App Store Data Mining Techniques Revealed – Part 1

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On December 2, 2009

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!

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On October 22, 2009

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

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On October 20, 2009

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 […]

App Store Heresies: Higher Price, Better Ratings. Don't Discount Your App At Launch.

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On October 15, 2009

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

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On September 30, 2009

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

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On September 28, 2009

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

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On September 22, 2009

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, […]

Area Code 408? Pick Up The Phone!

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On September 17, 2009

Guest author Aaron Kardell is the author of the iGarageSale app. This post originally appeared in his blog. Have an article to share with our readers? Contact us! At 8:45 Monday night, I received a call from an unrecognized number with a 408 area code. As a general habit I do not answer unrecognized calls […]

Mobile Orchard Jobs Board: iPhone Jobs & Contract Gigs. Help-Wanteds Free, But Must Pass Muster.

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On September 2, 2009

People want to hire you and, for a while now, they’ve been emailing me about it. I thought it best that they be able to tell you directly. With that in mind: I’m pleased to announce the launch of our Free iPhone Jobs & Contract Gigs Board. Pairing targeted help-wanteds and popular, topical sites that […]

Getting Started with OpenGL ES 2.0 On The iPhone 3GS

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On August 24, 2009

One of more the exciting new features of the iPhone 3GS is its faster, more advanced graphics hardware and support of OpenGL ES 2.0. Unfortunately, Apple hasn’t provided much info at all about how to harness those new capabilities. They provide great documentation and sample code for most of their APIs, but somehow their samples […]