Anthony Doesburg: Program maker taps iPhone's huge potential

If John Casasanta is representative of the iPhone application developer community, it's a fun and friendly world to be in.

It's also frenetic.

Apple launched its App Store, through which iPhone and iPod Touch programs are distributed, last July. In less than a year third-party developers like Casasanta have written more than 25,000 iPhone programs that have been downloaded more than one billion times.

Sometimes it's a controversial world as well. Apple vets applications before accepting them in the App Store (where it keeps 30 per cent of the program asking price, although many are free).

It will reject programs that compete with its own software, but imposes a non-disclosure agreement on developers whose work gets the thumbs down. And sometimes it just makes stupid judgments - such as approving Baby Shaker, which got the user to violently shake their phone to silence the sound of a crying baby. Baby Shaker survived a couple of days before Apple saw the light and withdrew it after an outcry from child welfare groups.

Casasanta made his Apple software debut long before the iPhone came along. His biggest claim to fame is iClip, a Mac application that makes copying and pasting much more useful by keeping a history of up to 99 copied items.

That means you can copy a succession of snippets of text or images without each new one overwriting the one before.

But Casasanta, who was in Auckland in April to talk to local software developers, also has a string of iPhone apps to his name. His company, Tap Tap Tap, created Where To?, which uses the iPhone's GPS and Google Maps to alert the user to nearby places to eat, banks, shops and all manner of other amenities.

Tipulator is another Tap Tap Tap creation, for working out how much to tip and how to split the bill in a restaurant. And Classics, which it co-wrote, is an e-book reader for the iPhone. Both have featured in Apple ads.

Casasanta is a big believer in giving users of his software an enjoyable experience. The US$99 ($153) iPhone software developer kit (SDK) makes it easy to write programs with features and options displayed as lists, he says, but he likes to go beyond that.

"We want to go an extra mile and make programs that are more interactive and more fun."

The fun extends to how Casasanta sells software, too. Another of his ventures is MacHeist, a website where Mac users can buy heavily discounted bundles of a dozen or more applications.

Casasanta and his two MacHeist partners have built up a community of hundreds of thousands of people who are drawn to the site to undertake "missions" that involve solving a series of puzzles.

"We've found that if people become passionate about solving the puzzles, they spread the word about the site."

MacHeist's most recent mission, which ended just before Casasanta was in New Zealand, resulted in sales of 88,000 software bundles for US$39 each, from which US$850,000 was given to charity. It's an unusual business model, Casasanta concedes, but lucrative.

Despite being completely immersed in the Mac and iPhone worlds, Casasanta is no Apple fanboy - he loves its products but wouldn't choose to work there. "I'm much happier working on my own."

It's a mutually enriching relationship. By making the iPhone SDK readily available, Apple has provided thousands of programmers with a meal ticket, and has millions of App Store customers lapping up their software.

Its handset rivals have so far failed to come up with a competitive answer. However, they keep trying.

Last week Nokia, which sells more mobile phones than anyone, launched its Ovi store with a claimed catalogue of 20,000 items; RIM, maker of the Blackberry, has Blackberry App World; Microsoft, not to be forgotten, will launch Windows Marketplace for Mobile when new phones running Windows Mobile 6.5 become available in the second half of the year; and Google has Android Market, where scores of programs for phones running its Android operating system can be found.

Palm, too, has a flash new model with many iPhone-like features, the Pre, due for release in the US tomorrow.

Too bad for Apple's imitators, says Casasanta, that there's a new version of the iPhone software, with a host of useful new features, due any day. Even more tantalising is the expected announcement next week at Apple's sold-out Worldwide Developers Conference, of the next-generation iPhone.

Having recently moved from the United States East Coast to San Francisco, where the conference is being staged, Casasanta will be present. He and fellow iPhone developers will be throwing a party to show off a bunch of new apps.

Let the fun continue.

Anthony Doesburg is an Auckland technology journalist

On a roll

Apple has sold more than 21 million iPhones since their debut in 2007, and brokers Morgan Stanley are predicting sales of almost 25 million phones this year and 36 million next year. The iPhone is Apple's most profitable product, with a gross margin of about 50 per cent to 55 per cent, Morgan Stanley estimates.

- BLOOMBERG