conventional items—documentation, help menus, and support—are not demanded by users.

When Block wrote 2 Across, she
was a graduate student in philosophy
and, although she had a background
in math, she had no formal program-
ming experience, Maland notes. “She
sat down with the documentation for
the SDK and just wrote it in something
like six weeks,” he says. 2 Across went
on to win several notable awards from
Apple, including “Best of i Tunes: Puz-
zle Games” and “Staff Favorite.”
Instant Cocoa has no formal user
support system, says Maland, but he
keeps up with email queries and par-
ticipates in a pTerm Google Group.
“A lot of the emails are, ‘How do I do
this or that,’ but somewhere in there is
a signal that tells you where you have
not done a good job. You get a pretty
good sense of what people want in the
next version.”

 

nuance Communications Unlike Spring Partners and Instant Cocoa, Nuance’s history goes back decades. The Burlington, MA-based company has sold its Dragon speech products via retailers and resellers long before app stores existed. But now Nuance has begun offering a few products—most notably Dragon Dictation and Dragon Search—for Apple mobile devices. Nuance also recently began publishing an SDK and APIs to its core speech recognition software so that any developer may easily incorporate Nuance speech into its products.

When apple
introduced the
iPhone, eric maland
started developing
for ios. “i didn’t
actually have
an iPhone,” he says.
“i just downloaded
[apple’s] sDK and
wrote my first couple
of apps in that.”

Nuance charges nothing for its online Dragon apps and derives no revenue from them, at least not directly. According to Aaron Masih, director of the Nuance Mobile Developer Program, the idea is “to prove to the marketplace that speech technology really works and is ready for prime time.” A second objective is to learn how people use speech in mobile environments and to learn more about how people speak, especially in foreign languages. Third, it is to increase the brand recognition for the Nuance name and to encourage users to try the Dragon desktop products.

Masih says that as the online app
stores become more flooded with of-
ferings, a shakeout will occur, with the
products of dubious quality and utility
disappearing. The survivors will grow
in complexity and will less likely be
free, he says.

Further Reading

Laudon, K. and Traver, C.G. E-Commerce 2011 (7th Ed.), Prentice hall, Upper Saddle River, nJ, 2010. Lee, B.G., Lee, G.H., Shim, Y.H., and Choi, A. Let developers run the app store by lowering the barrier-to-entry, International Journal of Electronic Finance 4, 3, July 2010. Mahmoud, Q.H., and Popowicz, P. Toward a framework for the discovery and acquisition of mobile applications, Proceedings of the 2010 Ninth International Conference on Mobile Business, Athens, Greece, June 27–29, 2010.

Stark, J.

Building iPhone Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, O’Reilly Media, Sebastopol, CA, 2010.

Yarmosh, K.

App Savvy: Turning Ideas Into iPad and iPhone Apps Customers Really Want, O’Reilly Media, Sebastopol, CA, 2010.

Gary Anthes is a technology writer and editor based in arlington, Va.

© 2011 aCM 0001-0782/11/09 $10.00

ACM Member News

to understand
and use large
datasets,
science must
continue
to make
advances in
the study of hybrid algorithms
that combine symbolic and
numeric computations, says
Zhi lihong, professor at the
academy of mathematics and
system sciences at the Chinese
academy of sciences.

One of leading researchers in this field, Zhi recently won

a Chinese female scientists award earlier this year. While her research may sound esoteric to the general public, Zhi stresses that her work means little if hybrid symbolic-numeric computations are not applied to real-world purposes.

“hybrid symbolic-numeric
computation is becoming more
and more important in solving
problems in various areas of
engineering, robotics, biology,
and signal theory,” Zhi says. “it
is also important in information
technology, cryptology, coding
theory, and other uses. these
require exact and/or certified
algorithmic solutions.”
that is the point behind the
hybrid approach, to get the best of
both worlds by taking advantage
of the speedier numerical
approach with the less error-
prone symbolic methods.
this has essentially served
as Zhi’s career focus. as a
graduate student, she sought to
develop a new computer algebra
system for China, a noble but
unsuccessful effort that helped
shape Zhi’s determination to
keep “real” application value
foremost in her work.