17/05/2012

Multitasking coming to the iPhone?

04/02/2009 By

iphone3gAt the last Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) Apple announced a push notification service. This centrally Apple managed service would allow developers to create iPhone applications that get notifications of new data without the necessity of running said app in the background. Steve Jobs explained that many of the instability issues of current smartphones are actually caused by poorly implemented multitasking and crappy third-party apps. Therefore Apple made a strategic decision to prevent any third party app from running in the background. Jobs stated that Apple does not consider “simply allowing apps to run in the background” the right solution for this common problem and until “really finding a perfect solution Apple would not allow background processes to ruin the great iPhone user experience and performance”.

Notification services did surface in beta versions of the iPhone SDK but got pulled out shortly thereafter. Since then Apple never updated the developer community about the state of affairs.

Since Instant Messaging, Reminders and many other type of applications rely on the ability to receiving updates (from the cloud) even when they are not active, the absence of a solution started to annoy developers. In addition many great applications running seamlessly in the background became available in the jailbreaking community.

According to MacRumors, Apple may be considering background processes after all.

MacRumors states that a part of the 3.0 iPhone firmware, users might be able to decide on a per-application basis which app would be allowed to run in the background. This change might come in light of the enhanced processing capabilities which are expected for the next iPhone hardware release in the June timeframe.

Filed Under: All Things Apple Tagged With: ,

More App Store Confusion

03/02/2009 By

Yesterday something cool happened: TAXIRUF, one of our iPhone applications, hit the “New & Featured” list in iTunes and the device store. We were experiencing a peak in downloads and wondering why. In the past we saw this happening when Mac Life, TechCrunch and others were reviewing our apps so we googled for reviews. Finally we found out about the updated and very prominent listing of TAXIRUF on iTunes.

Taxiruf iTunes Listing

Taxiruf iTunes Listing

While we definitely appreciate this move and do feel honored, we once again wondered about the statistical analytics Apple applies. We already knew that the review system is, well, far from ideal. Now we add “Featured & New” listings to the what-the-heck-goes on bucket.

Taxiruf App Store Listing

Taxiruf App Store Listing

Here is why: TAXIRUF was submitted to Apple during the first week of September 2008. It got approved September 17th, 2008. Shortly thereafter it hit the Top 10 Sold apps. Since then TAXIRUF moderately continues to sell across Germany.

So what’s the reason for the application to appear on the “Featured & New” list five months too late? And in light of this how reliable are all the other ratings and listings? Or is it all a big mess?

By the way, just in case anybody from Apple happens to read this: We’re not asking to remove TAXIRUF from its current prominent place. In fact we do like heavy download days. Messed analytics constitute a problem but having an app on the iTunes landing page is just fantastic!

Filed Under: All Things Apple Tagged With: ,

Guest blogging at iphone-notes.de

03/02/2009 By

I feel honored to announce that starting as of today I’m going to co-author posts on iPhone-notes.de. The site is 100% dedicated to the German speaking market so I thought it would be a perfect idea to further separate my various activities in this field and contribute to one of the most popular German speaking independent iPhone sites.

Those running jailbroken iPhones (I myself don’t as for the professional iPhone apps development business it’s important to have a model which is compliant with the ones shipped by Apple) definitely know iPhone-notes.de and it’s linked Installer/Cydia repository – sendowski.de – as it still is one of the most favorite sources for iPhone tooling and software.

I’m looking very much forward to working with Andre on expanding iPhone-notes.de reach and keeping you up-to-date with the latest and greatest in Apple Smartphone Land.

More announcements to come. Stay tuned!

Filed Under: Personal Tagged With: , ,

iPhone Visual Dial

03/02/2009 By


Filed Under: All Things Apple Tagged With: ,

Welcome back (sort of)!

03/02/2009 By

Welcome back to the third iteration of 24100.net – my personal blog and Internet home. If you came here, you’ve probably been around for a while. Beginning in 2009 I’ve started to consolidate my various online presences. The primary driver for this effort has been to achieve a better separation of the more private and technically detailed content from my business focused articles.

I also wanted to get rid of what over time has become kind of a “platform zoo”. The parallel use of Textpattern, Subtext and Typepad has become a bit of a pain lately, though Ecto – an offline blog publishing solution for the Mac – helped streamlining the process. I’ve decided to unify everything on WordPress. It has been around for a couple of years and I occasionally installed it to see how things are going. Last December I did another check and found that WordPress has matured a lot and addresses most of my requirements right out-of-the-box.

Last but not least all articles here will be in English only. The majority of my subscribers, followers, fellows and friends are from other countries than Germany. Google Analytics provides some great insight as to the regional distribution of my visitors and more than 85% do not speak German.

A couple of words to names, URLs and what will happen to my “old” articles:

My blog has always been available at www.24100.net. However, due to technical limitations imposed by my ASP.NET hoster, I had to redirect to another address (www.talentgrouplabs.com/blog). This situation has been less than ideal for a long time but I really couldn’t do anything to resolve it. The good thing is that was has been a disadvantage for so long comes in very handy now: As all of the direct links to previous posts are pointing to http://www.talentgrouplabs.com/blog/<post title here> they are not going to break.

Also search engine listings to old posts will continue to work, too.

Taken together this means:

  • My personal blog, the one you’re currently reading, will be available at www.24100.net.
  • My corporate blog is available at blog.acceleract.com.
  • www.talentgrouplabs.com/blog is frozen as of now. I’m not going to add any new posts. Comments will be closed. It’ll essentially become a read-only site.
  • The most favorite posts from the old site will be duplicated and copied over to this place. I’ll preserve the original date/time of publication.

This has all come a long way. Social Media is receiving more and more traction these days and I’m happy to having you here. Thanks!

Filed Under: Personal Tagged With:

Things in life change

01/02/2009 By

Things in life change.

This is true for presidents, mobile telephones, the universe and life. After more than four consecutive years of successful growth and the recent acquisition of our spin-off by Alcatel-Lucent/Genesys I’ve decided to withdraw from my daily operational job at VoicInt Telecommunications. As a loyal shareholder I’ll remain very grateful to the company and stay in touch from a healthy distance to accompany its future evolution. VoicInt has become a software vendor with an exciting future and I’m happy that we were able to build a strong new management team from its existing employees. I’m sure they will continue to further drive VoicInt’s positive development.

Taking a startup from incorporation to crossing the chasm is such a grateful task and I’m really thankful that I could play such a vital role in this process at VoicInt Telecommunications.

I’ve incorporated acceleract GmbH which will serve as my own holding for the next entrepreneural adventures I’m starting. acceleract GmbH will allow me to invest into and partner with businesses that share my passion for innovative technologies that make our lives more easy and comfortable. acceleract GmbH predominantly will hold the shares of VoicInt Telecommunications, straight2market and soon-to-be-disclosed other partners.

Operationally I’m going to help straight2market to become the leading management resulting company for go-to-market strategies and profitable product sales engagements. straight2market’s mobile marketing arm has already been cited by TechCrunch and several other important technology blogs for the outstanding applications for Apple’s iPhone and iPod touch, so we are pretty much on track here :-) .

We’ve incorporated straight2market in early 2008. The one thing I like most about creating and growing businesses is that it allows me to work closely and creatively with extremely gifted and dedicated teams. I’m glad that we could win Karl-Heinz Land – which Time Magazine considers to be “a tech pioneer that’s changing our lives in amazing new ways” – as being our chairman. I’m looking forward to working closely together with two of my friends, Roland Freygang and Martin Willnow, who have been such a tremendous source of inspiration over the years and are among the best sales people I’ve been working with.

I’m eager to get in touch with everybody who values integrity, honesty, openness, personal excellence, constructive self-criticism, continual self-improvement, mutual respect and has a passion for technology. If you want to get in touch here are a variety of classical and Web 2.0 options:

With that said, I’m extremely excited and amazed in light of 2009 with so much new things to come!

Thanks for stopping by. Thanks for your continuous loyalty. Let’s go for an amazing, exciting and new 2009!

Filed Under: Personal Tagged With: ,
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