ILA (CS) is the first incarnation of the iLA platform and is designed with deep learning, easy knowledge sharing and project planning in mind. Well, sure you can also just take notes and “beam” them to a friend or colleague.

Excerpt, organize and share, thoughts, ideas, and knowledge topics in a natural way, – simple and fast, without the interruption of the flow of ideas by having to think how to organise it, first.

Stefan’s own words after the break.

In iLA everything is about flexible creation of RTF Texts, collecting excerpts from Web pages and other media, about pictures and any content that helps to understand a problem, line out a process, or to complete a task.

We evaluated a couple of options until we found Oliver’s DTRichTextEditor. At first we thought “boy, 500 €, that is a proud number”, but: “think about it”.

Ending up with the wrong thing, or doing it yourself is way more expensive. So we contacted Oliver who was already at first contact very helpful (yes support is a factor !).

We purchased a license. For us it turned out to be a very good investment. We knew DTRichTextEditor was not designed for what we had in mind to do with it. But it performed surprisingly well out-of-the-box already, even in the abusive way we put it to use, and after a couple of tweaks we see that we could not have made a better choice.

When we had questions, Oliver promptly helped with his expertise, when we had suggestions or found an issue, the fix was sometimes done in a matter of hours. We saw, we didn’t buy a piece of software only, but premium support comes with it.

Well, as no software is perfect, we are having some grief with ordered/unordered lists, but I am sure it is only a matter of time that this will be fixed.

iLA hit the App Store in January and if you want to see what DTRichTextEditor can do for you, check out the free iBook about the iLA App.

Ziner is the latest entry in the battle for the best Google Reader client, fighting it out with other heavyweights Reeder, Feedly, Flipboard, Mr. Reader, FeeddlerRSS and Newsify.

I asked Ziner’s developer Jay Zhao to share with us a bit of the back story of Ziner.

Making of Ziner

(in Jay’s own words)

As we know, there are already a lot of Google Reader clients on the App Store. So why do I bother creating another one? Because they all failed to meet some of my criteria:

So before I set out to create Ziner two years ago, I commit myself to solving all the problems they have and combining all the good stuff to create a Google Reader client that I want to use everyday.

After 18 months of hard work, Ziner is now released and it truly excels in many aspects. For example, Ziner is really fast in syncing with Google Reader! You get all feeds synced within 4 seconds, the latest articles appearing within 7 seconds and all articles downloaded within 1 min. (Tested over Wi-Fi, 10000 unread items, 448 subscriptions). Yes, even faster than Reeder.

Ziner’s render speed is much faster than other RSS readers. See for yourself in this video demo:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pIpup-XHfNg

How about other Google Reader clients?

Take Feedly for example, when you tap a summary to read the full article, you always see “loading…” and only after a while can you see the full article. “Loading…” is really annoying and in Ziner you hardly see it except in the very first loading stage.

The great speed of Ziner is attributed to DTCoreText from Cocoanetics, a library that helps you convert HTML & CSS to Core Text, thus increasing render speed dramatically.

You can get more info about Ziner on its website and it is available on the app store.

One year before, when I attended my first WWDC I was less well organized and at this time Leo Laporte was still residing in what they called the “TWIT Cottage” a small house with next to no room for guests. But this year 2012 was different since just a few months earlier TWIT had raised enough money to move to their much larger current studio.

Because of this emailing ahead and reserving seats was but a formality.

Occording to Google Maps this trip takes around an hour, but realistically you have to add another half hour that it takes you to get over the Golden Gate bridge and out of the city. That’s not too bad, it is about the same time that it took the three buses from San Francisco to Cupertino for all the developers who wanted to pay their respects to the Apple Apparel collection.

The car we had gotten thanks to great organizing by Brendan Duddridge from Tap Forms (the famous iOS database app) was fully loaded with 4 gentlemen and one lady. Being the most compact of the lot I sat on the middle seat in the back row. Nobody complained about lack of space as we all were ecstatic to be visiting Petaluma for the first time.

Leo Laporte is running his studio like a big family. He’s the don, the star and a small army of helpers makes sure that technology, audience and organizing all goes smoothly. I had written specifically that we are iOS developers who are in town for the big event to follow the next day. I was hoping to get some time on the show, because in stark contrast to two of my traveling companions I am not camera shy.

But apparently Leo has not yet adapted his style to dynamically include audience members in his shows, at least not those who are not celebrities themselves. I guess he’s just got a certain way to do his show like he always did it, his two guests dialed in via Skype and appearing on large monitors to either of his sides. This would be the first feature request that I have for TWIT: include the live audience now that you have room for one!

The second room for improvement I saw with the chairs for the audience. It’s great to have the room to accommodate visitors, but your backs hurt after the show. Leo being Leo noted to me, when I tweeted him that, that with more comfortable chairs the audience would never leave! Really?

After the show Leo kindly offered himself to be taken pictures with all the while with the live video stream still going on. Some funny suitable comments could be seen passing by on one monitor that was showing chat room messages in extra large letters. Leo let everybody have ample time to chat a bit and so I took the bull by the horns and used the airtime to promote Cocoanetics a bit.

In the video below you might notice that in the middle of my chat with Leo the audio turns bad. This is because we were filming with my iPhone 4S and my GoPro camera at the same time, but the helping hand holding the iPhone 4S switched the recording off too soon. Everybody was assuming that I was about to raise from Leo’s throne which he graciously had offered but then I had the inspiration to mention my podcast.

This turned into me pitching to Leo the idea of doing a developer podcast dedicated to iOS. With cameras still rolling you can see his brain going into overdrive and this resulted in a full second act for my 10 minutes of fame. I’m still hoping that this was able to plant a seed in Leo’s fabulous podcasting brains and maybe one day there will be a TWIT iOS podcast.

The third act – which I moved before the first two in the Video for effect – was about me showing Leo the Find my Friends experiment I had been running all throughout WWDC. 114 “Freunds” symbolized by purple pins who were all converging on the Moscone Center. And while I was showing off the current state on my iPad we could see the third pilgrimage in one cluster moving north heading back to San Francisco. Leo was genuinely excited by the demonstration.

9 days after our visit I got another few minutes of airtime, or rather my iOS 6 public transit article did. This happened in MacBreak Weekly #304. I thought it only fitting to append this after my chat with Leo, sort of as an echo. Leo even mentioned that I had visited “a couple of weeks ago”. I won’t be holding this inaccuracy against him but rather I am thankful for getting another sliver of fame out of that.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YApgaBcEnVg

The material you see was recorded with two iPhone 4S and one GoPro HD (original, not the 2). My buddy Christian had begun to cut it on his Adobe Premiere but the program somehow messed up the project and made it unusable. So I could only use the first section of the video from the start until the beginning of the show. But thanks to the fabulous multi-cam support in Final Cut Pro X I was able to piece together a nice memento of the experience.

I still have to involuntarily giggle: Adobe messes up, Apple saves the day … or in this case, my video.

We’ll be returning to TWIT as soon as we can, at the latest when we’re coming back to San Fran for  WWDC 2013. Leo, don’t forget the iOS podcast! We got you on tape liking the idea!

I love to receive mail telling me about where in real life DTCoreText finds good use. Especially so if it is used for good, like by the Nottingham Multiple Sclerosis Therapy Centre info app. A case study.

Andy Warwick, Director of Creed New Media developed this app. It’s a ‘support’ app for a local charity that he’s involved with, the Nottingham Multiple Sclerosis Therapy Centre (NMSTC). This member-led charity specializes in Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy (HBO), Physiotherapy, Reflexology, Hopi Ear Candles, Massage, Aromatherapy and advice on various topics.

The NMSTC app uses DTCoreText extensively to display background and informational text in multiple sections. You can probably tell where it’s used: if not, it’s in the ‘Booking a HBO Session’ view, and the ‘About’ view.

Andy had tried using local web pages, but he found this solution to be far more polished and elegant.

It was useful for embedding images in the flow of text, styling text, and adding external links; all the stuff that you can do using local HTML pages. The key bonus for Andy, though, was the ability to display the content without having the jarring pre-load flash you get when using a UIWebView, even for local files.

“Thanks for all the obvious hard work you’ve put into your code; it makes things so much easier. Great job!” — Andy Warwick

There are hacky ways around that, of course, but DTCoreText — once Andy understood it’s usage — gave a much better ‘finish’ to the app, while still retaining the ability to quickly and easily edit the content when client made text changes.

You can download the free app on the app store to see DTCoreText in action. We say “Good Job, Andy!”

Updated: added info on Clipper.

In stark contrast to most other US cities San Francisco actually does have a reasonably working and convenient network of public transportation.

The ‘hoods

The locals are referring to areas of San Francisco by the neighborhood names. The most important region for us iOS developers is the area south of Market Street, incidentally called “South of Market Street” or SOMA. The Moscone Center is in there, relatively close to the main traffic vein Market Street. All of the hotels I’ve ever lodged in are north of Market, in Civic Center or the Financial District. These are the areas where you can get buy without entirely on foot and without ever using any kind of transportation aside of having ridden the BART from/to the airport.

Incidently it is also these neighborhoods which are used as names for the 3 conference rooms at the Moscone Center: Presidio being the largest, Pacific Heights and Nob Hill being distinctly smaller. (Sorry, I have to giggle every time when I mention NOOB Hill. LOL.)

In the least you should memorize an understanding where SOMA is, because this is what is turning into the New Silicon Valley with lots of tech companies settling around Bryant Street. (The original one being an hour or so south of San Francisco around San José)

Here is a wonderful guide to what kinds of people to expect to meet in the various neighborhoods.

Public Transport

Google Maps has all the public transport timetables. So the easiest way to get from A to B is to hop in your maps.app or online on Google Maps locate your current position and plan a public transport route to where you need to go. It even shows you the amount that the fare will be.

For the fare you should keep a stack of single dollar bills handy. A ride on the bus typically is $2 which you shove into a box next to the driver who will hand you a paper ticket in return. You need to enter the exact amount, no change given. So if you won’t want to be in the position of embarrassingly asking around if somebody could break a $5 bill, then you better be ready.

The trams and busses are supplemented with something they call subway, even though it is not subterranean as far I could tell. One thing that might be difficult is to find if a line you are supposed to change to is in fact downstairs.

There is an alternative to cash … tip courtesy of Nathan de Vries. You can buy a Clipper Card at Walgreens. This appears to be a card to put a balance on and then fares are subtracted from this whenever you “tag your card” i.e. swipe it over a reader in the vehicle of your choice.

This card also seems to be a replacement for the crappy card you get from the dispenser for BART and you can re-use it the next time you are in San Francisco. So I’ll probably get one, this tip is the first time I heard about it.

Generally whenever you pay or tap the Clipper card this is good for 2 hours. Therefore you don’t need to pay on every vehicle you get. You still tap your Clipper card every time so that a beep will tell the driver that you paid up. But you will not get charged for that.

Let’s not go there … Taxi

SF Cab drivers are known to complain about you paying by credit card, are grumpy all the time and often you cannot even be sure that they’ll come and pick you up. Or so I’ve heard.

At first I was sticking to the feet, then I climbed level 2 and used some busses and a tram to get to Fisherman’s Wharf. Level 3 is to get your own personal limousine.

Uber

The name of this company and it’s service derives from the German word Über, but since Americans cannot pronounciate the Ü they went with U and think they are funny using this creation. Having said that, “Uber-” is used to describe something that is totally over the top (much better) than the same thing without this prefix.

This service is one of many examples where a local tech company has taken on something that is not really working to the user’s advantage (Taxis in SF) and made it into a web- and app-based service that aims to disrupt the incumbent industry. It was highly recommended by my friends at Stackmob and when somebody I follow on Twitter was also mentioning it I figured I have to try it out.

So you sign up on their website, register a credit card and download the iPhone app. The cool thing is that if you use my promo link then you get $10 off the first ride and I get $10 credit as well. You should get this setup down in advance on the Hotel WiFi so that you are ready to go when you need a pickup.

You specify the pickup location and a delightfully cute icon of a man with suitcase and raised hand marks the spot. For a couple of seconds you have to wait for a driver to accept your hail and once you did, you will see the car driving towards you on the map.

I couldn’t believe it at first when I saw the car that was coming to pick me up, driven by Joseph who was wearing a suit.

An actual limousine?! And a bit of LOL’ing at the license plate.

My driver, Joseph his actual name, explained to me that he’s been driving limousines for many years now, but since Uber started he almost exclusively drives rides he’s getting from their service. And there are many other advantages: with the registered credit card you don’t have to worry about money at all, no chance for a robber.

Joseph’s limo has leather seats, water bottles if you are thirsty and also loves Uber. He’s also the one who told me about Taxis in San Francisco, see above.

Uber is said to be about 50% more expensive than taking a Taxi and the digital payment already includes the tip. You can fit up to 4 people into such a car, but I wouldn’t recommend it, it would totally spoil the feeling of luxury.

My ride came to $16 in total, $10 of which I was discounted because I had registered by promo code. They also keep a track of the route and email you a receipt. This in itself makes my geek hart jump with joy.

The trip I took was from my Hotel to the Stackmob Offices and it was a blast. I’ll definitely use this service again. It costs 8 times as much as taking the bus but the experience is worth it.

Is it just me or does it seem like more and more iOS developer are hoping to supplement their living from getting book royalties?

At the end of my procrastination I sat down and forced myself to read the first half of the book, taking notes to give this book a fair and balanced review. A word of caution: this will be a tragic comedy of epic proportions.

In Austria we have a saying: “Nothing is useless, it can always serve as a bad example”. It is my hope that this bad example serves to improve the overall quality of literature on our favorite subject matter.

The title of the work suggests that this book is not meant to be read in a linear fashion. You’d expect from a “Cookbook” to find “Recipes” for individual things that you would look up should you need to cook them. In the chapter about the book’s copyright you can read:

Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the information presented. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied.

So far so good, but who is this book meant for? In the words of the author:

The iPhone Interface Cookbook is written from the ground up for people who are new to iOS or application interface design in general. Each chapter discusses the reasoning and design strategy behind critical interface components, as well as how to best integrate each into any iPhone or iPad application. Detailed and straight-forward recipes help give guidance and build understanding far beyond what is offered through Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines.

From these two parts of information – and possibly the short author’s bio – you come to expect a highly polished work that may sit on the shelf of a fledgling iOS developer getting his feet wet on his first couple of apps. A reference manual for design, if you will.

This puts me at odds with the premise. Neither am I fledgling, nor am I designer. I love to code and generally I like to delegate designing UI and UX to the companies that hire me. After having realized this I gave the book a second chance in my head: if it is worth the expense maybe I could recommend it to those designers sitting in my client’s companies for reference?

As an iOS contractor you often have to deal with companies that have established themselves on non-iOS platforms and now – due to public and marketing pressures – they also want an iOS app. Generally their in-house designers will know how to design a Windows app or website. Often I have wished for being able to recommend to them a guide as to what they have to do differently when designing for our platform.

This book isn’t that either.

Maybe I was “holding it wrong” because I read the book from the front cover to slightly more than half when I had to abort the mission. I’m detail oriented by nature and so I found boatloads of errors, formatting problems and blatant omissions with which I filled a note on Evernote with.

For example this is how e-mail addresses are formatted throughout. What do you think if you see this?

At first I attributed the problems I was seeing to the ePub format. Apparently the publisher did not invest in this being properly edited. Neither from a formatting point of view nor in terms of technical correctness.

Each chapter in the book slavishly follows this structure: Getting ready, How to do it…, How it works…, There’s more…, See also. The general style hides some interesting information in a tone ripe with fluff and half-truths.

And what’s even more annoying is that these mini-sections all take up space in the index which is destroying that as well. In this example you can see the worthless index. Why in god’s name would I want to directly jump to a There’s more in a section? You have no way of quickly getting an overview of what “Recipe” would be the right one for a real-life design case. Except wade through these superfluous entries of sub-sections.

I admitted that I am probably a) not the right person and b) not reading it correctly. But the problems with this book go far beyond the formatting.

Somehow I am getting the feeling that the individual chapters in this book might have been articles on a blog, that somebody just copy/pasted together and replaced all instances of “article” with “recipe” and “blog” with “book”. Is that truly the way how modern developers expect their information to be diced?

For one thing you’d expect from an experienced iOS developer to know how to spell the name of our IDE correctly. Instead Cameron (or is it a lawman editor?) insists on spelling it XCode. This book couldn’t have been edited on a Mac because even my WordPress autocorrected that to Xcode. Purists might call this a blatant disregard for what is holy.

There are many more examples of misspelled classes, apps or terms we iOS developers deal with every day. To give a second example: WebKit is one word, not two.

Ok, there are formatting problems (ePub’s fault), there are technical editing problems. To top it off there are factual problems as well.

The author details how to generated certificates on the provisioning portal, but omits the simple information that you can just connect your device via USB, click on the “User for Development” button in Xcode Organizer and have Xcode auto-provision the device in your “iOS Team Provisioning Profile”.

Then there is much commingling. Alert Views are thrown in together with modal view controllers. Later they are mashed up with push notifications and local notifications. And the rationalization for why everything is modal:  “iOS is a highly modal operating system, forcing one application at a time upon the user.”

There are 4 step guides where the second and third step are identical, just worded differently. There are in-depth explanations about topic that a designer has no interest in, and the interesting topics are covered incompletely. In truth I found two or three nuggets of information buried deep in what I read. For example I found the explanation on Fitt’s Law quite interesting, didn’t know that.

Sooner or later you realize that the statement from the Copyright section is a lie. “Every effort” was definitely not made and the information isn’t presented at an acceptable level of “accuracy”.

The second promise that the publisher did not keep is who the book is for. Where are the explanations “far beyond” of what you can find in Apple’s HIG? Where are the chapters that I can recommend to the UI/UX designer working at my client’s?

I had to stop reading half way through, when I had accumulated 3 screenfuls of “bugs”. I am not getting paid to correct this book, so that amount exceeded the level of bullish!t I was willing to put up with. My job is to evaluate whether this work of art is worthy of your attention.

By now you should fathom my opinion.

I visited my first such event in Graz, let me give you some of my impressions. Welcome to the BarCamp Graz 2011.

When you enter the venue you get a name tag and have 3 slots where you put your tags. Those are basically the three copies that you feel interest you the most. I put CoreText, Components and Partnerships. Then – after breakfast – people can put topics they feel like giving a talk on onto post-its which are input into the “Paper Wiki”. That is a big piece of paper which a grid of rooms and the times. Organizers try to consolidate talks with general interest, some of the talks got moved to “next day” (or never), in some cases

At present – due to my daily involvement in this topic – I felt most passionately about CoreText. I have very little practice in giving talks in general, I’m simply too young in this industry to be a renowned speaker. But what’s great about bar camps is that you don’t have to if you have something to present. Even though I didn’t do any specific presentation preparation, the feedback I got suggested that people liked my presentation.

A bit unfortunate was the fact that all the other visitors to the iCamp generally seem to be too shy to present. Why is that? I keep meeting brilliant iOS engineers who are true artisans when they navigate around Xcode, but for some strange reason they also seem to think that they have nothing to share. I have a bit of an advantage though that I have some extrovert tendencies that found a fertile ground at this event.

There was one other iOS-related talk that I thoroughly enjoyed, talking about how to customize a UITabbarController. Boy, you can apparently make this do just about anything if you torture it enough… There actually where a few prepared Keynote slides. Regardless, I found that truly fascinating.

But my best reason to attend was not the conference itself, but the number of people I would meet there for the first time. It turns out that most of the engineers of BytePoets, a partner of mine, were present. We have entered into a partnership agreement, signed and sealed, a week before we actually met here in Graz for the first time face to face. The product that we are collaborating on might be revealed tomorrow, or not, we’ll see.

I did not have any Keynote presentation, although I still wish I had a reason to create one. Instead I simply used 3 tabs on a Safari window to show:

• my Website
• my Twitter account
• the location of the NSAttributedString+HTML project on Github
• I used one actual slide (ripped from a WWDC video on CoreText) to explain the connections

To avoid an appearance of wanting to hide between the desk I stood up when I was not giving a tour of code or websites. I feel that this made it also more personable and in touch with the audience.

Granted with a bit of preparation I could have cut down on the fluff and finished the talk in the time allotted, but it did not seem to bore people that I took an hour instead of 45 minutes. On the contrary! I had several interesting questions before and after it, which tells me that it indeed was a valuable introduction for most of the attendees.

One technique that worked really well to get people engaged is to ask question hand have them be answered by show of hands. Who’s a developer? Almost all. Who’s used CoreText before? Almost none. Perfect, captive audience, captivated by my talk. I couldn’t have had an easier to please crowd. Might have been luck. Or might have been the charm of bar camps that due to the number of multiple streams and topics you invariably tend to end up with the perfect audience because they WANT to listen to you.

In a way this 2-day event could also be seen as a sort of trial of the concept of traveling light. Earlier I had gotten myself an 11″ MacBook Air. This was supplemented by a 3G iPad 2 and – of course – my iPhone 4. In fact, since my Air also had Xcode 4 installed and working, I was only too happy to supply it for somebody else’s presentation. Keynote took longer than expected to install from the Mac app store, so the slides had to come from another 11″ sitting next to it. So you can see, the 11″ Air apparently is the modern presenters device of choice.

Ah and yes, so far I am very very happy with the mentioned combo. Of all the volume in the had I carried with me, most was made up of a two compressible rainskins and a pair of BarCamp swag T-Shirts. Now that my partner won’t attend the second day, there’s even less volume to carry. I can highly recommend this way of moving around. Yes, you can probably prepare a bit more professionally, have Keynote installed and ready to roll with some slides, but technically all you need are those 3 lightweight Apple devices.

Ah and I forgot to mention the best part: barcamps are  free and try to have as many streams as there are rooms and talks. On the one hand this means that nobody HAS to be there and you usually get more interested listeners than if people have to choose between the less boring talk in two streams done by paid professionals (which does not in itself mean that those couldn’t be boring as well). The other is that that since nobody gets paid for talking one saying holds true more than ever: it is what you make of it.

A truly intriguing experiment in doing a conference that isn’t one.

With the iPad I fulfilled my first dream of having a PADD like Jean Luc Piccard, so it was no question that I had to purchase the first digital WIRED app/magazine that came out last week. Many people rambled about the price tag, $4, but I think that’s fair, because you get way more value than you would in paper. Let me share my impressions and let’s peek under the hood of the first eMag that deserves to be called that.

Sipping a fresh espresso with a bit of cream, browsing through the Wired eMagazine. Let’s have a look at how it is to read it and look behind the scenes to see what we can learn from it as iPhone/iPad developers. Maybe there’s an eMagazine of our own in our future?

UPDATE: Here’s Adobe’s Promo for the Magazine. Adobe has announced that soon there will be software on Adobe Labs to do do what they did for WIRED for any InDesign publication.

The first hurdle to getting WIRED is obviously having to acquire an iPad, which is still not possible through official channels throughout most of the world. Next comes the $5 price tag, but we have made worse investments than that. Finally you have to wait until the 552.2 MB Behemoth downloads to your hard disk. This uncompresses to 570.5 MB which tells us one thing: most of it is video or PNG files for which zipping does not gain any additional compression.

How does it read?

Once you have it on your iPad the app loads very fast. It shows a mosaic and then you come to the front page. You feel like you’re looking at the “real” paper issue, but only visually. The first button you notice plays a short movie clip from Toy Story 3 in full screen. Then you notice that all the headlines are actually hyperlinks that lead you to the corresponding articles. This solves the problem you might have notices at the newsstand that one headline intrigued you but you would have to go search for it in the magazine because there was no usable index.

Of course WIRED also has an index that pops over the current page so you don’t get disoriented when you call it up.

The meachanics of reading WIRED as quick to get used to. If you tap the page black navigation bars appear at the top and the bottom. The bottom has a scrubber showing previews of the pages as you slide left and right. The top has buttons to return to the cover, a pop-over index, and the overview button. The last one being sort of a panoramic view.

The overview panorama also shows you which pages are longer than one screen.

Interactivity Ideas Inspected

In terms of interactivity I’ve seen the following ideas in play…

Thumbnail/Button plus partial page replacement. Most of the time you would have an article that explains the steps to something, take for example Sex in this issue. The four steps that make up the story are 4 round number buttons. If you push them the text below changes to describe the step.

Audio/Video. Advertisements or articles might have a play button to play related music or video. There are 10 audio files (25.4 MB),  15 video files (144.9 MB),

Swipe to Build. A 3D animation or something that builds up can be controlled frame-by-frame with scrubbing.

Tap to Animate. A tap might also start an animation that’s integrated into the page.

Rotate to Resolve. While most of the articles have identical text in both layouts, some advertisements ask a question and you have to rotate the screen 90 degrees to see the answer.

Links. For the most part you see links leaving the app in advertisements. These lead to a website or to the app store.

Compliments to WIRED! I don’t think the added interactivity distracts from the reading experience, but it adds additional value to the magazine. Judging from the file size I would have imagined that most of that would be videos, but I was wrong. They account for only 30% of the entire bundle. The rest is what you pay for: gorgeous PNG files… pardon, I mean: pages.

One thing that disturbed me a bit was to find a whole page dedicated to the “Application Terms of Use”. And there specifically that WIRED reserves the right to “monitor the activity of the app”. Hm, as long as this does not diminish my reading enjoyment …

Advertisements, lot’s of them

This WIRED issue has 121 pages in total, not counting extra if you can scroll into subsequent pages of an article. 64 of these are really articles you paid for. The other 57 pages are full screen advertisements, 47%.

For the most part you get image ads like you would see in a real magazine. Those are full pages, again always in portrait and landscape. You have to look hard to find any links that lead you to leave the WIRED app, sometimes it would be a button to lead to an iPad app on the app store, sometimes a link to make a booking for something. But you get the feeling that traditional advertisers of WIRED jumped at the chance to be in the electronic version, just so that they can say they where.

I come to this conclusion because contrary to traditional in-app-ads or banners they don’t have the primary aim of getting the user to do something. Still being able to fill up half or your virtual page real estate with ads speaks to the popularity of WIRED. Advertising agencies are artists themselves and they seem happy to have found a canvas to paint on that’s worthy of their creativity.

Sell something? Nah! Be there or be square! Image is everything, at least in this first issue.

Under the Hood

The app itself consists of one view controller, coming from a nib, a couple of PNGs for all the buttons and a big folder called “Issue” which contains the magazine’s contents. This contents folder has a sub-folder per page and one 1.5 MB XML file that contains the entire navigation information about the magazine.

If you wonder how Wired manages to get the layout perfect and the text super-crisp, that’s easy technically. Each page is just a big PNG. In fact not just one, but in several versions. Each page has the following versions: Full-resolution landscape and portrait, preview for index landscape and portrait and thumbnail for the overview also in portrait and landscape. One page equals 6 files.

So you see how much professional work is going into each page, besides of writing the article and doing the page design, they have double the work at their hands because they have to do a landscape and a portrait version of each page. So images let WIRED control every pixel on screen not having to worry about HTML rendering or text flow.

As an engineer I’m also quite impressed by the simple yet effective way they chose to encode the magazines structure into one big XML file. I would have expected HTML or maybe PDF, but having an XML file dictate the hot spots and navigation structure is ingenious.

Wired was probably one of the magazines that had to change their approach to ePublishing on the iPad when Apple announced the ban on compiling apps out of Flash. So it was an interesting hint, or actually misdirection by Chris Anderson, Wire’s editor in chief:

“To deliver this rich reading environment, we’re using new digital publishing technology developed by Adobe. The yearlong effort, spearheaded by WIRED creative director Scott Dadich, will allow us to simultaneously create both the print magazine and the enhanced digital version with the same set of authoring and design tools.”

One might think that this statement hints at some sort of Flash involvement, but doesn’t. Most likely the mysterious “technology developed by Adobe” he refers to is just the regular CS5 tools like Adobe illustrator. Nothing special, everybody can buy that. No Flash or Flash-to-iPad-Compiler anywhere in sight.

In fact, everybody can publish an electronic version of his magazine the same way as WIRED does if he is able to create PNGs of his pages, in all 6 variants per page. Ah and you need an app to understand the XML navigation structure and present the result in a consistent and interactive form. But I suspect the coding for this framework would not be a really large project, possibly about 1 man-month. Most of the work is in the design and filling up on eye candy for the contents.

Conclusion

WIRED has a winner. I can understand the need for about half of the pages being ads. Like all other magazines WIRED has a business to sustain. And thankfully a tad more than half of the pages is real content.

I didn’t read WIRED for quite some time but I get the feeling that it’s aimed at Internet-century geeks with a very short attention span. Most of the articles are started and finished on the same screen, I would have wished for more longer articles that tell a story. Those 4 steps to Sex articles or the 4 step Zombie Survival Workout are cute and geeky, but leave a bit to be desired if you are an avid reader.

But in concluding I judge the first WIRED on iPad to be just as glossy as any paper issue and way more entertaining because of the total lack of bad conscience due to killed trees or compulsive collecting habits. If you love the quirky style of WIRED, get it while it’s fresh.

I lost track some months ago, but I estimate my user base to be around 250 people worldwide. Because I am distributing MyAppSales as source code only this automatically requires users to have at least some fleeting knowledge of how to download source code from a Subversion repository. This is called “positive preselection”. That’s one of the reasons why I can hypothesize that MyAppSales users are smarter than the average Cocoa Touch developer.

I am proud of my baby and I was interested to learn which of the multitude of apps which are being tracked with MyAppSales are considered by their makers to be their crowning achievement . So I’ve asked my customers via Twitter which of their apps they deem to be their masterpiece (so far) and today I’m proudly presenting the best apps of the smartest developers to prove the hypothesis from this article’s title. I call this …

Cheese Collect

by Koh Jing Yu

Executive Summary

The cat is trying to attack you again! In this fun puzzle game, you are a mouse who tries to steal cheese without setting off the traps set by the cat. However, everytime you move, the cat would move the cheese away from you, unless there’s no space for it. Cheese Collect is a fun puzzle game with episodic updates.

Why is this your best app?

It was featured by Apple a while back and it earned the most out of all my apps.

Why do you like MyAppSales?

I love MyAppSales as it is very convenient and has a clean interface. I especially love the graphs as it allows me to track my progress. It’s definitely a must have tool for developers.

App Store > Games > Cheese Collect

Shufflito

by Jason J. Gullickson

Executive Summary

My app “Shufflito” is very simple, upon launch, it immediately starts playing random songs from your music library.  The difference is that it remembers which songs have been played, and never plays the same song twice.  It’s great for discovering music you haven’t heard in a long time, or for road trips where you don’t want to re-shuffle the playlist every time you stop for fuel and end up hearing the same music again and again.

Why is this your best app?

In my opinion, iPhone apps should do one thing well and as simple as possible.  Of all the apps I’ve released so far, Shufflito embodies this goal the most. The focus, attention to detail, use of iPhone functionality and the tightness of the code is greater than any other app I’ve created so far.

Why do you like MyAppSales?

More than anything else, MyAppSales, and it’s developer Oliver Drobnik adapt; as the App Store and it’s customers change, updates to MyAppSales alter, extend and enhace the application to provide developers with the data that matters as well as leveraging the latest technology the iPhone platform has to offer.

App Store > Music > Shufflito

Clock Radio

by Gregory Raiz (Raizlabs Corporation)

Executive Summary

The application is a combination Alarm + Clock + Radio. We partnered with AOL ShoutCast to develop the application. It’s been number #1 Utility in Japan and #2 overall in Japan. It’s also done well in Germany, Italy and Spain.

Why is this your best app?

I think it’s some of our best work since it combined many aspects of a simple user interface, back-end server integration, and utility. While we have had more popular apps and more profitable apps this is something that I use on a daily basis and really enjoy.

Why do you like MyAppSales?

Clock Radio has been moving up the charts in various countries and MyAppSales made it easier to track international progress.

App Store > Utilities > Clock Radio

Today Todo management

by Stefan Sorin Nicolin (Spielhaus)

Executive Summary

There is still room to innovate! Today manages your tasks for the actual day. No extra buttons, no myriad of taps to add a simple todo – just turn your device 90° to add a new task. With a simple yet beautiful interface Today also incorporates essential features like sorting and priorities without adding ballast to the navigation within the app.

Why is this your best app?

I think it’s some of our best work since it combined many aspects of a simple user interface, back-end server integration, and utility. While we have had more popular apps and more profitable apps this is something that I use on a daily basis and really enjoy.

Why do you like MyAppSales?

I love MAS because it spares me the otherwise cumbersome work of manually downloading the financial reports and scraping the App Store for user reviews – it is the all-in-one solution for my compulsive urge to stay up to date with our app sales.

App Store > Productivity > Today Todo management

Aqua Globs

by Vladimir Roth (Qwiboo)

Executive Summary

Aqua Globs is an entertainingly strategic game where agility and quick thinking are essential. Very easy to get into with the main aim to gain points by joining cute wiggly globs. Touch and drag to navigate them and join them together. But watch out! Blue & orange globs don’t like each other, and you only have three lives! Before you know it, the globs are coming from every angle! Keep your cool to navigate the little foolish creatures! . Guaranteed you won’t be able to put down this tantalizingly exciting game that will always having you wanting ‘just one more go’!

Why is this your best app?

Because it’s the only app we have

Why do you like MyAppSales?

It saves us loads of time and that’s great! No more logging into websites and having all my stats with me all the time is amazing. I really appreciate also the option to easily backup the data through the web interface.

App Store > Games > Aqua Globs

Dublin Bus Maps

by Philip Kirwan

Executive Summary

Dublin Bus Maps is for regular Dublin Bus users and even for tourists needing to navigate the city.

• The timetables are up to date so it’s better than most timetables at the bus stops.
• The timetables are stored locally on your device. Perfect for iPod Touch users.
• Like to stay up to date? The Bus Tweets and Dublin Bus News feature lets you find out what’s being said about Dublin Bus on Twitter and News Outlets.
• Favourite your regularly travelled routes.
• View bus stops for your route.
• Get an approximate next bus time at each stop.
• Are you a tourist? Find out how to use Dublin Bus, find out about sightseeing tours. Save yourself alot of time!!
• Multiple Themes

Using any transport system in a big city can be daunting. Dublin Bus Maps provides all the information in the palm of your hand making travel less stressful so you can enjoy the city of Dublin with ease.

Why is this your best app?

I think this is my best app as it allows the user to get all the information the need to travel by “Dublin Bus”(Dublin,Ireland) while on the move. The app allows users to have maps and timetables so they are never lost. Even tourist are catered for.

Why do you like MyAppSales?

I love to use MyAppSales as it allows me to view my itunes connect account on the move and away from my macbook. With a great interface and ease of use I find it brilliant. the newest updates such as push notification for reports are great as well.

App Store > Navigation > Dublin Bus Maps

iAdvent

by Josh Johnson

Executive Summary

Go digital with your Advent Calendar this Christmas! iAdvent is a modern-looking advent calendar designed specifically for iPhone users. Keep track of how many days are left until Christmas. iAdvent works just like traditional advent calendars. Beginning December 1st, click each day to find something inside. iAdvent’s something is a fun fact about Christmas. You can email the fun fact to friends and family to share the spirit of Christmastime. If you’re a parent, it’s also a fun thing to do each day with your kids – they love counting down to Christmas!

Why is this your best app?

iAdvent is my best app, not from gross, but that it provides the most targeted niche (Christmas) and it has provided the greatest learning experience.

Why do you like MyAppSales?

MyAppSales is always with me. Even though the iPhone has a browser and I can go to the other App Sales sites, I don’t have to sit there scrolling like mad. Plus it is easy, I just open it and see charts, reviews, and daily/weekly stats. Finally, it makes it easy to add archived data and back up.

App Store > Entertainment > iAdvent

Super Trumps Sports Cars

by Andreas Heck (der.heckser)

Executive Summary

Our Super Trumps application is the modern conversion of the classical card game “Go Fish” (in other countries also known as Quartett, Megatrumpf, Happy Families, Jeu de familles or Authors). The 32 cards with modern sports cars  from BMW, Mercedes, Audi, Porsche, Ferrari, Lamborghini and others are shuffled and evenly shared between the player and the iPhone. The player choose the value of one category of the displayed card and the value is compared with the same value of the card which the iPhone is holding. Who has the higher value wins the trick and the winner has the turn with the next card of the stack. The game is ending when one player has lost all the cards or the timer of 10 resp. 20 minutes expires.

Although it’s a simple game – everybody knows from childhood – Super Trumps offers long entertainment and high motivation!

Why is this your best app?

We think this is our best app because it is an entertaining game with cool and professional user interface. The possibility to look at the 32 beautiful cars with big images is like having two apps in one. With the integrated social networking stuff like twittering your earned high score it’s even more fun. Along with a fair price we think that we did a good job.

Why do you like MyAppSales?

MyAppSales is always with me. Even though the iPhone has a browser and I can go to the other App Sales sites, I don’t have to sit there scrolling like mad. Plus it is easy, I just open it and see charts, reviews, and daily/weekly stats. Finally, it makes it easy to add archived data and back up. I can see my daily income on the fly wherever I am. The UI is clean and clearly arranged. To get the reviews of our apps is another benefit which is why MyAppSales pokes out of the competitors.

App Store > Games > Super Trumps Sports Cars

Win for Life – Vinci per la vita

by Michele Aiello

Executive Summary

My best app so far is Win for Life – Vinci per la Vita, that is an app for an Italian Lottery that has just be launched in October. My app helps gamblers by suggesting numbers based on the customer’s preferred numbers and some statistics like overdue and frequent numbers. Moreover there is also a way to check your winnings by having the latest drawings on the iPhone. This application has been on top of the Italian Paid Apps for over 10 days.

Why is this your best app?

Win for Life – Vinci per la Vita, is my best app so far because is the only one that made it to the top of the Paid Apps Ranking and also because of the appreciation that I’m getting from my customers.

Why do you like MyAppSales?

MyAppSales is always with me. Even though the iPhone has a browser and I can go to the other App Sales sites, I don’t have to sit there scrolling like mad. Plus it is easy, I just open it and see charts, reviews, and daily/weekly stats. Finally, it makes it easy to add archived data and back up. MyAppSales is definitely the best app available for checking my sales on the go . I travel a lot and I like to keep an eye on how my apps are doing and what are the latest reviews from the customers. MyAppSales does all this and is also “open source” in the sense that I can have a look at the code and be sure that my info is not “misused”! I would have never trusted another app with my iTunes login/password if I couldn’t have a look at the source code. Great job Oliver and keep up the good work!

App Store > Utilities > Win for Life – Vinci  per la vita

The Carrier – graphic novel and comic book

by Geoffrey Young (StopWatch Media)

Executive Summary

A man wakes up in a dark room. He doesn’t know how he got there and can’t remember who he is. He looks down, and a titanium briefcase is shackled to his wrist.  He doesn’t know what’s inside it… and he doesn’t know how it got there… and he might be the world’s most wanted terrorist.  What would you do if you woke up and had a briefcase on your wrist? Would you run? Who would you call? Where would you go?  What if you were a terrorist but didn’t even know it?

As a graphic novel, The Carrier is a globe-spanning action & espionage story.  As an iPhone app, however, The Carrier is a multimedia experience that unfolds in real time over the course of ten days, pulling you into the story through geolocation, email, messaging, and more. In all, The Carrier is a 35-chapter, 680-panel mobile comic experience.

The Carrier is a unique example of what the iPhone has to offer in terms of e-readers – it moves beyond a “just like print” experience and into to telling a layered story in entirely new ways.

Why is this your best app?

I’m proud of The Carrier for what it accomplishes creatively and programmatically: it’s a rich and layered storytelling event that hinges on connecting a fixed work of fiction with the world outside in real-time.  Seeing all that come together for readers is really exciting and rewarding, and that’s why it’s our best app.

Why do you like MyAppSales?

MyAppSales is always with me. Even though the iPhone has a browser and I can go to the other App Sales sites, I don’t have to sit there scrolling like mad. Plus it is easy, I just open it and see charts, reviews, and daily/weekly stats. Finally, it makes it easy to add archived data and back up.
MyAppSales provides not only an easy format for viewing global sales, but customer reviews from all AppStore markets around the world.  That kind of information is invaluable to us.

App Store > Books > The Carrier

The iPhone and iPod Touch devices from today have orders of magnitude more computational power and for a modern game to be successful it has to feature fancy graphics, action and 3D. Or does it? I had a look at two games that like to be correlated to the “Retro” category while at the same time claiming to add “a new twist”. I was intrigued by such a bold statement and thus I am reviewing both apps in this article.

Have a look at those two candidate games and let me know if you think that Retro can be a viable category of games on the store. Or is it the past and should we be glad that it’s over?

Radial 50 – 360 Degree Brick Breaker

The mother of all brick breakers has to be Arkanoid, now Radial 50 takes the concept of ball versus bricks and makes it circular. But before you can get to play you first have to jump through a couple of hoops to create a profile or skip it. When I started the game the first time my impression was not a good one because it crashed two times, each time at a later stage. Also when submitting my user name there is no visual feedback so I hit several times and got the message that user “Drops” already exists. Still I got into the game.

Which is way more polished than the non-game screens. You get into it rather quickly as the simplistic game mechanic involves rotating the bar at the radial outside of the game by means of sliding upwards and downwards. If you don’t bounce back the ball you loose energy which is shown as bars next to the score. Thankfully this bar recharges after a while of juggling the ball.

I had one problem with the controls because my iPhone 3GS screen does not permit good gliding because of the fat repellant coating. With experimentation I found that the tip of the index finger tends to get stuck which the part where your fingerprint is located tends to glide much better. Older iPhones’ screens probably glide much better.

The graphics are polished to the max and the background rotates together with the bar which makes for an amazing visual effect. I also give extra kudos for the rockin’ soundtrack which has a sort of trancy quality to it and fits perfectly with the style of the app.

Gameplay: Easy to get into. Great style and suitable soundtrack. Does not pretend to be an adventure game, but is a diverse and original variant of the brick breaker theme. Sometimes I got often confused by the direction the ball would get reflected by the bar, because it seemed more random than physically correct to me. But I guess you have your hands full anyway rotating it around the screen with only the up/down on one side. Fans of the genre have something fresh worth trying out.

Technology: I hope that the makers will soon fix the bugs in the profile setup screen and when first (and second) loading the game. But that’s fixable if they take quality serious and analyze the crash reports. From the point of view of the game itself you see great layering, snappy and responsive animation, A+ sound and music and generally great production value.

According to Applyzer ranking data the app is being widely sold with Slovenia, Vietnam, Venezuela being the current top three in Games/Arcade. But apart from a couple off-mainstream countries it seems to quickly loose ground.

Radial 50 (iTunes), Radial 50 Lite (iTunes)

Great Leaping Lambrettinis

Here I totally salute the makers because their effort to make an iPhone era “Game&Watch”-style app is just as daring as the leaping of the Lambrettinis themselves. The makers of the game assured me that the design and everything about the game is brand new. Only the style of the graphics aims to be a salute to era of LCD based pocket games. Even the sounds effects fit the style they are the sort of beep you got from such a device. And

I already explained the general game mechanic in the introduction of this article, control generally happend via some early form of plus-shaped D-Pad and maybe two buttons similar to modern Gameboys the grandfather of which those where. That’s another area where a straight “conversion” simply does not make sense. Instead of simulating a D-Pad on screen you control the Lambrettini family via direct touch.

Touch the artists on the boards to make the switch sides. Touch the people towers to make the top artist jump to the left. The only thing that was not immediately clear to me was that you have to make room for the constantly new artists jumping from the tower on the right by having the artists on the leftmost tower jump. For this there was a 2 page instruction leaflet, which looks as if it would have been found inside the box that came with the game.

When playing I found my brain drifting into sort of an automated trance state formulating strategies that would make possible a new high score with the least accidents. In the end I had the most success (see screenshot) by tapping the towers left to right 1,2,3 and then the boards right to left 1,2,3 which the new artist jumping off the tower was still in mid-air.

Gameplay: Once you have studied the “leaflet” you immediately get into the game and you are pulled in. Like a juggler having to keep track of multiple balls in the air you get sort of a brain-hand-coordination high by relaxing into a blank mind state that is necessary to control 7 moving Lambrettinis at the same time. Playing the game I found that true retro LCD graphics give it a unique charm that’s missing from most other games on the store.

Technology: The artwork is beautifully handcrafted, technology becomes transparent to the user and thus permits immersion into the idea of the game. Outside you have a couple of animations but again those don’t destroy the illusion of having a new “Game&Watch” game on your iPhone. You basically have a static colored backdrop and black images that are made visible and invisible at the right time.

Looking at the Applyzer ranking data I can say that D/A/CH seem to “get it” while it’s being largely ignored in the rest of the world. It only sells a fraction of what Radial 50 manages to move.

Great Leaping Lambrettinis (iTunes)

As we know in IT, training costs money and those dogs need lots of it. About 29.000 AU$ to be exact. That’s approximately the price of 10 luxury MacBook Pros… kind of puts my own financial challenges into a different perspective.

Now Roel has published his first app, an Australian slang dictionary dubbed OzSlang. This is a fun and essential tool for everyone who likes to brush up his OZ Slang skills to not stick out like “such a tourist” or to generally sound more like “Crocodile Dundee”.

I think you can see that the maker put a lot of love into it, it is very well made. Roel tells me that 100% of his proceeds (minus Apple’s cut) go to the above mentioned organization so that eventually the cost for a dog for his son can be covered. The details can be found on Paws 4 Roel website.

It was especially disheartening for Roel when he learned that his app had been pirated. The sales dropped and prospects for an AAD for his son deteriorated. Who can now still argue for piracy as a means of getting “trialware”? Very few (if any at all) of the people who download OzSlang from warez sites would eventually contribute to the cause.

In my book you don’t rip off charitable products especially if they are at the lowest price possible. That’s simply bad karma. If you burglarize the donation box, don’t complain if your future projects fail. That’s how karma works.. On the other hand if you want to get karmically ahead or even, it’s as easy as purchasing a copy of this app.

With his next app, which is currently under review by Apple, Roel will try a different approach. Make the app free, but include a charity button. We know that Apple does not like to see money is moving where they don’t get their 30% share. But I’m keeping my fingers that they won’t mind a donation button for charity.

You can do something good by either donating directly, contacting Roel about sponsoring opportunities or purchasing OzSlang via iTunes. If your contribution is a sizable one I will throw in an hour’s worth of iPhone Development consulting for free to be used any way you like. Good Karma anyone?

OH MY GOD!
This Application is Extremely AMAZING!
“It puts AppSales Mobile in the trash bin!”

Do you mind If I review this app on my YouTube? — And I Guarantee this wont be a bad one! – Cause I am Flipping off at the amazing work!
Keep it up!

Of course I welcomed this. Long have I been longing for somebody to show the beauty and speed of MyAppSales in a video. Thank you Moshe!

It was for this surgery that I researched and discovered the method of Target-specific Headers and many of the techniques in this article about compiling for 2.x and 3.0 from the same project. Now he can happily concentrate on just collecting artwork and information for new sets and can keep 95% of his code unchanged.

Andreas Heck is doing beautiful work on the contents of his apps, you can purchase them by clicking on the images above. Now that his first 4 “Super Trumps” games are live on the app store I checked up on them on Applyzer because I was interested which geographic preferences could be gleaned.

All Super Trumps games share the simple yet fun gameplay. From 32 cards you receive half. When it’s your turn you can choose which feature you think is the best. This is then compared to the card of the computer player and who has the better card wins. The game ends when time runs out or when one player has accumulated all the cards. The major strength of those games is the beautiful pictures combined with easy to get into gameplay.

I added all four games to the list of my subscribed apps on Applyzer, which you can currently do for free until the BETA ends. Then I made a screenshot of the first 5 countries for each game to see if there are any surprises.

Top Trumps Cars

UK and Germany are known for their interest in beautifully manufactured cars. An effect that seems to infect neighboring countries like Austria and Ireland as well. Slovenia has a strongly growing economy and because of that it is one of the most recent new member countries of the EU. With prosperity comes an interest in cars … and iPhone games about cars.

Super Trumps Bikes

Germany is one of the biggest markets for the iPhone as well as motorcycles, but I could not have predicted the strong interest in Bikes in Egypt and Chile. Isn’t there too much sand in those places? No wait, the Egyptian desert is the place of choice for many bike crazy people who have fun hopping over dunes on their motocross machines. Switzerland and Finland have interesting and varied landscapes which make biking all the more fun. Here we can see their hidden interest in beautiful bikes.

Super Trumps Aircraft

Again we could have predicted Germany being top 5, but all the other countries express a longing for flying machines that you would not necessarily attribute to them at first glance. Well, except maybe Taiwan. Isn’t that where most of the electronics parts in modern aircraft are coming from?

Super Trumps Guns

Finally the Guns Trumps have always been the wild card in the deck. Andreas Heck originally targeted those at the gun grazed US market, but found almost immediately that the Americans seem to prefer first person shooters to card games about guns. Super Trumps Guns is doing extremely well because of it’s high rank in UK and Germany. Who would have thought that the peace loving Swiss care for guns? Latvia and the United Arab Emirates are also a surprise. Latvia might be influenced by the Russian mafia, while now we know what those sheikhs might be carrying beneath their long clothes … an iPhone with Top Trumps Guns.

The Future holds … Even More Trumps

Having such great success Heck tells me that he is working on several more card games. With the newly unified project he can now concentrate on content rather than coding. We’re thinking: how about a couple of adult-themed trump games. What other whacky or interesting themes can you think of to see in a trumps card game?

In any case I must congratulate Michael Dorn who does a fantastic job with Applyzer. This top 1000 ranking information allows for amazing insights into the workings of the iPhone app market.

Here are all the apps I had a look at so far. Sorry guys for taking so long, but my US iTunes account is on my Windows PC which I avoid to turn on whenever possible.

MyMemoryMad

Gameplay: The objective is to remember more and more flashing lights plus their distinct tones. This is simple and fun to test your short term memory, but you probably lose interest after having found your limit. Probably a less steep progression of the difficulty would increase long term fun. Like have the same number of flashes for several levels, only with increasing speed.

Technology: Very simple app, only a few screens. The game screen uses a fading effect for the flashing plus well selected sounds.  Unfortunately the German translation is done poorly, sounds like Google Translate. You could have called me to do a proper German translation. I could have done this app in less than 2 weeks. Then again, it’s very first app of this developer, so congrats on getting this done and into the store!

(iTunes Link)

Magnetic Block Puzzle

Gameplay: Addictive! The game mechanic is original, I’ve never seen it before. You get into it very quickly, only one page of instructions. Also you can play with swipes or the accelerometer. The objective is to get colored boxes attached to each other as if they where magnetic, but most of the time you have to plan ahead because otherwise to attached boxes might block the path between two to-be-attached boxes.

Technology: A touch of 3D, probably Open-GL makes it stand out. The game engine itself works in 2D, but going the extra mile of having display in 3D gets extra bonus points. Also the dialogs are all designed beautifully. The sounds are fitting, though there is no real soundtrack. He gets full marks on all my scales.

(iTunes Link)

Bird & Snail

Gameplay: It’s clearly for kids. Haunted House has taken the same artwork and created a multitude of variations of it which you can either purchase by themselves or in the one dollar higher priced deluxe version which bundles all of them together. You get two versions of a coloring book, a story with active parts, story just to listen to and a memory puzzle. The latest (and only free) app is a sliding puzzle in the same style. The artwork is the definite strength of the set and also makes it unique.

Technology: A tip of the hat has to go to the beautiful integration of graphical art and synchronized sound effects and/or narration for the book variants. Having so many different editions probably has marketing reasons. There cannot be a technical limitation as there is a deluxe version with all the parts combined. Apart from this it is not a technological marvel, but a solid translation of multiple childrens books into the iPhone realm.

Deluxe (iTunes Link), The Book (iTunes Link), Paint Lite (iTunes Link), Memory Match (iTunes Link), Paint Full (iTunes Link)

Astronomy Picture of the Day Viewer

Usability: Search for pictures, add them to your favorits, get the picture of a specific day or a random one. No clutter, you get what you expect. I cannot imagine any other way to access this publicly available source of fabulous astronomy-related images.

Technology: Nice UI, rotates to make use of a wider screen in landscape. Makes good use of the tab bar. Nice effect of making the picture description larger with the touch of a button. Why does he abuse badges as counters instead of notifications of something new?

APODViewer (iTunes Link), APODViewerLite (iTunes Link)

Wake!Simply & Wake!Gently

Usability: A settings page and the clock, rotatable between landscape and portrait. That’s all there is. The Gently variant also has slowly increasing volume for the alarm. Why there are two versions of essentially the same app can only be explained by marketing.

Technology: I know from my own experiments with the built in LED-font how difficult it is to properly place the letters because they are proportional. You either have the letters as graphics or you have right-aligned lables for all the digits. Makes also great use of implicit animations for flashing the colons. Kind of minimalistic if you ask me.

Wake!Simply (iTunes Link), Wake!Gently (iTunes Link)

Dodgers & Red Sox & Yankees

Usability: There is one app per team, a marketing ploy? Or do Americans generally only root for “their” team? Then this seperation might make sense. You have a couple of pages with baseball related stats and news. Something only an avid baseball fan might find useful. That’s why those apps came out when baseball season started.

Technology: A navigation view with 3 screens, plus some code for loading the stats and news from a site. Somewhat barren I should say. Nothing that has not been done before. Retrieval of data is rather slow, but beggers can’t be choosers. Most likely the data is scraped from an official site.

Dodgers (iTunes Link), Red Sox (iTunes Link), Yankees (iTunes Link)

London JamCams

Usability: Simple interface, make good use of the tab strip. Though the icons on the tabbar could be improved. But the retrieval of a random cam was very fast and convenient. So fast, I was astonished to already see an image.

Technology:  Though I don’t think it is regular UI practise to have 0 on badges, only values greater than zero make sense there. Also badges are meant to show something NEW as to alert the user that there is new content. In this app this concept is abused for counting the content. This is a minus for otherwise flawless execution.

(iTunes Link)

Hot Field

Gameplay: This game mimicks a vertical scrolling shooter like you have probably played on in arcades. But several twists make it more playable on the iPhone. You don’t need to worry about shooting, you have auto-fire. Otherwise the plane follows your finger and combined with additional fingers you have special abilities. Easy to get into, though the boss battles last maybe a tad to long.

Technology: The author visibly mastered several basics needed to create such vertical scrolling shooter. Sprite Graphics, Collision Detection, Power Ups, Auto-Fire, and many many more. There is a slight 3D effect but obviously the developer wanted to retain the retro style with sprites. The maker has all right to have this in the “Game” category of the app store unlike many other wannabes.

HotField (iTunes Link), HotField Lite (iTunes Link)

You and me and lots of other iPhone developers have strenghts and weeknesses. Some of us can code really well, others are great at design and there are also some people who excel at marketing iPhone apps. There are some commonalities amongst us as well, besides of 99% having a physical iPhone and 66% using twitter to build their network. We all have Internet, as benign as this may sound. We all have websites that have some information on the apps we have in the app store. We are advertising ourselves to the world. Hoping to get noticed. Looking for help. Or simply looking to make as much money as possible with the jewels they have polished in endless hours.

Static, non-machine-readable HTML. Sometimes even worse: Flash! Looking great, but achieving nothing except a good feeling for the person who created it. But that’s just Web 1.0. 

A few of us took the next evolutionary step and started to write in forums (the official one as well as the largest non-official one) and get business-centric profiles on facebook or Xing. That’s Web 2.0.

But still those are information silos, you don’t own your posts, you don’t own your content on “social networks”. I say “That’s passé!” Here I am proposing Web 3.0 and all participating iPhone developers will benefit.

The fundamental need that I am trying to address with this proposal is to create a way for iPhone developers to find their peers. Find someone who talks their language, or is close enough geographically to meet and discuss ideas with over coffee.Starbucks, anyone?

My first thought was to create an online DB with a web form to allow people to enter their details, but then it hit me: that’s < 3.0 and I have sworn an oath to my coding god to never touch anything that does not adhere to the fundamental law of web 3.0: “RAW DATA NOW”. I would have created yet another silo and you would not have owned the data you had entered there. 

They say that web 2.0 is about user-generated content, but you can claim content as being your own only if it is on your own blog and you can modify or even erase it at a whim. I believe that the benefits of web 2.0 can only be truly realized when you make your properties machine-readable. The same goes for any other information about your apps. There are countless websites out there which scour the iTunes XML data for information about apps. But just as countless they are useless. Very few add value, most use this as free content that is their substrate on which they plant their tradedouble links. That’s the modern form of spam: repurpose other people’s content with your own pay-per-clickthrough links and make 5% on every app sale.

I propose to wholeheartedly step into Web 3.0 by creating an XML schema or protocol that allows every developer or development company to publish meta information about themselves on their web site root. This schema would be similar to RSS or FOAF in that it would be present as link rel=”alternate” in your HTML pages. So I might have an XML file on my blog like this: http://www.cocoanetics.com/iphonedev.xml for example.

The schema of such an XML file would have to be defined reusing as many previously defined xml modules as possible. For example I would put in ICBM information into the file so that you could find developers who are close to you. 

I think it’s best to think of developer and app entities as objects non unsimilar to Cocoa classes. Only difference would be that URLs are the pointers, the class definition would be an XML schema and class methods would be endpoints of XML-RPC, SOAP or REST based scripts.

Off the top of my head this is the information that I think would be useful:

• A permalink to the master Xml. If somebody makes a copy he should preserve this link and treat is as the primary key. This link will also be the source from which to refresh the data from.
• Name or Nickname of the developer
• if this is a developer or corporate entity
• Link to the developer’s blog rss feed
• A .profile or .project where the developer can write in freeform text what he is currently working on
• Several ways of contact: e-mail, twitter, etc.
• Artist ID of the developer to be able to directly link to all his apps on the store
• Languages understood
• App IDs, Names and Icon.png of all your apps on the store. This could be used to automatically construct a signature that has your apps’s icons with links to the store. Maybe even more meta information if it’s useful to trade it, like the release notes for the latest versions. Thinking about it, maybe in the developer XML there should only be links to XML files that would represent the individual apps the URL of those XML files again will be the permalink.
• if the dev is interested in: partnering, specific resources, training, providing training, etc.
• and then links to other such XML files of other developers. If a process is retrieving this developers XML file it should also provide him with at least another developers key URL. Also there should be sort of an approval or ranking scheme to such outgoing URLs so that I can say e.g. developer A I have successfully partnered with or developer B I know personally or developer C I don’t know
• You should also have a possibility to specify if you purchased another developer’s app and how you liked it. The app information would contain a link back to your review or rating which is still on your web server, so every dev could validate that a statement about your app is really coming from the person you say it does. If you write up your reviews in your blog, then the review’s permalink should be present here.

Having a basic XML structure will enable most people without web development capabilities to participate in the network and their information will get seeded. I expect for people to start spidering these XML files to create searchable databases of developers which could also be searched for local peers.

Developers on a higher level will also be able to create or use open-source solutions to provide instance methods for their online objects. For example to aggregate links that are presented to other XML iphonedev files. So one web server should be able to ping a certain number of known developers to inform them when there is a new peer. Also if there are significant changes this peer-to-peer network should pass on such information.

I absolutely invite your ideas or expertise in web apis so that we can collaborate on establishing the best, most useful spec. Who thinks this is a good idea? I invite you to share your thoughts.

Can this benefit a great number of iPhone developers who currently struggle to get their solo-projects done? Or do you think that this would only increase the number of people sticking around and preventing the self-cleansing process of the iPhone developer community?

Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to get into the app reviewing business. I rather leave this to my friends, like Crazy Mike. But I see that there is a niche somewhere between the consumer-oriented review sites, the in-store iTunes reviews and the internal secrect review process inside of Apple. This niche is providing unbiased opinions of a fellow developer.

That’s something only somebody can provide who themselves keeps going through the long and painful development process. Those who not just develop apps, but also develop themselves.

There is one thing that I cannot get out of my head, I have a memory of an Apple presentation that I cannot prove actually happened. This memory says that Apple announced the apps will be reviewed by peers in a fair manner. But such a peer review process was never established, most likely because of the sheer amount of new apps and updates that are going through those secretive hands at Apple. But wouldn’t that be much more useful to have developers review other developers’ work?

Steve Jobs only mentioned “Porn, Privacy, Bandwidth Hog, Malicious, Illegal and Unforeseen” as reasons to be rejected. Actually there are many more reasons that should keep apps out of the store  to prevent this current flood of Krapps. And some overdrawing reasons should be removed altogether to allow for competition to happen on a higher level.

While I’m at it I will also drop a comment in iTunes, as honest as I humanly can. These will be much less technical. A general problem seems to be that very few customers will actually send those few seconds to rate an app. Even less will write an opinion. On the other site you can easily imagine enterprising developers paying people to give them fake reviews so that they have a higher rank.

I was hoping to establish a Peer Reviewing Network where participating developers can trade promo codes and write their honest opinion on their own sites, just like I am doing here in this new category “Peer Reviews”. Still looking for blogging devs to partner on this one. The general idea looks like this:

• Developer uploads a number of promo codes into an online database
• In exchange he gets (at random) the same number of promo codes of other devs
• He will download those free apps
• He will peer review those apps, note technical innovation or tell if there are technical shortcomings
• Then for each he will post his honest opinion on his blog and ping the database
• Also he will rate and comment in-store at iTunes, optionally mark his review as [peer review]

The main advantage would be that you have a central place where you can offload a certain quota of those 50 promo codes you get per version and you can be certain that you will get some honest exposure around cyberspace. Also in this meritocracy that is iTunes if your app is really good then your peers will give it a much needed visibility boost for free.

I invite your comments.

• added Spanish, Dutch, French, Italian proverbs
• added Spanish, Dutch Localization
• minor fixes

Also, Crazy Mike’s Apps graciously reviewed LuckyWheel and seems to like it, too!

He says:

“A Cool Game for the Price”.

“[...]found the puzzles to be quite challenging”

“A cool twist to this game is that it can be played in the English or German languages. You must change the language in your iPhone settings to do this, but this is a nice international option. The next Lucky Wheel version will have language options for English, German, Italian, Spanish, French, and Dutch (very cool).”

Also as of this version there is a LuckyWheel Lite that lets you play 10 word puzzles in every supported language.

The first few sites that linked to the store where clearly automatic robots. iTunes gets its information in XML plist format and a couple of sites came into existence that do nothing but parse this information

• Apptism
• MacMost
• Fresh Apps
• iApper

I don’t know what effect those will have on sales. They might just be a modern form of spam blogs.

But what really made my day was finding a review on FingerGaming. LuckyWheel went public on the same day as “Wheel of Fortune” by Sony which aims to mimic the mechanics of the TV show by the same name. In contrast we did not try to copy something, but create a unique approach. Make a game that uses the strength of the touch interface and fill it up to the brim with proverbs in English, German, Spanish, French, Italian and Dutch.

They say:

“LuckyWheel additionally boasts a feature that Wheel of Fortune doesn’t include in any capacity — a fully fledged German-language option, complete with a localized puzzle selection full of German proverbs.”

“[...] LuckyWheel offers gameplay variety that Wheel of Fortune could never dream of.”

“LuckyWheel is a good protest purchase if you want to voice your disappointment in Wheel of Fortune[...]“

Next up in mostly positive feedback was iPhone App Reviews.net. This was the only site that actually also allowed for giving away a couple of free promo codes to their mostly US-based readers.

They say:

[...] LuckyWheel can really be pretty fun when you’re with a friend or two and having a little pass-n-play competition.

[...] Drobnik is committed to developing LuckyWheel to be as good as (or better than?) Sony’s game

Everyone who likes this kind of word puzzle but isn’t married to the TV format, get LuckyWheel. Despite its shortcomings, LuckyWheel is decent for $1.99 and hopefully it’ll grow into something that can really compete with an established franchise.

Just as welcome as professional reviews are comments by the users themselves

Chris: “I like the game. I have also tried Wheel of Fortune from Sony and have more fun playing LuckyWheel. Not because it is now free. I hope that there are more people who think the same.”

Peter: “I have also tested both games and have come to the result that LuckyWheel is the better one. Surely the graphics are not as beautiful, but why spend $4.99. So why not support LuckyWheel. Maybe a spin button would be nice, but I like spinning the wheel rather.”

We still have some promo codes available, valid on the US app store which we’ll happily provide to anyone who would like to write a review about any of our applications.

Also note that the next version has already been submitted to Apple and increases the guessing fun to all of these languages: English, German, Italian, Spanish, French and Dutch.