I guess what I’m trying to say is you better start looking at Andriod. Its not going anywhere but up.

Applications may only use Documented APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any private APIs.

So it’ll work for everyone else, just not our iPhone and iPod users.  Which is starting to become a resounding theme.  It’s like Steve is doing everything they can to make the iPhone the “IE6″ of the mobile community.

Yesterday I read on Wired a quick how to on getting your web browser to think you’re an iPad. This enables you to see all the cool new iPad friendly sites that have been launched. This morning I tried it out for myself. The quick hack was really as easy as Wired said  it would be and it was pretty fun to see what was out there for the iPad. Some sites/interfaces have drastically changed.

What are some sites that you regular iPad users would recommend I visit?

Then strolls in this great little write up and video linked to from Engadget: http://www.engadget.com/2010/04/05/adobe-air-developer-demonstration-one-game-five-platforms-all/

iReverse running on OS X, Windows 7, Ubuntu Linux, the iPhone, a Droid and the new iPad, explaining how it took only a series of seriously tiny platform-specific wrappers to make his program function on each.

Now it looks like I might have to move AIR forward in my queue.  With that kind of potential it could be a major advantage for applications that aren’t tied to the platform specific functionality…and that’s a lot of app ideas!

Now sit back, and prepare to be…INFORMED!

1. Identify your support team: for me it’s my family, my wife especially.  She is always there to calm me down when I get frustrated or give me a small nudge when needed.  If you don’t have the support of your family or friends (or whoever you depend on) starting something will become exponentially more difficult.
2. Get inspired: Beyond my family and of course Reid and Holly, I was inspired in two different ways.  First, Carla, who I had originally met through work and has become more of a friend was a big inspiration when she launched her first application a little over a year ago.  I followed her story and even read her books and that was definitely a big inspiration.  On top of that, I attended a great conference last year, Big Omaha, which included a great line up of very inspiring speakers.
3. Just Do It! (this blog post is not sponsored by Nike):  You’re never going to have your process completely perfect.  The application/product/service you’re looking to create/provide will never be absolutely perfect for everyone.  So at some point you need to pull the trigger and take a shot at it!
4. Use the resources available: The absolute best resource that I found was SCORE.  Basically, it’s an absolutely free service provided by business experts in your community that just donate their time to help you gain the knowledge you’ll need to start a new business.  Priceless.
5. Don’t get intimidated by the details: Last  year at Big Omaha during one of the many great speeches Jason Fried of 37 Signals made a good point that really hit home for me.  Don’t get stuck on the word “entrepreneur”.  It’s such a loaded word.  It makes you think that you really need to have everything figured out before you can even think about starting something.  That’s not the case.  Anyone can start a new business…anyone!

I’m sure I’ll expand on this list later, but this is a great place to start.  The majority of the work starting a small business is just convincing yourself to do it, the rest is just a matter of doing the work.

Technically, I’m in the middle of starting a small business. It really doesn’t feel like it most days, being that its just a business based on software and the business includes two lifelong friends. Both of those factors take a lot of the paperwork, overhead and hassle out of the reality of starting a small business. Really the idea of TriMutiny was something that Reid, Holly and I had been mulling over for a few years. After graduating we all ended up going into wonderfully complimenting fields and the idea of starting a company together slowly started to percolate in our minds. There were some small complications, such as, we all live in different time zones and we all lead extremely busy lives but we’ve found a way to use these complications to our advantage.

The every day advantages from starting a business of your own are endless.  Some of my favorites include learning new technologies, building my portfolio and having a great outlet for new ideas or skills I want to advance.  When you start a new business, you can start it doing anything!  There is no one to tell you what you should be learning or how to do it, you can make all of those choices yourself.  I’ve found that these ideas and goals just tend to multiply themselves and so you find yourself just trying the time to fit in all of these great ideas with where you’d like to take your company!

So I guess what I’m trying to say here is…if this is something that is sitting in the back of your mind…go for it! Manage your risks and take your time, but there’s no penalty in starting the process and seeing where it takes you!

Unfortunately, there isn’t a knowledgeable associate there waiting to help you out, so what is a person to do?  Well, it’s not up to the customer, it’s up to the app store and the creators of those apps (you) to describe the product effectively in order to allow the user to find the application they are looking for.

I’ve read some good explanations, from the quick: App Store SEO: Using Specialized SEO Techniques to Promote Your App by Teresa Lane to the more descriptive: How To Successfully Promote Your App: iPhone App Marketing by our good friend Carla Kay White.

For the most part the basics come down to making a good first impression.  App stores are in the infant stages of properly utilizing meta data to classify the apps that are displayed on their shelves, but they are slowly getting better.

First and foremost, the name of the app is king.  You need something catchy but you also need it to be descriptive.  Finding the proper mix is tricky.

After the name, you’re really hostage to the constraints put on your by whatever app store you’re dealing with.  You will most likely though have access to things such as keywords and description to help you along, so figure out how to use these to your advantage.  It is very similar to the early days of internet searches.  It’s a crude system currently, but you need to do what you can to make it work for you.  The weakness of the system is the lack of intelligence that can be built into the searches due to the very minuscule proportions of meta data available, but because of this you really need to be creative with your marketing.

Advertising outside of the app store is really where you really need to start to look after you’ve done everything you can inside the app store when you set things up.  Social media is a major factor and old fashioned networking is always a valuable tool.

So once you’ve read up on the standard configuration type settings that are available to you to describe your app inside the store and you’ve done your initial networking through social media and locally don’t forget to get creative with how you get your app out through the noise.

Here are just a few of the great ideas I’ve seen for getting your app out beyond the noise:

1. Creating / Joining a tribe: this is something that Carla speaks about in her “Inside Secrets to an iPhone App”.  The basic idea of it is to see what group of people your app really strikes a chord with and networking with those people to get your message/app to them.
2. Pick a vertical: even if your app can be used with multiple different groups of people, it may be a good idea to keep the app’s focus on a specific vertical that you think will be most useful
3. Think like a website: As stated previously SEO inside an app store is going to follow most of the same rules SEO follows on the web, so tuning your product page and product itself to fit with a solid SEO strategy will get you a long ways.

These of course aren’t the only good ideas out there, so what are some of the good ideas you’ve seen strewn about the web?

Most of what I do is labeled with a pairing of letters. IA/UX/ID/BA (information architect, user experience, interaction designer, business analyst). Regardless of titles, each role requires me to know what is possible, what isn’t possible, and what will be possible when developing an application/experience.

What can I design for? When an application is developed, what are the pieces that make it work and how do those pieces work together? What are we programming this thing in and what are the limitations? Is it actually usable and how do we track this? … and lastly, how can I communicate all of this to the developer, designer, client, and end user?

In the agency world you have to master these questions/answers for a variety of audiences and platforms as they are ever-changing on a project to project basis. Focusing the above questions/roles in one niche category is an aspiration of mine and is what drew me to the event.

This past weekend I was able to relax a bit and focus on two of my favorite things, music + application development, at the Boston Music Hack Day. London, Berlin, and Amsterdam hosted events earlier this year. The next is in Stockholm in January 2010. Though this is a music and development focused event, the methods and analytics practiced reach outside the realm of music+tech. Besides hacking, there were circuit bending workshops and panels on Music Discovery and the Future of Music, with members from Last.fm, LimeWire, The Hype Machine, Songkick, Pitchfork, and more. [ panel list ]

Music Hack Day, defined.
“A full weekend of music hacking. Software + hardware + art + the web. Come build the future of music.” … or now popularly dubbed “A Dungeons & Dragons conference for music geeks.”

User / Data Analysis and APIs
In a previous life I used Director (and lots of Lingo + Xtras!), Max/MSP, midi+animation, external controllers, etc. to manipulate the sound and signals that midi carries. But now there is so much more to consider, manipulate, and most importantly, to analyze in this medium. Music is a choice medium since there are so many datapoints to play with, manipulate, visualize, etc. Two of the high-level aspects of this are as follows:

1. There is the community aspect: providing a tool to users, sharing, feeding recommendations, tracking user behavior based on playing habits, serving up related content and like-minded users…

2. The next part (where my mind is blown) is the more detailed analysis of data: Spectral and textual, the psychoacoustic way that the brain perceives music, key and time signature, mode, pitch, timbre, harmonic content, structural aspects of how the score is segmented… [ wow, The Echo Nest ]

What is really exciting (and the main focus of a Music Hack Day) is what happens when you make the APIs public to developers who want to find ways of making 1 benefit from 2 or vice versa. What happens when we introduce resolver frameworks or simply stretch the boundaries of the APIs, tools, and data we use every day?

Thank you Music Hack Day for opening my mind again to what is and will be possible in this space. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about what I learned, the inspiring people I met, and the things I want to create. I skipped over a bunch, but wanted to recap briefly from my perspective. To learn more about what is being done in music + tech see the links below.

Hack entries, winners, and in-progress
http://musichackdayboston.pbworks.com/Projects

a couple of my favorites:

Outlier.fm
http://musichackdayboston.pbworks.com/Outlier-FM
http://www.outlierfm.com/

Paul’s Music Wreckomender
http://musichackdayboston.pbworks.com/Paul%27s-Music-Wreckommender
http://playlist.echonest.com/Wreckommender/

Companies to watch and tools to use (if you aren’t already)
there are so many more, so check the MHD site.

The Echo Nest
http://www.echonest.com/

Playdar
http://www.playdar.org/

SoundCloud
http://soundcloud.com/

Last.fm
http://www.last.fm/

Noteflight
http://www.noteflight.com/

Thank Yous
A big thanks to the following for putting on such an awesome and inspiring event: Jon Pierce of @betahouse (@jonpierce), Paul Lamere of Echo Nest (@plamere), Elissa Barrett (@elissab), Dave Haynes of SoundCloud (@haynes_dave), Brian Whitman of Echo Nest (@bwhitman), Echo Nest (@echonest), and Microsoft for the great facilities.

Also, special thanks to friends Tim Heineke (@theineke) and Marcel Corso (@marcelcorso) of Twones for being my buddies for the weekend. I now know where to find an emergency endodontist in boondocks Massachusetts on a Sunday.

word/phrases of the days
crab core, scrobble, content resolver, put a donk on it

shameless plug
http://soundcloud.com/hollyhabstritt

my not so great pictures from the event
My Boston Music Hack Day Flickr Set

So now I’m back to Verizon and trying out the new Motorola Droid.  As Reid mentioned earlier, I wanted to write just a quick “first impressions” review of the two phones side by side.  Here’s some of my initial comparisons of the two phones.

1. Usability – This is a major difference on the two.  Apple did a great job with the iPhone, making the functionality extremely user friendly.  Everything that you try to do on the iPhone seems very natural and understandable.  There are very few things that you need to look up directions on how to do and most of the tips and tricks that come in handy are for quicker ways to accomplish things.  For the Droid, things are a little less natural.  The reason for this is a combination of a few contributing factors.  First, it’s a new operating system.  A lot of the niceties that you get with the 3GS are due to complaints from the previous releases.  Secondly the amount of configuration that is allowed.  With the iPhone you are required to do everything one certain way for the most part…you can’t change it, you just have to go with it.  That restriction leads to a very controlled and comfortable but somewhat constricting experience.  With the Droid, the limitations are fewer, but because of this the functionality can be a little less understandable.  Finally, the fact that manufacturers and service providers are allowed to customize the UI according to their needs also leads the Droid to be less user friendly.  The winner in this category…the iPhone.

2. Service -This really isn’t even a fair fight.  If you’ve seen any of the great map commercials lately, you know the difference in their 3G capabilities.   Along with that, even the areas that AT&T claims to cover on their maps…come with some exceptions.  One of those exceptions for AT&T happened to be the neighborhood that I live in so service was laughably horrible.  Going back to Verizon though puts me back on the better network and also gives me more options of friends and family to call for free…due to the fact that a vast majority of the Midwest is on Verizon service.  Winner and really the only competitor…the Droid.

3. Applications – Now there’s no arguing it, the iPhone has thousands of apps to pick from, this is their major advantage.  On the other hand though, the iPhone has thousands of apps to pick from and this is their problem.  Yes, you read that right.  Here’s the issue, with all of those thousands of applications, you get an extremely large amount of noise coming out of the app store.  Many of the apps are either extremely low quality or really nothing that you’d be interested in owning.  The Android has the advantage of not being as popular, so the market is a little less crowded with low quality apps, but still main stream enough to allow you to find the applications you really like.  Advantage here is close…but would still have to go to the iPhone.

4. Features – The main feature list is pretty similar between the two.  For me, the one big difference (at least currently) is the addition of turn by turn navigation from Google for the Droid.  It still amazes me how easy to use and how packed with features the Google Navigation system is.  With everything from turn by turn voice commands to live traffic updates…the feature list on this application alone is incredible.  Oh…and it’s still in beta.  I can’t wait to see what refinements and possible additions will come in the next year or so.  The features of this application almost makes me feel bad for the people who own a $400 navigation system.  My $200 phone does everything their navigation system does…and everything their iPhone in their pocket does.  Advantage here, definitely the Droid.

Now you might be interested in more comparisons like astetics of the phones or hardware differences…but for me…these are the important factors in a phone and overall I would have to give the advantage to the Droid.  In a year from now it might be totally different, but that’s what keeps it exciting.

All the news this week in the cell phone industry has been about the new Motorola Droid which sold 100,000 units over the weekend. One of the members of TriMutiny actually just upgraded to this phone and plans on talking a bit more about it on our blog soon.

I’m not so much interested in the Droid specifically as I am the OS that comes along with it. Google Android is obviously turning the heads of phone manufactures and consumers. In fact, by years end 18-20 new phones running Android will have been launched. I’m really excited to see what Google does with Android, after all, most of Google’s projects turn out to be huge successes. One thing that I’m curious to see pan out is the way the OS is implemented on different phones.

One thing Apple has going for it is standard design. All their phones are running very similar hardware. If you’ve used on iPhone you’d feel at home picking up any iPhone and using it. Android on the other hand is being run on multiple sets of hardware, multiple networks and with multiple means of implementation. Take a look at these phones reviewed by CNET… no two phones are the same. They’re not even similar. No, I don’t expect every phone to be cloned after the first, but how will Android developers compensate for this? I need to do more research, but I can imagine it would be difficult to develop an Android specific app for phones that have totally different hardware and capabilities.