Each colorful upper case alphabet letter from A to F smoothly morphs into its lowercase counterpart, creating a strong visual association for a child learning the alphabet.

Alphabet Morpher Lite is the free “trial” version of our popular Alphabet Morpher app.  The “lite” version also features Autoplay and a gives a good preview of the teaching and entertainment capabilities of the full version.

Technorati Tags: iPhone, iPod Touch, Apple, mobile, Alphabet Morpher Lite, Alphabet Morpher

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Alphabet Morpher, a new Education / Entertainment App from BluMtnWerx, Now Available on Apple’s App Store

Alphabet Morpher, an innovative tool for teaching the alphabet to preschoolers, is available for immediate download on Apple’s App Store.

Los Altos, CA — July 24, 2010 — BluMtnWerx, a developer of leading edge applications for mobile devices is pleased to announce that Alphabet Morpher, its first education/entertainment app, is now available for download from the App Store.

Alphabet Morpher is an innovative and extremely engaging iPhone™ / iPod touch™ app that teaches the alphabet while entertaining the preschool set.  Each colorful upper case alphabet letter from “A” to “Z” smoothly morphs into its lowercase counterpart, creating a strong visual association for a child learning the alphabet.  Familiarity with the letters is reinforced by an accompanying song and memorable image for each character.

“While we’d never want one of our apps to be characterized as ‘cute,’ Alphabet Morpher comes pretty close,” says Dean Stevens, founder of BluMtnWerx.  Mr. Stevens continues, “Autoplay mode allows you to entertain little learners for hours with minimal interaction, while the interactive mode really helps develop letter recognition and familiarity.  This is a powerful teaching tool targeted directly at those impressionable young minds.  It’s fun, it’s engaging, and it might even be (at least a tiny bit) good for the little folks.”

Alphabet Morpher is available on Apple’s iTunes App Store at:
        http://itunes.com/app/alphabetmorpher

The Alphabet Morpher web page is:
        http://www.blumtnwerx.com/AlphaMorph.html

About BluMtnWerx:

We believe that the nexus of interaction with computing is moving to the very edge of the network.  With this in mind, we assembled an elite team of engineers to develop applications at the edge.  We build software to bring the universe to you, wherever you are and whenever you want to connect.

We currently have a number of applications available on the Apple App Store, and several more in the pipeline.

For further information on BluMtnWerx, please visit our website. For direct inquires, please contact:

Dean Stevens, Founder
BluMtnWerx
408-461-9913

dean (at) blumtnwerx.com
http://www.blumtnwerx.com
http://www.blumtnwerx.com/blog

Technorati Tags:  iPhone, iPod Touch, Apple, mobile, Alphabet Morpher

Each colorful upper case alphabet letter from A to Z smoothly morphs into its lowercase counterpart, creating a strong visual association for a child learning the alphabet.

While we’d never want one of our apps to be characterized as “cute,” Alphabet Morpher comes pretty close.  Autoplay mode allows you to entertain little learners for hours with minimal interaction, while the interactive mode really helps develop letter recognition and familiarity.  This is a powerful teaching tool targeted directly at those impressionable young minds.  It’s fun, it’s engaging, and it might even be (at least a tiny bit) good for the little folks.

Technorati Tags: iPhone, iPod Touch, Apple, mobile, Alphabet Morpher, TiltBall, TiltBallLite, Alphabet Morpher, Alphabet MorpherLite, iPunt, RingDance, RingDanceLite, Scoreloop

“…we’re hearing that it is in fact a system-on-a-chip driven by a Cortex-A9 MPCore CPU “identical” to the one found inside NVIDIA’s Tegra 2, while besting the iPhone 3GS significantly with its 1GHz speed and multicore architecture.  The A4 is composed of that Cortex barnburner, an integrated memory controller, and the Mali GPU, making it an all ARM affair…”

Engadget was even so kind as to publish a “photo:”

Lovely.

And then, today, Ars Technica tries to bring the whole dream crashing down:

“…it turns out that the the A4 is a 1GHz custom SoC with a single Cortex A8 core and a PowerVR SGX GPU.  The fact that A4 uses a single A8 core hasn’t been made public, but I’ve heard from multiple sources who are certain for different reasons that this is indeed the case.  (I wish I could be more specific, but I can’t.)

In all, the A4 is quite comparable to the other Cortex A8-based SoCs that are coming onto the market, except that the A4 has even less hardware.  The iPad doesn’t have much in the way of I/O, so the A4 itself can do away with the I/O that it doesn’t need.  In contrast, the typical Cortex A8-based SoC has more I/O hardware than a mobile phone can use, because you never know what customers will need which interface types.”

Now I grew up in the days when real men had big block V8’s in their cars, so I was excited by the original rumors.  On the other hand, the Ars Technica post makes a lot of sense — cram a simpler CPU in, jack the clock rate and let the software do its stuff.  In many circles, that’s just plain old good system design.

Image Credit:  Serious Wheels

While I absolutely agree with his primary conclusions…

“The era of the PC’s dominance is officially over.  We have crossed over into the age of mobile computing.”

and

“I’m not saying we won’t still have desktop computers.  But if you’re looking for the real action, the exciting innovations, it’s going to be in mobile from now on.”

… I can’t quite get on board with his assertion that the clear signal of this transition was Microsoft’s recent Windows Phone Series 7 announcement.  Instead, I think that most of us recognized the transition about the time that the iPhone hit 20M units.  By then, nearly everyone that we knew either had one, or was getting one.  Almost every major handset vendor had announced at least one “iPhone killer” and tens of thousands of us suckers were rushing to develop apps.  At that point, we saw iPhone use spanning all demographic groups, and people genuinely loved them (enough to put up with AT&T’s network).

Let’s face it, Apple may not be the dominant player in the long term, but, as they have so often before, they brought fascinating technology to the mainstream.  The truth is that nobody else could pull it all together in a compelling package.

Still, if you have any doubt that the future of computing is mobile, please go read Mr. O’Brien’s column.  If you still don’t believe it, consider that my 77 year old father is the very happy user of a new iPod Touch.

A good portion of my foundational thinking about mobile computing comes from meetings that we had with Jeff Hawkins, back in the Palm Computing era.  Mr. Hawkins’ stories about carving a block of wood until it fit in his shirt pocket have stuck with me.  As the story goes, that block became the model for the early Palm Pilots.

That’s exactly the point.  Until we have some kind of implants that connect us directly to the data flow, I want the following things in my device (in order of priority, but these have pretty much all been show stoppers):

• It fits in my pocket — otherwise it won’t be with me enough to be effective.
• As a corollary to the above, it is light enough that I don’t mind packing it pretty much all of the time
• The software that I use runs on it
• It has a high bandwidth connection to the Net
• The UI is accessible for me
• It functionally replaces other things that I carry.  A few years ago my briefcase held a notebook computer, a cell phone, a PDA, a pager and a few kilograms of cords / chargers / cables.
• It lasts through, at least, a full day of normal use without recharging (my iPod touch can’t do this if the 802.11 radio is active)

My dream has always been to have one handheld device for most activities, along with, maybe, a netbook/ultra portable laptop that I could drag along if I planned to do heavy text entry (I’m fine with Graffiti, and I’ve come to quite like the soft keyboard on my iPod Touch).

Finally, getting around to my point, I’ll gladly spend whatever I have to in order to get a device that meets my criteria and runs on a reliable network.  I’m certainly not, however, going to spend several hundred dollars for something that’s inconvenient to carry, no matter how beautiful it is.  Beauty and functionality are useless to me if the device is sitting on my desk when I’m out and need to connect.  At that point, a tablet is about as useful as my first Mac 128K (long since recycled) would be.

As far as I’m concerned, the iPhone 3GS and the Google Nexus One are as close to my ideal device as we have right now.  Perhaps I’m just dense, but I don’t understand why the tablet is the subject of such breathless anticipation.  I’d much rather have Apple devote its considerable engineering talent to making the iPhone even better.  They’re almost there…

The real reason for this post is that I wanted to call your attention to an incredibly compelling essay by Jaron Lanier.  Apparently, the piece is based on an excerpt from his new book:  “You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto.”

Mr. Lanier asserts, quite convincingly, that we’ve taken the wrong direction with the internet (perhaps by extension, apps, open source, etc.?).  I whole heartedly agree with his contention that, rather than sinking to the lowest common denominator of crowd sourcing, we should be encouraging, and significantly rewarding, innovation and creativity.

Personally, other than the random Tweet, I’ve significantly scaled back my participation in the ceaseless chatter because, as Mr. Lanier points out:

“…we made a huge mistake in making those contributions unpaid, and often anonymous, because those bad decisions robbed people of dignity…”

Later in the essay, he drives the dagger home:

“We shouldn’t want the whole world to take on the quality of having been designed by a committee. When you have everyone collaborate on everything, you generate a dull, average outcome in all things. You don’t get innovation.”

I strongly recommend that you read this thought provoking essay.

I don’t have a ready solution, but I’m certainly working hard in 2010 to refocus on doing work that creates new things, applications and technologies, instead of incessantly adding my two bits to the valueless e-noise.

Image Credit:  Fast Company

In a past role, I spent time at both EA and Lucas Arts.  I’ve seen their production values.  EA will certainly raise the standards for games on the iPhone.  I just wonder whether there will still be a place for the humble efforts of small shops like ours.  If nothing else, as the Fast Company post suggests:

“…it’ll be harder for mom and pop games to get noticed…”

Is anyone else out there worried about how they’ll compete against the big game studios?

My thoughts follow along lines similar to the reasoning in John Boyd’s recent post:

“… the smartphone experience is rapidly becoming mass market and main stream and as that trend continues, people will want more choice, more hardware and performance. In short, in early cycles, Apple’s strategy of control is usually going to be superior but as a technology becomes mainstream, it fails.

We’ve seen the model for this in Apple’s early years, where people favored Apple over the PC. People thought Apple was unbeatable but they were eventually driven to the point where people started looking at the cash value on the balance sheet.

Eventually as people became comfortable with the PC World, they didn’t want to be controlled anymore. Even the least savvy technical users wanted more choice in hardware and applications as their comfort level rose.”

I love what Apple has accomplished with the iPhone, just like I loved my first Mac 128k (no hard drive, just the floppy).  However, I’m afraid that the challenge presented by the diverse teams contributing to the Android+hardware ecosystem will simply be overwhelming. 

The aforementioned HTC Passion, based on a 1 GHz Snapdragon, is just the latest example of how fast this juggernaut is moving.  With iPhone OS as a template, and the vast resources working on Android+hdw, the solutions will evolve quickly and will pass the “good enough” mark in very short order.  Given its relative carrier independence, Android+hdw will absolutely present a challenge to the iPhone hegemony.

The Wired story linked to above has the money quote:

“This scam was so effective that the applications regularly rose to the tops of charts. One, called ColorMagic, even made it into the Staff Favorites section of the store (which brings some doubt as to whether these are actually staff picks at all).”

It does indeed make me wonder how they go about identifying their “favorites.”

The cynic in me can’t help noticing that Molinker produced 1 app for every 5 units of the iPhone sold during the launch with China Unicom (we’re told that Apple yanked 1000 of Molinker’s apps).  Oh well, 1% fewer apps are out there competing for attention.