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Prototypes for Mac lets you use images to prototype iPhone interfaces – interaction and all.

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Prototypes is a Mac application that helps you test your interfaces early in the design process, helping designers find problems with their user experiences before major coding for their websites and iPhone apps takes place.

It’s a common problem: you’ve got a Photoshop mockup that looks great, but thanks to the static nature of such apps, you can’t take that interface for a test-drive. Once coding begins and problems are found, it’s back to the drawing board — with significant time wasted for all involved.

Prototypes allows you to turn those designs into prototypes that you can interact with through the mouse on your Mac or by tapping on your iPhone. You simply draw and link hotspots and set animations, share your interface with other stakeholders, and get testing.

To get a feel for the output Prototypes creates before spending the cash, head over to ptyp.es on your iPhone, follow the instructions presented to you for installation, and enter the PIN 1234 5678. You’ll be able to try out a Prototypes-generated interface yourself.

The app costs US$39.99 and was developed by iOS developer Duncan Wilcox and user interface expert and Skitch creator Keith Lang.Mac Stories

Is it possible? AT&T drops lower in customer satisfaction survey

It's a bit of a surprise. AT&T has dropped below Sprint in consumer ratings, at least according to the American Customer Satisfaction Index, as reported by the Associated Press. Both T-Mobile and AT&T are ranked at the bottom, which makes you wonder about the wisdom of the announced sale of T-Mobile to AT&T. Think of the fun customers will have as the two worst companies on the list merge accounting systems and networks. Consumer Reports also ranks AT&T the worst of the cellular carriers.

Sprint and Verizon both get a score of 72 in the survey, which was done by polling 8,000 households in the first quarter of the year. AT&T is at the bottom with a score of 66, down 3 points from last year. T-Mobile scores a 70, also down 3 from a year ago.

At first glance I would have thought there would be some improvement in the AT&T score. We've been reporting on problems for years, and AT&T says it has spent millions in upgrades and says it has been trying to fill in the coverage gaps. What's your experience? Is AT&T getting better or worse, and if you made the jump to Verizon, are you happier?

Is it possible? AT&T drops lower in customer satisfaction survey originally appeared on TUAW on Thu, 19 May 2011 19:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Reminder: the real smartphone war is against dumbphones

Will Android kill the iPhone? Or is it the other way around? It’s tempting to stick with the market share battle mindset when it comes to smartphones, but as Asymco’s Horace Dediu points out, the real question may be, who can tempt away users of dumbphones, or traditional cellphones?

Dediu compiled second quarter smartphone market figures for the past four years (see chart at right), which makes it easy to see just how much potential is left untapped among dumbphone users. His data shows that smartphones now account for 27 percent of phones shipped to retailers.

“What the chart shows is that Android (and phone versions of iOS) have taken share from direct competitors but have taken more from non-consumption,” Dediu writes. “Rather than focusing on rivalry between platforms, minds should be focused on the shape of the smartphone adoption curve.”

Looking at the smartphone market in that light, there definitely seems to be room for entrants aside from Google and Apple to make their mark. For example, even though Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 devices may not be selling like hotcakes yet, there’s potential for the platform to explode if it can properly tap dumbphone users (that definitely seems to be the angle with its Windows Phone ad campaign). Microsoft’s upcoming partnership with Nokia to create flagship Windows Phone devices could help in this respect.

But it’s definitely not going to be easy for Microsoft, or any other modern smartphone newcomer, to entice dumbphone users. In addition to powering high-end smartphones, Android is well positioned for dumbphone consumers, since it’s versatile enough to run on low- and mid-range hardware.

Research firm Gartner also released its latest mobile device numbers today, which gives us a more granular look at the state of the industry. Smartphones accounted for 23.6 percent of phones sold in the second quarter (compared to last year), according to Gartner, which falls in line with Dediu’s smartphone shipment statistics. Gartner’s numbers show that over 100 million smartphones were sold in the last quarter out of a total of 428 million mobile devices.

Additionally, the firm says that only 1.6 million Windows Phone 7 devices were sold last quarter. That’s a tepid response, for sure, but it’s definitely not enough to scare Microsoft off of smartphones. As I’ve previously argued, Microsoft is in the smartphone market for the long haul with Windows Phone, and I suspect it will work even harder to target dumbphone users over the next year.

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Found Footage: Rage for iOS running in WebGL

The video on the next page shows a pretty mean feat of coding. Developer Brandon Jones has taken files from the iOS version of id’s Rage game, which came out for iOS a little while ago, and tweaked them to display in WebGL, a library for JavaScript that can generate 3D graphics in a compatible web browser. In other words, Jones ported (some elements of) Rage for iOS to the browser.

He even had John Carmack’s help, getting a few hints on exactly how the file format worked and how to get it together. Understandably, Carmack also asked him not to post the art files on a public web server, so while the source code is available for developers, the demo isn’t actually live for players to try out.

Jones has a much longer post about the actual tech behind the demo, though it may cross your eyes if you’re not that code-inclined. It’s still amazing, though, and it shows that iOS might actually work well as a portal to development on other platforms. As Jones says, mobile devices often represent a crunch on available resources and performance, and that aligns perfectly with the limitations that lots of web developers are facing as games on that platform get more and more complicated.

[via Waxy]

Continue reading Found Footage: Rage for iOS running in WebGL

Found Footage: Rage for iOS running in WebGL originally appeared on TUAW on Wed, 18 May 2011 00:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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In-flight iPhone snaps Space Shuttle launch

The picture at right isn’t something you see every day, and it’s something there’ll only be one more chance to capture: a Space Shuttle launch photographed from an in-flight passenger jet. Stefanie Gordon shot this image of the Space Shuttle Endeavour’s launch with her iPhone as her plane descended for a landing.

The shot itself is a rare enough event, but what happened next was an eye-opener for the photographer. According to Mashable, within a few hours of uploading the launch pics to Twitter from her iPhone, Stephanie was getting phone calls from ABC, CNBC and the BBC. Her follower count on Twitter went up by over 1000, and she was getting so many @mentions as a result of the pic that she had to shut them off so her iPhone’s battery didn’t get drained.

Other people on the plane took pics, but apparently none of them uploaded them to Twitter. The real draw of this story isn’t that the photo was taken with an iPhone — people use the device to take extraordinary pics all the time — but the colossal and immediate response the photographer got after sharing it. This scenario shows just how interconnected everything has become today thanks to devices like the iPhone, and it’s a trend that’s only going to become more powerful as more people start sharing information this way.

In-flight iPhone snaps Space Shuttle launch originally appeared on TUAW on Tue, 17 May 2011 09:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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