http://theoatmeal.com/blog/apps

I do question whether this was a metric that developers found easy to manipulate in the early days of app stores that may not necessarily hold true in the longer term, a great comment I once read stated

” 3/10 cent a gallon for water delivered straight to the home.
$1.50 gallon for a jug in isle 13 at your super market
or $1.75 for a 20oz bottle at the checkout counter.
Are these all the same product? Do they even compete?”

This statement lead me to read the great book Positioning The Battle for your mind by Al Ries and Jack Trout, whilst on the face of it, it is all common sense I do wonder how much is being applied to the current mobile app stores and the shovelware mentality of ship it and they will come

I have long been the advocate of the difference between $ 0.99 and $1.99 is nowhere near as vast as the chasm between free and $0.99. If you can convince your users to pay for your product are you really going to put off 50% of these people for the sake of $1?

Thankfully we do seem to be leaving the dark days of fragmentation in the Java mobile world behind us, it is fairly easy to get lulled into a false sense of security.

Shai’s closing comment on the article highlights the sort of “discovery” that device specific information, when not in the public domain, may cause many developers to burn time.

To quote Shai:

Applications are expected to explicitly declare their support for touch to utilize the full screen of the device. This is done using the following Jad flags:

Navi-Key-Hidden: true
Nokia-MIDlet-On-Screen-Keypad: no
MIDlet-Touch-Support: true

Notice that the last entry (MIDlet-Touch-Support) is required by current/older Samsung/LG devices but is illegal by the MIDP specification hence fails on Nokia etc. so for support on these devices you would need a copy of your JAD (only the jad) with this attribute added.

Read Shai’s full article, which includes some good tips on using LWUIT on touch devices http://lwuit.blogspot.com/2009/11/optimized-for-touch.html#ixzz0VvlYKZXm

Here are some anagrams of the two, that made me laugh this morning , please feel free to add!

@dan_mcneil Terminable Goo

lame rebooting

to range mobile

I belong to met

And one that dont quite use all the letters, but the brand in 2 years?

Tango mobile

The New York times leads with Yahoo’s profit rose nearly 8% whilst TechCrunch leads with Yahoo’s revenues Drop 13%

Great news,now all that needs to happen is for some “sexy” phones to be announced in Barcelona next week that are utilising the Android platform

There is a $25 sign up fee that is paid via Google checkout, far easier and simpler process than signing up for Apples app store

Will take an application through the process as soon as possible

Here is Googles primer for Java programmers coming to Objective C and cross compiling from Java

Google Objective C primer