Demian's Blog

Another case of iPhone devs reporting the full lifecycle of their AppStore experience.  These guys used a third party to develop their app and earned back their $5k dev costs quite quickly.

An interesting read.

I have a lot of customers who are confused about the pros and cons of selecting web versus native development solution for the iPhone.  And now that Google has clearly bet the farm on all mobile development going web with HTML5, it’s good to hear some other opinions on the matter.

This article gives some valuable insight:

1. Offline Mode — The ability to continue to use an application when you are not connected to the Internet.
2. Findability — If you’re not in the App Store, people won’t be able to find your application.
3. Performance — Javascript on mobile is too slow to use for application development.
4. Device Attributes — The need to access things like the camera, gps and the accelerometer.
5. Monetization — The ease with which people can and will buy your application.

To find out more about using MySQL in iPhone development see the full details over at the eval-art website.

Drew Crawford has written an excellent article How to find an iPhone developer that describes some of the details involved in building an iPhone app and dispelling many common myths.

• All you have to do is find a developer
• No, your app is not “simple”
• The good developers are always busy
• But this five-star company on eLance offered to make my app for $10!
• How to find a developer
• If you don’t have $5k, walk away

Read Later is an app that lets you save web pages on your iPhone/iPod for offline reading.  Not the first app to do that?  Well it’s integrated with delicious.com so any bookmarks you tag with a to_read tag (or any tag of your choice) are detected by the app and downloaded for offline reading.

And when you’re finished reading the article on your iPhone, hitting the ‘mark as read’ button sends a request to delicious and your read_later tag is removed.  Nice, simple and clean.  And currently free in the AppStore.

The articles are a pleasure to read on the iPhone.  All flashing ads, graphics and irrelevant distractions are removed for you.  You just get the cleaned text for easy reading.  The app’s description says it best:

• All web pages are cleaned and stripped of irrelevant adverts for easy reading on the iPhone.
• Store hundreds of  webpages on your iPhone
• Read Later remembers which article your were last reading
• Sync your iPhone with your Delicious account to get our latest bookmarks

Apparently there are currently 1.5m “to_read” and similar tags on delicious so there must be a lot of folks using this system to flag articles for later reading.  Check it out.

This is by far the most informative and interesting article I’ve seen on the subject to date.

Check out this exhaustive live of features, very handy for those who don’t have 8 hours a day to dedicate to their iPhones