If you missed the first part of Ed Lea’s interview, catch it here.
In today’s episode, we find out more about Ed’s MMS application, he discusses his views on in-app mobile advertising (“not something I want to do at the moment”) and describes how he’s crafted a team of experts to work with him on his projects.
I reckon I’ve got about 2 more episodes of footage from our interview still to edit so standby for those soon.
It was an absolute pleasure to sit down for an hour with iPhone developer extraordinaire, Ed Lea. I dropped him an email on the off chance that he’d be available to pop by One Alfred Place for a bit of filming. He’s usually knee deep in code and, as one of Europe’s leading (and most successful) independent iPhone developers, he’s in huge, huge, huge demand.
This is what Mobile Developer TV is all about. Sitting down with uber-smart people and capturing them talking, informally, directly, honestly, about their experiences.
We filmed for about an hour and more or less all of it is gold dust.
If you’re involved in iPhone development — or indeed, any mobile development, seriously take a few minutes aside to sit and watch Ed talk about his experiences.
In this episode, we get introduced to Ed, a bit of background — then we find out about his initial experiences with his first few applications.
A good friend of mine, Ed Hodges, first mentioned Touchnote to me back in March. I think I’d come across the company a few months prior — but since it wasn’t entirely mobile-based, the company drifted in and out of my radar for a little while. Touchnote is a service that enables you to upload a photo (or select one from various services) and then have your photo sent, physically, to anyone.
It’s a very simple concept — and one that’s been around in some form or another for a little while. For instance, Vodafone UK has a rather pants service that tries to do this via MMS. I used it about 3 years ago and.. well.. it was ok. But it wasn’t easy, it wasn’t graceful — in fact, the user interface was shocking. I used it once.
Touchnote’s web service is beautiful and graceful. Wouldn’t it be great if they could duplicate that on the mobile?
They have. Ed and a team of developers moved mountains in order to get Touchnote Mobile live and into the Nokia Ovi store in 33 days.
Thirty three days.
Shocking. They developed the mobile version from nothing — from literally a concept on a piece of paper to LIVE on the Ovi Store in 33 days. What an achievement.
It’s shit-hot too. Here’s how it works. Run Touchnote Mobile. Take a photo. Crop the photo into a square (really, really easily), type in a brief message and select the recipient’s address from your address book. Send.
It costs you two pounds. Your recipient gets a beautiful greetings card through the mail complete with your photo, your message AND even a Google Maps mash-up showing where you took the photo.
Writing about it doesn’t do it justice though.
You hafta-see-it. Which is why I invited Razia, one of Touchnote’s founders, to give us a demonstration on film. Take a few minutes, kick back and watch the video — and then tell me what you think.
I’m told the iPhone version is coming soon — and I’m sure Android and some kind of feature-phone support can’t be that far off.
You’ve just spent $1,000 (or, at least committed to spent that amount) on a gorgeous new Palm Pre, right?
You’ve spent a little while playing with it and you decide to login online to the Palm Pre online management console at Palm.com. You’re rather impressed that the phone constantly updates your personal settings on the site so that, should you lose your device, you can easily re-establish your entire settings on a new device. All is good. Further, you’re rather impressed that you can press a button on this web console and, woosh, you can erase the handset just in case somebody steals it.
Nice.
You’ve only had your Palm Pre for an hour and you haven’t really had a chance to play with it… but you’re just dying to try out the remote ERASE function on the web console…, right?
So what do you do?
Press it.
That’s what Myriam Joire, otherwise known as Tnkgrl, did yesterday.
Cue all kinds of havoc, along with a super-fast personal resolution from the Palm caps.
Today we bring you first impressions of the Palm Pre from Myriam who was first in line at 6am on Saturday morning outside the Sprint store in the Castro area of San Francisco.
That’s dedication.
Myriam knows her stuff — she’s a mobile developer by trade for one of the large manufacturers — and she just couldn’t help herself from hitting that ERASE button…
If you’re anywhere near interested in Palm Pre, definitely have a watch.
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Yesterday morning I sat down with Christian Lindholm, the Managing Partner of internationally renowned design house, Fjord. We filmed about 40 minutes worth of his super perspective on all things mobile.
Fjord are the people behind the absolutely beautiful BBC iPlayer Mobile service (amongst others). Christian has a rather unique viewpoint on the mobile industry on account of his relentless pursuit of ‘elegant simplicity’.
Here’s a quick screenshot of the iPlayer on the Nokia N96 and iPhone from the Fjord site:
I can’t put up the whole 40 minutes in one go as it’ll be too big to distribute, so instead, I’ve cut it into parts.
Part 1 — Mobile Applications and Mobile Developers.
You can have these automatically delivered to your iTunes if you add this podcast RSS feed. Or download the 640×360 video file via our super-fast-content-delivery-network via this link (57mb).
