App Store Data Mining Techniques Revealed – Part 2: Scripting App Store XML Downloads

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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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

MonoTouch: Native iPhone Apps In C#

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On September 15, 2009

Novell and the Mono team — the folks behind the popular OSS/alternate platform .NET and Silverlight implementations — have released MonoTouch. Using MonoTouch, programmers can write native iPhone applications using C#. I spoke with Mono Project founder Miguel de Icaza and Joseph Hill, Mono’s product manager, about the project, the audience, the programming model and […]

Tutorial: Easy Audio Playback With AVAudioPlayer

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On August 11, 2009

There are plenty of different places to get a mobile application designed. The problem is that they’re quite expensive. You might be able to figure out how to create your own, but it will probably look very basic. Instead, a good mobile application development software can make it even easier, so that you can build […]

New In iPhone 3.0 Tutorial Series, Part 5: Battery Monitoring

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On July 27, 2009

If you read last week’s New in iPhone 3.0 post on proximity monitoring then this week’s post on battery monitoring is a gimme. Like proximity monitoring, battery monitoring is enabled by setting to YES a property of the UIDevice singleton: UIDevice *device = [UIDevice currentDevice]; device.batteryMonitoringEnabled = YES; iPhone OS provides two type of battery […]

Tutorial: iPhone SQLite Encryption With SQLCipher

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On June 16, 2009

Stephen Lombardo and his firm Zetetic are the creators of the encrypted iPhone data vault Strip. In this article, Stephen shows how to use SQLCipher — their OSS transparent encryption add-on to SQLite that’s at the heart of Strip — in your own iPhone projects. Mobile devices are notoriously difficult to secure. With a small […]

Marketing In Code, Part 2: Setting A User's Status In Facebook From An iPhone App — A Tutorial

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On June 10, 2009

In part one of this series we ran the numbers and found that posting a status update to 13 average Facebook users generated as much exposure as spending the entire post-commission revenue for an average priced app in the top-100. In this tutorial, you’ll learn how post status updates from an iPhone: Outline There are, […]

Marketing In Code, Part 1: Using Facebook Connect For iPhone To Increase App Visibility/Discoverability

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On June 3, 2009

iPhone app pricing precludes traditional advertising. Some math illustrates why: The average price for a paid app in the top-100 the US app store is, as of this moment, $2.82. After Apple’s commission the per-unit payout is $1.94. Advertising is normally sold in cost-per-thousand exposures (CPM; M is the Roman numeral for 1000) and cost-per-click […]