TickleSpace - iPhone App & Drupal Developers

MacRumors asks What is the Ultimate Role of the Apple Tablet? There is a nice warm debate questioning what need the Apple Tablet will fill.

I think the Apple Tablet brings the iPhone experience to a computer/device with a bigger screen.

Marshall McLuhan said “The Medium is the Message” in a similar vein of thought might I suggest that The App is the Device?

On the iPhone/Touch the App is king. This is thanks to the complete lack of ‘Computer Adminstrative Debris’ as Edward Tufte put it, allowing the device to be one with what the user is thinking and wanting to do. A bigger screen allows more information and interaction.

Another equally important thing that make the iPhone experience special is that all the apps are sandboxed. ‘Sandboxing is a good thing?’ you ask, Yes it is. It is like having a web app experience without the lousy browser. The sandbox acts as a way to protect YOUR device from bad apps much like the browsers (IE being the exception) protect you from poor or malicious websites. The website has some access to your computer but only as much as you want or the browser allows.

I have developed and continue to develop web apps and native Mac/iPhone apps. Web apps are YEARS behind desktop apps and continue to fall farther behind because desktop OSes, especially Mac OS X, are not standing still. Web apps still suck and the failed promise of Develop Once and Release to All Platforms is nowhere in sight. You need only visit browsershots and see how many flavors of browsers you have to support to see my point....but I digress.

So will the Apple Tablet fill a need or have an ultimate role? Yes and I think the timing is right. Apple has the AppStore, the OS, the developers, and the technology/design to make the Tablet as beautiful and as useful as my iPhone.

Way way back in 2006 I posted I had a dream about the iPod AV. While this time I haven’t had any dreams about the tablet, I've had an urge to write my predictions of what the tablet will probably be like based on the many rumors and posts I’ve read.

• A 2x or 1.5x screen resolution of the iPhone 960x640 or 720x480 with hopefully the same density ppi.
• Will work with the app store and only the AppStore.
  • New section for tablet specific apps may be added to the App Store (I hope this is so).
• It will be a locked system OSX system just like the touch and iPhone.
• Apps will be sand-boxed just like the iPhone/Touch. (This is the future of computing....you are free but not things that run on your system)
• It will be very thin.
• it will be light and nice to hold and touch.
• Will have very good battery life.
• Will have a camera or two.
• It will have tethering to an iPhone or possible have cellular capability (i doubt this).

These next items I suspect will be what we will complain about:

• It will not be cheap.
• It will of course not have enough space. There is really no way to please people on this point. I predict 64GB or 128GB if we are lucky. Ideally I’d like it to be 256-500GB.
• It will not run mac apps.
• No SDCard slot.

Frankly I’ll just be happy to see the thing get launched.

My only lingering concern is what the rumors community will have left to speculate about. The tablet has fueled and fed us all for so long....

UPDATE: Just read that Jobs "Extremely Happy" with Upcoming Apple Tablet I translate that to mean he has managed to take away all the remaining buttons..so it will be buttonless tablet. Just a big gorgeous screen to touch. ;-)

We have started developing a new module to allow a Drupal based website to send push notifications to the iPhone.

I've posted a note on groups.drupal.org to get some discussion going.

This is of course half of the puzzle. You will need to build an iPhone app that will interact with your site.

Finding people to test your newly launched iPhone app is hard. But last week, Apple announced a new iTunes AppStore feature which provided developers 50 promo codes for each version.

A lightbulb went off in our heads and at that moment we decided to build a site that focused on sharing promo codes with an enthusiastic group that would provide valuable feedback to the developers in return for free apps.

Visit PromoAppCodes.com

TUAW's wrote this about us

We built PromoAppCodes.com using the latest version of Drupal, a bunch of contributed modules and a few custom modules to provide some special functionality.

Django's serializer has some limitations which makes it a bit of a pain to use. Basically it will ignore any atributes that have been added to a model object.

The code below is for an alternative serializer. This version allows you select what attributes will be serialized on a per object basis. It also allows you to either serialize the data into json or xml. This code also works if you have model instance as an attribute of another model.

You can get the code on django snippets.

The original json encoder was written by Wolfram Kriesing.

Usage:

dumper = DataDumper()
dumper.selectObjectFields('model_class_name',[...fields...])
dumper.selectObjectFields('model_class_name',[...fields...])
dumper.dump(model_instance,'xml')
dumper.dump(model_instance,'json')
dumper.dump(queryset,'xml')


Get ready for the third annual Toronto DrupalCamp.

The event will be held at the Bissell Building on the campus of the University of Toronto on May 23rd and May 24th 2008. (More information at http://2008.drupalcamptoronto.org)

TickleSpace is proud to sponsor this event.

Officially, the event is presented by the Toronto Drupal Users Group with the support of the Drupal Association. However, this event is entirely organized by volunteers and Drupal enthusiasts from around the Greater Toronto Area.

I will be presenting a session on building your own social network with Drupal

See you there.

My little ChiPet has finally returned to its spot on my dashboard. As you can see it is healthy and was trimmed just before the screencap. With the new sleep capability he will stay healthy and not die on me every weekend....assuming I don't forget to put it to sleep.

Big thanks to NovisDesign for coming through on this update.

Go to ChiPet to download the latest version.

Technorati Tags: widget, dashboard, widget

If you recently watched Lessig's presentation, you will notice he made reference to RW Internet, and gave some funny examples.

While the URL for some of the clips was given, the clip of mana mana set to an anime was not. After looking around I found it. It is titled "Muppet Show meets Vampire Hunter D". You can also see the Original muppets version of manamana