Jean-Jacques Halans ‹› Afterhours

Remember the LP? I’m not really talking about the actual vinyl, but the cardboard cover it was encased by. Some artist aspired it to be a work of art, something that extended the music, in an analogue world. I remember my dad having a Rolling Stones Sticky Fingers LP with a real zipper attached to it. Some LPs would fold open. You could hold them, reading or singing along to the lyrics while listening. I used to have the New Order Blue Monday floppy disk LP, some fancy Cure LPs, Primus,…

Then the CD replaced the LP, at less than a quarter of the size. Which means the booklets shrank too. Publishers started adding extra content onto the cd itself, hybrid cds with video. Now we have mp3 downloads, with hardly any cover art. Sometimes we’d get an extra pdf booklet, which I think is pretty sad mostly. Or the web itself on the official artist’s website (if you can find it) offers additional content, videos, lyrics,…

Then Apple quietly introduced iTunes LP and iTunes Extra last year with the new iTunes 9, but only with a limited number of titles, mostly older releases, repackaged with some video, lyrics. I haven’t seen that list grow either for the last 4 months. No new releases with LP content. Then end of November ‘09 Apple quietly published the TuneKit API, for publishers to developer iTunes LPs. If you look at the technology, it’s as open as it gets: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, packaged in a webarchive with .itlp extension (just rename to zip and open up). It works both on Mac and Windows iTunes, and on the Apple TV. But currently not on the iPhone or iPod touch. It is supposed to be similar to the CMX (Connected Media Experience) format supported by 4 major music companies, but they still need to deliver any actual media content (which is supposed to be the second quarter of 2010).

Up until now the submission (by music and movie publishers only) has been manual and limited. When you look at the iTunes LP page now, it says:

“Automatic, electronic submission of your iTunes LP or Extra is scheduled for the first quarter of 2010.”

Cue, the Apple iPad! Although missing from Steve’s presentation, it seems obvious that music publishers will be offering lots more iTunes LPs by the time the iPad is released (at least that’s what Apple is preparing for based on the above comment). It provides music publishers with extra revenue for music and video. And it provides Apple with another media segment to be sold to eager consumers (like me) using their hardware. Apple has control of the whole ecosystem: selling hardware, developing the format, selling the media. A hard act to follow by media companies, although at one point in time Sony was probably one of the few global companies to be able to offer a similar ecosystem of hardware, movies, music and games. But by now it may be a little too late. All they can do is try to catch up.

This also offers another great opportunity for web developers. You can actually publish your “iTunes LP” anywhere, have people download it on their iPad, which opens iTunes and shows your media/app (pure speculation at this time of course)! In time, the TuneKit API might be should be updated with a JavaScript touch API (like PastryKit?). If they don’t, you can always add it yourself! As for now I haven’t played around that much just yet. I’m not sure if it can load external content into an iTunes LP to get updated content.

Flux 2, a web development IDE for the Mac, comes with an iTunes LP and iTunes Extra template to get you started!

Of course you can do all this with a website. But the iTunes LP offers something to distribute, use offline. It might be just one more trick up your sleeve.

So finally, after almost a year since I registered as an iPhone developer over at Apple, I build myself a couple of iPhone apps. Here’s how.

I have a couple of Objective C books laying around, which I opened once in a while, but closing them again pretty quickly… so I never got around developing anything. For now, I couldn’t justify any time spend on learning yet again another language. It is after all just a hobby project (the iPhone development that is). As a webdeveloper I could develop cool iPhone web apps (with jQTouch), but still that wouldn’t give me the same satisfaction as a native app. Then there are a couple of frameworks like PhoneGap and NimbleKit which allow you to develop iPhone apps with HTML, CSS and JavaScript. But you’re still confronted with XCode, working in a new environment.

Then I found Appcelerator and their Titanium Mobile. Their Titanium product allows for cross platform development for desktop apps, and their Titanium Mobile allows for, well, cross platform mobile applications, using JavaScript and HTML. And Titanium Mobile is itself written in Titanium. Still in beta, I thought I’d give it a try. Was I in for a surprise! Titanium Mobile creates native iPhone and Android apps, which means you get to use native UI elements, the GPS, the accelerator,… to get some apps up and running pretty quickly. For example, I took the http://nextsydneyferry.com code and converted into a simple iPhone app (in the simulator) in less than 30 minutes! Before I was able to get it onto my iPhone though, I had to set up “provisioning”, generating certificates and all. Something you need to do for XCode development too. Once that was set up, you click a button and it gets transferred through iTunes to your iPhone, and you got yourself a native app. Without opening XCode, in my preferred webdevelopment environment!

Some gotchas:

• If you want to develop iPhone apps, you still need the iPhone SDK which is Mac only. No way around that. But you already have a Mac, right?
• You’re building native apps, and there’s different support between iPhone and Android. For one some features are missing in the other. So you’ll need to cater for that, and fork code between iPhone and Android.
• You still need to follow Apple’s design guidelines (although I’ve seen some horrible apps out there that don’t follow any design guideline). You’re not building an iPhone app for Android, or an Android app on iPhone.
• Don’t expect to go building 30fps 3D apps or something, you’re better of doing that in Objective C

Having said that, for simple text-based, web-connected applications, Titanium Mobile is perfect:

• There’s the basic API documentation of the JavaScript framework.
• They have a Kitchen Sink app and source that shows you all there is available in the framework, so it’s just a matter of copy/pasting.
• There’s a great forum for support and discussions.
• There are a couple of screencasts to get you started.
• Both iPhone and Android apps (and soon Blackberry) with a little bit of effort. I hope they would also add Palm’s WebOS.
• It’s Open Source (on GitHub).

Oh right, something about the iPhone apps I developed… A NextSydneyFerry app, which is just a port of the web application into Titanium Mobile. I might add some more features like saving the data locally, so you don’t need a web connection (only for updates). And a Twitter visualization tool called TweetFrame, which cycles through tweets based on a search query you define, like “a digital picture frame, but for tweets”. The funny thing is that, through Facebook I got a request to have something like TweetFrame, but as a website widget (don’t know why, but there were already widgets like that). Well, since it’s just some JavaScript, I did the reverse and created a widget based off of the iPhone app… You can see it in action on the homepage, below the Flickr feed.

For now I mainly focused on iPhone. I don’t care that much for Android at the moment, though with a little extra effort I could get them to work on Android too. One of the other platforms Appcelerator is looking at is Blackberry (though could )

It’s golden times for web developers, a Renaissance, where HTML(5) and JavaScript open great possibilities. I think we’re only seeing the tip of the iceberg, there’s so much happening now, it’s an exciting time.

So, if you’ve been keeping off developing for iPhone, try out Titanium Mobile!