Egg⁴! sneak preview

It's not out yet, but it should be out any time now. Here's a little sneak preview.

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

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

Egg 1.1 coming soon..

I finally had some time to make some changes to Egg! over the weekend. I submitted version 1.1 to Apple, so hopefully this will go through quickly.  The turnaround time for the approval process is supposed to be much shorter than the original 2 week turnaround time. So maybe it will be approved in time for Easter.

I fixed a bug where sometimes you would hear the lion growl by default, this default sound has been changed. Also, I fixed the visual glitch where the background image was running up into the advertising banner.

As for new features, I added a button that will appear when the Egg! is opened, to let you get a new Egg!  This is an improvement over the old way of getting a new Egg!, where you would have to keep tapping on the screen. This is what the new button looks like (highlighted state & normal state).

Hopefully, I'll get to push some even bigger improvements soon.

Egg!'s popularity continues to grow. Last time I checked there were over 3832 users. I have no idea how people find it amongst the 160,000 or so apps on the AppStore, but hopefully people will continue to stumble onto it and enjoy it.

Next thing on the to-do list is to update FlashCardz.

Working on new features

I haven't posted in a while so I just wanted to give a little update on what I've been up to. One of a features that a FlashCardz user requested was an option to hide certain cards within a set of flashcards. So I've been working on adding this. When the update becomes available, it will require users to delete their old versions before installing the new one.

The great thing about this is that if you've already learned/memorized a card, but what to keep it in the stack for review later, you will be able to do this. It will let you focus on the cards that you don't know so well, then later bring back all the cards for a final review.

Over the course of a semester, a student can continue to add cards to a set and show only the ones that pertain to the test they are studying for. Then at the end of the semester, they can show all the cards in the set to study for the final exam.

Special thanks to Albert for requesting this feature.

New Features Update

Over the weekend, new versions of QuoteKeeper & FlashCardz were approved. These include much requested features that I will highlight here.

1. Shake to get a random card. While viewing cards in FlashCardz or quotes in QuoteKeeper, you can shake the iPhone to get a random card or quote. This does not change the order, but jumps you to a new one in the list.

2. Shuffle the list. While in the edit mode pictured here, you can click "Shuffle" in the upper right hand corner and shuffle the list of cards or quotes. This changes the order and cannot be undone. And as always, you can rearrange the list manually, by grabbing the right side of an item in the list.





3. Shorter default text. When you create a new card or quote, the default text that appears has been shortened, so that you can more quickly enter your own text. I could have made it so that no default text appears, but it is important to maintain some sort of visual cue for users. I may explore a different solution to this in future versions.

Also, FlashCardz FREE includes these new features. QuoteKeeper FREE is still awaiting approval.

WebMD Review

Hypochondriac's rejoice! WebMD has released an iPhone app. I don't normally browse the Medical section in the App Store, but when I did, I found this. This is not an app that I look at every day, in fact the only reason I keep it on my iPhone is that one day it might save someone's life.

WebMD mobile does three major things: 1. Check your symptoms 2. Check your prescriptions 3. Gives First Aid Information.

If you go to the Symptom Checker for the first time it will ask you for your age, gender and zip code. I have no idea what your zip code has to do with anything, but I'm not a doctor either.

Depending on the gender you specify you will get a person pictured like this. You can touch different parts of the body and select from a list of different symptoms. Once you build up a whole list, you can touch the "View Possible Causes" button. From there you can read up on the different possible causes for your list of symptoms.

Next is the Treatments tab, that lets you search for different drugs by name, or by shape and color. Once you find the drug you're looking for, you can read about all kinds of relevant information such as uses, side effects, precautions, interactions, and overdoses.

And finally, there's the First Aid section. Just click on the relevant situation and it will pull up the relevant article. It's probably worthwhile to read through them before you encounter these situations, but it's still handy even if you don't.

It's a well done app and as I mentioned before it could save someone's life. I also like the symptom checker and the way it was implemented.

Overall Rating:

Setting Expectations

One of the mistakes I made when I first posted my apps to the App Store, was failing to set expectations. This is important because when people come across apps, they have all kinds of wild expectations as to what it is and what it should do. If what they expect doesn't match up with what they experience in the app, they will come away with a negative impression of the app, which leads to negative comments a lot of the time. So it is up to the developer to do what they can to set the proper expectations for their apps.

Let me illustrate with a couple of my own apps. When I first posted Egg!, I didn't want to spoil the surprise and tell everyone what was inside. So I posted it with this description:

Just tap tap tap to reveal what’s hidden inside the Egg!

I have since added the following:

Egg! is for those times when you’re waiting for the movie to start, stuck in a boring meeting, or for when you have to entertain a small child and don’t know any magic tricks.

Adding this line, gives Egg! more context and helps people understand some of the rationale for it.

For FlashCardz, I added this to the description:

When I was creating FlashCardz, I took a look at similar programs on the App Store, but none of them was what I was looking for. There were some apps out there that did more than FlashCardz, but that didn't really concern me. I didn't set out to make the Swiss Army knife of flash card apps with all the bells and whistles. I just wanted something clean and easy to use, that let me make flash cards on my iPhone. This is my niche. People that want more will choose the other stuff that's out there, but there will be many people that find FlashCardz meets their particular need.

People naturally compare similar things to one another, so here I try to differentiate FlashCardz from the other stuff that's out there and give my perspective on where FlashCardz fits in. If people come in expecting FlashCardz to do everything they will be disappointed, but if they understand that it's not trying to do everything, then they can focus on what it does do.

So whether you're making the next great iPhone app or not, setting expectations will help people understand you and your apps better and reduce the negative comments from mismatched expectations.

Piratizer Review

Happy Monday! I found a funny app that should brighten up the start of a new week. Piratizer lets you turn people into pirates. Take a look.

You can add different hats, facial hair, and other pirate accessories. Each one can be rotated, resized, and repositioned.

The lite version doesn't let you save the new image, but I suspect the paid version does.


Overall Rating:

It made me laugh, so it gets 3 stars.

Y! Finance Review

I want to review at least one app a week, and I wasn't sure what I was going to review this week. But last night when I was running Egg!, I started to see some different advertisements and one of them was for Y! Finance. I clicked the ad and before I knew it I was downloading this on my iPhone. Now normally, I want to review something that I think a lot of people would find useful and enjoy, so a finance app doesn't quite fit the bill. In fact, if I had not stumbled across it, this app would not be on my iPhone (blasphemy for an MBA grad). I have to say, I was very impressed with the design of the app and that is why I am reviewing it here.

This is the summary screen of the app. It gives you a quick look at some of the important things finance people like to look at (DJ, S&P, Nasdaq), and just below some of the top stories. This is the least exciting part of the app, so stay with me. If you tap the small black bar at the bottom, there are a number of options to customize what you see on this summary screen.

Under the quotes section, this is what we see. You can have a bunch of different companies that you want to follow. If you hold down on one, you have the 3 options pictured (Remove, Move, Resize). To move a company, you'll see these blue dots appear, and you tap the dot that represents the position you want to move to. This wasn't obvious to me at first. Initially, I thought the blue dots were anchors and tried to drag them to a new position. As for Resizing, there are 3 options (Compact, Graph, Details). The Apple Inc. box shows the detailed view with the graph and news article headlines below it. The others companies shown are in the compact option, and the graph option is just like the detailed one without the news headlines.

I found this screen by accident, while I was putting my iPhone down. If you turn your iPhone sideways while you're in the quotes tab, you get this sexy graph that lets you compare up to 3 different stocks or indices. You can scroll through all stocks/indices that you are following.

If you tap on a company from the normal quotes tab, it takes you to a detailed view where you can rotate your iPhone for a detailed graph of that company's stock performance. Here you can choose different time scales for the chart, similar to what you see on Yahoo Finance and Google Finance websites. Swiping along the bottom half of the screen lets you swap between news, performance indicators, and industry/competitors. I've shown the performance indicators here.

The last two bits are the Research and Tech Ticker tabs. As you can see the Research tab offers up a wealth of information and allows you to import your own My Yahoo! Portfolios. This is nice, if you have a lot of stocks that you're following and have them setup in Yahoo. It's even smart enough to know if you've already imported a company's ticker and tells you how many new companies were imported and how many you tried to import that were already there. The Tech Ticker tab features videos from the Yahoo Finance portal on current events in business.

I don't follow BlackBerry or Android too much, so I don't know what Yahoo offers on those platforms. But this is the first iPhone app that blew me away. If you have even a passing interest in finance or stocks, or if you want to see how the funds in your 401K are doing, get this app. (It's free).

From a developer's perspective, this app does a great job organizing the enormous amount of financial information in the marketplace and making it easy for users to navigate that information. Yahoo does a great job of customizing their app in a way that builds their own brand image. When you use it, you know it's a iPhone app, but it doesn't look like every other iPhone app out there. This is THE killer app on in the iPhone for finance. It's amazing how far we've come. It used to be that you would have to sit at your computer to get this kind of financial information. Now, it is available at your fingertips wherever you are.

Overal Rating:

I don't expect to give out 5 stars too often, but the information and the way this app presents that information is amazing!

QuoteKeeper & FlashCardz Updated

I just submitted updates to QuoteKeeper & FlashCardz for approval. So expect to see an update in the AppStore in a couple of weeks. I added the ability to shake for a new quote or flash card, and also the ability to shuffle the list in the edit list mode. I will give a more detailed post w/pics when they are officially up.

If you happen to use either of these apps and would like to see some feature implemented, please leave a comment and let me know. These new features were implemented for one of my old roommates, Albert Lee.

AppStore Rejection

So it's been about 18 days since I submitted QuoteKeeper FREE for approval and today, I finally got a response. REJECTED!

The actual wording in the e-mail is more tactful, but says the same thing.

First I should mention that QuoteKeeper FREE was submitted the same day as FlashCardz FREE (Aug 17th). FlashCardz FREE was approved Aug 29th (12 days later). The only difference between the original versions and the FREE versions is the advertising at the top. Here's a snippet from the e-mail.

We've reviewed QuoteKeeper FREE and determined that we cannot post this version of your iPhone application to the App Store because of an Apple trademark image.

And this is the image they sent for reference...

At first I couldn't figure out what the problem was. But I think it has to do with the Ad at the top that mentions iPhone. Here is the statement concerning the use of the Apple Logo that was sent with the rejection e-mail, etc...

Apple Logo and Apple-owned Graphic Symbols: You may not use the Apple Logo or any other Apple-owned graphic symbol, logo, or icon on or in connection with web sites, products, packaging, manuals, promotional/advertising materials, or for any other purpose except pursuant to an express written trademark license from Apple, such as a reseller agreement.

It's not too big of a deal. I fixed it so that the only advertising that shows up is my own for Chili Dawg Software, which doesn't mention Apple or iPhone.

Now if you read the fine print, it talks about logos, graphic symbols,  and icons; none of which are present in this image. Strange. I'm beginning to understand why a lot of developers are complaining about the app review process. However, I do appreciate that they are at least telling me why it was rejected.

Anyway, I resubmitted my application for review and I hope it doesn't take another 2.5 weeks to get it approved.

I love the Mac and the iPhone, and I think Apple is one of the best companies out there. I know they're working hard to make improvements to the overall process for developers, which I appreciate. This is just one of those things that leaves me scratching me head.

The YouTube Effect

One of the thing's I've noticed about myself since getting an iPhone is a dramatic increase in watching videos on YouTube. I call this the YouTube Effect. Before the iPhone, I would visit YouTube occasionally  to watch things like Lion vs. (insert name of soon-to-be-dead animal) and funny things that friends would send along.

As you may know, the iPhone comes with the YouTube app built in. (It is one of the apps that you can move around but never remove from your iPhone. Notice the X on the upper left corner of the Facebook App) I started out watching the most popular videos for the week, and after that I would check the most popular videos of the day on a regular basis. I soon found myself subscribing to different channels and following certain channels fairly regularly.

This iPhone-YouTube connection turned a casual YouTuber into a regular viewer. The YouTube Effect.

It's one thing to watch videos on YouTube everyday, but it's another thing to actually make a video every day. So I started to wonder why people would do this, and I learned that the top video bloggers make six-figure incomes. These are people with hundreds of thousand views every day. Here's a link to a NY Times article on the subject. I have a lot of respect for the work that the guy in the article puts in to his show (but I can't watch more than of few seconds of him).

This is getting long, so I'll just leave with some interesting people on YouTube:

Erin and Roxanne, they sing covers of popular songs. They got to the point where they recorded their own single and get to hear themselves on the radio. When they're not singing they work at a Chinese restaurant.

Christine Gambito, from HappySlip, she plays six different characters in her videos.

Peter Chao, (warning offensive language & content sometimes, does this make you want to see it more?)

Ryah Higa, this Hawaiian guy has some funny stuff.

Peter Schiff, boring unless you're into financial markets, insightful if you are. He predicted the housing bubble collapse.

Who do you watch on YouTube? Leave a comment and let me know, I need to feed my YouTube addiction.

TapWord Review

OK, to launch this blog, I'm going to review an app that's been keeping me up late at night. This app is called TapWord and I downloaded it for free from the AppStore. I don't remember if it was a promotional thing or if it was always free, but I didn't pay for it.

In TapWord, you are given a set of letters arranged in a 4x4 square and you have to use your finger to connect adjacent letters to make three-letter words or longer.

As you make valid words, they are added to your word list, and you are awarded points. If you attempt to make a word that isn't a word then you will hear a drum sound to let you know.

Eventually time will run down, and with 10 seconds left, your iPhone vibrates to let you know its almost over.

After time expires, it gives you your total score and tells you the % of total words you found. It also shows you the list of all possible words. I hover around 14-20%. It's actually easier to get a higher percentage on tough boards with few vowels. If you get to play this, you'll know what I mean.

There are options to expand the board size to 5x5 and increase the minimum word length to four-letter words. I have yet to play the 5x5 board, just looking at it is mind-numbing, but this may be my next challenge.

This game is very addictive and super fun! I have spent hours putting words together. I would put this in my current top 10 iPhone apps.

There is a downside, but I'm still trying to figure out who to blame for this. You see, when the game is over and I get the list of possible words; I think to myself, "Is that really a word?" I was always better at math anyway.

TapWord does a great job of exercising your mind, but it does make your brain hurt after a while. After long sessions, I have to do something mindless like Farmville or Mafia Wars.

Overall Score: