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I’ve been reading a lot of Asymco since John Gruber linked from Daring Fireball a few weeks ago. Great analysis illustrated with lots of graphs.

Take a look at this one, from Android’s Pursuit of the Biggest Loser:

I thought these were great points:

Speed. This shift of profit occurred over an unprecedentedly short period of time. Three years is no more than two product cycles in the industry and it’s an order of magnitude faster than what happened historically to other industries.

Disruption is the diagnosis here. The incumbents were caught in the headlights. Disruptive innovation leads to asymmetric competition and this is what we just witnessed. History has shown that the shift of profits is usually the last stage of disruption and is usually irreversible because the change in business models cannot happen at the rate of change of profit transfer.

There are a couple of good points in the comments as well, in particular about HTC and about where value is created if all the components are commoditized.

The title is pretty dead on. Microsoft dropped the ball, and Apple, and to a lesser extent RIM have come in and disrupted the other players.
In Google’s business model, there’s a huge benefit to complimentary products and services to be commoditized, and they’ve come in and swooped up all of these suddenly desperate players who’ve seen their businesses commoditized.

photo credit: Arlington County

I’ve been working on an app that stores a substantial amount of data in HTML5 local storage. Works like a charm on all the browsers/platforms I’ve tested, with one exception: mobile webkit on the iPhone and iPad. There when you try to overwrite a key that’s already been stored, the subsystem throws an exception indicating that the storage limit has been exceeded. I’ve reproduced this on OS 3.2, both in the simulator and actual devices.

The workaround is to first delete the key, then store the key/value pair. Not great, but at least it works.

Anybody who has been to our office knows I am an Android fan. My prediction is that the Android platform will end up with a much, much larger install base than iPhone OS. Originally, I felt this way because you can get a Android phone on every carrier for a lower cost than the iPhone – many of them are now free with a contract. This is good enough, but I have a new insight. The Android OS does a great job of directing your attention to highly important information. As such, its easier for new users to pick up and for busy people to use. How can this be? You should argue that the the Android OS so similar to the iPhone OS. You are right. However, it comes down to usability. The majority of people out there won’t explore their device to find information. They just want the phone to do the work for them. If it doesn’t smack them in the head it might as well not exist. Android has two crucial features that make it a helper more than just a smart phone.

We have a number of clients who have taken a hard look at MonoTouch. Objective-C was just too much of a technology shift for them with their C#/Java/Ruby developers. Now with the revised SDK agreement and it’s section 3.3.1, it looks like XCode and the C-derived languages of the 1980′s are in everybody’s future.

Now along comes HTML5 with it’s offline caching of resources, it’s offline storage (key-value and SQL), and it’s Canvas. Throw in the high performance of the new crop of browsers, and you see where this is all headed. And with WebGL, well, check out this port of Quake II by the GWT team. Yep. That’s Quake II running in the browser.

Offline storage on on the iPhone is limited to 5 meg (10 meg if the user permits it), but that’s still pretty decent for an online/offline app. And you can absolutely give users part of the experience of a native iPhone app with a custom app icon and a startup screen. Will this type of app replace the native iPhone app that needs the sales channel of the AppStore? No. But in the short term, it’s a good option for companies looking to develop lightweight mobile apps for all WebKit capable devices.

photo credit: Mushroom and Rooster

I can still remember how I felt the first time I deployed a a Java application from the WinNT desktop where I had developed it to a pair of Solaris servers. It was either late 1998 or early 1999. Up to this point most of my experience in cross platform development had consisted of the surprisingly difficult and painful task of tweaking the code and header files of open source programs to compile on ever so slightly different flavors of Unix. Forget about crossing the Unix/Windows divide — that way lay madness.

This was one of the first servlet-based application outside of Sun, and so it was still unproven technology, but when that webapp was ftp’d and installed and ran against that Sybase back end just like it had on NT, it struck me as deeply weird, unnatural and…wonderful. Would I, finally, as a developer, be able to write once and run anywhere?

Well, the answer was a resounding “sort of.” Java never really took off as a desktop platform, but it inspired other cross platform runtime environments, like Flash and Ruby. The Balkanization of software development platforms seemed, if not at an end, then at least in remission.

With the advent of powerful and widely available mobile platforms, it seems that we’ve experienced a relapse. Apple recently revised section 3.3.1 of it’s SDK agreement to read:

3.3.1 Applications may only use Documented APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any private APIs. Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine, and only code written in C, C++, and Objective-C may compile and directly link against the Documented APIs (e.g., Applications that link to Documented APIs through an intermediary translation or compatibility layer or tool are prohibited).

Many blog posts have already been written. Perhaps the best responses can be found here, here and here. My thoughts? Lawyers get overzealous and put all sorts of unenforceable things into contracts on the off chance that it might stick. This one strikes me as unenforceable.

Beyond the above bit of silliness, there’s speculation afoot that the iPhone will singlehandedly kill of Flash. Why develop for Flash if the use can’t see it on an iPad, the reasoning goes. And if all we were talking about were the demise of inappropriately flashy corporate web brochures, annoying web adverts and a few video players, not one would care. But as with most cross platform runtimes, there’s more here than meets the eye.

Flash/Flex is, for example, an excellent data visualization platform. Drawing fancy graphics efficiently even in a native environment is no mean trick. Animating vector graphics with millions of points demands prodigious effort on the part of developers. Having to do it twice or three times for different operating systems means it will likely only get done for one.

If Flash ceases to be a viable platform, it will kill off some really useful software, or at least make it less available. Let’s hope that doesn’t happen. Otherwise “porting,” that least useful of development tasks, will become a ubiquitous verb again.

So Opera Mini for the iPhone got approved and is available in the App store since last night.  I downloaded it this morning and should say I am mighty impressed with it. It is zippy, fast and intuitive.  There was a quite a bit of speculation around whether this would get approved by Apple.  I m happy that Apple approved it.

I did notice a few quirks with the Browser but they are in no way deal-breakers. From my brief interaction with it, the browser looks awesome to me! I dont deny Safari being a solid mobile browser itself but with Opera out now, its “Bye-Bye Safari” for me

Opera Mini for the iPhone

This year’s Day of Mobile had a number of interesting tracks, including the ever popular hack-a-thon.

In the hack-a-thon, developers worked alone or in teams to build applications that targeted any one of the mobile platforms (iPhone, Blackberry, Android, Palm, Windows Phone) and presented their applications to the attendees to win prizes.

Our own Mike Laurence, who won the in in the open source category for developing an iPhone application for the Lighthouse issue tracking service. In three hours.

How? By using our recently released Core Resource Framework, a local/remote resource management framework that accelerates the creation of API clients, our soon to be released DynamicCell project, and integrating with the Lighthouse API. Pretty sweet.

I talked to Mike about it afterwards, and here’s what he had to say:

“Three hours is a pretty short time to develop an application, but this was a good chance to test out the Core Resource framework. I’ve been working on the framework itself for the last five months or so; for the hackathon I decided to see if I could actually make a working app in 3 hours. I ended up creating a Lighthouse account (bug tracking website) for the project, and because Lighthouse has a nice API, that’s what I used as my source. I did get an app up and running in 3 hours, which was pretty exciting. It even looked decent, due to the other open source project I announced (DynamicCell.”)

The Core Resources framework is available now, and look for an announcement on the DynamicCell project in the next week or so.

We’re building a fair number of iPhone and iPad applications now, and it’s great so have someone like Mike on the team and contributing back to the community.

There’s still a lot of internet chatter about why you’d want a tablet anyway. I think there’s a big space between the laptop and the iphone, and that in particular, the iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch will take over from a lot of purpose built devices that deliver specific high value functionality. Here are a few examples:

1. The daily commute. It’s a simple matter of ergonomics here. I will use the iPad, sold with a cheap data plan when I’m sitting down on the El, rather than the iphone. Because it has a bigger screen, and it’s already connected. I won’t use my laptop, because it doesn’t come with a data plan (or only an expensive one that I won’t buy), and it’s pretty uncomfortable to use in a cramped row of seats. I’ll use it instead of a laptop because the form factor works much better, and because I will have bought the data plan bundled with the iPad.

2. The eBook reader. I’ll use it instead of a Kindle because it will be good enough (or better), and I can do a lot more than read with it. My guess is there will be more people that read on the tablet than who buy a dedicated reader. (Just as there are more people who do photo sharing on facebook than on flickr.)

3. In the Kitchen. If I’m in a situation where a sealed, mess resistant device with a big screen is a big advantage (like a kitchen) then I will use the tablet. I will prefer it to the iPhone because it’s bigger and I can look at it while I’m doing something else, and I will prefer it to a laptop because the keyboard will not get gunked up. There are already devices retailing around $300 to store and retrieve your recipes in the kitchen – an iPad with the right recipe app will run rings around that.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the Skype Video Phone, part of a trend towards trading needless complexity for simplicity and ease of use. It’s also on the wrong side of another trend: The trend away from single purpose mobile devices to flexible mobile platforms.

For a while there was a trend towards more and more purpose built digital products, from ebook readers to portable picture frames and pocket size digital cameras, all the way to to digital recipe readers ($299) and tablet pcs with tough cases, handles and barcode scanners for the medical industry.

The iPhone, the iPod Touch and the soon to be launched iPad signal a reverse of that trend. Apple has designed and built flexible platforms that combine the ease of use and simplicity that single purpose devices with the flexibility of general purpose devices, and that is proving to be a compelling value proposition.

On the iPad, for example, you can easily get as good or better a recipe reader experience as you would with the demy digital recipe reader, a better digital picture frame or slide show experience than with a digital picture frame, likely as good or better of an ebook reader experience, and likely as good or better of a bar code scanning medical tablet experience.

How is that last possible, when the iPad does not come with a bar code scanner? The solution will likely be through peripherals built into functional cases. As an example, take a look at the digital checkout devices like Apple’s own EasyPay touch (used at Apple’s retail stores), Verifone and Morphie – that combine a magnetic card reader, a bar code scanner and a battery in a case for an iPod touch.

photo credit: B Rosen

I remember my first real grownup and serious web project outside of the university environment. It was 1994 and SSL was a novelty. People were making insane predictions that one day up to $600 million (think Dr. Evil) worth of consumer goods would be sold on the web worldwide. In 2007, just Canadian B2C sales were US$12.9 Billion.

Some folks, especially startups and smaller companies, saw the web as an opportunity to shake up the established order and establish a new sales channel or an entirely new business model. They invested what they could in building the first of what became known as e-commerce sites. Among established players, and some more conservative smaller players, there was initial hostility toward the new medium. When in 1994 I proposed to Ameritech (now part of SBC/AT&T) that they bring their lucrative print yellowpages online, I was run out of Hoffman Estates on a rail.