Hold and Copy in UIKit

By

On February 24, 2010

This article also appears in Zetetic’s blog. Zetetic’s the company behind the transparent SQLite encryption OSS project SQLCipher and the iPhone password vault Strip. Recently, I wanted to implement an interface where a user holds down on a UIView class or subclass to reveal a copy menu. Basically, I didn’t want to have to present […]

Podcast Interview With Oceanhouse Media Brands And Their Impact On Volume and Price

By

On February 22, 2010

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 $4 […]

iPhone Game Rebates

By

On February 16, 2010

I’m fond of folks who take what is, for more people, a complaint and turn it into an opportunity: It’s common to complain that apps outside of the Top Charts are invisible. There’s substance to this complaint. What’s been interesting is seeing how people turn that into an opportunity. Turning this into an opportunity is […]

Bookmarklet As App Store Paid App

By

On January 26, 2010

Vais Salikhov wrote to tell me about Find In Page, his newly available $0.99 app. The app isn’t. Instead, it’s a Mobile Safari bookmarklet. Confused? Allow me to explain: Mobile Safari, like any modern browser, supports bookmarklets. Bookmarklets are compact blurbs of JavaScript saved as a bookmark. When you navigate to a JavaScript bookmark the […]

Developer-To-Developer iPhone App Distribution Without Ad-Hoc Provisioning

By

On January 20, 2010

Developers can share iPhone applications that they’ve created with other iPhone developers without using ad hoc provisioning. Setting this up takes less than 5 minutes. This is one of the method’s I’m considering for distributing CodePromo, my app that makes it easy to generate and share promo codes from the iPhone. This article provides step-by-step […]

CodePromo: Generate/Send Promo Codes From Your iPhone — Beta Testers Wanted

By

On January 13, 2010

CodePromo is an iPhone app that interacts with iTunes Connect to generate promo codes for easy sharing. Motivation You’re chatting with someone. Might be at a bar, conference, or business meeting. You’re talking about your app — paid app to be precise — and decide that you’d like to share a copy of the app […]

Simulating Native Apps In iPhone Simulator For Better Demo Videos

By

On January 12, 2010

Guest author Aaron Kardell runs Performant Design, created the Best App Ever nominated iGarageSale, and will soon launch the MobileRealtyApps.com service for realtors. As described in this article, the iPhone Simulator combined with screen capture software provide an easy way to record a demo video for your app. However, if a key part of your […]

Opening The Facebook App To Your Facebook Fan Page

By

On January 6, 2010

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. […]

For Your Consideration: How To Get Nominated For An Award – Part 1

By

On January 4, 2010

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

By

On December 8, 2009

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 […]