Today my latest project went live, Cat Calls. An adorable little application that will both annoy your pets, entertain your friends and look cute doing it.

You can find more information at my company website.

I’m moving all my new handheld development away from the iPhone. The app store is too flooded with junk applications causing consumers to lose any confidence in the quality of software they find there. No matter how much time and effort you spend, the drive for a lower price point makes development difficult to justify. There are also instances of some “developers” flooding certain app store categories with fifty of the same application. This is what happens when you get that gold rush mentality.

Microsoft announced their application store the other day and so far I like what I’m seeing. Microsoft restricts the number of applications a developer can release in a given year with each additional application requireing more of a financial investment. I’m hoping this will eliminate the overpopulation of poor quality seen on the Apple app store.

I’ve been spending this evening getting multithreading asset loading working. I’ve converted a lot of my iPhone code to C++ and keeping certain things as Objective-C objects only when I absolutely have to. This of course came back to bite me when trying to spawn off loading in a separate thread. Since the NSThread code expects a class object inherited from NSObject(id), it crashed everytime I passed it one of my C++ objects. I finally realized this and created a class wrapper whose only job is to be called by the thread and initiate the loading of the regular objects. Sure, it’s another layer, but now things are playing nice with one another and I can get on to the actual fun bits of the code.

With Apple’s iPhone app store hitting 20,000 applications, it’s already  a flooded marketplace making it difficult for any single application to get noticed. If this was an actual store, most of these applications would have long ago passed into the bargain bin and into oblivion. For a while now, developers have seen the app store as the next gold rush and jumped on board hoping to strike it rich. While some small developers have found a niche and made their development costs back, many apps are ignored and try desperately to find a market. Even though applications require a knowledge of an actual programming language that hasn’t stopped a ton of horrible apps from making it into the store. Now, comes along a company, 280 North, that has plans to make it worse. Their product allows those with the knowledge to make a webpage, the ability to put together a full iPhone application for sale on the app store. As if we didn’t already have a rush to the bottom when it came to price with most people refusing to even pay .99 for an app, this will push the price to nothing. Great for kids downloading apps to their iPod Touch devices, but a bad thing for developers actually trying to squeek out a business.

MobileCrunch.com has the full story on 280 North.