Ever find yourself standing at a bus stop, starring at a poster for the latest Hollywood Blockbuster, and wondering “well, looks exciting, but what’s it all about?!“? ViPR Visual Search, developed by Evolutionary Robotics, promises an answer. Snap the cover of a CD, DVD or book with your camera phone, and it will analyse it and return a description, YouTube link and iTunes store link. Presumably it could recognise (or be programmed to recognise) the film poster too, saving you the trouble of such hassles as typing the film title into a search engine and selecting a suitable result.

It’s already on 3 million phones, and is soon coming as an app for the iPhone
through the App Store, which is fast looking set to be an important way of popularising such innovations.

See demo above

Cogapp was recently accepted onto Apple’s official iPhone Developer Program, so we’ve been thinking a lot about the potential for the device, and technology like ViPR, in our field. This got me wondering….

How about implementing this in a museum, so information, visitor reviews
and audio guides can be activated just by pointing and snapping? How about a
children’s version with alternative, child-friendly content? It would be an easy, playful and really rather useful way of accessing information when and where curiosity arises.

Thinking bigger - what if major art galleries could collaborate on a database, so that when you come across famous works of art you can find out where they are currently on display? It would keep up to date with the movements of famous pieces from one gallery to another, and as you leaf through that book in school or on someone’s coffee table, you immediately know where you might have to go to see the piece in the flesh.

As technology like this improves, and more and more people start to own capable devices, the possibilities continue to multiply. It’s going to be exciting to see how and where such things start appearing. Snap snap!

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 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.

Last week, I had the good fortune to be invited to speak at the Over The Air conference at Imperial College. Organised by Mobile Monday London, it was focussed on mobile phone development, and had a great lineup of speakers as well as lots of techy fun including an all-night hackathon.

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