Bubble Foundry

Do you have a app in the iTunes App Store with spaces in its name and can’t seem to make a correct deep link? The format is itunes.com/app/word1word2…wordn. For example, itunes.com/app/smakelijkamsterdam.

My Apple iPhone Developer account expires in 56 days, so I wanted to know what expiration date I should mark in my calendar. Here’s how I calculated it from the Python console:

>>> import datetime
>>> datetime.date.today() + datetime.timedelta(days=56)
datetime.date(2009, 11, 8)

Google says it very succinctly: “HTML5 and WebKit pave the way for mobile web applications.” HTML5 is coming and it has a lot of interesting features, from audio and video support to local storage. Combine this with the fact that web apps are a particularly attractive way to reach many mobile platforms and the WebKit browser found on the iPhone and Android platforms already implements many of the HTML5 standard, and you can see why HTML5 is so attractive for mobile apps.

With the ability of HTML5 web apps to store data locally and have the browser pass along the device’s hardware states, I believe that HTML5 wbe apps can do almost anything you could want an internet-using application to do. The only exception I can think of is high performance 3D graphics, as even great 2D graphics are possible with CSS3 and HTML5’s canvas tag. Already there are nice libraries like RaphaëlJS that work in the iPhone’s Mobile Safari.

With my friends Katie, Paul and Travis I’ve started Appostles. We’re awesome iPhone, Android and Blackberry developers and we want to build your apps. Sound interesting? Then hire us!

I’m very excited to announce that we are putting on an Android Dev Camp on January 8, 2009 in Amsterdam. It should be a lot of fun, so you should definitely come.

Hopefully this will make up for not posting at all about Mobile Dev Camp, an awesome event I organized in Amsterdam at the end of November. There’s a huge amount of interest in mobile development, so I hope to do more Mobile Dev Camps, both in Amsterdam and in other cities, such as Helsinki. If you’re interested in helping organize them, please drop me a line at peter@bubblefoundry.com.

This Friday sees Lunch 2.0 visiting Utrecht for the first time, where will be hosted by iDiDiD. On August 22 we have a Lunch 2.0 at Sogeti in Diemen. Finally at the end of the month, I am hosting an iPhone Dev Camp on August 30 at my office. We’ve had a huge response to the Dev Camp idea, so if anyone has any routers, tables, chairs, projectors or other gear they’d be willing to lend me for the day, it’d be much appreciated!

Finally, keep November 22 open in your calendars. Together with Joris Machielse, I am organizing a BarCamp-style event around creating startups. More information to come in early September, but if you have any people you’d like to meet or things you wished you knew before you started your business, please leave a comment below or email me at peter@bubblefoundry.com.