Flashlight by Rik iOS app Privacy Policy

For the French version, please scroll down. Pour la version française, veuillez voir plus bas.

This Privacy Policy explains how I collect, use, disclose, and safeguard your information when you visit my mobile application "Flashlight by Rik".   Please read this Privacy Policy carefully.  IF YOU DO NOT AGREE WITH THE TERMS OF THIS PRIVACY POLICY, PLEASE DO NOT ACCESS THE APPLICATION.

COLLECTION AND SAFEGUARDING OF YOUR INFORMATION 

My app does not collect any of your information. It does not connect to the internet, ever. 

USE OF YOUR INFORMATION

Having none of your information, I cannot use your information, ever. 

DISCLOSURE OF YOUR INFORMATION 

Having none of your information, I cannot disclose your information, ever. 

CONTACT US 

If you have questions or comments about this Privacy Policy, please contact me by commenting on this post. Thank you.

POLITIQUE DE CONFIDENTIALITE (VERSION FRANCAISE)

Cette politique de confidentialité explique comment je collecte, utilise, divulgue et sauvegarde vos informations lorsque vous visitez mon application mobile "Flashlight by Rik". Veuillez lire attentivement cette politique de confidentialité. SI VOUS N'ETES PAS D'ACCORD AVEC LES CONDITIONS DE CETTE POLITIQUE DE CONFIDENTIALITÉ, VEUILLEZ NE PAS ACCÉDER À L'APPLICATION.

COLLECTE ET SAUVEGARDE DE VOS INFORMATIONS

Mon application ne collecte aucune de vos informations. Elle ne se connecte jamais à l'internet.

UTILISATION DE VOS INFORMATIONS

N'ayant aucune de vos informations, je ne peux jamais utiliser vos informations.

DIVULGATION DE VOS INFORMATIONS

N'ayant aucune de vos informations, je ne peux jamais divulguer vos informations.

CONTACTEZ-NOUS

Si vous avez des questions ou des commentaires à propos de cette politique de confidentialité, veuillez me contacter en commentant sur cet article. Merci.

Close

"Flashlight by Rik" : the (totally) free iOS light app

Almost 3 years ago, I set about to fix a problem plaguing the iOS App Store: it was impossible to find an extremely simple flashlight utility that was free and free of ads.

So I built one, squeezed it through the app store approval (before there were so many that new ones were banned) and blogged about it and it ultimately passed a million downloads, with the users extremely satisfied:

Flashlight by Rik

Over the years I've kept on improving it to support all the latest devices, coding standards and operating system features. For example, it is one of the few flashlights that allows you to fully control the strobe pattern: it doesn't have to be synchronous, you can let the light flash for .1 second every second, for a neat eye-catching strobe effect. And of course it fully supports iOS 6's control of the light intensity.

But all through those years, I've constantly striven to make this basic utility as small and fast as possible. And even today, with support for 4 languages (English, French, German, Russian) and the iPhone 5 screen, the download is a mere 80kB. And the launch speed is pretty much unbeatable. It ranges from below 1 second if the app is starting for the first time, to near instantaneous if it still resides in memory and is swapped to the front.
I wish I could do even better, but I still have to fit in all those icons and other files. And since I will never compromise on the speed and simplicity, fancy graphics will never be seen in this app. After all, don't you want a light that starts as soon as you tap on it?

Whatever the hundred other flashlight apps want you to believe, none of them is any brighter or faster than Flashlight by Rik. I invite you to try them all, and if you find any that is faster I will do my utmost to release a new version that matches its speed. (Incidentally, assuming you set the brightness to 100%, all the flashlights are the same brightness. Don't bother testing that part!)

In closing, I will indeed never charge for Flashlight by Rik. Nor will I ever put ads on it. The iPhone should have shipped with a flashlight app. I aim to fix this recurring problem.

Thank you again to my million (and more) users.
Rik.

The "paradox" of simplification: since the dawn of Man!

So @bwertz posted on the Version One Ventures that one should s.i.m.p.l.i.f.y.
I couldn't agree more, after all one of my email signatures is a quote from Alan Perlis about it. What does bother me a little (hence this post) is the quote that accompanies his post:

“A modern paradox is that it’s simpler to create complex interfaces because it’s so complex to simplify them.” (Pär Almqvist)

That's just bullshit, in the sense that there's absolutely nothing modern about the difficulty of simplifying. Yes it's hard. And yes it's what one needs to aim for. And it's much, much, much harder than its opposite.

The core of the issue is this: it's much easier to add than to remove.
When adding, you don't care about what was, you just look ahead and think that you're doing good by creating. That's very good, in general. Where it starts becoming really bad is when you add so much that the whole system collapses from its inwards gravitational pull. In other words, it calcifies because there's so much going on that one either doesn't understand how it works or is afraid of doing anything to upset it.

This applies to everything, including interfaces: when you don't know how the users are interacting with your site, you are fearful of change. So you spend resources tracking them. Then you get too much data. Then you have to sift through that data to truly understand what matters. Finally you can take action. And that's assuming your site hasn't grown so big with so much spaghetti code that you need to refactor (i.e. simplify -- that word again -- the code) before doing anything.

For entrepreneurs, my advice would be: don't let anything grow too big that it becomes a huge undertaking to bring it down to a manageable size. Decouple as much as you can. Define clearly the communication protocols between those small pieces. That's what matters in the end: how your people communicate within the organization, how your users communicate with you (web clicks, apps, etc...), how your system modules communicate with each others.

In one word: APIs

What was Alan Perlis' quote that I alluded to at the top of the post? Glad you asked:

"Fools ignore complexity; pragmatists suffer it; experts avoid it; geniuses remove it." - Alan Perlis

On Facebook vs. Twitter publisher value

Well it's been a year since my last post. Time flies, etc... etc...
Speaking of Facebook, I just saw on Twitter a link to Publishers Cool on Facebook. The crux of it, as has been going around the blogosphere for a while, is that less than 20% of people who "like" a brand on Facebook actually get to see that brand's posts on their wall.

And that's a pretty bad value proposition for all those brands investing in eyeball acquisition. Especially since email newsletters and Twitter posts to followers are supposedly free of that ridiculous filter. And I say supposedly because one shouldn't expect that a push service is going to be always viewed. For emails there's actually a very good chance (which is why I think email addresses are the holy grail of marketing), but if your Twitter follower follows 10,000 people I suspect that your tweet will drown in that person's firehose.

There is a fundamental difference here though: the Twitter rules are clear, and they're the same for everyone who doesn't pay for sponsored tweets (for now): 100% of what you tweet ends up in a follower's stream. Whether or not the user sees it is up to her and chance, but at least it's not up to some arcane closed Facebook algorithm.

And that's what it's all about. Publishers and brands want to know the rules. Nobody antes up before knowing the rules of the table.

The Facebook IPO

Facebook: Short term hype play, long term mistake

I've been asked what I think of the upcoming Facebook IPO. Here are my thoughts, with the usual caveats that I am not responsible for any decision you take, I am not a qualified adviser or anything of the sort, etc...


With that out of the way, let's get to the core of the matter.


Positives:
+ Huge user base (850MM)
+ Powerful ecosystem and developer environment
+ High switching costs

Negatives:
- Mature concept
- Huge user base (how much more can you grow it?)
- Growing early adopter fatigue
- High valuation
- Small floatation
- Expected exodus after lock-in period

From a purely financial perspective, the problem is that FB has a high valuation (up to $100B), a huge user base (850MM people) and a small floatation that artificially creates scarcity. FB can't go any lower than $75B valuation, but at the same time it's very tough justifying it due to very low revenues ($3.7B) and even lower profits. While Google did go public at 100x profits, its valuation was much lower and allowed for 7x growth. In this case, a potential investor only needs to look at the upside. How much can he expect? If he buys at $100B valuation, more than 4x upside is wishful thinking. I'd assume about 2x upside within a couple of years at best, at a $200B valuation (similar to Google currently, after 6 years of floatation).
So an investor would look at a highly volatile and risky investment for a 2x upside at best, knowing that the user base won't grow that much more. The other reasons to grow FB's valuation are:
1- increased monetization of users through additional products and services
2- better profit margins
3- speculative bubble

I contend that FB's current massive reliance on advertising is a dead end. Advertising on FB goes completely against FB's value to users (better communication, reduced friendship friction) while for example advertising is perfectly aligned with Google's value to users (finding relevant information). So comparing FB to Google in valuation based on the advertising model is totally flawed and Facebook is hugely overvalued. All advertisers today on FB want to believe that things will get better and that they'll find a way to monetize those FB "likes" but that's just wishful thinking. Conversion rates are abysmal and they will stay that way.
So the only way to really increase monetization is through new products such as in-app purchasing (IAP). It is clear that this is what FB is betting on, but that hasn't been validated yet as a good long term revenue line. Most of the current profits here stem from Zynga (and others) that sell games, and we all know how quickly fatigue settles in. FB has maybe 3 years to find better use of IAP than FB games before that too fizzles.

As for better margins, I think that when FB gets better margins this will be a red flag: it'll mean that people are using less of FB's services, necessitating less computing power per user. True, computers always get cheaper and faster, but FB constantly has to innovate to keep the users excited, thus negating that advantage.

in my opinion the real fundamental achilles heel of Facebook today is the perfect storm of early adopter exit (like myself), regular user fatigue looking for the next fun thing to try, and emergence of highly targeted small social networks with high added value competing for user time.

To sum up, investing in the short term in Facebook is akin to playing the lottery, hoping that most people expect to win and drive up the valuation. But in the long term investing in Facebook is a very bland proposition that in the absolute best of cases will yield a 100% ROI given non-negative market conditions.

Personally I'm going to pass. At $30B I would have considered it.

OS X 10.7 Lion and User Conditioning

Over on his blog, Faruk Ateş discusses user conditioning from the perspectives of Apple and Google. I encourage you to read his column as it has some very keen insights, but I feel the need to comment on his statement about the direction of scrolling content being muscle memory since time immemorial (i.e. the 80's):

People are used to their scrolling behaviors; after all, they’ve used them in one and only one way since the 80’s—or whenever they started using computers. It’s understandable that this complete reversal of (mental and physical) muscle memory doesn’t appeal to everyone. 

I don't particularly agree with that powerful statement, for a couple of reasons. First, to talk about switching scrolling behaviors, one needs to look at when scrolling became touch-based rather than click-on-scroll-arrow-based. The idea of using the trackpad to scroll I think originated in the PC laptops where the right side (and bottom for horizontal scrollbars) of the trackpad was used as a scroll area. And that was certainly not done in the 80s.
There's also the mouse wheel scrolling, but I contend that a wheel is a physical impersonation of a scrollbar, so I'd be surprised if Apple expected mouse wheels to behave in an inverted fashion.
Anyway, my point here is that Apple didn't necessarily make such a massive change: it only fixed a mistake it introduced when it allowed for two-finger scrolling on the whole trackpad: Apple thought it was emulating the scroll bar movement, when in fact it should have realized that it was emulating the hand moving the content around.


I have for a long while been of the opinion that Apple is systematically fixing its interface behavior to move towards a unified model of virtual touch where anything physical will be made obsolete in favor of touch screens. Over a year ago, I was hoping to see soonish a MacBookPro with dual screens and running iOS.
Lion is slowly but surely moving towards this unified model where touching the virtual content is the cornerstone of the UI. Apple made a direction mistake a few years ago when it introduced "two finger scrolling". Had it known it was making "two finger virtual touch" at the time, I am certain it would have gotten the direction right. That's the extent of Apple's change.


The real user conditioning change is from using physical intermediaries to act on pixels vs. using your hands. And in 5 years' time, no adolescent will ever understand why we were sliding our fingers down to go down.

More on identity

Dave Winer wrote a blog post titled Using DNS as a thin ID system . I encourage you to go read it, but in essence his main gripe is that the current means of identifying a person online are too complicated.
And I agree, but with a caveat: there is clearly a need for a simple identification system, while the need for (and current existence of) more complex ID systems is also there.

Winer postulates that the DNS could be used for the simple ID system. Let's call it SID for short. Here again I have to agree he's on to something, since when we designed the .tel top level domain, that was a primary goal.
However, with .tel we started by the complicated stuff, implementing all the current stuff like OpenID et. al., and also implementing a unique, original encryption system for sharing private information inside the DNS zone itself.
So now in the spirit of bootstrapping and getting something up quickly, here's my implementation of Winer's SID:

http://passw0rd.henri.tel

Here's how it works:

• Assume you don't know the above URL
• I go to your site and want to authenticate myself
• you ask me for my domain name (henri.tel) and password (passw0rd)
• you look up password.domain
• if you look up using DNS and it returns NXDOMAIN, then authentication failed
• if you look up using HTTP and it returns 404, then authentication failed

That's about it.

Oh, one more thing: inside passw0rd.henri.tel there are a number of interesting records of type NAPTR that point to my different web properties. There are also TXT records that define my name and current work. If you're looking it up via HTTP, you'll get that info in the hCard of the resulting page.

All of this, today, is available to any .tel owner, without any need for knowledge of DNS or anything beyond knowing to uncheck the "create a link" box in the below screen:

That's all there is to it.

Now the purists will say that this identification system lacks much more than it provides. I agree. If you want OpenID, my henri.tel domain is an OpenID provider as well.

But here, we're looking for a dead simple way of knowing that the person is the same person who came last week. We don't want more than that, and I think Winer's SID is something worth trying out, especially since it's pretty much universally applicable across all top level domains. (I would only use domains, because they give you good legal control in case someone tries to impersonate you, etc...)

Connecting More: People and things

We're at a cusp of a new phase of the Internet, where an extremely large set of non-computers are going to be nodes in this vast network. Those new entities will be people having their own real estate (i.e. domains), and devices that have just enough electronics to communicate in there.
I've got a post with Justin Hayward on the Telnic Blog talking about this "Internet of Things", and how the first step is necessarily discoverability: how a newly arrived node says "hello, I'm here and that's what I can give you."
I can't wait for my garden sensors to tell me that this area of the lawn is too wet and the water isn't filtering down, before the lawn turns yellow and exceedingly ugly (true story).

And another step towards iOS on Macs

Apple just released a multitouch trackpad for your macs.
This is yet another step towards replacing OS X with iOS, as I was describing in my June post entitled "The never-ending Apple Revolution".
I for one am looking forward to that new generation of operating systems being ubiquitous.

iPhone 4 light apps

There are at least 50 iPhone 4 light apps now, which have one or more of the following features: turn on/off the torchlight on the back of the phone, and strobe the torchlight.
That's it. Half of those apps cost $0.99, and probably most of the rest have ads enabled.

I thought it was pretty stupid, and I was also told the apps are slow to start up. One of them takes 5 seconds just to load up. So I felt the need to write in 2 hours a light app with strobing, including separate controls for light/dark timings of the strobe. Kind of fun. The app loads in less than 2 seconds and is well under 100kB.

If you want the source code, just let me know.
Update: I've just submitted the app to the AppStore, called "☼ Flashlight ☼"
Update 2: It's available on the app store.
Please leave a comment here in this post if you have issues or suggestions with the app. Thanks.

The "light" app in all its glory

The never-ending Apple Revolution

Steve Jobs just announced the iPhone 4, with a slew of new features and his usual hyperbole. But let's stay clear of discussing the hyperbole, which Apple fans and foes alike love to argue upon. Just the facts ma'am, and here are some hard ones.

Fact: iPhone 4 is extremely powerful, using the A4 system-on-a-chip that's also in the iPad, even though we don't know if it'll run at the same speed. Nonetheless, it's so powerful that it has literally clearly transformed the smartphone into a multipurpose handheld computer replacement: 720p hi-dev video camera, book reader on a screen with the quality of printed paper, music and video player, games machine, etc...

Fact: iPhone 4 has a front-facing camera. That's nothing new hardware-wise, but this time it comes with software that makes video-calling straightforward. Watch the operators scramble once again to increase their bandwidths.

Fact: iPhoneOS is now officially iOS (not to be confused with Cisco's IOS). It has grown up from its toddler years into adolescence: solid APIs, proven UI paradigms, runs on multiple devices, supports heavy-duty gaming and all manners of application types.

If you now ask why I consider iOS to be an adolescent, and when I'll see it grow to adulthood, my answer is simply the day you'll see Apple computers ship with iOS. It is my firm belief that Apple's iOS is its next-generation operating system across all devices, from laptops to servers and AppleTV. Think about MacBooks with dual screens, the keyboard area being replaced by a second haptic screen. The "laptop" can then be turned sideways into a "book" with two pages when you're running an ebook reader. And of course the MacBook can be sold as-is in every country in the world, no keyboard layout issues. Think about the cost savings.

Incidentally, I only keep my MacBook Pro because I can't yet run XCode to program iOS apps on the iPad. The day XCode runs on the iPad (or the iPhone+screen+bluetooth keyboard), I will never again need my trusty battered OS X 10.6 MacBook Pro.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is the NeXT Step. Soon.
In the meantime, enjoy the music, book, video, mobile phone and gaming revolutions that the wizard Mr. Jobs has thrust upon us in the past decade.

Enough with DRM already!

Ars Technica (a great publication, in case you didn't know of it) has an article about the problems plaguing eBooks: No universal format, fight over DRM, etc...

If you read the comments section, there are only two universally acclaimed places from which to buy books online: Baen (webscriptions.net) and O'Reilly. And guess what they have in common? Absolutely ZERO DRM and therefore the ability to provide the books in a multitude of formats, including the ubiquitous PDF.

Personally I've been buying and reading books from Baen on my iPhone and computers for 2 years now, and it and O'Reilly are the absolute only two places I buy books from. It's easy, prices are good, and I never have to worry about which device I'm reading the book on.

DRM must go. Check out the author Eric Flint's introduction to the newly-created Baen Free Library in the year 2000, and then his followup rant on DRM in 2006. Publishers and authors have been getting this kind of market research continuously for 10 years now, and they still don't get it. Looks like books are going the way of music, movies and video games (Ubisoft, I'm looking at you): how to best shoot oneself in the foot by screwing the customer.

On the need for basic statistics training

These days anyone will do anything for a bit of exposure, for search engine positioning or otherwise. And sometimes it borders on the idiotic (well, in some cases it truly is Jackass-level idiotic, but that would be on purpose).

Here's the latest beautiful example that I was just given, courtesy of Business Insider: CHART OF THE DAY: Here's Why The Mobile Ad Market Is Still Small

This report on a survey, and accompanying chart, attempts to convince us that the mobile ad market is small and very few people research or purchase products on their cell phones. Sure, the basic idea that weekly only 8% of people research products on their cell phones may be correct. I don't dispute that.

But if I were to say that 32% of all smartphone owners research products weekly on their smartphones, which by the way, are geared to receiving high-quality mobile ads, wouldn't you rethink the conclusion?
Furthermore, while only an assumed 25% of all mobile phone owners today have smartphones, the smartphone share is exploding and therefore so will the mobile ad market.

Lies, damned lies, and statistics

Why I too 'deleted' my Facebook account

Some weeks ago I pulled the plug on my Facebook account, that I'd had since the days when Facebook required a ".edu" email address. Yes, that was a very long time ago in Internet Years, and no I wasn't in school at the time but thanks to my UPenn lifetime email I was able to get in and see what this new social network was about.

Today I just cannot justify being on Facebook. All my working life I've fought against complexity and interdependence, and many of those at the receiving end of my emails know that I fancy an Alan Perlis quote that goes:

Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it.

And today, Facebook has become such a tangled mess of relationships that:

• it's impossible to understand how why you're shown something
• it's impossible to control the flow of your information
• it's impossible to handle your privacy with any confidence
• it's impossible to know where Facebook will stop this cancerous growth

No thanks, goodbye Facebook. Back to basics, to simple and controlled interconnections. Anything else yields an abyss of unending wasted time and resources, and dangerous consequences. It's just not worth it

I'm still here

Just in case you were wondering, yes I'm still here.
My.tel 2.0 is out on the iPhone app store. We're busy rolling out a new version of the TelProxy, and I need to update both My.tel and Superbook again. So many new features, so little time.

Emerging

Okay it's been a while, I'm now emerging back from a stretch of intense work.
My.tel 2.0, the iPhone app for managing your .tel domains, is in beta and almost done. Also TelPages is being tested, especially for its algorithms, and I'm quite happy with the first iteration.
All in all, work is progressing well.

Blogger frustrations

Gah, Blogger is very frustrating in regards to formatting posts. I had to edit the previous post a dozen times to make it look decent because I had copy-pasted some text from an external site that used tables.
Even after removing all the html code I could barely make it work.
I think Blogger is another failure of Google where it just is leaving it to die a slow death. Why did Google buy Blogger anyway?

Dumbing down

I just stumbled upon a blog post I wrote 5 years ago, at 3 in the morning, bemoaning the state of computer games. I'm reprinting it here because it made me realize that the situation has gotten significantly better in 2009, with many developers re-learning that gamers might just have a decent IQ.


Dumbing the game down
Posted at Sep 29, 2004 3:04AM PST
Are gamers considered to be a negatively evolving species? Why are we now only given "cinematic experience", or only faster action? Are we supposed to simply regress back to better reflexes? Or become fatter couch potatoes as we see longer and nicer cut-scenes? What happened to long involving storylines? Where's the intelligence factor gone?
Download Ultima V and play it on the emulator of your choice. That was a real game. Something worth playing, where you as a gamer were respected by the developers as an intellectual peer, not just as a wallet or fast fingers.
I am so happy that we have emulators of old systems. Maybe that will teach the next generation of game developers how to write games. The current one seems to have forgotten.


My quick reviews
Posted at Sep 29, 2004 3:18AM PST
Call of Duty: Beautiful cinematics, but scripted to death and ultimately simply a nice very long movie.
Far Cry: Could have been great, they messed it up by including monsters. Developers: We are sick of monsters. Give us real regular people and make the story not need monsters! You can do it, come on.
Deus Ex 2: Too simple, catering to 10-year-olds. There wasn't one challenging piece, even though the story was better than average. The original Deus Ex was targetting older gamers, in my opinion.
Splinter Cell: An exercise in frustration because it's so precise and scripted. It turns into a game of guessing how the developer wants you to move around the dimly lit room.
X2: Good, but its scope is a little too large with not enough differentiation. It has great potential with a few mods.
Sacred: Very pretty hack-and-slash, better than Diablo 2 except that unique items aren't varied enough, and there are still frustrating bugs at version 1.66. Version 1.7 supposedly fixes them. But the storyline is good, and the world is very large.

.tel management app for iPhone: My.tel version 2

It's high time I updated the My.tel iPhone app for managing .tel domains.
I've been working on it heavily in the past couple of weeks, and it's shaping up well. I still have a lot of work to do (especially graphics work) but I've already achieved most of my goals. In fact, version 2 is going to be so powerful that I'm worried regular .tel owners will not want that kind of app. I'll probably publish a 'lite' and a 'pro' version.
Among the new features:

• support for multiple .tel accounts at multiple registrars (in process)
• support for domain display title (done)
• much more intuitive profile handling (done)
• native Google Maps instead of OpenStreetMaps (done)
• rewritten keywords section (in process)
• support for the latest record types (done)
• profile renaming (done)
• subdomain renaming (in progress)

That's about what I can remember off the top of my head. Feel free to comment and ask for other features. I can't promise anything, but you may get lucky.

Note that this will be for iPhone OS 3.0 and above unfortunately, due to a number of reasons including Google Maps support and certain other functions.

Mobile Advertising

Considering that mobile handsets are quite probably over 4 billion today, v.s. computers at 800 million pieces, mobile advertising is something of a hot potato.

But mobile advertising is much trickier than regular Web advertising for a number of reasons, most notably:

- Not all mobiles have data access
Mobiles that don't have GPRS/EDGE/3G are restricted to phone and SMS.

- Extremely varied screen sizes
Some motorola handsets have screens of 128x160 pixels. The iPhone has a touchscreen of 320x480 pixels. And there's all sorts of sizes in between and outside that range.

- Random Web support
It is so difficult to know how (if at all) the handsets will display web pages that the .mobi registry has created a specific product called Device Atlas to help developers understand the features and limitations of each device.

- Cost and speed of data access
There are now more and more "all-you-can-eat" data plans thanks to the advent of the iPhone, but this is by no means the majority. Furthermore, roaming data access remains prohibitively expensive. On a recent trip to Canada, over a period of 6 days with relatively little roaming data access, I managed to accrue a Euro 450 bill on my French SFR mobile. Talk about forgetting to acquire a local SIM card and switch my .tel domain to it (I won't make that mistake again)! Also speed is a concern, even with the latest 3G technologies that favor larger files over smaller ones: the cost of initiating a connection is high, which will happen for every ad.

A new paradigm

As we were designing the specifications for advertising on .tel domains, we decided from the start that one of the requirements would be that ads should be available directly inside the domain itself, and not just as an add-on to the web interface. Doing so would allow any native application the ability to display those ads without resorting to HTTP requests.

Beyond the obvious efficiencies in a small and fast DNS query, an additional benefit of storing the ads in the DNS (or providing a DNS interface to an ad server) is that the ads are structured data, much like an XML API for ads. So you can easily determine how you wish to display them in a native application, removing all issues of matching advert size to handset screen size at the server level.

An ad in some.domain.tel domains is a TXT record, generally stored in _ad.some.domain.tel, with the following structure:

TXT ".tad" "Version" "DisplayPreference" "Preference" "Title" "Label" "URI" "Description"

where "URI" and "Description" can be multiple consecutive key/value pairs, ensuring that both can be as long as necessary.
Specific information can be found in the full spec for ad serving in a .tel domain.

I am looking forward to seeing ad servers implement a DNS interface to their ads, and in the process making them even more suited to mobile applications of any type.