Egg⁴! is coming soon...

Egg⁴! is on it's way to the Apple App Store. I was able to get it in working order this week and just submitted it a few minutes ago. So, it should be up some time in the next week, if all goes well.

Egg⁴! is the iPad friendly version of Egg!, and lets you race against your friends and family members to see who can break open the Egg⁴! first. It is a universal binary, so it will run on both the iPad and the iPhone/iPod Touch. It will look like an ad-free version of Egg! on the iPhone/iPod Touch, but the real fun is on the iPad. In the U.S., Egg⁴! will be $0.99.

On a side note, the original Egg! has been well received world-wide. It reached #1 in Indonesia, Israel, & the Philippines; #2 in Costa Rica; #3 in Poland; and #5 in the UAE. I can only hope, Egg⁴! will be as well received.

Posted via email from Chili Dawg Software

How much $ from iAds?

So the big question that I've had since iAds was announced was, "How much $ will developers get for using iAds?" Because, if it is not more than what they currently get, there's not much incentive to switch to iAds. A recent MacRumors article says that Apple is charging advertisers $0.01 for each Ad impression and $2.00 for each click. With this information, we can get an idea of what this means for developers.

Taking some data from my Egg! app which is ad-supported by the banner Ads at the top, this is what I have for the past 30 days.

209,697 impressions & 6,507 clicks for a click through rate (CTR) of 3.1%

To get the revenue from these numbers using iAd prices:

209,697 ($0.01) + 6,507 ($2) = $15,110

Of this total, Apple takes 40% and developers take 60%, so:

$15,110 (60%) = $9066

If the numbers being reported are correct, then this is a significant increase over the $158.21 that I actually received (or will receive) from my current advertisers. What would I give up if I switched to iAds? Analytics & custom ads that promote my other apps. What do I gain, over 57 times my current ad revenue. This could be a real game changer. I guess now would be a good time to start integrating iAds into Egg!.

My calculations assume that I will get the same fill rate and CTR that I get now. This may be affected by how many advertisers actually sign on with Apple. If only a few companies sign on, then people will only see those same advertisements over and over again and the CTR will likely drop. If you notice, the revenue from clicks makes up 86% of the total revenue. With impressions alone, I will still get close to 8 times my current revenue; $1257 vs. $158. Not bad at all.

Posted via email from Chili Dawg Software

Fun w/UIView Animations

I'm in the process of creating a new version of Egg! for the iPad. It's not a straight port where I just resize images, etc. I'm taking the opportunity to redesign the code & underlying classes, as well as, adding additional functionality specific to the iPad. One of the interesting bugs that cropped up in the process had to do with UIView animations and their transformation matrices. If you've taken a course in Matrix Math, some of this will sound vaguely familiar.

All UIViews have a transform property that you can set, that will be applied to that view.

UIView *myView = [[UIView alloc] init];
myView.transform = CGAffineTransformIdentity;

Here I set the transformation matrix of the view to the Identity matrix.

The CoreGraphics API on the iPhone has a bunch of functions that will create a new transformation matrix and let you apply those transformations to your view. These are things like:

CGAffineTransformMakeScale, CGAffineTransformMakeRotation, CGAffineTransformMakeTranslation, etc

You use these, when you are creating an initial transformation matrix for a particular view. So in my code, I have a view that I want to rotate. The code will look like this:

UIView *myView = [[UIView alloc] init];
myView.transform = CGAffineTransformMakeRotation(M_PI);

Later on, if I want to apply more transformations to the UIView, I will use:

CGAffineTransformScale, CGAffineTransformRotate, CGAffineTransformTranslate, etc

Notice that these do not have "Make", because we are not creating a new transformation matrix, but instead we are operating on an existing transformation matrix. So now, I can translate my UIView with this:

myView.transform = CGAffineTransformTranslate(myView.transform, 25, 75);

To animate these transforms, I can put them in an animation block:

[UIView beginAnimations: @"rotate" context: nil];
[UIView setAnimationDuration: 2.0];
myView.transform = CGAffineTransformMakeRotation(M_PI);
[UIView commitAnimations];

This will rotate my view 180 degrees over 2 seconds.

If you don't use the correct functions, you will likely see some strange behavior and spend a lot of time wondering why things aren't working. This is what happened to me. In my particular case, I was using a "CATransform3DMakeTranslation" where I should have been using a "CATransform3DTranslate".

Once iPhone OS 4 comes out, I will have to redo the animations in my code, because, according to the documentation, "Use of this method is discouraged in iPhone OS 4.0 and later. You should use the block-based animation methods instead".

Posted via email from Chili Dawg Software

iAds

So one of the big news items last week in the Apple world was the introduction of iPhoneOS 4. A big part of Steve Job's presentation had to do with mobile advertising, and in particular Apple's solution iAd. When I was releasing my apps, I did some research into different advertising platforms because I wanted to release a free app that would generate ad revenue for me. I eventually decided to go with Moblix and have been very pleased with the developer support and the analytics that they provide me.

Apple's iAd model gives 60% of the revenue to developers and they keep 40%. Will I make more money using iAd or sticking with Moblix? I don't know yet. I guess it depends on what Apple charges advertisers. If I do make more, how much more? Steve didn't mention any support for analytics that tell me how many people downloaded my app, how many people clicked the ads, or how much ad revenue I made on a particular day. Another drawback is that there didn't seem to be any built in support for custom advertising. At the present, I have my own ads promoting some of my other apps; they show up 2-5% of the time.

For the time being, I'm not ready to jump on the iAd bandwagon. That may change if moving to iAds means 2 or 3 times more Ad revenue, but it will still be hard to give up the analytics and custom ads.

But Steve Jobs is right about one thing, a lot of mobile ads are garbage. Hopefully, ad agencies will create more compelling, higher quality ads.

Posted via email from Chili Dawg Software

1 handed iPad typing technique

Download now or watch on posterous

IMG_0084.MOV (2850 KB)

Posted via email from Chili Dawg Software

Egg 1.1 has been approved!

Just got the e-mail from Apple. Egg! 1.1 has been approved, so it should hit the AppStore within the next 24 hours. I submitted it Monday night and it was in the "Waiting for Review" state the whole week. So earlier today I sent an e-mail to them asking them to review it before Easter. I said something to the effect, "I know everyone is probably busy reviewing iPad apps, but it will only take 2 minutes to review my app and I want it to get out before Easter." I don't know if sending such e-mails have any effect on the response time. It's very likely that my app finally made it to the top of the queue, but either way it's good news.
I think I mentioned in an earlier post the new button for getting new eggs. Another change is that once you have revealed what's inside, if you continue to tap, you will hear the sound effect again. This was not possible with the way I was handling sounds in version 1.0. I also fixed some visual glitches related to the advertising banner on top.
I hope you enjoy the changes and have a Happy Easter!

Posted via email from Chili Dawg Software

7 months later...

I launched Egg! roughly 7 months ago and lately I've been noticing a spike in the ad revenues, so I decided to dig into the data that Apple provides to see what's been happening. After some hard-core Excel work, this what I've come up with. As you can see, the number of downloads has spiked dramatically in March. The total number of downloads world-wide stands at 37,087.

Here's a breakdown of the top 11 countries...

It's no surprise to me that the U.S. is first, but what is surprising is that the Philippines is #2, especially since 96.9% of that is from last month (March 2010). Prior to last month, the Philippines would not make the top 10. The same thing goes for Indonesia, Israel, Poland & UAE. All these countries had huge spikes this past month. Japan's big month was in February with nearly 80% of their total coming in that month. The UK, Germany & Brazil (#12) are pretty steady from month to month.

So here is the ad revenue for the month of March. The blue is revenue, the red line is the click-through-rate on the ads.

I have no idea what the next month will hold, but hopefully this exponential trend will continue, and people all around the world will enjoy Egg!

This is the complete list of countries in order of # of downloads (78 total):

United States, Philippines, Israel, Indonesia, United Arab Emiriates, United Kingdom, Poland, Singapore, Germany, Japan, Canada, Brazil, Costa Rica, Korean, Lebanon, Australia, Netherlands, France, Mexico, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Switzerland, Italy, Taiwan, Thailand, Sweden, Turkey, Spain, Norway, Austria, India, Argentina, Saudi Arabia, Greece, China, Kuwait, Russia, Denmark, Chile, Ireland, Egypt, Belgium, Columbia, Luxembourg, South Africa,  Peru, Qatar, Czech Republic, New Zealand,  Pakistan, Croatia, Ecuador, Finland, Nicaragua, Romania, Hungary, Portugal, Slovakia, Venezuela,  Estonia, Panama, Slovenia, Guatemala, Honduras, Macau, Lithuania, Vietnam, Jordan, Kazakstan,  Latvia, Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Sri Lanka, Republic of Moldova, Macedonia, Malta, El Salvador, Uraguay

Posted via email from Chili Dawg Software