It’s been around 2 months since my last post! We have been very busy with some very interesting projects. This year has had a good start from the point of view of getting to work with some very new and cutting edge implementations.

My team just finished work on a custom design/modeling tool for Yardistry implemented in Papervision3D and Flex 3. I have not seen something so functional and complex implemented in 3D on the browser platform. I am pretty proud of the work the guys put into building this product both in terms of technology and usability. I really encourage you to go play with it and use it once it is out at http://designer.yardistrystructures.com/. The custom design tool should be going live there within the next few days. I’ll put out a post once it is live.

The other thing I have playing with a lot in the last few weeks is the iPhone development platform. The popularity of the platform just cannot be ignored and Payman, I and  a few others have been putting a lot of thought into leveraging this first really usable mobile platform to bring our ideas to life.

Every serious developer has looked at some mobile device or platform in the past few years and had a few ideas for it but been frustrated with the sheer unfriendliness of the platform both for the user and the developer. I think the iPhone has changed all that – it’s a very serious mobile computing platform.

Payman put out a CMMI Reference App very recently and you are going to see many more in the next few months. The CMMI app is free. I know a lot of you come from the process engineering background and might find it very useful. Please don’t forget to rate it and leave a comment! Here’s the direct link to it in the app store: Click here.

I have been working on a very exciting iPhone app myself. I hate to be a tease but I cannot talk about specifics. Lets just say that it leverages social networks like Facebook and twitter to bring something very practical and functional to a crucial experience in a person’s life. Sorry, but that’s about as specific as I can get. I wanted to bring it up so that I can talk about a couple of things I have been thinking about since I started working on the app.

If you are an iPhone user, you probably groaned when you saw the words “social network”, “Facebook” and “Twitter” in reference to an iPhone app. I understand. There were an estimated 65,000 third party apps in the App Store mid July and it sometimes look like all of them deal with social networks.

We understood this. However, there is a difference between focusing on social networks like most apps tend to do and what we are trying to do – which is leverage them with a lot of attention to providing users with the benefits of integration with their favourite social networking sites without becoming about the social networks.

What we are realizing is that in order to differentiate between our app and the other thousands of apps in the app store, we have to do two things well.

First, it is no longer enough to have an application that has no server component. If your app is dependent solely on third party sites like Facebook, Twitter etc, you are always bound tightly to their APIs, restrictions and performance. Of course you are getting a lot - like a ready made audience and functionality that you don’t want to re-invent. But remember that everybody else out there is also using the same APIs and they probably work exactly like your application.  You have to enhance that experience in some way. The best way to do that is to have your own custom server component that adds some richness to the experience. You can layer this server component on top of existing social network sites ideally or add it to the list in order to achieve differentiation. The server component may or may not have a Web UI but it probably will have web services that cater to your app specifically.

Secondly, the integration with social sites should be balanced so that a user’s audience or their friends on those sites are made aware of your activities through your app but the app itself should not become focused around the third party sites.

A good example that comes close to illustrating my points is the GAP StyleMixer iPhone app. The StyleMixer app allows you to create and style your own outfit on the iPhone. I like the way it handles sharing the outfits a user creates. It allows you to share your outfits with your Facebook friends but also to GAP’s own StyleMixer community.

By doing that it gives you your standard Facebook experience but also gives you a specialized GAP community experience that would not be possible inside Facebook. It also means that the focus is around the StyleMixer community. Support for  third party sites like Facebook, Twitter can be added, removed based on their popularity. Your app is not very dependant on them anymore and works better because of the specialization you have built using your own server component along with a hook into Facebook and twitter.

Perhaps some of what I say above flies in the face of current practices but if you are building a serious product, I would say that the ‘Cloud’ becomes a rich back-end for your app only if you have a say in it – and that means your own server component more often than not.

It is easy to think that a server component for a mobile application is over-kill. But thanks to the iPhone and potentially platforms like Android, the time has come where a mobile application  is serious business and can be the backbone of your enterprise. If companies are getting funded for their iPhone app ideas, then we better believe its time to consider building more than a client only experience.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 19th, 2009 at 2:37 pm and is filed under Apple, Architecture, The state of the art. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.