Archive for October, 2008
App Store cheats?
I like the iPhone App Store. I mean I really love all the different kinds of cool apps available 24×7 on my iPhone which I can install over edge or wi-fi anytime I want.
It takes real hard courage to go ahead and buy any app from the app store. Mainly because we (Indians) are so much used to free software that we take it for granted. The thought of buying software just brings LOL to our minds.
The app store changed all this. I saw people in India actually buying these apps! Forget everyone else, even I went ahead and bought a couple of .99$ and 1.99$ apps. Due to the sucky conversion rate to INR, they do cost us little more than they should. But still, I buy them.
After reading a lot of positive reviews, I gathered a lot of courage to buy the Moto Chaser game @ 5.99$. The game lived up to my expectations. You can read my review here .
But today after reading the news that the game’s price was reduced to .99$, I feel cheated. I mean lowering the app’s price for a few days might be a good marketing gimmick, but it fucks up the courage to buy new apps. I mean after seeing this, I am not gonna buy any app right away. I will probably wait for the developer’s birthday or any other stupid reason for the price to go down and then buy it.
Apple should do something about this, else people will stop buying the apps.
Flickr and Orkut launch iPhone versions
Posted by admin in First Look, Tech on October 4, 2008
Two of my favourite social sites – Flickr and orkut launched their new versions of mobile sites for the iPhone.
Although the iPhone version of safari renders both these websites properly in their normal desktopy version, an iPhone optimized site adds that extra wow to the overall experience. You don’t have to zoom in or pinch to look at a section.
Instead of developing a stand alone app for the App Store, these sites focussed on developing web based app. This has its own advantages. For example, if they want to update the site, they just need to do it in their servers. All the users will start seeing the updated version instantaneously. Whereas if it was an app, people have to upgrade it manually.
However, a web based app has it’s disadvantages a well. First, it cannot be as rich as a stand alone app. Secondly, if any of these services want to use the apple’s push notification service (likely for orkut), they can’t.
Anyways, it’s great news for users.
Access Flickr’s iPhone version at http://m.flickr.com
Access orkut’s iPhone version at http://m.orkut.com/Home
Some screenshots:
