Apple has increased the limit for downloads over 3G or EDGE from the App Store and iTunes Store on the iPhone. Previously the limit was 10MB and anything additional needed to be downloaded via Wi-Fi.

From iLounge:

This limit now appears to have been increased to 20MB in both the App Store and iTunes Store on the device, allowing users to download larger applications and video content.

The reason why might be timed to get users used to downloading bigger apps before before the iPad arrives, or it could be a quiet response to an increasing demand for apps on the run over 10MB.

Whatever the reason it's good to see some relaxing on an arbitrary restriction. Seoul City Metro weighs in at 9.6 MB so I approve of this relaxing in restrictions.

I just got emailed this morning that my quick point release for Seoul City Metro has been approved. That was less than 48 hours from submission. Call me impressed!

It's a total change of pace when a new binary can be pushed to customers that quickly. My "What's new in this update" stated that it was just two small bug fixes, I wonder if that had any influence on the review team that saw the initial 1.1 release only 5 days ago.

Anyway, a win! Seoul City Metro Lite is also now in review.

SeoulMetroApp announces it on twitter

It's been a long slog, I have to say. It took a solid six weeks of development and many hours of dead ends and frustration but I finally managed to pull together a complete, stable release that made it through the approval process.

There's still lots to do, and since Saturday morning I have already sent for approval Seoul City Metro Lite, and Seoul City Metro V1.1.1 wich contains a few small bug fixes.

Busan City Metro is also in the works, I expect that to be running on the Seoul City Metro V1.1.1 code in the coming days and up for sale soon.

There's lots more to write on the extended development period of SCM 1.1, but for now I'll let everyone get the update and I'll take a deep breath!

Current iTunes Connect status

What a night! Dragging myself up out of bed at 2:45 am (Seoul time) to check in to the MacTalk Australia live coverage; idle in ustream the IRC chat room; and refresh the live Gdgt.com text feed was totally worth it! Not only were the rumours true; but the price is reasonable and the versions arriving with 3G connectivity (using the strange Micro-Sim card ) will come unlocked. iPad runs on a new version of the iPhone OS; on custom Apple silicone; and touts an all glass 9.7 inch multi touch display. 60 and 90 day arrival times for the Wifi and 3G versions respectively.

My opinion: I want one.

Apple iPad hands on from Wired.com Gadget Lab

Demonstations of the device appearing all over the web show the iPad with a multi column layout, orientating to however you hold the device. I can't wait to see what developers make of the new UI elements and SDK APIs.

As far as my development goes - all my current work on Seoul City Metro 1.1 appears to be compatible and runs just fine in the iPad's simulator in it's 1x and 2x zoom mode. Anyway, just a few screenshots that I've already posted on twitter - time to get back to work.

iPad Simulator with Seoul City Metro 1.1 Installed

Seoul City Metro V1.1 running in the iPad Simulator

It's not directly related to development, but it does get in the way of development when I'm distracted by the amazing snow in Itaewon last night and today.

I've uploaded the video to Facebook, let this be a bit of an experiment in embedding FB video into the blog.

My attention has been divided the past week or so between the development of Seoul City Metro v1.1 and looking ahead at other cities to cover. While I spend a lot of time scribbling down ideas and drawings (and code) for SCM v1.1 - I've found myself drifting back into Illustrator to come up with some new colours and iPhone icons for upcoming cities.

I thought I'd put a few intermediate ideas here, they're just as a few iterations on the original concept.

Iterations on the SCM Logo

It's taken months for this moment! I have been frequenting the Frisbee store in Myeong-dong 명동 frustratingly circling the store since October looking for signs of new Apple gear....the iMacs and MacBooks arrived at some stage in November... but no Magic Mouse. The online Korean Apple store kept changing the delivery dates too - first November, then December. It wasn't looking good...

Magic Mouse (finally!)

Anyway - just a quick update that I'm happy to finally replace my 2nd scummy Mighty Mouse.

Next I need to replace my Bluetooth keyboard with the new 2 battery version (I'm currently missing 2 keys on my current keyboard), and get my MacBook Pro keyboard and trackpad fixed/replaced.

I think I might miss the middle click that the Mighty Mouse had, but I am getting my scrolling back!

As I thought, this might be the case. Upon releasing the initial version of Seoul City Metro into the wild my work has load only got more intense. Two days after SCM hit the store the main Korean competition app unleashed a new 3.0 release and  a price reduction - and in addition to this almost all the feedback I received pointed towards one or two features I had deliberately left out of the initial release. So since SCM wen't live on the 10th I have been frantically preparing my infrastructure to handle timetables and Google maps (via the MapKit framework). I am also working hard to streamline the viewing, cacheing and organisation of the 'Routes' part of the app.

I'm not worried about implementing MapKit because I have previously mapped all 440 stations and their GPS coordinates - but it's been managing the almost half a million pieces of time table data that has taken so much more time that I had originally anticipated. Although the details of the timetable data are relatively boring, I find the statistics quite interesting.

• 468,000 individual trains mapped equalling 17MB of SQL data.
• 1,600 pages scraped, totalling 48 MB.
• The addition of this data almost quadruples the total size of the app (originally 5.7MB)

This leads to an interesting problem with the app bundle size. Apple limit the maximum size of an App you can download over 3G to 10MB. Personally I think keeping an app (if possible) below 10MB is really important, as it allows your app to capture the impulse purchase. I'm currently considering several options about how to manage this, including providing only the basic data with the app and allowing users to download the additional data as an SQLite adon-on, or by providing a web service that can be queried from within the app. There's advantages and disadvantages in each case (which I might outline in a later post) but in my opinion, most people will only need the first and last trains departing each station anyway.

New SCM Branding

In other news, I've been working with Steven Miller (@yargalot and from TheNetocracy) on some new branding and a new website for SCM and I have to say I'm pretty chuffed at what he's come up with. I had pretty specific ideas in mind when he asked me if he could help design a website and he met all expectations when he came up with a clean, stylish design almost instantly. We spent more time making sure we had the markup optimised for search engines that we did on design elements - and it looks great. The website now exists at http://www.seoulcitymetro.com (previously http://seoulmetroapp.com) and is hosted with a swish new slice purchased the other day from Slicehost (Slicehost Referral link).

With the idea in my mind that I would possibly serve 17MB downloads to SCM customers or provide a XML/JSON feed for individual station timetables - I had upgrade the hosting to something more flexible. Enter Slicehost. With the help of Jacob (@jacobch) we now have seoulcitymetro.com and our git repositories running on a speedy clean Ubuntu Karmic Koala slice. So far we're totally impressed with both Slicehost and Ubuntu and we hope to run more services from this in the future.  I can definitely envision a public bug tracker and documentation wiki for SCM and other upcoming projects.

There's heaps of work to be done! I'm hoping to have the next SCM version 1.1 submitted to Apple by 1/1/10. Watch this space! To the minute updates can be found on twitter by following @seoulmetroapp . Seoul City Metro is available on iTunes for $1.99  iTunes Store (iTunes link)

Seoul City Metro

I'm excited to report that Seoul City Metro has gone live on the Apple App Store!

You can purchase a copy on the world wide store right here for $1.99 US.

Now that the iPhone Application development cycle has been completed - it's time to start some promotions to drum up some sales! I have @yargalot and myself working on a proper website, and I'm looking into promotions on Facebook, and around Seoul itself.!

There's no shortage of apps that will take your 1-4 dollars and let you sift through lists of stations or tap on a map and work out a way for you to get from A to B in your given city.

I've been working with a pile of transport apps leading up to Seoul City Metro and I've noticed a lot of similar transport apps fall into the trap of implementing too many non standard UI elements or offer too many different ways to do the same thing at the cost of consistency.

Non standard interfaces are not uncommon as developers decide not to adhere to the apple Human Interface Guidelines and roll their own half baked Us. I I have found some great examples of non-scalable, non standard implementations that are so bland and basic (or crazy and complex) that it's hard to know what you're doing or what you just did. The time required to lean these UIs is frustrating to say the least.

Great example of very non-standard UI

My second issue with the current state of transport apps is the compromise made to consistency to offer multiple ways of accessing the same functionality.

Most transport apps provide you with a list of stations you can select via searching or scrolling through via a 'Stations' Tab Bar icon. This interface is then repeated via a 'Routes' Tab bar icon and quite often you can also access the 'Stations' via the 'Lines' Tab Bar icon. My problem with this solution is when the selection of a station name in a list looks the same and behaves differently.

Two ways to begin a route visible here.

As is often the case, selecting a station from the 'Stations' tab gives you a detailed overview of the station. In the case of the 'Route' tab it skips the details and provides you with the same interface over again to select another station.

A lot of apps have about 3 ways you can enter into the 'route calculation loop' and I find this overlap pointless and confusing.

Another example is when applications let you tap on a map and use the selection as a 'route start' or 'route end' and then take you to a list or an overlay of the route you've selected. This can be a great feature except when you can get to the same map that behaves differenty via three other Tab Bar icons.

In the case of applications with a tab bar interface you can end up with the same screen of information appearing on all or most of the tabs at once by navigating through each Tab Bar icon independently. This is not a good user experience because clicking on a tab bar icon saying 'Stations' can be showing a map if thats how the user haphazardly left it.

My approach to a transport app (although only in it's first iteration) focuses on the soul purpose of directing the user towards selecting stations. The user will be given ways to select a station by map, name, or nearby then be presented with the detailed view of the station in order to decide what to do with it. After the user has completed an action their selected station (set as route start, or route end), the user navigates back to the main menu to select a second station. Only when a route has been completed are they presented with a 'view route' option.

Straight forward navigation structure

So rather than a Tab Bar I have used a single navigation structure to direct the user down a single path at a time to select a station. This provides the user with a linear way of working, keeping them from getting confused between 5 or more tabs that all do similar, overlapping things (and could all be displaying a map at that particular point in time).

I think it saves the user mental processing too. The maximum menu depth a user can get to to view a calculated route is only three screens deep, and if they have used a route before they can get to the calculated route in only two steps. The worst case in the application above (London Tube) can require you to navigate through 5 different screens to view a route and then you need to go back through the whole 5 to start again.

I think simplifying transport apps is the way to go, working and thinking about how to do this all the time.

If you've read this far - thank you! This post just touches on my thoughts about current transport apps and their inconsistencies, I'm keen on posting more of my thoughts as development of my transport apps continue.

Seoul City Metro should be hitting the App Store around December 14th. Follow @seoulmetroapp on twitter for updates!