Discovered Posterous

So I discovered Posterous and decided to give it a try to handle my blogging. I started out by importing my old blog posts to it. It think because of the way blogger handles pictures, the layout of the blog posts got messed up. Going forward I don't think this will be a problem because Posterous does a much better job handling images. I'll still keep my Blogger blog, but I'll be using Posterous write the updates.

If you are unfamiliar with Posterous, the great thing about it is that it will update your twitter, Facebook, and blog all at the same time. And to post, all you have to do is send an e-mail. Previously I had to use twitterfeed to post my blog entries to twitter then use something else to get that to update my Facebook status. I don't even remember what I'm using right now to get my twitter to post to Facebook, but I'm trying to find out so I don't get multiple posts for one entry.

This is actually my first test post.

Posted via email from Chili Dawg Software

My Real Job

Posted via web 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.

Copycat app

So this weekend when I was showing a friend Egg! on the AppStore I noticed that someone copied my idea and released a copycat app. It's pretty clear that my app was released first. I shouldn't be surprised because this kind of thing happens all the time. But it is kind of sad. I don't know if Apple has anything in their terms of service about this and I don't even know if I want to pursue it. I guess if it was costing me millions of dollars in lost revenue that would be a different story.

I've made a commitment to donate all ad revenue from Egg! to organizations or individuals in need, so this copycat app doesn't really affect me one way or another. It is just sad that someone would take your original idea and pass it off as their own.

On an unrelated note, I'm away from my desktop so I'm writing and posting this entry completely from my iPhone.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Fiscal Year 2009

$56.93 This is how much I've made in app sales for the past 6 months on FlashCardz & QuoteKeeper.

For the most part this is done with very minimal advertising. The majority of which come from the custom ads for chilidawgsoftware in Egg! (my free app).

As you may know, I also have free versions of both FlashCardz and QuoteKeeper that serve ads and generate revenue from ad clicks. So over the same 6 month period QuoteKeeper Free has generated $56.94 and FlashCardz Free brought in $15.00 for a combined total of $71.94.

One of the questions that I had at the beginning of all this was whether or not I would make more money with ad-supported free apps or from traditional paid app sales. The final answer is IT DEPENDS.

Depends? Depends on what? Well, I think it depends on the type of application. I made more $ from regular app sales on FlashCardz vs. the ad-supported version (more than double). I attribute this to the fact that people who use FlashCardz are most likely using it to study for something, so seeing ads at the top is distracting. So the demand for the paid version is higher than the ad-supported version of FlashCardz. The usage of the free version is actually very low.

However, the ad-supported (free) version of QuoteKeeper made more $ than the paid version even though the paid version was available more than a month earlier. In fact, the ad-supported version of QuoteKeeper more than doubled the revenue of the paid version. My view of this is that ads are more tolerable in QuoteKeeper because people are using it more casually.

What about Egg!? It is by far the most popular app. The ad revenue over the past 6 month period is $128.72; this accounts for 1/2 of my total revenues.

Although, QuoteKeeper and FlashCardz are valuable to people in their respective niches, Egg! seems to be more universally popular. Over the last half of 2009, a total of 3,258 people have downloaded Egg!.

At this point, it's about getting noticed. With over 140,000 apps on the app store and more being added every day, its easy to get lost. I consider myself fortunate that I can get people to see my other apps through the custom ads that show up on Egg!. I'm in the process of getting Egg! to update user's Facebook status as a way to generate more exposure. The idea comes from this blog post. Hopefully, by the end of next year (or sooner) we can add a lot of zeroes to the end of these numbers.

If I add up all app sales and all ad revenue, the grand total is $257.59 for the last half of 2009.

Financial Update - End of 2009

Only posting the unit sales because I think there's a error in the financial reports that are skewing the results. The error in question has to do with the financial report from the Japan AppStore. It lists one sale, but for $81.00. So either the Japanese Yen is doing a lot worse against the dollar than I thought or there was some kind of conversion error. Regardless, this is how the unit sales have been.

As for Egg!, this is what the last 90 days looks like:

The blue bars represent daily revenue and the red line is the click through rate. It's been a while since I checked this, and at that time, I was averaging about $1/day.  This has increased a little bit to $1.46/day. Still not enough to retire with.

Unwanted Calls

Recently, I've been getting some unwanted calls on my iPhone. I went looking for a way to block these calls, but unless you want to pay $4.99/mo there is no good way to do this. After googling around on the internet, I found a workable solution that others may find useful:

The Silent Ringtone

Instead of blocking calls, you can add them to your contacts and set the contact to a silent ringtone.

I created a contact called "Telemarketer" and added the number of the person that has been calling. The great thing is that you can add multiple numbers to the same contact. (I don't know what the limit is, if there is one).

To get a silent ringtone into your iPhone, just google "iphone silent ringtone" and download one. Then drag the ringtone to iTunes and it will be available the next time you synch w/iTunes.

I know this solution has probably been around for a while, but most people don't look for it until they need it.