My app was featured in the Apple Store.

This morning I received an email from another iPhone developer in the Raleigh-Durham area (Tantrum Apps, if you have small kids these apps are a great find). He shared an image he had taken from one of two local Apple Stores showing the icon for my app, iAdvent (iTunes Link). Checking out the other local store, I found the icon hanging up as well.

So how does this happen? I can only speculate. I wasn’t contacted by Apple or anything. I assume a store planner designed an in-store “App-Christmas” tree, and searched the store for matching themes. The design was approved, printed and sent to the stores. I have learned that this design is likely in most of the US stores, so my App is hanging up with other Christmas apps all over the US. (If you see this as true or not, let me know, it would be interesting to know if these displays are standard)

Still quite exciting to walk into your local Apple Store and see the icon you created hanging up for all to see.

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.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I know this is insanely simple, but sometimes, the simplest things are the neat too.

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.

(Disclaimer: I’m a coder, not a marketer, not a salesman, not even a businessman.)

Sure, there are people squatting on app names, pushing out so many junk iPhone apps they are banned from the store, and several other crazy stories. In those areas, sure, wildness can roam. But how is this different from other industry?

An example: My other passion is filmmaking. What are the chances that I make a movie that will be the next Paranormal Activity? About the same as writing the next iShoot. Is this really a problem with the app store or is it sheer numbers. People pump out movies at an unbelievable rate just to make small audiences.

Thanks to YouTube, everyone is a filmmaker. Thanks to the iPhone, everyone is an app developer. In other words, every industry has trash.

I don’t believe that taking advantage of what Apple provides is bad. You do what you can to make your product sell. If you find your niche, you have to work it or it won’t be with you long. That is not the Wild West, that is business. I wish for people to stop buying fart apps, but their existence is not a reflection of the app store. It is a reflection of society.

For what it’s worth, I really like how Tantrum Apps has found a niche and has worked on it. This really goes well with a presentation from David Heinemeier on making money online (by not trying to be the next Twitter); find your niche and work it.

Earlier this month, I updated my Christmas-based app and waited to see what would happen. As seen in the graph from AppFigures, the day the update went live, sales spiked. Not a huge spike, but a spike none the less. For an app (that only really works in December) new customers were generated from an update in October. Is this people just eager for Christmas? Maybe, but going from 3 sales to about 10 is a small result. I’m sure this scales to more popular apps too.

I wonder if this builds over time, do constant updates continually build on the 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)

More on Inspiration

Ok, I said the post would be about inspiration. You don’t have to look far to see the inspiration for the design of 100percent. Tapbots create wonderful apps that are “utility robots designed and engineered for your iPhone and iPod Touch”. Now, 100percent is not a robot and not a direct clone, but you have to give credit when its due.

Find out more

Learn more about 100percent at Triple D Design or buy it now on the iTunes App Store

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.

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.

Let me explain, one comment was, that all of your logic is available via view source and that by using a code-behind, this is protected. This, I disagree with the most. AJAX is not meant to be used to perform logical operations. If someone is putting Business Logic in the Javascript or in the AJAX calls, they are doing it wrong. The data being transmitted should ONLY BE THE VIEW DATA, nothing more. The data inserted into a control in an ASP.NET code-behind should be the same data you’d transmit. AJAX just provides a way to skip the update of the entire page.

The simple truth is, nothing should be done in excess. Client-side Javascript provides a great way to modify and enhance the user experience, communicate data back to the server and more. It can be overdone, but so can over-reliance of the postback.

MSDN Southern Fried Road Show

Session 1, Connected Silverlight Applications, detailed creating WCF web services that used a binary format to transmit data instead of using XML. While this was pretty interesting, I have to question a few assumptions. The idea that server cycles required to serialize data to XML (or JSON) is more of a problem than the bandwidth to transfer said data seems off to me. I mean, it is a lot cheaper to build a bigger machine than to buy more bandwidth; and that is server side, not even mentioning the client side. I think I just don’t fully grasp Silverlight (or Flash) as an application platform.

Session 2, Microsoft’s Prism for Component Applications, discussed Microsoft’s new framework, or development pattern, or silverlight/WPF building library. Therein is the problem. I don’t really know what Prism is. From what I can tell, it looks very interesting, but it will require more research.

Session 3, The Future of ASP.NET and VS2010 was by far my favorite. They discussed a few of the new features coming in VS2010 and ASP.NET. What am I looking forward to? ASP.NET AJAX 4. First, a disclaimer, I hated ASP.NET AJAX. The AJAX toolkit was a complicated mess and I could never get into it. I guess I’m old school and like to write my own Javascript. However, ASP.NET AJAX 4 has hit it out of the park. Live 2-way binding. I am looking forward to experimenting with this.

So there it is, I don’t get Silverlight, I like AJAX in moderation, and I hate postbacks.

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!