New App

Silly new app has been submitted to Apple’s App Store for review. I’ll tell you about it in a few days.

This week’s update.

What do we have this week? My MD5 Calculator has been updated to include a way to tip the developer $0.99 (or whatever the regional equivalent is) via in-app purchase. Fun! Also, I removed the ads. Yuck is gone!

Oh, and it’s pretty cool when I have to remember what apps are still awaiting approval.

App-A-Week Challenge Update, also Font Tip! (Also, Snippets!)

PizzaPal has been updated to 1.1 with the following changes:

• Removed iAds.
• Added 4th pizza comparator.

Yeah, I know, that’s kind of cheap to count that as an app release. Whatever, making an app a week is no picnic.

Oh, also, if you do any kind of coding/programming, you should totally check this out:

I’ve switched my programming font of choice from the venerable Consolas for BBedit (14 pt) to the wonderful Inconsolata (15 pt). Inconsolata is simply a beautiful monospaced font that is easy to read, renders beautifully, and yet has TONS of character. My only criticism so far is that the underscore (_) character renders a bit thin. OH WELL. Seriously, download this font and give it a whirl. You shan’t be disappointed.

Also: holy crap why have I never used snippets in Xcode 4 before? Maybe because it’s not entirely obvious how to use them or maybe I was just not as smart a programmer as before. Anyway.

Here’s how to use snippets:

1) type out the thing you want to make a snippet of. Any “bubble text tab” thingees you can create with <#sometext#>. Drag it to the snippet library.

2) Give it a nice title, completion shortcut, and double-check for perfection:

3) Since snippets are sensitive to scope, you can make one for interface and one for implementation!

4) To use, just tap the completion shortcut letters, for example:

Basically, if you find yourself typing similar things over and over again in Xcode, make a snippet RIGHT NOW!

App-A-Week Challenge: Week 4

Another week, another app! Here’s the one I’ve been working on for a few weeks now. I finally got it all nailed down and it got approved by Apple!

It’s called BrewTime and you can get it right here! Let’s take a look-see:

What did we learn about for this app? UITableViews, NSTimers, UILocalNotifications, etc.

App-A-Week Challenge Update

Here we are at week #3 in the App-A-Week Challenge! What have we for this week?

Nothing too terribly exciting. Just updates to apps already on the store. Here’s what we have:

• Pizza Pal has been updated to 1.0.1 (adding support for armv6 processors and thus the iPhone 3G and the 2nd Generation iPod Touch
• The Beer Nerd’s Olde Volume Equvilance Calculator has been updated to 1.0.1 adding support for armv6 just like PizzaPal
• MD5 Calculator has been updated to 1.1 adding iAds (a shockingly obscene amount) and customization of the output.

But, next week should be a big week! We’ve submitted the brewer’s countdown timer and are waiting for review. Check it!

Do free apps increase sales of paid apps?

Some of you might remember my crazy idea of pledging to publish an app a week. I thought that this idea would be a good way to force myself to learn a lot about iOS development and actually get things done. And it has!

But one thing I did not consider was how downloads of simple, silly, free apps would affect sales of my paid apps. It’s only been one week but I am pleased to report that there has been some positive influence!

I had two free apps come out last week: The Beer Nerd’s Old Volume Equivalence Calculator came out on Wednesday and Pizza Pal came out on Friday. What you’re about to see are weekly sales figures for last week that cover free iOS apps, paid iOS apps, and paid Mac OS apps.

First, let’s take a look at the free iOS apps:

 

Even though the new free apps didn’t come out until later in the week, we’re seeing a 4-8x increase in free app sales. It was hovering between 10 and 20 a week and shot up to 80 last week.

So, we have users downloading the free silly apps. How might that affect sales of paid apps?

It appears that sales have roughly doubled from 30/week to 60/week. Nice! Is it possible that this increase works for Mac OS X apps as well?

This is not as clear but there appears to be an increase. It might average out to twice as much but I haven’t done any maths on it yet.

It has only been a week but it seems pretty clear that adding free apps to your stable of apps helps increase sales of your paid apps. And increases your skills and experience! LEVEL UP!

New app! Also: Xcode + iOS + iPhone 3G tip. Also: insane idea.

I have a new app on the iTunes App Store! Allow me to introduce The Beer Nerd’s Olde Volume Equivalence Calculator:

It’s a handy little app that lets you compare equivalent prices for different volumes of beer. Interesting? Maybe. In all honesty, I whipped this app up real quick for the following reasons:

1. It uses the new accurate UISlider subclass I’ve been working on (which I will open source soon!)
2. It has an iAd. Ooh or eew? I don’t know yet.
3. I’m trying something new to help increase my skills. It’s kind of like Jonathan Coulton’s Thing a Week. I intend to write and publish a new app every week for the next year. What?

That last item seems like it might be a doozy. Not every app is going to be a winner. Apple may kick me out for generating too much crapware. Most will be free or iAd supported. Some might be decent.

There is a lot of doubt entwined with this idea. But here is something about which I don’t have much doubt: writing and releasing an app a week will stretch all parts of my development skillset, from writing code to understanding design patterns to designing icons to submitting and packaging. We’ll see how this goes. App #1 is done, app #2 is waiting to be reviewed and app #3 is nearing completion. Also, I haven’t forgotten about Lens•Lab! I’ll count an update of that as part of an app a week.

Oh, and the Xcode + iOS + iPhone 3G tip is this: when you create a new project in Xcode 4.2, the plist for your app has a entry called “armv7″ in the “Required device capabilities” section.

If your app targets iOS 4.2.1 and lower, you MUST remove this entry to support armv6 (the processor variant in the original iPhone, iPhone 3G, and 1st and 2nd generations of iPod Touch.) I just found this out this morning and an update to The Beer Nerd’s Olde Volume Equivalence Calculator has been submitted to Apple!

Lens•Lab for iOS development update.

Greetings, fellow photography nerds!

We’re working on an update to Lens•Lab for iOS devices. Here’s what we have in store:

• Editable constraints for focal length. For example, I can set the focal length to go from 24mm-85mm, just like the lens I currently have on my Canon 10D.
• Editable constraints for aperture. For example, I can set the aperture to go from ƒ/3.5 to ƒ/22, just like the lens I have on my Canon 10D.
• Aperture values are straight decimal values now. (They used to snap to 1/2 stop increments but now it’s more versatile.)
• A new Lens Information panel with the following information:
• Sensor Size & crop factor information.
• Angle of View (Vertical, Horizontal, Diagonal).
• Plane of Focus (Vertical, Horizontal, and Diagonal size of the focal plane.).
• …also for Depth of Field Near and Depth of Field Far.
• …and more!

We are excited about this release! If you are interested in trying this version out before it goes public, leave a message here or send an email to jmenter+blog [at] gmail [dot] com.

Lens•Lab 1.0 Released for iOS Devices!

We are pleased to announce the release of Lens•Lab 1.0 for all iOS devices!

What is Lens•Lab? Here’s a short description:

Lens•Lab is a virtual lens simulation tool for photographers of all skill levels. It graphically illustrates how depth of field and field of view relate to your SLR camera and lenses.

Lens•Lab works with all iOS devices running firmware 3.0 or newer and works great with iPad and iPhone 4 retina displays!

MD5 Calculator Released for iOS Devices

We are pleased to announce the release of MD5 Calculator in the App Store!

What is MD5 Calculator? It computes an MD5 hash from text you enter as you type. Sweet!