We had the opportunity to chat with our friend Rob from Hobbyist Software. He’s developed VLC Remote and OFF for the iPhone but he’s also been a mobile app dev for the Palm platform as well.

Where do you think Palm has failed and Apple has succeeded?

1. Failing to promote the benefit of apps. For years, palm has failed to sell the story of apps to consumers when they buy their treo. There should have been leaflets in the boxes, links to the store (and a decent store), etc

Palm produced some research years ago that over 90% of users didn’t have a single app installed. They had the ecosystem and fabulous apps – but they never turned that into a selling point for the everyday user.

2. Uglyness. It was fine to be ugly with the early cheap screens that required it. With the new high res, colour screens, there was a capability to fix that. There were two great third party apps that re-skinned the entire interface and made it look pleasing. Not as good as apple/iPhone, but pretty good. Palm should simply have licenced or replicated this to give an overall facelift to the treo.

Where do you think Apple has failed and Palm has succeeded?

1. Useability. I’m not talking the ‘my grandma can use this’ type of useability now. I’m talking the ‘I can get things done’ type of useability.  Let’s add an item to the calendar for drinks tomorrow at 5pm with bob…

Palm;
1 press calendar button to turn on palm and switch to calendar
2 press centre button to unlock
3 press right to switch forward one day
4 pull out stylus and tap at 6pm on the calendar
5 type ‘drinks with bob’
(alert is automatically set for my default 15 mins)
total time 17sec (I timed it)

Apple;
1 turn on iphone
2 unlock (animation)
3 slide screens to calendar (I keep mine on the far left screen)
4 launch calendar (wait 2-ish seconds)
5 press ‘day’ mode
6 switch one day to right
7 press ‘add’(animation)
8 press title (delay,animation)
9 type ‘bob drinks’
10 press save (animation)
11 press starts/ends(delay,animation)
12 scroll to time I want
13 press save (animation)
14 press alert (animation)
15 select 15 mins
16 press save (animation)
17 press save
total time 49 seconds (I timed it)

and here is something ’special’. If I miss step 17 (thinking that I have entered all the info) and press the home key. All the info is lost. I don’t even get a ‘do you want to save this event?’ dialogue.

so, palm was always a calendar/contacts list that added a phone. The iPhone is an iPod that added a phone. Perhaps it is unfair to expect the iPhone to be as good with the calendar (it is certainly better with the music/video functionality)

But do we really need 7+ animations to enter a new calendar event?

What do you see as the core differences between the development of a Palm app and an iPhone app?

Night and day. Palm needed to conserve cpu power historically, so they had us coding in C and accessing a fairly small number of system APIs. iPhone has all the delights of object orientation and powerful frameworks.

Palm is much harder to work with, and doesn’t give you the easy/pretty apps. Internet access, media, graphics etc are all painful to work with. (I had to build a chunk of native code below the normal framework level in order to build alpha blending capability for my apps. It took many days to build.)

On the other hand, there is a huge irony in what Palm lets you wring out of the less capable device. The OS is mostly not multi-tasking, however it has multi-tasking-like capabilities. E.g. you can create a sound thread which while it is designed to process sound files, can actually do anything. Chattermail used this to create an email app that ran in the background.

Palm also offers powerful notification mechanisms that let you act as if you are a background app. So, many of my apps processed the ‘hede’ notification which is sent with every single event on the device (a keypress probably triggers 4 events). On each event, my app would be called and asked if it wanted to do anything.
Technically this is not multitasking – but to a user it certainly is. My speciality is background apps that make the OS behave in a more powerful manner.
One classic is letting users assign globally available hotkeys to calls or apps. It is tough to do right in Palm, but possible.

By comparison, Apple has a real multitasking operating system – but they won’t let anyone use it.

They give justifications around not draining the battery, but these are simply bogus. Allowing an app to set an alarm wouldn’t drain the battery. Of course, if the alarm has to launch an app, and the app has to have it’s code signing for 2 seconds before it can do anything…

The whole notifications system is welcome – but still hopelessly inadequate for some basic tasks (like setting an alarm). Do you really want to rely on your network connection to make sure you are woken up in the morning? Is it reasonable that you have to remember to put the alarm app on at night and make sure it is charging in order for your alarm to work?

Of course, none of these restrictions apply to the Apple clock. But there are many ways that users might want their alarm clock to work differently to the ‘apple way’

What does this lead to?

The type of apps you get are dramatically different. The Palms allow developers to hack around with the system and create tools that change how it works. Power users love these and they were probably the most successfull category of apps on the Palm.

On the iPhone, I can’t build apps like Power Hero that sit in the background and turn off unneeded battery hogging features when they are not needed (bluetooth, network, screen light)

However I can build apps that look wonderful. So, I’m focussing on different kinds of apps. VLC Remote is my bestseller. It looks great (after I got help from a designer to re-skin version 2). It lets users remotely control VLC while they watch movies, or listen to music.

My new app Off also looks great, and works on the same theme of controlling your PC/Mac. Off lets you turn off the computer remotely.

Both of these were triggered because I wanted them for myself. VLC remote so that I could stop stepping to the computer and grabbing the mouse when watching something. Off so that I can turn off my computers after using them to stream music at night.

Why did the iPhone become a phenomenon?

• Marketing
• A beautiful looking product
• Targetting the entertainment+phone segment rather than the organisation+phone segment

(see a great analysis of the opportunity that all the other smartphone makers missed)

What did you have to do to market your Palm apps?

• Offer great apps (so the power-users would spread the word)
• Offer great service (so the power-users would spread the word)
• Engage with the power-user community

What is a tip you can give iPhone app creators so they can market their app?

I really haven’t figured out iPhone marketing, but the importance of the top x lists seems to be high enough that in most cases it is worth pricing low in order to maximise your chances of getting exposure via top-x listings.

How would you recommend a Palm developer learn to develop for the iPhone?

Go the the Big Nerd Ranch! I signed up for their objective-c plus cocoa class which was a fantastic 7 day intensive introduction.

Have you seen as much success with your iPhone apps as with your Palm apps?

No, not nearly.

For most of the last couple of years, I had 3 or 4 apps in the top ten list at Mobihand (major palm apps portal that I sold through). On the iPhone, I briefly hit #2 paid app in Sweden, but I’m not consistently even in the top 100.

Having said that, there is a lot more cash being spent on iPhone apps, so I’m doing ok financially.

How much do you think UI plays into the picture between the 2 platforms?

People buy stuff that looks great. There was an interesting development on the Palm over the last few years where folks started producing replacement apps (e.g. the memo app) that were much better looking. These sold like hot cakes.

I would never consider buying one of these as I take the engineer’s functionality-first view and prefer the existing free and equally functional memo app despite of it’s uglyness.

I made this mistake when I initially released VLC Remote with an ugly-ish interface. Fortunately the functionality kept the app alive, but it is doing a lot better now that it looks great as well as working well!

Palm let the engineers run the show for too long. Apple’s genius was realising how important looks were – even when they sometimes detract from functionality.

What about the hardware design?

I think Apple rightly has the reputation as the world’s top hardware designer.

App store?

Apple have done a brilliant job here. Selling the benefit of apps to their users has created a real engagement with the device, and built a real competitive advantage.

If only Palm had managed to build a decent connection between customers and applications…

Of course there are downsides. Apps have to be approved by Apple, and can be rejected for very arbitary (or factually incorrect) reasons. It’s Apple’s game though, and they have brought consumer dollars – so developers will put up with the restrictions.

Is Palm Pre going to be a major competitor to the iPhone?

I certainly hope so! I love how their marketing story shows the new multi-tasking interface.
It’s going to be tough for them.

1. Sell the story of the Pre’s advantages
2. Build a great app store and bring consumer dollars to it so that developers will come.
3. Find partners willing to push the Pre against the iPhone

I think the multitasking story is really strong on the Pre and I love the way that the OS really makes that visible through the cards metaphor.

I’d love to see an attack ad along the lines of the iPhone ad where it switches between apps to show the things it can do. In this ad, the Pre would be really switching between these apps, and the iPhone acting in real-time and showing the delay each time there is an app switch…

Is there anything else?

Try my apps!
VLC Remote – lets you control VLC remotely from your iPhone/iPod
OFF – Lets you turn off your computers without leaving the sofa!