Please ignore this. I want to see if the body text makes it all the way though to the photo page and the blog.

This is on a new paragraph.

This really pisses me off.

I just got an SMS text from some company called “VoxSciences”, who (probably) do some kind of voicemail to text service like the ill-fated and extremely poorly run Spinvox.

Spinvox, after raising a massive amount of money, over £100million I believe, went tits up after the truth about their technology and earnings came out and the information about how the executives were literally squandering the heap of cash on gifts, cars, weddings, undeserved bonusses, parties and all manner of things unrelated to the actual business.

They ended up selling to their competitor called Nuance.

After all the dust settled there, since the finances were squinted at for some time, all those brave investors got some money back: a whopping £600. Between them.

Yes. You read that right. Six hundred pounds. Between the lot of them.

So.. back to this SMS. I must have tried out Spinvox, back in the day, a grand total of, ooooo, once maybe?

Getting this SMS today can only mean one thing. Spinvox/Nuance just sold the entire customer database and all their mobile numbers to ‘VoxSciences’.

Bloody disgusting, if you ask me. (Which you didn’t, but hey.)

It states:

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).

Just some facts about Appcelerator’s Titanium tools and their app creation process, which we hope will see them on the safe side of Section 3.3.1:

“As a pre-requisite to using Titanium, developers must install the Apple iPhone SDK and Apple XCode development toolchain.

They must install Titanium on a Macintosh and they must have a valid Apple Developer membership before they are even able to create a Titanium-based iPhone/iPad application.

Titanium produces a valid XCode project (*.xcodeproj) at application creation, generates Objective-C (and sometimes C/C++) and executes the xcodebuild to compile the XCode project into a native application using Apple’s published APIs.”

The tools launch Apple’s iPhone simulator to test applications, create the correct Apple binary for integration to iTunes when testing the signed application on a device and uses all the certified Apple tools for signing to create the final distribution.

“The developer must obtain their own Apple signing certificate for creating applications with Titanium and Xcode and the developer uses their own Apple iTunes Connect membership and login to upload the package to Apple for submission. ”

via their developer blog : http://bit.ly/cVfY0w

Adobe’s CS5 however, would allow developers to build iPhone app on Windows, which I’m sure is an absolute no-no. The process appears to be quite a kludge (of the AIR publishing process), from what can be seen in this tutorial by Lee Brimelow (who was extremely vocal about his disdain for Apple in a recent blog post: http://theflashblog.com/?p=1888 )

See his tutorial on Adobe’s app creation process here : http://gotoandlearn.com/play?id=116

One thing to note after watching this tutorial is the resulting iPhone app filesize of the (less than 20 lines of AS3 code) Flash app: 3.2Mb !

That’s pretty big for what it is! And this makes me wonder what else Adobe are bundling with the app. Possibly its ‘LLVM’ (a low-level virtual machine – which is known as an ‘Ahead Of Time’ compiler – see here from Adobe: http://bit.ly/MQtRZ – as opposed to a ‘Just In Time’ compiler, which is effectively what the desktop Flash player is)

I have been using Titanium to create a far more complex app than this example for the iPhone for Phreadz (see image above), which is capable of doing some things that none of the other potential offenders’ platforms are possible of doing (taking and manipulating photos, recording videos, recording audio, etc.etc) which I write in JavaScript, which then gets compiled using the process stated above to create a proper, signed iPhone app for submission to the AppStore.

The resulting file size of the app? Only 1.6Mb. Amazing.

Another key issue here is that Titanium is completely open source, compared to Adobe’s very much closed platform.

ps: I’m not a Flash hater at all (as many readers who have known me for years will know). I’ve built many useful things on their platform for many years – when it makes sense to. And I agree that desktop performance of it can be awful – what with web pages and blogs literally riddled with them, often causing any browser to crash.

Adobe should concentrate on making their tools support the output of HTML5 .

I have had no experience of Monotouch or Phonegap, though from what I can gather, Phonegap (which is extremely simple, yet limited to what it can actually do beyond what a browser/webapp can do – but with some hooks into a few of the hardware APIs) might also be on the safe side too, since they ironed out issues with Apple a while ago.

UPDATE: PhoneGap use has now been approved under these new terms. See: http://blogs.nitobi.com/jesse/2009/11/20/phonegapp-store-approval/

I, along with many other developers and evangelists fully support Appcelerator and their Titanium tool for iPhone app development. I have found it to be the most exciting and enabling project I have ever seen in many years (15) of mobile and web development.

I’m seriously crossing my fingers for Appcelerator. The hard work they have done to enabled so many great things to be built for the iPhone, the iPad, Android as well as on desktops for OSX, Windows and Linux is truly remarkable.

This story has generated a huge amount of discussion on blogs posts from places like TechCrunch that it’s definitely fired up a lot of passion on both sides of the argument.

Firstly, I hope you all had a Merry Christmas and have a Happy New Year!

Secondly, I thought I should mention that I have finally got around to setting up my own server with all the required gubbins to host the latest WordPress on it.

So, you can now find my blog over at http://blog.kosso.co.uk !

Oh yes… it’s a new me! See you there!

‘Social Media’ and ‘Social Networks’ are rapidly becoming crucial to our “digital lifestyles”, helping us discover new things and make informed choices based on personal recommendations and opinions from our friends and others in our extended global networks.

Companies, clubs, brands and creative artists from all genres are increasingly using social media to grow communities and networks around their offerings, building on the trust and relationships formed by the openness and transparency which it enables.

Phreadz embraces this evolving tidal wave in ‘social-multimedia’; by making it easy for its members to create, publish and share content and opinions from a desktop or mobile device.
Phreadz is a ‘social multimedia forum system’ where content is posted and replied to by community members, creating compelling and engaging ‘conversational threads’ using multimedia which can be shared and re-branded in many places at the click of a button.

Phreadz can provide public or private ‘channels’ dedicated to specific groups, topics, events or brands making it easier to engage the members in any particular area, away from the common ‘forum lobbies’. Each dedicated Phreadz channel can be fully branded and customised to fit the intended audience participating.

There are several ways to start or contribute to a conversation thread.

A post on Phreadz can be:

• Video recorded in the browser using a webcam

• Video, audio or photos uploaded from a desktop or mobile using an uploader or email.

• Video from other video sharing sites like YouTube, Blip.tv, Flickr, Vimeo, Viddler, Qik, Seesmic, 12Seconds, DailyMotion, BBC News, ABC News, Funny or Die, UStream (pre-recorded), TED Talks videos.. and many more.. or any Flash video url.

• Photos from desktops and mobiles or shared from Flickr or Second Life.

• Audio podcasts, performances or any mp3 url.

• PowerPoint and Keynote slideshows from SlideShare.net

A Phreadz post and its replies can be easily shared using:

• Blogs : WordPress, Blogger, LiveJournal, Tumblr or Drupal (and more to come)

• ‘Microblogging’ services : Twitter, Jaiku, Identi.ca, etc.

• Widgets and players for MySpace, Windows Live Spaces, iGoogle and NetVibes.

• Any website allowing HTML embed codes or links.

• A blip.tv account (videos)

• A Flickr account (photos)

• RSS feeds for very post, member and channel.

Phreadz is developing an API (Application Programmers Interface) making it easy for third parties and developers to create their own customised applications and interfaces to view and post content from any site or device which supports RSS, JSON or OPML data.

Phreadz currently has around 500 passionate and active testers trying the closed beta testing phase. Phreadz has obtained its first paying client for a bespoke white-label system at a university in the UK.

To see what a Phreadz ‘channel’ looks like without an account, please visit one of the current ‘public channels’ built around recent (and ongoing) special events:

• http://podcamp.phreadz.com
• http://newmediaexpo.phreadz.com
• http://geeknbury.phreadz.com

Phreadz was ‘bootstrapped’ and built in its entirety by myself (Kosso) on a single server and is actively seeking new customers. Phreadz will soon be looking to raise some seed funding from angel investors to provide the rapid growth in network, hardware and human resources it needs to kick start it and open up registrations to all.

©2008 Kosso : Phreadz Networks Limited.

Click the green button in the top right of the player to see the story so far…

Sit back and watch how this amazing game develops. You start off as a hungry amoeba. Then you have to grow legs and take off to the land to evolve your new species, which you design entirely using the really fun tools. It’s incredible the amount of scope for creatures in this world.

The gameplay can sometimes be a bit tedious and frustrating, but the cutaways and characters are pretty rewarding and fun.

I had a pain installing it due to the DRM service not working when it should. But once I got over that, I was fine with it. EA Games are getting a LOT of stick for it though. It’s apparently now the most pirated game ever! Pirate Bay have had it on their top list for a week or so.

I bought my one months before it came out. Was it worth it? I think so, but they’re quite restrictive on how many times you can install it, which seems to have annoyed a lot of people, with Amazon customers showing it as the worst rated game.