Rob's Mobile Apps

The Torch Lite app is a very simple free app, allowing your phone/ipod touch to show you the way on dark nights!

It came about following some coding experiments with bouncing a ball around the screen. If I made the ball big and white, I thought it looked a bit like the beam of a torch tracking across the screen. So, I added a few different colour balls, a few fade and box effects and some simple blank screens, and hay presto – a torch lite app.

I figured that the default behavior of the screen turning itself off would be a bit annoying if you were really using your phone as a torch. However, leaving the app on full white screen would drain the battery, so I added battery checking so that the app would stay on, only if the battery was over 20%. This took a bit of time to test (waiting for the battery to flatten) but worked out well in the end. I think it’s quite a useful feature.

Most of the screens are really just eye candy, and if you just need an app to act like a torch, then the plain white screen is all you need.

The app has been out there for about a month with about 3000 downloads. Interestingly, most downloads are from France and the UK, where a portable lighting device is called a Torch, unlike the US where I assume its normally referred to as a Flash Light.

It was an interesting experiment to see if I could get an app built and deployed in a single day. As it turned out, it took about a day and a half, so overall, I was pretty pleased.

Following rather poor sales, I’ve decided to make the Quick Brown Fox a free app.

The app was released about 2 months ago. Initial sales were pretty much non existent. I think I sold about 10 in the first week. So, I spent a day investigating all the app review sites I could find and sent off about a dozen emails requesting reviews. I tried to address each email to the correct person and included promo codes and all the appropriate links to my site and iTunes. To be honest, I wasn’t expecting much success. I’m sure these sites get hundreds of requests each day.

Then to my absolute delight, AppStruck actually reviewed my app! I think it appeared on a Friday and the review remained on top of their page all weekend. I was pretty pleased with the review. 3 stars and quite fair I thought.

So, the next day, I checked my sales figure with much excitement and anticipation. Hmmm, nothing – must be the reporting delay. The figures often seem a day behind. I’m sure the next day will be better. No, nothing again. Next day? Nothing! Next Day – Yes! one guy in Japan bought the app!

Not very happy

I decided to give it a while in the hope that someone else may review the app but no such luck.

After almost 2 months on App Store, I sold a grand total of 16 @ 99c. ROI 23c/hour.

Only one thing for it, might as well give it away. I added a little advertisement to the high score screen, released a new version and made it free.

That was about a week ago. So far I’ve had over 900 downloads in 7 days and a 5 star review from a happy customer in the UK.

So what have I learned:

• App Reviews != Sales
  I’m sure a lot of times reviews may help, but there is definitely no guarantee.
• It’s a kind of an odd game and it was difficult to come up with some keywords that I thought might get it found on the App Store. I thought the reason no one bought the app was that not one could find it. However plenty of people have found it now that its free!
• I suspect an odd app like this really needs a lot of word-of-mouth exposure, however I’m not big in the social networking scene so this is a difficult one for me.

I am pleased to announce the release of the Torch Lite iPhone application.

Torch Lite is yet another free Torch/Flash Light application.

See the Torch Lite page for more information.

I am pleased to announce the release of the Robs’ Lists iPhone application.

Robs’ Lists is an indispensable source of information, available at your fingertips.

Facts, figures, dates and trivia, all available within the application, without the need, speed or expense of internet access.

Information is sourced from all over the web, with a majority of it coming from Wikipedia.

See the Rob’s Lists page for more information.

A free version is also available.

This is a fully working version of Robs’ Lists, but with less lists!

I thought I’d have a bit of a debrief on my Quick Brown Fox app.

Development time was about 14 days at about 4 – 5 hours per day (~60 hours) spread over a two month period.

The project contains the following artifacts:

• Classes: 9 Controllers, 11 Views, 7 NSObject (support classes) and 2 Protocols
• Sound effects: 4
• Images: 230 flags, 110 keys, 20 others

I didn’t use the Interface Builder at all on this project.

Most of my time was spent in two areas,

1. Supporting both landscape and portrait modes. This all worked fine against 2.1 SDK but broke when I upgraded to 3.0. Spent way too much time getting this to work consistently. I think the reason was that I was initially retaining views/view controllers between different tabs. So, if you swapped tabs, then rotated from landscape to portrait in the next tab, then swapped back, I had to remember what my previous orientation was and rotate that. I ended up destroying as much as possible between tabs and that improved things. Its probably how it should be done anyways w.r.t memory.
2. Setting up the global high score server using Google App Engine. This was my first App Engine project so obviously there was a bit of learning to do. Also, initially got XML parsing of the results working fine in 2.1 simulator only to discover that I’d inadvertently used some Core Library classes not available on the phone, so had to rewrite all that again too. Interesting that it didn’t complain in the 2.1 simulator but did complain in the 3.0 simulator.

One other area I spent too much time on was the flashing cursor that follows where you type (in a UIWebView). This was javascript drawing on a canvas in version 1.0 but there must be some timing problem in the OS because the sentence area would flash and blank out for up to half a second every now and then. I kept getting the error: “CGImageSourceGetType image source parameter is nil” but it mostly worked. A quick search found a few other people with this problem so I needed a workaround. In version 1.1, I replaced this with a flashing image view which I move as typing occurs. Very hacky, having to define the coordinates of each position, but it only took an hour to create 2 arrays with 45 x and y coordinates, so it wasn’t too bad. Still not 100% but much better. Completely unportable obviously!

Overall, I was pretty pleased with the app, especially the moving keyboard and the global high scores.

(This blog entry was moved here from my personal site)

Came across some great stats on the state of the mobile application market the other day.

The guys over at abmob have heaps of stats on iPhone, iPod and Android application usage.

Here are some of the ones I found interesting:

How do people find my apps

State of the market: iPhone/iPod vs Android

Share of the smartphone market

Source: Gartner, August 2009

Age of iPhone / iPod users

Source: AdMob and comScore, June 2009.

(This blog entry was moved here from my personal site)

I am pleased to announce the release of the The Quick Brown Fox iPhone application.

The well known sentence “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” contains every letter of the English alphabet.

How fast can you type the sentence on the iPhone? More importantly, how fast can you type it, if every time you touch the keyboard, all the keys move!

See the The Quick Brown Fox page for more information.

After a bit of a rocky start I am pleased to announce the publication of my first iPhone application.

World Leaders, Presidents, Prime Ministers, Kings & Queens

This is a simple reference application listing various world leaders, sourced from Wikipedia and presented in a familiar “Contacts” style interface.

As this was my first app, I thought I’d write a bit about the steps I went through on the way to publication.

1. Identify a gap in the market.

There are already a few Presidents apps and one King and Queens of England app, but at the time, I didn’t see any apps covering other countries. This looked like an opportunity to build a more comprehensive world leader reference application. There is plenty of data covering world leaders on Wikipedia so I decided this would be a good candidate for a first simple application.

2. Learn Xcode

First step was to learn the process of building apps using Xcode. This also involved learning Objective-C and Interface Builder so there was a lot of stuff to get through. The type of app I had chosen was also based around a desire to learn how to use TableViewControllers and sqlite. These two technologies are used extensively in the app.

3. Mock up some screen shots

This was initially done on paper and later built in IB. In this case, IB was just used as a sort of graphics drawing package. This identified the various navigation levels and an obvious need for a search capability. Also, with so much info on Wikipedia, I had o decide which bit to include and which to leave out. This then led to the inclusion of the Wikipedia browser screen to supply any extra info users may require. This seemed much more user friendly than jumping off into Safari everytime. I always find apps that do this a bit annoying – especially if you don’t have internet access at the time (which is often the case with my iPod). Although apps may remember where you left off, you still need to exit Safari and then find the app you were running. Not always a simple thing on a full device!

4. Build and Go

During coding, I initially used IB quite a bit and TableViewControllers. Later I ended up hand coding some of the IB screens and converting some controllers to simpler ViewController that implemented the appropriate delegate protocols. This was mainly because I couldn’t achieve certain effects, in particular the flip to the instructions screen from the first page, and the search screen.

5. Too much data

The data I gleaned from Wikipedia was entered into a spreadsheet and I wrote a small python script to convert the data into sqlite insert statements. This was the included in the build steps. It was at this point I started to wonder if this was the best app to start with. I probably spent at least a quarter of the total development time just typing in dates and names and cropping images. Also, the data on Wikipedia had a tendency to change. On one occasion, the dates of a whole bunch of early Scottish kings changed by one day!

6. Coding Numbers

Code was version controlled using Subversion. Version 1 of the app consisted of the following classes:

• 6 Controllers
• 1 UIView
• 10 Support Objects (mainly model data holders)
• 1 Protocol
• 8 NIBs

Counting the days up in my calendar across February and March, I worked on the app about 30 different days. This is definitely not full days however. Some I only spent an hour and I don’t think I every worked more that 5 hours in one day. I’d say an average of about 3.5 hours/day. Total about 100 hours.

7. Submission

I probably spent another day or so getting everything ready to submit the app. Screen shots, descriptions etc. The app was submitted early June and approved about a week later on June 14th.

8. The web site

This website started life a few months ago as a Blogger site. This didn’t really look very good so I switched to WordPress and hosted it on Bluehost. Spent a bit of time trying out different themes and hacking style sheets and php until arriving at my new site RobsMobileApps.com Also spent a bit of time creating a video. This was also all new and a bit of fun. Basically I captured some screen shots and live recordings of the simulator using Capture Me. I then edited them in iMovie and added titles etc. Finally I posted them to YouTube. I’m not very happy with the image quality on YouTube and spent a bit of time trying out different resolution. The local movies are nice and crisp but the YouTube one are not so clear. I may investigate some alternatives soon.

9. One week later

To my absolute astonishment and delight, some people have actually bought the app! Not many yet, but considering there are over 50000 to choose from and over 250 new ones every day I’m surprised anyone noticed my little app! After 1 week I sold about 40 apps. Mainly AU, US and GB but a few elsewhere (KW, MY, RU). Might just keep me in coffee. I’ll need a few more sales to keep me in beers though!

Overall its been a very rewarding and interesting experience. I’ve learned a lot of new stuff and been able to apply it to actually produce a finished product that I am able to sell and am proud to say is all my own work.

(This blog entry was moved here from my personal site)

I am pleased to announce the release of the Chakra Wellbeing iPhone application.

Balance the mind, body and spirit to achieve greater wellbeing.

The Chakra Wellbeing application presents the 7 major chakras: Base, Sacral, Solar Plexus, Heart, Throat, Brow and Crown.

Also included are 3 of the extra chakras: Earth Star, Soul Star and Divine Star.

Each Chakra is represented by a beautiful image from nature and includes an affirmation, its location and a healing sound.

See the Chakra Wellbeing page for more information.

I am pleased to announce the release of the World Leaders iPhone application.

This application provides a handy reference to past and present leaders of the world. Information is sourced from Wikipedia and presented in a familiar “Contacts” style.

See the World Leaders page for more information.