Unofficial iPhone Blog

Flickr has launched a new iPhone-optimized version of its site, and it looks fantastic. As you can see in the screenshots, the most used options run along the top of the page and, although there doesn’t appear to be any AJAX-y cacheing going on, the individual pages load at a fair clip.

You can do anything of the viewing you can do on the normal Flickr, although the bite-sized version doesn’t offer any editing of pictures — the Organizr, for instance, isn’t there.

But then, it shouldn’t be. It would have meant a complete rewrite of the Flash based interface for little gain — who wants to edit on the tiny iPhone screen anyway? What Flickr has done is take the essential search and viewing tools and made them small, slimline and fast. I’m testing the site out in an internet cafe (thanks for blowing up my home connection, Telefónica), and – apart from a problem loading photographs in my sets – the site has almost no delay.

Fans of slideshows will be disappointed, though. There aren’t any. For that you’ll need a standalone iPhone application Like Fraser Speirs’ Exposure. Sadly, Yahoo’s experimental AJAX-based Flickr site for the iPhone, which offered slideshows, seems to have been taken down.

Coldwell Banker Real Estate is out with a new version of its Web site customized for iPhone users.

The new version shares the same domain as the company’s traditional site but automatically recognizes iPhone end users to serve up the iPhone interface. iPhone users just need to go to www.coldwellbanker.com from their iPhone, without having to download or install any special software. The new site offers a very well-laid out look and feel, along with convenient navigation on the iPhone’s screen, especially the property listings search and home value estimator. Read more… »

From Medialets, the company that was first to launch with an ad platform that was like “doubeclick for iPhone apps,” has just announced a new version of their analytics tool for mobile apps. Previously available only to iPhone developers, the company is now bringing their analytics program to Android developers, too.

Now, no matter what next-gen platform you want to develop for, iPhone, Android, or “whatever comes next,” says the company, you can stay on top of your business with one easy-to-use tool.

Mobile Apps Are Making Money

Apple may be monkeying around with some developers and restricting certain highly anticipated apps from inclusion in their store, but that’s not going to stop the overall land rush to develop for the iPhone. Why? Success stories like that of Trism, a popular puzzle game that raked in $250K over the course of two months, prove there is potential for huge success on this platform. It’s nothing like the mobile market has ever seen.

And today, we receive yet another next-generation platform designed to compete with iPhone: Google’s Android, a mobile OS with applications of its own. Even before this platform became publicly available, Google had developers competing to win cash prizes by building the most promising apps for the upcoming OS. With winning prize amounts in the range of $100,000 - $275,000, these were “quit-your-day-job” numbers.

If Building Mobile Apps Is Big Business, Then We Need Big Business Tools

When someone gives up months of their time to build an application or makes the decision to build a business around an application, there’s a real need for tools that can help measure an app’s success (or, perhaps, the lack thereof). What developers need is a way to track all the information about their application - from downloads to daily users as well as historical changes.

Did everyone download the application right away but never really used it more than a few times? How many people installed the latest update? Are ads generating any revenue? How do I compare to my competitors? Is my app doing better on iPhone or Android?These are the types of questions a developer needs to know the answers to. Once they have answers, they can then make informed business decisions like whether they should add more employees, adjust app prices, etc.

Looking at the screenshot below, you can see the types of answers the Medialets analytics program provides. Active users, average daily users, sessions, average sessions, ad revenue, app store ranking, metrics, historical changes, and much more are easily visible in the program’s well-designed UI.

In addition to those basic metrics, developers can also gain insight as to how users interact with the application itself. This is done via custom app events, which are basically small triggers written into the application itself. They can be anything about the application that a developer would want to track; for example: how many people beat the first level of a game? How many people clicked the link that provides the directions in the location-aware app? These triggers let developers receive the kind of feedback that console game developers would only get after hours on end of monitoring focus group users as they interact with a game.

Why Medialets?

Medialets isn’t the only company out there that can help iPhone developers analyze and monetize their applications. However, they’re already five to six times bigger than their nearest competitor, Pinch Media, having managed to sign up around 200 developers within their first sixty days. Those developers are building some of the top-rated applications out there, too.

But size alone is not the key difference between Medialets and Pinch Media (or others like them). The key difference is in their focus. Where those other companies are iPhone-only, Medialets is building tools for iPhone, Android, and whatever platform comes next. For today’s app developers who don’t want to be tied to just one mobile OS, they can now choose to have the same consistent tool set available no matter where their applications are installed.

Developers can sign up for the beta of this new analytics program at http://www.medialets.com/android.