With over 100,000 apps available on the iTunes App Store, developers are striving to be seen. If your iPhone App is on the front page of the App Store, sales tend to rise. What if your App is in the actual Apple Store? Will it help sales? I guess it could, but most users won’t make the leap from an image in the store to the app in iTunes. That said, at least you can say “My app was featured in the Apple Store”.
My app was featured in the Apple Store.
This really isn’t a trick, or even a tip. In fact, no additional code was written to get this behavior. However, it is too cool not to show some how and the small pictures on the App Store don’t do it justice. By placing a UIView (or subclassed view) on the bottom of my main view, messages to touchesMoved:withEvent: are made as soon as your finger crosses into the iPhone’s screen. Voila!, the illusion of dragging from the outside of the screen.
My last app, or rather, Triple D Design’s latest app “100 Percent” (which is now available on iTunes) has this little trick. See the video below.
http://www.vimeo.com/7447347I know this is insanely simple, but sometimes, the simplest things are the neat too.
I don’t remember where, or when; but I heard someone recently say “we are in the wild west of iPhone Apps”. Is this really true?
Yesterday, I attended the local iPhone Developer meetup (maybe that is where I heard it). The topic was iPhone App Marketing and featured some great presentations on where to go to spread the word, and what to say. It all goes back to one principle: Start with a great App, then communicate it well.
There is this feeling though, not just locally, that the app store is in the wild west and people are taking advantage of that to be the next big thing. Well, of course they are. I think the build a business overnight success of the App Store is even more few and far between than we like to think (or hope), but there are still a lot of devices out there.
You might not make it to the scale some have, but you can still succeed. In our area, there are dozens or hundreds, I can only think of one who made the big jump in leaving a day job. So, are we in the Wild Wild West? I don’t believe so.
I’ve often heard/read iPhone App developers comment on a connection between updating their apps and new sales. In other words, keeping your app up to date leads to more sales, and happier customers. Makes sense, really. What happens if an app, a small app, that is seemingly dead gets an update? Does the mere fact of updating the app drive sales? Does an app that averages 2-3 sale / month? I decided to test it out on my own. Mostly curiosity, and in my small scale test, it does drive new sales.
Here it is, yet another video showing the process of creating an iPhone app, just a bit inspired by the video posted by tap tap tap. As you’ll see, this whole post is full of inspiration.
My latest project has been for a client that was looking for a focused percentage calculator. A quick search through the App Store shows a lot of tip calculators and even some percentage calculators. It would be very easy to pop a few controls and some simple math together to make an app, but aren’t Mac / iPhone interfaces supposed to be a bit more thought out? Well, yeah.
Keep reading for a video showing the process of designing the app from sketch, to final product. Or just check out the app on iTunes (iTunes link)
Another day, another story about the success of an iPhone App Developer. This time around Tap Tap Tap tells the story of Convert, a great app I bought on day 1. I love these stories, they are inspiring, but they are also disturbing. These stories drive thousands of people into the Gold Rush (myself included). I haven’t been a long-time member of the Mac Developer community, but I see how the influx of programmers only trying to strike rich can be strange. Do these developer plan to stay? Expand the community? Even if there is no iPhone money made? I know I’m in for the long haul.
Which leads to MonoTouch. Now available today, for a hefty price, the Mono folks have released MonoTouch to a large community of .NET developers. It is pretty amazing what they’ve done, even including Interface Builder into the process. From skimming through the hello world example, it appears there are a lot of CocoaTouch concepts required for developing in Objective-C. One side of me (The .NET developer side) is highly excited. The other side (the one that has spent a lot of time learning Cocoa) is apathetic. Why use this now? I guess I’m not the exact target of it. Still, I do wonder how much of an overhead there is in using MonoTouch.
Friday afternoon, a few coworkers (and our boss) stepped out of work to attend the MSDN Southern Fried Roadshow over at NCSU. Two session on Silverlight, and a session on VS2010 and ASP.NET 4 was delivered to a nearly full room.
After the short seminar, we had a small discussion on the usefulness of AJAX. I was in the minority of “getting” it and “liking” it. Now, I’m not calling for sites to be some massive AJAX project where every single function is transmitted over the net. However, I do find there are more valid places for it than we discussed.
Is it OK for a software developer to buy a theme for their blog? I’m no expert, but I know enough PHP to create my own theme and have in the past. So is it lazy? At first, I thought so. Then I realized one simple thing: It isn’t worth my time.
For whatever reason, I decided I needed to update my site and reactivate my neglected blog. The time I’d spend writing, tweaking, and stressing over making my theme perfect just isn’t the best way to spend my time. So I bought a theme. There are thousands out there, but I finally committed to one and spent the money. That $70 will be a lot better spent while I work on what I really want to work on; iPhone apps and a few AU 2009 Proposals.
This realization is very revolutionary to me. I don’t know how other developers are, but I often fight doing ‘project a’ due to interest in ‘project b’, ‘c’, and ‘language a’, ‘b’, ‘c’. At that rate, I’ll never find the time to finish anything as I’ll continually be trying that new thing. In other words: Focus. When at work, I’ll focus on .NET, WCF, AutoCAD, and those things, and at home, I’ll focus on Objective-C and any side projects I happen to be working on. Eureka!