Guest author Robert Strojan (@blackoutrobb) is the founder and lead iPhone app developer at Blackout Labs. He is also a speaker at the 360|iDev Conference in April. In September I wrote a post on iPhoneDevTools.com about opening the Facebook iPhone app from within another app or from the web with the Facebook app’s custom URLs. [...]
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For Your Consideration: How To Get Nominated For An Award – Part 1
The nominees for this year’s Best App Ever awards are out. This contest is a great free publicity opportunity. In snapshot form: The awards and nominations are news; accordingly they’re covered by the press. The awards will be announced at a party during Macworld; lots exposure to decision leaders. Some of the nominees will be [...]
App Store Data Mining Techniques Revealed – Part 2: Scripting App Store XML Downloads
Welcome back. The first article in this series introduced App Store data mining fundamentals, principally that iTunes works essentially like a browser, except that instead of rendering HTML iTunes uses XML data to generate its views. In part one, we used a proxy as a man in the middle to save a copy of some [...]
App Store Data Mining Techniques Revealed – Part 1
The App Store is a treasure trove of data. App Store data can help you pick a category/segment, track trends, find the right price point, chart the total number of apps, track the rate of app approval and much more. App Store data mining isn’t magic. It’s about finding data that’s exposed in iTunes, extracting [...]
Gift This App, Apple!
Synopsis: The iTunes Store features a “Gift This Song” capability. The App Store does not feature a “Gift This App” capability. It should. Update: It does now! In Q1 of this year, I wrote the Wheels App to address an oft-lamented problem: most apps in the store are invisible. As most of us now know, [...]
Screencast: iPhone Provisioning: Running Development Code On Your iPhone — $5
Spend Hours With The Docs Or < 10 Minutes With This $5 Screencast Downloaded over 1,700 times! It’s a hassle getting development code running on an iPhone. There are lots of moving parts, all of which have to come together perfectly in order to deploy to your own iPhone. By walking dozens of new developers [...]
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App Store Heresies: Higher Price, Better Ratings. Don’t Discount Your App At Launch.
Lower your price, lower your ratings. Lower ratings, lower social proof. Lower social proof, lower sales. That’s my theory, and I’ve got data to support it. I’m a pattern matcher. I like extracting the hint of a signal from noise. For a while now, I’ve had a hunch that pricing an app higher would lead [...]
Announcing iPhone Wax: Native UIKit iPhone Apps Written In Lua
Development Goes Faster With iPhone Wax Early this summer I started playing around with MacRuby, which lets Rubyists create native OS-X applications. While I love Objective-C, scripting languages have speed-of-development, memory management simplicity, and other advantages. Getting Ruby running on the iPhone is challenging; while I’m sure it’ll get there, I wanted something sooner. I [...]
3 Tips That Might Get You Featured In The App Store
Read on for three goodies that I’ve picked up here at the excellent 360i|Dev Conference that’ll help you get Apple’s attention and, if you’re lucky, will get you showcased in the App Store. The first two come from Matt Drance, the well-known now-indie one-time Apple iPhone evangelist: Apply for an Apple Design Award. If your [...]
Programming The iPhone For Accessibility By The Visually Impaired
Per Busch, a blind iPhone user from Germany, has been on a crusade to raise developer awareness about VoiceOver, a new-in-3.0 accessibility enhancement. Per’s is a noble quest, so we’ll do our part here: VoiceOver Over View VoiceOver, says Apple, “describes an application’s user interface and helps users navigate through the application’s views and controls, [...]
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