in Las Vegas, NV (USA) at the Paris Hotel & Casino. We're partnering with Convexx a long-time, world-class show organizer to make this the best mobile App developer conference bar-none. Please check out the site and help us celebrate the APPCON launch.

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I have been recently noticing the use of WiFi in some cool implementations.  It is nice to watch companies innovate and evolve a technology beyond a pure data pipe.  Sure, the following references are sending data over WiFi but the use in each case is somewhat unique.  The underlying technology is no longer the "selling point" for the solution, it is now more a more subtle technology enabler.  Here are just a few that caught my eye.

Parrot AR.Drone - This has to be one of my favorites.  Parrot, an established manufacturer in the Bluetooth space, has developed an augmented reality (AR) quadracopter.  Their big push is for game developers.  They have a full game development API available and a great use of 3D tags for animation.  Take a peek at their product ad and their AR gaming platform.  My neighbors are going to hate me in the near future.

WiFi Scale -  Nice concept and integration.  This provides great utility for a task that is typically not automated.  I foresee many integrations across a number of applications for this type of consumer product.

Tivit - Interesting device based on the new mobile television standard.  The device streams content to many WiFi-enabled device like Blackberries, iPhones, Netbooks and even Notebook platforms.

WiFi Energy Harvesting - RCA (wow, they still developing new technology?) demonstrated a very interesting concept.  They were at CES showing an energy cell solution that converts WiFi signals and charges a power cell.  I see huge benefits here.  If this really works, is efficient, and can be manufactured cost effectively, this could be a game changer.  I will be watching this one.

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Apple started it all.  The outrageous popularity of their app store has spawned app stores for almost every mobile platform available today.  Heck, there is even an app store for Media Center PCs.  With popularity comes control.  So much so that the company that started the whole craze had started to draw some serious fire over the latter part of 2009.  Apple was being questioned in the public blogs and even in the mainstream press for some questionable practices when it came to approval of various apps.

We have only been in the game a relatively short time and have begun to see dramatic changes.  Our first app submitted in late August 2009, Tap Groups (iTunes link), was approved in exactly the published average at the time, 14 days.  Our second app focused on the event services vertical , IAEE (iTunes link), was submitted in mid November 2009 and took 11 days for approval.  We recently landed two new accounts for our event services offering to cover the International Poultry Expo, IPE2010 (iTunes link) and the International Feed Expo, IFE2010 (iTunes link), taking place in Atlanta from January 24 - 29, 2010.  Both apps were submitted in early January 2010 and were approved in less than 48 hours...no kidding.  Others have also noted faster app approvals and less scrutiny on particular app constructs which were almost always a recipe for a rejection.  

It is refreshing to see that Apple is responding to the developer community and changing their process.

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Several years ago, some of the Taptopia team worked together on another start up and were pursuing several technologies and solutions.  One of the areas we saw as an interesting combination of technologies was mobile phones and satellite radio.  At the time, the footprint of the satellite receivers was fairly large but we knew that the technology would eventually reduce in size.  Our thought was to create a UI for the emerging smartphone platforms that could control portable satellite receivers and programming.  That very solution has been recently released for the iPhone iPod touch platform.  This is a great combination of mobile technology that provides a great benefit to customers. 

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There are so many consumer electronic devices that people use daily that charging becomes a factor in daily life.  You know the scenario, you are in the airport and heading to your connecting flight and your phone battery is about to die....what can you do?  Until now it meant searching for that one, very popular, outlet at gate 37 and you are at gate 15.  Samsung has installed power stations that are becoming very popular and they have stated that they are going to increase the number of installations in the future and expand to university locations.  This is a very nice sight when you need to kick out that last email or SMS before your flight.  Look for the expansion of this and other charging stations in the near future.

As out tag line says, "and a cool technology or two...", this is one of those.  Our team investigated this technology several years back and it just wasn't ready to productize.  This last year, two companies, WildCharge (now marketed as Pure Enegry Solutions) and Powermat released solutions that use inductive charging techniques for consumer electronic devices.  These are now affordable and enough devices use some form of USB as a mechanical interface that the popularity will only grow.  WildCharge actually licenses their technology to others for a branded solution.  This is a great approach and will only enhance their position.  I believe we will begin to see this technology to be included in the handset design, like the Palm Pre/Pixi Touchstone, very soon.  Once that proliferates across the major hardware manufacturers, we will begin to see integration within the automotive industry.  How cool would that be to have a charging pad on the dash for all of your re-chargables?

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Organizing code within XCode is fairly straightforward when working on simple iPhone Apps. However, as you scale up the Apps (or what you're doing with core framework code) you will need to start diving into iPhone Static Libraries under XCode. Unfortunately this is an area that's not well documented but the process is very straight forward if you follow the XCode documentation on the XCode Build System - specifically how to use Targets within a project (or cross-project references) to link static libraries together.

The process of creating and setting up an iPhone static library took about 15 minutes following the XCode documentation. However, after creating my static library target and putting some files into it, I ran into a very cryptic error:

/Developer/Platforms/iPhoneSimulator.platform/Developer/usr/bin/libtool failed with exit code 1

Ya, wonderful. Very helpful. I was able to troubleshoot the problem by resorting to the xcodebuild command line to build my library target:

xcodebuild -target <LibraryTargetName>

The resulting error messages made it obvious what the problem was:

/Developer/Platforms/iPhoneSimulator.platform/Developer/usr/bin/libtool: can't locate file for: -licucore
/Developer/Platforms/iPhoneSimulator.platform/Developer/usr/bin/libtool: file: -licucore is not an object file (not allowed in a library)
Command /Developer/Platforms/iPhoneSimulator.platform/Developer/usr/bin/libtool failed with exit code 1
Command /Developer/Platforms/iPhoneSimulator.platform/Developer/usr/bin/libtool failed with exit code 1
** BUILD FAILED **

Yup, the default target setup linker options for an -licucore - which won't work (at least for iPhone 3.0 SDK). Fixing the issue is a cakewalk now that the cause is known. Select the static library target in the main project window, right click and select "Get Info" (or hit Cmd-I), select the "Build" tab, and in the search box at top, type "Other Linker". You'll see the Other Linker Flags setting with the -licucore flag set. Simply delete the flag and the project will link and build without problems.

Note: a second gotcha is Apps that you link your iPhone static library to should include the "-ObjC" Other Linker Flag option if your static library contains Objective C code (see Technical Q&A QA1490). If you use Categories you may also need the -all_load flag (try compiling without it, and if it fails, add and recompile... it creates fatter Apps but is a workaround if you can't link otherwise).

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A recent development in the mobile analytics space is a welcome collaboration.  Flurry Analytics and Pinch Media have announced that they are merging.  Both companies provided essentially the same service with Flurry beginning to innovate and add more features.  The companies offer developers the ability to embed analytical algorithms within mobile applications to monitor things like how many times an app is used, how long the user used the app, where the user is located, what OS platform is used, etc...  They also offer advertising and referral models for mobile devices.  Think of it as Google Analytics for mobile applications.  The concept is a great utility for mobile developers and provides very useful information.  It will be nice to see how the new entity evolves.  I predict great things to come.

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With all of the recent talk and confusion around the AT&T data plans, looks like they are still in hot water.  We all know that the popularity of of the iPhone has brought challenges to the network.  Once it becomes part of the public conscience, you know you are in trouble.  It sure doesn't help when your network is imploding and your spending, or lack thereof, on network enhancements is publicized.  

There are more and more rumors of a Verizon iPhone so things are going to be very interesting in 2010.  I personally hope this brings a reality check to AT&T and they listen to their customers.  Competition is a great thing...

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There is an interesting phenomenon taking place in the whole Personal Navigation Device (PND) and Smartphone arena.  Dedicated PND devices are dropping in price to a commodity level.  Traditional PND manufacturers like TomTom are jumping into the iPhone app business and charging ridiculous prices (iTunes link) for their apps.  

A game-changing event occurred when Google announced that they are porting PND functionality to the new Droid platform.  Free of charge.  This had a definite impact.  TomTom dropped their price, along with others, in the App Store.  Everyone can see where this one is going.  My guess is that we will see an iPhone version at some point.  If I were betting my business on Smartphone turn-by-turn, I would start to worry.  Changes are coming and the once dominant PND and value-added app space is quickly drying up.

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