Time traces

When Apple launched its new App Store earlier this summer, the assumption was that scads of businesses would develop applications for their iPhone-toting customers. Although there are more than 60 apps in the App Store’s Business category, virtually no big-name companies have bothered to cough up one of their own. Since Apple plans to make at least 40 million iPhones in the next year, many of which will no doubt end up being used in the workplace, what’s the holdup?

Nick Halsey, vice president of marketing at business intelligence (BI) vendor Jaspersoft, says it’s simply not worth the bother. “Our business users are using Safari to deliver JasperReports to them on their iPhone. While the effort to write the 100 lines of Java code to build an iPhone app is minimal, it’s just not needed.”

Halsey says Jaspersoft would be willing to create an iPhone app in response to customer demand, but there hasn’t actually been any yet. However, he says it’s likely that someone from within the user community will choose to make and submit an app on his own “as a fun project.”

Chuck Dietrich, VP of Salesforce Mobile, says his company, Salesforce.com, has a different take on the usefulness of iPhone apps. Realizing that mobile professionals won’t want to take the time to haul out a laptop and boot it up simply to look up a customer’s order history, Salesforce Mobile provides the same information-and more-with less hassle.

Before launching its app, the company prioritized feedback and ideas from the user community to develop one that includes more than 60 percent of the features customers want most. While users can still access client information via the iPhone’s native browser, Salesforce Mobile is a targeted app designed specifically for the mobile professional. “[It] allows iPhone users to access Salesforce CRM applications and more than 70,000 Force.com custom applications right from their iPhone,” says Dietrich.

Dietrich sees iPhone apps as part of the natural evolution of mobile devices in the workplace. “From a historic standpoint, the mobile revolution began in the’90s with the mass adoption of mobile phones as a primary means of communication. Soon, mobile e-mail became a way of life in the enterprise. As consumers and professionals became more familiar with mobile devices, and as mobile devices became more like mobile laptops, end users increasingly desired and expected to be able to do everything from the mobile devices that they could do from their desks.”

BI firm Oracle also couldn’t pass up an opportunity to design an app specifically for the iPhone. Oracle Business Indicators lets users access their company’s business performance information and manipulate the data based on what’s most convenient for them.

Lenley Hensarling, general vice president of application development at Oracle, says, “It’s not meant to replace a dashboard and analytical apps that have a whole bunch of drilldowns, but rather to give you handy access to core sets of metrics. We wanted to make usage and availability ubiquitous, and let users tailor the information to exactly what they want to see.”

Indicators also makes use of the iPhone’s native tools. “Since we support [the iPhone's] alerting mechanisms, you don’t have to go hunting for information. You’ll get alerted when data crosses a threshold that you or someone else has set.”

Although Apple is famously picky about who gets access to the iPhone Software Developer Kit (SDK), Hensarling says developing an iPhone app was easy as pie. “The cool thing is that you’re actually developing in Cocoa and the Mac OS environment, so in terms of the development environment, it’s very mature and complete.” He says they also never felt constrained during the development process because rather than try to shoehorn an app made for the desktop onto the iPhone, the team instead built Oracle Business Indicators from the ground up.

Salesforce’s Dietrich agrees that building an iPhone app is a smooth process. “Thanks to the iPhone’s robust development environment, we were able to develop, test and deliver Salesforce Mobile for the iPhone, all in less than three months,” he notes. In fact, the process was so painless, the company plans to develop additional apps in the coming months. ” Salesforce.com and Apple will continue to work closely to iterate and expand the breadth of functionality of Salesforce Mobile for the iPhone to expand the ways that enterprises can use Salesforce CRM and Force.com applications to improve the way they work.”

Still, Jaspersoft’s Halsey remains unconvinced. He says there is a greater demand for Web apps that can be accessed anywhere, regardless of device or browser. He points to the growing trend toward cloud computing as evidence. “What’s more interesting to us in the enterprise, and where we see customer demand, is for Web 2.0 tools for reporting and analysis as well as for collaborating on making BI tools better,” says Halsey.

In a move to help companies follow their sales and perhaps calm some disgruntled iPhone developers, Apple is now providing daily statistics that can be downloaded or viewed on the Web.

Several developers Macworld spoke with confirmed receiving the stats, which gives them sales per day or per week, broken down by country of sale and SKU. While the sales stats are helping, they aren’t quite where developers want them yet.

“It’s definitely more useful than no data (which was ridiculous), but the reports are a bit sparse at the moment,” said one developer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

For instance, the developer said that if you want the total sales of a particular product on any given day or week, you have to manually add up the sales from every country.

With such stiff competition in the App Store, developers want the sales stats to adjust pricing or generally track how their applications are doing.

The new reports are certainly a step in the right direction for Apple in working with its iPhone developers.

Speck on Tuesday announced their PixelSkin cases for the iPhone 3G. iSkin has announced its new DuoBand for the iPod nano, and Ivyskin is offering its iPhone 3G XyloT3 case.

The textured PixelSkin cover for iPhone comes in seven colors. The Xylo Touch-Thru (T3) case is a hard shell case that lets you touch and still register your touches on the iPod’s screen. It uses “Surface Xylo Wave” (SWX) technology that pass over the touch screen panel without interference. It costs US$34.99.

The iSkin DuoBand for iPod nano 3G costs $39.99. It’s aimed at athletes and others who want to carry their iPod nano on their arm, and it’s designed to enable you to slip your iPod nano in and out of the band without removing it from the protective silicone case. It’s available in red or black.

The PixelSkin costs $24.95. Made of silicone, it’s form-fitting for the iPhone and has slightly thicker corners to protect the device from bumps and scrapes. A textured tile pattern gives you something to grab onto, and the case offers access to all ports, controls and sensors. It comes in black, white, purple, pink, yellow, blue and green.

For more Mac news, visit Macworld. Story copyright Mac Publishing, LLC.

AT&T has posted to its Web site details of free Wi-Fi access it is offering at hotspots around the country. Those hot spots include Starbucks coffee shops, airports, hotels, convention centers and bookstores.

Details about AT&T’s plans to offer free Wi-Fi for iPhone users first appeared in May, but shortly after posting details of the plan, AT&T pulled them again. AT&T is the sole provider of data and voice plans for iPhone users in the United States.

AT&T says it has more than 17,000 Wi-Fi hot spots nationwide. The company counts 12 airports, 31 hotels, 23 universities, 18 convention centers, five sports centers, 8,000 or more restaurants, 700 or more bookstores and more than 50 supermarkets.

Pangea Software is a veteran of the Mac game industry, so it’s understandable that the company would repurpose some of its most popular games for the iPhone. One of those is Enigmo, a physics-based puzzle game that’s made a nice transition to the new platform–nice enough to net an Apple Design Award at this year’s World Wide Developer Conference.

Drippy Mess: Get the water, oil, or lava from one vessel to another using limited puzzle pieces in Enigmo.

Enigmo is a 3-D puzzle game in which you have to manipulate various objects–slides, bumpers, cannons and such–to maneuver cascading streams of flowing liquid from one vessel to another. You can move or rotate the puzzle pieces to divert the stream of droplets so they can reach their target. The faster you manage this the better, as your points are determined by your speed (and a rapidly descending bonus clock in one corner of the screen).

Enigmo uses the iPhone’s pinching multi-touch control to let you zoom in and out of action; you can control the orientation and direction of your puzzle pieces by clicking on them and rotating with your finger. In between each level, you can save, just like in the Mac OS X version of this game, which makes it simple to restore if you need to quit or take a break.

The game’s 50 levels get progressively more difficult, with more obstacles, more puzzle pieces, and different kinds of fluids (water, oil, and lava) to keep track of. Some of the puzzle pieces can be a bit confusing to use and some of the levels can use a bit of play-balancing to make them less difficult, but all told it’s a lot of fun.

There’s no music to speak of, but Pangea’s populated Enigmo with sound effects of fluid hitting objects and funneling through the various puzzle pieces, which creates a rhythm all its own. The colorful puzzle pieces and animation make Enigmo a feast for the eyes, too.

Enigmo is compatible with any iPhone and iPod touch running the iPhone 2.0 software update.

It only makes sense that one of the most popular games to be developed for “jailbroken” iPhones would see life anew as an official App Store release. That’s the story behind Tap Tap Revenge, the first offering from Tapulous, and which iPhone hackers may recognize as the successor to Tap Tap Revolution.

Tap Tap Revenge is a rhythm game similar in concept to games like Phase for the iPod, or the console titles FreQuency and Amplitude, all developed by Harmonix, which also makes Guitar Hero and Rock Band.

The goal in Tap Tap Revenge is to tap at the bottom of the screen in time with bubbles that descend from three colored beams of light that snap and crackle with energy. The more bubbles you can pop in time, the higher your score. You’ll also get points for shaking the iPhone or iPod touch left and right or up and down in time with arrows that descend down those light beams.

There’s a two-player mode that pits both players at either end of an iPhone or iPod touch (and changes the string geometry a little bit to make more sense); you can also turn off the shake feature.

The game includes only a handful of music tracks and offers no way of linking to a resident iTunes library that may be on your device, so the music selection gets very old quickly. But Tapulous says that more tracks are coming very soon. (The game can use new tracks as soon as they’re available.)

Four difficulty levels keep your fingers tapping–and kept mine tapping enough to wear out my wrist. I need to ice it.

Tap Tap Revenge is compatible with any iPhone and iPod touch running the iPhone 2.0 software update.

The nice thing about those Scandinavian telecoms: when their customers complain, the companies listen. Just as Sweden’s TeliaSonera reevaluated its iPhone offerings after customers launched a petition, similar efforts in Norway have now borne fruit as well.

NetCom, which is actually owned by TeliaSonera, has relented after over 3500 customers expressed their disappointment with the limited download plans being offered in the land of the vikings. And so the company unveiled iConnect, a phone plan that will allow for unlimited data transfer on the iPhone 3G, at the pricey rate of 499,- kr/month ($99).

That’s not the only price attached: while downloads are unlimited, Norwegian customers taking advantage of the plan will have to pay by the minute for all phone calls, at a rate of 0,49 kr/minute ($0.10) and by the text message at 0,59 kr/message ($0.12).

In addition, the iPhone 3G itself will be more expensive when you sing up with the iConnect plan (which still requires a 12 month contract). The 8GB model will run 3.290,- kr ($652) and the 16GB model will cost a very expensive 4.190,- kr ($830).

While we’re glad that Norwegians will have to options to not worry about their data rates, it does seem like it’s a pretty expensive proposition, especially if you want to use the phone features of your new iPhone. But at least they can just e-mail each other instead.

Potential customers of the iPhone 3G in the U.K. briefly had the option for unprecedented service this morning, as British provider O2 offered people the ability to pre-order an iPhone online, in order to have it delivered–yes, hand-delivered to your very house–on the 11th.

Plenty of people took advantage of the opportunity–so many in fact, that O2 is now saying that the “due to the huge demand for the iPhone 3G, it’s currently out of stock online.” We presume they haven’t run through their entire inventory–a note on the page instructs those interested to come back on July 10th for more information.

But what’s most interesting about this, from our stateside perspective, is the fact that the phones get delivered. That would seem to suggest that unlike those in the U.S., U.K. customers won’t need to hang around in stores to have their phones activated. AT&T has told us that online ordering will not even be available to those of us in the U.S–we’ll have to queue up at 8AM if we truly want to get our mitts on an iPhone 3G.

According to the fine print, taking delivery of the iPhone in the U.K. requires at least an 18-month contract, a credit check, and direct debit. However, the price of the phone is still subsidized in the U.K.–in fact, if you sign up for £45 ($89) or £75 plans, they’ll give you the iPhone 3G for free (with the cheaper £35 and £30 plans, it’ll cost £99). That suggests perhaps the phones being shipped must be pre-activated, though we won’t know for sure until Friday.

Since the iPhone 3G was announced last week, speculation has run rampant that you would be able to activate the phone within 30 days. However, AT&T said this is simply not true.

AT&T spokesman Mark Siegel confirmed for Macworld that activation must be done at the time of purchase, in-store. Siegel also said that customers could keep there current iPhone or AT&T phone numbers and move to the iPhone 3G when it’s released.

According to the speculation around the Internet, you would be able to purchase a subsidized iPhone 3G and not activate it immediately. After 30 days, AT&T would bring up your account and charge your credit card for the subsidized amount of the phone.

In theory that sounds fine, but it does nothing to solve the problem of having hacked iPhones out in the market. That’s not to say that this measure will stop hacked phones, but the companies are trying to cut down a peg or two.

The fact that the iPhone will be legally available in so many countries now will also likely cut back on the demand for hacked iPhones.