Kindle Apps Blog

Even before KDK was announced people wanted to use Kindle to organize their lives better. So “Kindle Calendars” were some popular eBooks that sold on Amazon Kindle Marketplace. With Kindle lacking any interactive features at that time these were merely eBooks with a page for every day of the week. You could then type notes for every day and these notes would be backed up to Amazon’s online servers.

While this provided security in case your calendar was lost, it would not show you your upcoming appointments in any easy way and it wouldn’t synchronize with any calendar services like Microsoft Exchange based corporate or personal mail servers, MobileMe, Google Calendars etc.

With Kindle SDK out all these features would be easy to implement. Also this app can very well be free since calendar isn’t likely to cause a lot of internet traffic unless your schedule is extremely busy.

I would bet that Calendar App would be among the first ones to appear.

Kindle Checkers is another app that is likely to emerge quickly. I’t pretty much the same deal as with chess. Being able to play against Kindle CPU if you are beginner or against web-service. Controlling the game with 5-way controller is even easier since there are only 32 squares to choose from as opposed to 64. Also because the game is not as complex Kindle CPU would be able to provide more of a challenge to a human player.

As of this morning Amazon is accepting applications for participation in the limited Beta of KDK. You can apply at this page.

While I would love to read any kind of blog on my Kindle I’m not that sure that this is going to happen.

While the application wouldn’t be that hard to create, it will pretty much render Kindle Blog publishing dead, since why would anyone want to pay for each individual blog when they can just pay for an app (even if it will be a recurring monthly subscription because of the amount of Internet traffic it will generate) and get all of the blogs including ones that are not available in the Kindle Store because their authors don’t want/care/can’t or just plain wouldn’t put them on there.

Although I doubt that blog subscriptions generate a noticeable porting of revenue compared to book sales and newspaper and magazine subscriptions the issue can cause bad publicity fallout for Amazon either way.

If Amazon would chose to block all such applications from it’s app store that will surely anger the user-base and cause bad publicity. Worse yet it will provide competitors with an easy opportunity to score a feature that Kindle wouldn’t match.

On the other hand should Amazon chose to release such an application, it might anger bloggers who submitted their content to Kindle Store and perhaps earned sizable income from doing so. I have no doubt that some blogs can boast more Kindle subscriptions than brick-and-mortar paper periodicals that are also available on Kindle. Should Kindle RSS reader application become a reality everyone except the most lazy individuals will likely cancel their subscription and switch to the app. This will result in revenue loss by bloggers and might cause some retaliatory bad PR. Although the number of begrudged people would be much less than in the first scenario these few people because of having popular blogs would have louder voices.

Despite the fact that personally I have some blogs published in Kindle Store I would prefer Amazon to go the open way. However I don’t know if it would be the case. Technically the app can be considered a “generic reader” that is explicitly prohibited by the Kindle SDK guidelines.

While most of the blogs can be read via Kindle’s built in browser the experience is so inferior to using the Kindle Store subscription (mostly because browser takes forever to start and navigate to the proper page) that I doubt that many people actually use it.

While GMail as well as some other web-based email services work in Kindle’s basic web browser to one degree or another. Still accessing email is more frustrating experience than it should be from a device with decently sized screen, full keyboard and 3G Internet connectivity.

Therefore another application that is bound to appear is email client. Even though I have iPhone that can I can read my email on I would love to do so on Amazon Kindle because of it’s larger screen. After all if I carry it with me anyway to read books while I wait for one appointment or another why not use it as email client as well?

However there are some factors that don’t make this as easy and nice it one would wish:

1) The application will likely be subscription based since fixed-price and free applications are limited to 100 kilobytes of Internet traffic per month which is much less than average email user receives nowdays. However for those of us who do receive only few emails once in a while there may be a freeware app. Another option would be to setup filtering rules that would prevent all but email from several while-listed senders to ever reach the device.

2) While nothing is certain at this point it’s possible that Kindle SDK will prevent applications from connecting to any but standard HTTP ports and therefore whoever would distribute the app would have to come up with HTTP to POP3/IMAP/SMTP proxy service.

3) Rendering HTML emails with rich formatting might prove tricky given Kindle’s limited computing power on top of the fact that the SDK is likely java-based. While there are several ways around it – none are perfect.

4) International characters. Fonts that are installed on Amazon Kindle are limited to only Latin characters. With KDK and applications putting more strain on the limited amount of RAM that is available on the device Amazon will be even less likely to put fonts that would support broader range of characters and therefore consume more memory.

Folders is probably the most asked for Kindle feature. So with Kindle SDK out are we likely to see Kindle folders application? Right now it seems a coin toss to me.

After Kindle 2 was released internationally Amazon acknowledged the problem of organizing large libraries on the device promised a solution sometime in 2010. As I see it there are 4 options:

1) Amazon implements folders themselves. Folders can be one of the sorting options or a tab in the main screen that would most likely be accessed by tilting the 5-way controller right. Since Amazon owns the software and can integrate new features however they like it wold be easiest for them to do. So they may try to implement one-size-fits-all solution. I’m pretty sure that default home screen is going to be left intact by default so that the majority of users who are used to it will not have to change their habits.

2a) Amazon will provide a rich enough SDK that will allow developers to integrate their apps into home screen and book reading screens in a seamless and natural way (new menu items, new hot-keys, redefining existing hot keys, etc). This would allow the same experience as described in option 1 but developed by 3rd parties. So users will have more than one folders app to chose from. Multiple such applications might conflict with each other and spoil the user experience. However users will be free to chose any app or none at all. Since such seamless integration will require more complex SDK there is a chance that Amazon will not allow this kind of integration at all at least for now.

2b) Although it will not be possible to integrate folders application into home screen, Amazon will still allow applications to see filer in the “documents” folder and launch book reading application and PDF viewer. In this case folders app will be something users will have to explicitly start before they can see their library in an organized way. While this might not be too user-friendly it may end up being the only option. Lets not forget however that options 2a and 2b don’t cancel out option 1 (Amazon implementing folders themselves)

3) SDK will not allow applications to touch books at all. So folders app will be impossible to implement at all unless paired with a hack that Amazon will not likely allow.

Personally I find options 1 and 2b slightly more likely. Time will show if I’m right.

Kindle Chess

Kindle Chess is very likely to be among the first released apps. There are many ways to implement this game on Kindle platform.

The game will likely take advantage of Kindle’s free 3G Internet connectivity since onboard CPU isn’t doesn’t have enough computing power to challenge anyone except for very novice players. Experienced players will have to test their skill against server somewhere on the web or against their home PC that can use 100% of its computing power and memory to challenge the human player.

Another scenario would be human vs. human play. Kindle owners would be able to engage in either fast paced blitz tournament style games or take it easy and enjoy slow play-by-mail type matches at one turn a day or even a week. Since chess is social and highly competitive game I wouldn’t be surprised if some Kindle Chess application would also have social networking features.

If I were the owner of one of the online chess websites or existing PC chess games I would start working hard on creating a Kindle version and add value to the whole services by making it available on Kindle.

Implementing chess on Kindle isn’t likely to present a major ergonomic challenge since 64 squares on the board can easily be navigated with 5-way controller or player can just type their moves on the keyboard (e2e4)

Kindle Sudoku

Since little is known right now about KDK and the way it will integrate with Kindle software I can only speculate about which Kindle apps will be available. And this is precisely what I’m going to do.

Kindle Sudoku is likely to the among the first application to appear in fact I believe that there will be multiple versions of it by several companies. Sudoku is a very popular game, it doesn’t require fast screen refresh, colors and any computing power or memory. On top of that it’s not encumbered by trademarks or copyrights so everyone is free to implement it in any way they like. Kindle keyboard and 5-way controller are good enough for playing Sudoku (I have to admit that touchscreen with a stylus would have been the most perfect).

In fact if you look at Amazon’s official KDK page, one sample app that is displayed on Kindle there is Sudoku.

I’ve been blogging about Kindle for a while over at blogkindle.com. However with a recent explosion in the number of eBook reader devices the blog has gravitated from solely covering news related to Kindle to comparative reviews of eBook reader that are competing with Kindle. Amazon’s announcement of Kindle SDK gives me a chance to recapture the focus on my favorite device.

Since there is quite a number of posts published over at the old blog on a regular basis, I’ve decided to start a new blog here. I’ll post reviews of new and upcoming applications for Amazon Kindle. I’m also interested in developing Kindle applications myself so once I get on board the KDK program I’ll write about my KDK development experience here too.

Stay tuned for more posts.