Published by rich on
Saturday, November 29, 2008 - 19:35:38
- Filed under Other Fun Stuff
Uh oh... here comes a rant...
(One Star) THIS SHULD BE FREE!
That's nice junior. Why don't you...
Buy a Mac and the full iPhone SDK ($1000)
Take a week to learn the iPhone SDK / Objective C
Jump through all the hoops needed to provision your phone for development
Jump through all the hoops needed to get setup with the Appstore
Take a week to code up the application
Submit the application, wait a week (possibly much longer) for Apple to accept or reject it
Update the application every time Apple breaks your app
Certainly people do all of the above - and there's a lot of good free software as a result. Don't go ripping on me for not having the motivation to give away my time.
I had some others reviews I was going to rant about, but I think I'll leave them alone.
What I really want as a developer is an option next to each of these reviews that reads:
Uninstall application from purchaser's iPhone, refund their money, then don't let them purchase any more of my applications.
After a while, a certain pool of reviewers would find themselves virtually locked out of buying any new apps. I suspect these geniuses purchase a fairly small percentage of apps, but write a large percentage of the reviews.
Application ratings (and hence sales) would on average go up. The quality of reviews would also go up. Genuinely bad apps would still get trashed by a variety of legit reviewers. Everyone wins!
(I of course know this isn't remotely realistic.)
Published by rich on
Tuesday, November 25, 2008 - 06:01:51
- Filed under Other Fun Stuff
The company I was contracting for recently went out of business - leaving me fully self- (and somewhat under)-employed.
I've been dabbling in iPhone development for a little while. Now seems to be the time to "go at throttle up" and see if I can really bring in some real money.
So far I've released three apps:
LOLcatMaker
Quiet Noise
I Hate Christmas Music
One app is currently undergoing review by Apple:
Virtual Ninja
Some basic observations on iPhone development:
- Getting fully setup with Apple's developer program / provisioning / distribution process is a moderate pain.
- Objective C is really great if you like Objective C.
- Apple seems to take 3-7 working days to approve applications / updates.
- Newly added applications are effectively "featured" on some views in the Appstore. As a result, it seems common to get more sales at first, and then have them taper off.
- I've been pricing all of my apps at $0.99 so far - partly because I haven't had enough sustained sales to do meaningful pricing experiments.
- As a promotion, I switched one app to free for about 2 weeks. For this period I observed about a 15x increase in downloads. However, after going back to $0.99 I did not see a subsequent boost in sales.
Apple has no problem breaking stuff
iPhone OS 2.2 shipped a few days ago. It broke all three of my shipping applications. I won't get into technical details - but from poking around online I can tell I'm not alone in this. The problems don't even seem particularly related to any bad practices on my part.
Fortunately, I was able to patch up all my apps with about 3 hours work.
Unfortunately, Apple will take 3-7 days to post the updates - so people will continue to download the apps - encounter OS 2.2 related problems - and likely leave bad reviews.
Seems doing a full retest on applications with every update from Apple is pretty much mandatory. Hopefully Apple will get out of the habit of changing things every 8 weeks.
While it's nice that there's only a single device to worry about with iPhone development - there are now 3 significantly different versions of the iPhone OS out there. I'm not even sure how I'd test for backwards compatibility...
It's hard to figure out what will sell
My first application was LOLcatMaker. I was optimistic it might make me some real money.
It brought in a little cash at first, followed up by less cash. It's only selling a few copies a day now.
After releasing LOLcatMaker I started working on some kind-of-exotic (top secret) stuff - that proved difficult and frustrating. I ended up putting everything aside for a while.
About 6 weeks later I finally got back to developing and cranked out both "I Hate Christmas Music" and "Quiet Noise" in about 3 days.
Both apps are noise generators. "I Hate Christmas Music" was the original concept - "Quiet Noise" was really an afterthought.
It's too early in the season to tell if "I Hate Christmas Music" will be a hit or not, but to my surprise "Quiet Noise" has taken off pretty well.
It's not enough to live off of - but it's pretty substantial money if it keeps up (especially considering the small time investment).
The lesson I'm taking from this is to "Fail Early and Fail Often."
I'm now trying to create roughly one application each week to every-other week.
My latest app - "Virtual Ninja" took about 40 hours to complete.
Published by rich on
Thursday, August 14, 2008 - 15:43:04
- Filed under Other Fun Stuff
A few months ago I announced the launch of
PodSpew.com - a site that lets you stream any podcast directly without downloading.
I just finished a number of code tweaks that let you use PodSpew with your iPhone.
That's right, you can now stream any podcast directly to your iPhone wirelessly.
Here's a demo:
(direct link to video)
(ok, not quite any podcast - a few of them are still broken with the iPhone - but it's getting looked at)
PodSpew is completely free and doesn't require a sign-up.
If you have a podcast you'd like included in our directory - just email it to podspew@spambutcher.com (if you could link to PodSpew.com someplace in exchange - that'd be great).
If you're a podcast owner, you can send your users to PodSpew.com for streaming even if you're not already in our directory.
Just put your RSS feed into the "Enter your own Podcast RSS Feed to Stream" box - and then provide a link to the resulting page.