The Critical Path

Here’s my first weekly review of “what’s new in digital”. This week, I have been using the Guardian iPhone application, hence the many references to that most excellent newspaper.

Twitter Location Finder

After a week of Twitter downtime and various malfunctions a neat new feature has emerged. Twitter places is a location finding service that allows you to include a nifty map link to where and when you are in your Tweet. I believe this will also make it’s way into the Twitter API, delivering some pretty interesting options for geotweeting in the coming months.

iPhone 4

And what better platform to Tweet your movement from that the very cute new iPhone. It has an amazing new display, and is being touted as a viable ebook reader among many other things. What really interests me was the huge interest in the launch. Demand for the new iPhone has seen ordering websites crash in the US and UK with demand running 10 times ahead of last year’s 3GS.

To me this is particularly interesting from a platform development perspective, and gives me some comfort in my decision to focus my initial mobile development efforts here.

New Apps

There are Apps and there are novelties, the later, whilst potentially lucrative for their developers are just generally annoying in my book, and what could be more annoying than a Vuvuzela. Love them or loath them, these bloody annoying droning horns have become the backing track to the world cup. Sleep soundly tonight or wake screaming in terror as your friends and neighbours download and show off the Vuvuzela app.

Windows on the web

Finally for this week’s update,  news of Microsoft stepping up to launch a web version of Office. It’s a freebee in the Google docs style (you just need a hotmail / live.com ID to log in) and offers versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote. It all seems to work, but is basic in some of its functionality. Still, good to see an alternative emerge to Google docs. What will be interesting to see is where Microsoft go with this.