WWDC is over. And my head hurts. Just so much information packed into such a short space of time. They certainly know how to put on a bash; each and every session was presented in super slick Apple stylee, great venue, great food, great city. The speakers were fantastic, engaging and knowledgeable. As Neo would say…”I. Know. iPhone”

Though the focus was heavily iPhone, there was also a ton of other good stuff. Getting up to speed with Core Animation was a highlight, as well as seeing what Apple have in store for the future, both on the Desktop and in the web browser.

The icing on cake though, was getting an email from Apple whilst out there, saying that Cogapp are now official iPhone developers, so we can start testing our apps on actual hardware. More of which later…..

So I survived the queues and the frenzied Mac fanboys, and got into the World Wide Developer Conference keynote. If you haven’t witnessed one of these events, they are a proper whoop-fest, with every utterance greeted with rapturous applause and celebration, like a massive high-five between Apple and its developer community. Jolly good fun had by all.

So the big announcements this year were:

A new iPhone

No surprises here. It’s a new 3G model (running 2.8x faster than Edge, and 36% faster than a Nokia N95), slightly thinner, a flush headphone socket (we are not worthy of such luxury, a headphone socket you can plug headphones into), same sized screen, black back, increased battery life. Bigger suprise was the price: $199 for the 8GB model, which apparantly is going to stay the same across all countries. So 100 quid, for a faster iPhone. Nice!

Oh and it’s got built in GPS. Out July 11th.

iPhone firmware upgrade

No secret this was coming, adding the App Store, lots of stuff for “the Enterprise” (not the spaceship disappointingly), Parental controls etc. But we now have a released timeframe, early July. Free upgrade for existing iPhones, $10 for iPod touches.

Other snippets in regard to the App Store: Enterprise users can deploy apps outside of the App Store to its phones. The app is downloaded to the end users desktop machine, and then synced onto their authorised phone via iTunes. On a similiar note, is Ad Hoc mode, which lets developers authorise up to 100 iPhones, and distribute the app to them for free. Again they sync via iTunes.

Any apps on App Store under 10MB can be downloaded over Edge, anything over this limit is Wifi/iTunes only.

Also there is now support for Apple iWork documents (Keynote etc.) and they have completed support for the full Microsoft Office suite, with Powerpoint now added.

And lastly of note, were the Push Notifications. This is to solve the problem of apps needed to be kept updated, even when they are not running. Take for example an Instant Messaging (IM) app; it needs to display to the user a new message has come in but were it running constantly to check for these, battery life and general performance would suffer. Enter Push Notifications. This is basically a system whereby your server can send notifications to applications via an Apple gateway. The gateway maintains an IP link to your phone, sends the notifications through, and the phone then acts on them. So to reuse the IM example, a badge could be placed over the app icon, displaying 1 message ready to read, and the user could then open the app.

Mobile Me

One that slipped under the radar. Dubbed “Exchange for the rest of us”, Mobile Me is basically a way of syncing all of your Email/Contacts/Photos/Calendars and files between all of your computers, friends and family. Your data lives up in “the cloud” (i.e. on a server somewhere), and is kept perfectly synced at all times. Add a contact on your laptop, and it gets synced to the cloud and your iPhone. Add a picture from your iPhone, and the gallery that you have shared with your family gets the photo instantly.

All this is tied together with a super-slick web based system that looks and behaves like Apple’s own Desktop apps. All for $99/year.

I’ve no doubt missed loads. The most interesting for me has to be the new price for the 3G iPhone, as when we at Cogapp start pushing out iPhone apps (which is the whole point of me being here), the bigger the audience the better.

On the way back from Museums and the Web in Montreal, Ben and myself stopped off in Manhattan, to visit MoMA. This was under the guise of doing work (seeing the finished MoMA.guide installation in the flesh) but in reality was an excuse to go to the Design and the Elastic Mind exhibition. MoMA’s site goes some way to capturing just how many cool things were crammed into the space, you are left physically exhausted with the sheer amount of information and ideas bombarding you. Highlights included:

Philip Worthington: Shadow Monsters

Julius Popp: bit.fall

Noam Toran: Accessories for Lonely Men

Jonathon Harris, Sep Kamvar: I Want You To Want Me

Graffiti Research Lab: L.A.S.E.R Tag

On a long haul flight recently, I at last got some time to take a look at the shiny new iPhone SDK, released by Apple last month. We do a lot of Cocoa development at Cogapp, having just shipped MoMA.Guide and the Prudential Eye, both of which use Cocoa extensively. (I was put through my paces at the legendary Cocoa Boot Camp, by the mighty Aaron Hillegass himself). And the good news is, development on the iPhone is pretty much exactly the same.

We’re very excited about the possibilities this offers to our clients, and already have some internal demos running. Our new kiosk development framework is specifically designed to allow publishing to multiple platforms. The demos we have in-house involve the exact same content being published to a kiosk, a website, a mobile web version, and a native iPhone version, all from the same publishing mechanism, and all optimised to the strengths of the target platform.

Be sure to check back for further updates.

Ben, Rachael, Colin and myself hopped over to Montreal last week to Museums and the Web 2008. Here are a couple of the sessions I found the most interesting.

Peter Samis of SFMOMA gave a session called [deep breath], “Who Has The Responsibility For Saying What We See? Mashing up Museum, Artist, and Visitor Voices, On-site and On-line.” He talked about the museum’s experience in creating a microsite for Scandinavian artist Olafur Eliasson (best known over here as ‘that bloke wot did the sun in the Tate‘). Eliasson’s latest works are concerned less with the actual objects or installations the artist creates, and more to do with the way the viewer experiences his works. He ruffles curators feathers everywhere by saying things like: “Objecthood doesn’t have a place in the world if there’s not an individual person making use of that object…” and declares to the visitor, “I don’t think my work is about my work. I think my work is about you.”

From the paper Abstract: “the SFMOMA Interactive Educational Technologies (IET) team produced an interactive kiosk / Web site that offered background commentary and footage of the artist discussing his philosophy and studio practice, but stopped short of describing individual works in detail”. This took the form of blog comments. Visitors were encouraged to describe their experiences and opinions on the works, and in effect extend the scope of the installations in the virtual world. Peter talked of the process of setting up such a ‘hands off’ forum, and gave examples of the range of comments they received.

Aaron Straup Cope from Flickr, (whose job title is Hackr) gave a session where he talked about the importance of computer programming in the medium of online artworks and ideas. He made the comparison between printmaking and the Internet, arguing that just as printmakers embraced the “craft” of chemical engineering in order to create their plates, so people wishing to create online need to recognise the necessity of programming.

He made the point that it is essential for large cultural organisations to have coders on their in-house teams, and for them to be involved in the creative process from the very beginning. Which is a sentiment we at Cogapp would wholeheartedly agree with.

This followed an email from Tim about the playful user interface at etsy, for instance the colour browser which is particularly interesting to us, as Tim wrote a prototype for a similar thing for the MoMA.Guide a year or so ago.

So it reminded me that when I was on holiday I was thinking we needed to start have a discussion on the current developments in user interface technology. Not only in terms of original methods of existing navigation, but also what people are doing to reinvent the way we interact with electronic media.

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The nice people that made the reactable have released the engine behind the table under the GPL.

As a multitouch interface used by musical artists including the legendary Bob Moog and Björk on her Volta world tour (Live Videos on Youtube Later with Jools Holland and at the Coachella Festival 2007 ) this user input technique gives real hands on approach to computer interaction.

The multitouch experience is genuinely play like and most importantly, very user friendly.

Behind the scenes computer vision blob detection algorithms facilitate multiple object detection and tracking, controlled through the ‘Tron’ like interface of the music table.

Away from the music table the engine itself recognises amoeba type objects called fiducial markers and can track their x+y coords, as well as the rotation around the z axis.

The reacTIVision app spews out this information using the TUIO protocol, which means that anything that uses OpenSound control can tap into it. It can also send messages as MIDI.

And they’ve got example code for use in most of the major ’software you use to display nice stuff’, including Flash and Quartz Composer.

So far Cogapp experiments with multitouch systems like reactable have proved a fun way to interact with technology, adapting the complexity behind the scenes to produce an engaging and intuitive natural user interface.