Tweeb is an interesting app for us not just because we love what it does but because of how it came to be. This was an app that Ken created some time ago. He brought it to us because it had undergone several rejections in the App Store and had serious performance issues. We spent about four weeks completely rewriting the backend and adding a couple of significant new features. Of course, after this work, it flew threw the approval process and into the App Store.

It’s not our style to push forward with a launch until we’ve allowed our users to kick the tires for a bit. Aside from all the feedback Ken incorporated previously, we were able to get some great insights from the first round of App Store users and recently pushed a subsequent update. If you are really interested, go read the release notes for Tweeb v0.9.1.

Version 1.0 of Tweeb is currently in development and should be pushed to the App Store by the end of this week. The best way to get us feedback is through our help desk or via our support e-mail (support at this domain).

“I think it’s definitely going to kill the Kindle,” said Barg Upender, founder and chief executive of Mobomo. But he did express a little disappointment that the iPad fell short of the most enthusiastic prophecies — for example, control by voice commands. “It’s a step in the right direction but not as revolutionary as we thought it would be,” he said.

In others news, he’ll be a panelist at next week’s DC Lean Startup Circle event. Barg will be discussing his ideas on applying lean startup principles to iPhone development.

As a long-time FreshBooks user, I pitched this idea to Barg towards the end of 2009. While there have been a couple of FreshBooks iPhone apps, they weren’t really useful to me. A more natural way to use FreshBooks while not in front of a computer is to capture those things that you do while not in front of a computer. Namely, pay for meals while meeting with people, purchase office items, buy gas for the car, etc. Hence ExpenseBooks was born.

We finished the iPhone version first but decided that we wanted to also give Android a little love. So, we held off on doing the launch until the Android app was also already to go.

For more info, you can read the FreshBooks announcement on their blog, visit their iPhone or Android add-on pages, or just go download the apps. We’ve got some great ideas in store for ExpenseBooks but will be listening to the community closely. We’d love to hear from you, so be sure to submit support and feature requests at the Mobomo help desk.

For Android devices, search “ExpenseBooks” on the Android Market.

Like most of the Internet, we were glued to the various blogs covering Apple’s iPad event today (gdgt seemed to deliver both the best quality and availability). As soon as the SDK was announce we jumped on it and got to work updating one of our iPhone apps to see what kinds of challenges were ahead of us.

We made all of the basic changes needed to get our HexOut puzzle game running at full iPad size with new high-resolution graphics in just about an hour. I can’t wait to see things running on a real device.

Building an iPhone app that also takes advantage of what the iPad offers (namely more than 5 times the pixels to fill) is going to be more of a challenge when you have a complicated application that has to scale all sorts of UI layouts smoothly. With a game you can generally just substitute bigger iPad-suitable images for the smaller ones that are used for the iPhone version. Developers that stuck with standard table views and navigation layouts are going to reap the benefits of adhering to Apple’s guidelines soon. Highly customized UIs are going to be a lot of trouble to scale up to iPad size.

I can’t talk about many of the details thanks to the NDA (can I even say that there is an NDA?). I can say, however, that I think that the iPad will be the platform to host some of the most important UI innovations of the next decade. I can also say that this is going to be one heck of a casual gaming platform. I also think we will see some really innovative apps for different areas where tablets have been tried before like medical, retail and industrial. We are also pleased to offer iPad development to our clients who are looking to take advantage of this new platform for content distribution and custom applications.

If Apple succeeds in doing the tablet the Apple way, then the starting point for it will not be to think about how the tablet fits into the current gadget landscape. Instead, Apple will have embarked on how it could once again redefine an industry to make the tablet a necessity.

Apple is as much about content as it is about hardware. That’s the proven Apple recipe. In the last two decades, Apple has blown up both the music and software industry with iTunes and the iPod and the App Store and iPhone respectively. It’s obvious where the next big media disruption is happening — print. Apple’s once again in its favorite place — not being first to market but instead watching and waiting, observing and then innovating.

Sure, Steve Jobs mentioned that Apple doesn’t care about e-readers. Similar statements were made about playing videos on tiny screens and staying out of the phone market. More significant though is that an Apple tablet would probably resemble as much an e-reader as the iPod did an MP3 player. Compared to Amazon’s Kindle, the Apple tablet would be full color, multi-touch, and probably have a larger screen. And unlike the Kindle, which is only just launching a platform for apps (not especially exciting), the Apple tablet could soon embrace all of the 100,000+ apps running on the iPhone.

Like many technology predecessors before it, the initial response to the impending Apple tablet will be to categorize it as a gizmo, shiny toy, and luxury. After all, it’s just a glorified e-reader. What skeptics will fail to recognize is the significance of a large multi-touch personal media device that provides always-on access to a little thing called the World Wide Web while packaged in the form factor of a true modern day digital notebook (versus the ones that were called such towards the end of the 20th century).

No, no one knows what the Apple tablet is going to look like except those at Apple. Wish lists and concepts aside, what is for certain is that if Apple has decided to venture into the tablet world, the print and computing market is going to be changed forever.

Now, if the prediction of 300,000 iPhone apps by the end of 2010 is true, the problem of discovery and app management is only going to be exacerbated. That’s going to make users and developers frustrated, with Apple working around the clock to try to please both parties. Thus, I believe the best way for Apple to begin improving the App Store in 2010 is by learning from these different categories of iPhone apps about iPhone apps. While it may seem like I’m selling these developers out to Apple, what I actually would recommend to Apple is to buy the apps, assets, and the developers themselves because these issues are big problems to solve

Near the end of the posts, he also touches on some ways to improve the iPhone itself. It’s an interesting read, so check it out —

How Apple Can Improve the App Store (and iPhone) in 2010

Enjoy. I will update the gist as I improve the script.

Motorola’s Droid is probably the most-discussed of the bunch, with beefy specs and a pretty slick design (and marketing campaign to boot). From a feature standpoint it’s enough to make an iPhone geek want to jump ship. Whether or not the new batch of Android phones will catch on with consumers is yet to be seen, but we know that developers are getting on board.

Now, I’m not about to ditch Interface Builder for the paltry Android equivalents and start churning out mountains of XML, but the hype is enough to make me give some form of Android development a second look. I’ve always felt that cross-platform development is less than ideal. Some cross-platform mobile development tools rely heavily on web views or not-quite-native controls to get things done. You write HTML, and they stick it in the native platform’s WebKit view and call it a day. Compared to an application developed with the native APIs you get something that is slower, looks worse, and behaves in very strange ways. You can’t build the type of experience that the hardcore iPhone fans will pay for that way.

Enter Appcelerator Titanium.

Titanium combines web development with native controls through its clever JavaScript bridge. It bridges your JavaScript code to many of the native API methods on the iPhone and Android. This allows Titanium apps to really look and feel like native apps (because they are native apps, with native controls). There’s even a module system to add additional native components, like OpenGL views for graphics, or libraries that don’t already come with Titanium. There’s a whole class of applications that seem like a great fit for Titanium. Many apps that follow the CRUD pattern and mainly deal with web services or web content are prime candidates for something like Titanium. Writing JavaScript after writing Objective-C is a bit of a breath of fresh air. Using familiar HTML and CSS markup to define layouts is great compared to configuring UITableViewCell objects on the iPhone.

Being an open-source project, however, there are still some rough edges. From the GUI tool, sometimes it takes two or three clicks (of the same button) to launch your app in the simulator, or to stop the simulator. I found that a fresh project that included Prototype.js would not build, even though Titanium let me choose it when creating the project in the first place. The ease of writing JavaScript is balanced by the difficulty of effective debugging from within the app itself. It’s back to printf-style (with log4j-style levels) debugging for now. There seems to be no apparent output when JavaScript errors occur at runtime on the iPhone, and the JavaScript bridge technology may need extensive development before any more powerful debugging is possible.

The best part is that it actually does work! Despite a few obscure bugs in the Titanium library my quick-and-dirty Mobomo Blog Reader application was fairly simple to develop.

In short, I am willing to give iPhone/Android cross-development a chance for many types of apps with Titanium, and I’m interested to see where the platform goes.

-John

We got to meet Ted Leonsis, Capitals’ owner and AOL Exec at the DC Chamber of Commerce Gala, over the weekend with our friends at Network Solutions. Ted won the “Economic impact of the year Award.” During the Gala, the Capitals won against the Nashville Predators with a final score of 3-2.

Councilman Marion Berry was at the next table. We got picked up by TechBisnow here.

Barg will be joining fellow entrepreneurs Hooman Radfar, Matthew Voorhees, and PV Bocassm in a panel titled “Technology Innovators in the WDC Region.” Our goal is to discuss ideas for fostering innovation and entrepreneurship in the government. The event is being held October 19th-21st at the Four Seasons Hotel in Washington, DC.

We look forward to seeing you there.