Most of the time the vendor, Apple in the case of iPhone and iPod, run those stores but on some platforms like Windows Mobile you don’t have to go through the app store to install apps.  The same goes for “jail broken” iPhones.  There are also independent app stores, often more websites really that offer a wide range of free and paid for apps.  There are also open libraries that allow developers to just add their stuff.  Google’s Android platform, which powers the Nexus one, is a kind of cross between open library and App store.

Are any of these a better or worse model than any other.  I don’t think so, not until you bring trust into the scenario.

So who do you trust to give you great apps and what are you trusting them to do?

I guess most people want explicitly:

• Applications that work on their device

There’s probably something implicit though in the offering of any application by the devices manufacturer.  That it’ll be safe.  That the application you just installed won’t try to steal your data, your identity.

There’s long since been a battle with Apple and developers for not allowing in some applications for some very out there reasons.  I wonder how many times it was because the App was trying to steal your identity?  I wonder if any got through?  One did into the Android marketplace and that was a problem, it was an application that purported to be a banking app but it stole your bank details.  Bad.  Very bad.

Did people install it because it was in the app store and so they believed there was “implicit trust”.  I suspect so.

What can you do about it

At the moment the best thing to do is to crowd source that trust.  Reviews on sites build trust, use that to your advantage and only install applications with lots of positive reviews.

Alternatively do your homework.  Get educated.  Learn about the developer and determine for yourself if they seem like they are worthy of your trust.

Will this be sorted out?

Sure if you start telling people that trust is important.  Finally, it feels like there’s a business opportunity in there to me…

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This is really great news for businesses.  Microsoft have just opened up another avenue of devices choices for business road warriors and the clincher is that Microsoft System Center will be able to manage these Nokia devices.  That means that businesses only need to buy one tool to manage their estates, for  BlackBerry they need more servers and that that means more to go wrong in addition to more cost.

Questions:

• What does this mean for “project pink”? – My guess is nothing
• What does this mean for the Windows Mobile – A new manufacturer?
• What does this mean for HTC? – Competition
• What does this mean for Nokia – Help in the area they struggle, device management.

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Microsoft have, through their developer network MSDN, released a case study on how to port an application from iPhone to Windows Mobile, the actual target device is a HTC Touch Pro.  The case study makes an interesting read, particularly for iPhone devs who want to make money through the Windows Mobile Marketplace that Microsoft are releasing very soon.  I really like this direct quote from the developer, it’s something that I’m sure everyone who writes C# already knows but there you go:

“What I’m finding is that it’s harder to mess up with C# than in Objective-C, which is used for iPhone application development. This makes any extra effort needed to customize the classes I want worthwhile,” commented Luke Thompson, Gripwire software engineer porting the Amplitude application.

So hopefully it won’t be long before those innovative iPhone apps become innovative WinMo apps and when porting becommes de rigeure hopefully  the fantastic WinMo developers can concentrate on function over form.

I picked up on this from twitter from the @Microsoft_gov account and Computer World which has an excellent article on the subject.

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Having done loads of looking about the only really good thing I could find was from Y-CAM.  It’s now been delivered and it’s installed.  I picked the Y-CAM Black and bought from ebuyer, since it was about £30 cheaper than everywhere else.

Having installed it, at first it really wasn’t a great experience, it didn’t like my router and it brought down the whole network…I’ve done a firmware update now and all seems to work well.  Very well.

This camera sees really well in the dark with its knight vision, and the management software is pretty good.  Actually it’s a breeze to setup.  It can do motion alerts to email, which again was simple to setup and allows me to select 4 regions of the picture to watch for motion.

Two I need to work through at the moment:

• I need to setup FTP publishing to somewhere so that I can view the camera at work since I can’t see the active X control
• I need to get an app for my WinMo phone that allows me to view mp4 encoded RTSP…unfortunately HTC Streaming media won’t cut it.

Finally I’ve also emailed the manufacturer to find out if they have an API, so that I can develop something to easily arm the motion detection.

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To test the functionality I will soon be releasing the fist of these applications as a preview of what will become integrated into HelloTwitFace.  If you want to be notified of the release as soon as it’s available simply subscribe to the RSS feed or follow me on twitter.

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You can read the full review at Mobile Tech Addicts…

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For the past week I’ve been toiling away on integrating Summize into HelloTwitFace.  Summize replaces TweetScan as HelloTwitFace’s replies and search tabs.  This was a challenge as I’d already built in RSS reading capabilities to read the TweetScan results, but Summize works with ATOM.  I did some diggining and finally got it working…and I have the start of a Summize .NET API.

I think this is the first Windows Mobile app out there to include Summize capabilities.  Summize rocks by the way, it is SUPER FAST!

Deets on how to use what’s new after the jump.

So how do those new features work then?  Simple, you click on “@” to see all replies sent to you, including those that just mention you with an “@” in there and thoser replies that come back when people have responded to many people at once.

Search is simple too, click the “Summize” tab and enter the search criteria.  All your searches are cached locally on your device.  Note not the actual results but the search criteria, I did that ‘cos like the rest of the app, I find it useful.

The final change is also one that’s under the hood, but it won’t crash now when TweetScan goes down.

Final comment, when you download me, follow me, @simonster , on twitter.  I release HelloTwitFace about 24 to 48 hours in advance on twitter and to AppToDate users.

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]

A few sources are today talking about facebook opening up their chat application to jabber capable clients. I’ve talked about this before and I can see this being the killer thing for the fb chat platform, which to be fair has been lack luster in its growth.

I see this as being a kin to to twitter opening their api, just like most tweets come from other app’s that’s what will happen to the fb chat platform.

Notice that I’m calling it a chat platform.

Opening it up in this way is going to encourage some really cool app developers to come out with cool things! On the mobile front apps like palringo are gonna sky rocket in their use, any kind me identity aggregation will take off with high use of the elements the combine. The very widespread and diverse user case of fb will lead up to more people chatting. I think we will also see some asynchronous methods me using fb chat popping up, like sms to chat services.

This space is gonna get very cool, very quick, mark my words!

Posted from moBlog – mobile blogging tool for Windows Mobile

Via: Paul’s blog, techcrunch

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