Tweet Natalia Luckyanova, half of iPhone Gaming’s cutest couple, wrote to share their experience giving away 1000 copies of Harbor Master using the new Gift-This capability of the App Store. Here’s what she had to say, emphasis added by me: We decided to try a mass giveaway to see how gifting really works. We gave [...]
Corona On Android
by Dan Grigsby on 24. Mar, 2010 in News
Tweet Lately Android has been on my radar. It’s gone from easy to ignore to something impossible to ignore. I’ve tried to ignore it because I don’t care for Java. It’s a fine language, but it’s not for me. So, I’ve been quietly learning Scala to use instead. Then this came across my inbox today: [...]
Apple Adds “Gift This App”
by Dan Grigsby on 22. Mar, 2010 in News, Tips
Tweet Last October, I wrote a piece prodding Apple to add Gift This App capabilities — similar to the existing “Gift This Song” — to the App Store. Now, according to this TUAW story, you can! This is going to be big. Expect to see a raft of clever promotional uses of this capability.
Cult Of Mac Monday Promo-Code Giveaways
by Dan Grigsby on 10. Mar, 2010 in News, Resources, Tips
Tweet The popular Apple fanboi site Cult Of Mac wants to trade you promotional codes for visibility. More specifically, they’re building a regular Monday promo code giveaway feature and are looking for app devs/publishers to volunteer some codes. They’ve got a respectable 6,000 Twitter followers and around 2,400 Facebook fans. Zealots are valuable in word-of-mouth [...]
GDC: iPhone Developer’s Union Party Tomorrow (Weds) Night
by Dan Grigsby on 09. Mar, 2010 in News
Tweet GDC is on in San Francisco this week and, with it, comes the iPhone Developer’s Union party. The party’s free to attend and open to all. Come mingle with our own Ari Braginsky, indie iPhone devs and the media who cover them. Where/When: Marriott Lobby Bar (across from Moscone West). Weds, March 10 @ [...]
Funding App Development With Wholesale Sales
by Dan Grigsby on 03. Mar, 2010 in News, Tips
Tweet I love App Store marketplace hacks. Here’s a new one: appbackr provides app developers with cash up front to develop their apps. The cash comes from wholesale buyers who pay a discounted rate for the app before it’s built and then recoup the full amount when the units they purchased are sold in the [...]
NetNewsWire’s Brent Simmons On “Switching Away From Core Data”
by Dan Grigsby on 02. Mar, 2010 in News
Tweet Brent Simmons (podcast interview), author of the popular RSS Reader NetNewsWire, published a thorough piece on his weblog about switching away from Core Data for specific performance reasons. Simmons says that Core Data “is the right way to go 95% of the time” but that, because — as an object graph and persistence manager [...]
John Gruber On The App Store And Apple’s Brand
by Dan Grigsby on 25. Feb, 2010 in News
Tweet John Gruber’s Tits and Apps is required reading. Read it for thorough analysis on Apple’s decision drop 5,000 steamy apps while selectively keeping similar apps from known brands. John’s reasoning — “Apple sees the App Store as an aspect of its brand. Developers see the App Store as the entirety of the Cocoa Touch [...]
Podcast Interview With Oceanhouse Media Brands And Their Impact On Volume and Price
by Dan Grigsby on 22. Feb, 2010 in Interviews, News, Podcast, Tips
Tweet Oceanhouse Media has an enviable track record: For almost the entire lifetime of the App Store they’ve consistently had a handful of apps in the top-100. Their apps beat the averages for both volume and unit price; in fact, they won’t build an app unless they can sell five to ten thousand units at [...]
Funding iPhone Ecosystem Plays
by Dan Grigsby on 18. Feb, 2010 in News
Tweet Scott Kveton, CEO/co-founder of Urban Airship, the company whose services take the sting out of push notification and in-app purchase — and sponsors of this site! — wrote to let me know that they’d closed a $1.1 million series-a funding round. This was rattling around in my brain along with a recent memory that [...]

