iAd: new opportunities for iPhone apps developers

We all have already heard about iAd, this new Apple’s project. The company positions itself as a seller of expensive advertising services targeted at audience of solvent Internet users. Indeed, when iPhone appeared in the U.S., the statistics showed that family income of the most iPhone owners amounted at least to $ 100,000 a year. Of course, now this gadget has become much more available, but only people with above the average incomes are ready to pay for new iPhone applications and accessories regularly. So, the audience of advertising services from Apple is quite solvent.

The business model of iAd has not clear yet. In particular, the basis of payments wasn’t defined (the number of showings, clicks or users’ actions).

The whole advertising system will be centralized. All its content will be stored on company servers, and Apple sales managers will control the whole process. However, all the iPhone apps developers and advertising agencies will be able to create advertising for the iAd system. It was already announced that iPhone developers can integrate advertising system into their applications in just a couple of hours.

iAd from Apple: ads in mobile apps

This month Apple has introduced its new mobile advertising system iAd. It differs from competitors (for example, Google’s AdMob), because iAd integrated directly into iPhone OS. Moreover, these ads will be stored on Apple servers.

Advertisements will be interactive and will look like small applications. It is already known that some of them will be created using HTML5 technology. According to this new business model, iPhone apps developers will receive only 60% of proceeds from the iAd advertising.

The iAd system was announced by Apple CEO, Steve Jobs. According to his words, the average user works with iPhone mobile apps about half an hour a day. So, demonstrating new ads every three minutes the company will get about a billion hits a day.

Also Steve Jobs stressed that Apple is not going to focus on the quantity of advertising, on the contrary it will intend to raise its quality making from ads a new source of positive emotions.

The iAd platform will be integrated directly into the operating system, and will run ads within applications. Apple engineers want to change the approach to development of the most commercials: it is proposed to use not only text and image links, but multimedia applications that will be embedded into other applications ( such as games, readers, RSS-clients etc.). The platform will make its debut this summer.

Read also: Mobile Application Development: Boom in the IT World

Background images for Outlook 2007 and Outlook 2010 beta

According to statistics about 45% of people use Microsoft Outlook as email client. About 10% of people use Outlook 2007. So it is a big deal for marketing departments to create and implement attractive HTML emails using Outlook 2007 email client. And it was pretty easy to do using any version of Microsoft email client released earlier Outlook 2007.

Why?

The problem is that both Outlook 2007 and 2010 beta do not support background images for any element except body. So which difference between these two versions leads to this issue? Outlook 2003 uses Internet Explorer to render HTML emails. Unfortunately Outlook 2007 uses Microsoft Office for this purpose.

Nokia wants to launch own “App Store” for mobile apps developers

Graig Williams, Managing Director of Nokia in South-eastern Europe, has admitted in his recent interview to Die Presse (the Internet edition) that his company developed a new product, which main task is to press Apple on mobile market. So, Williams has promised that Nokia will introduce a direct competitor for iPhone this year. This device is supposed to focus on network services. According to experts’ opinions, the very App Store, connecting iPhone apps developers and users, has greatly contributed to success of iPhone on mobile market. According to Greig Williams’s words, Nokia is going to create a similar, but more open service (without total control, as in Apple’s project).

By the way, the last Nokia’s multitasking OS Meego is meant not only for smartphones but for Tablet PCs also. In addition, Nokia plans to produce some new devices, based on this OS. However, Williams refuses to tell anything about future competitors of iPad.

Creating mobile applications with jQuery

We have already written about web development for iPhone using html and js only. And today we want to tell you about jQTouch, a plug-in for well known Javascript-framework jQuery. It allows to create web applications for touch phones very easy – for all the phones with a touch screen and with finger-oriented interface. Such as iPhone, for example, and as based on Android HTC Hero, Dream, Magic, and a lot of different WM-communicators with different shells.

Let’s enumerate some features of jQTouch:

•    It is very easy to control behavior of all the components.
•    It is possible to create themes.
•    There is some interaction with a phone (for example, you can determine its orientation).
•    It supports animation and various interface features of iPhone.
•    This is jQuery, and this says it all!

The plug-in is very nice, but still we do not have a full application at the output. Why? As we do not have access to such things as the accelerometer, vibration, sound and so on.

And, by the way, using such frameworks as PhoneGap you can transfer your mobile apps written with html and js to any other platform. For example, PhoneGap, supports iPhone, Android, Blackberry (OS 4.5), Symbian, Windows Mobile, Palm and Maemo. But remember that developing iPhone applications you need MacBook, license and all that other stuff.