I Have No Idea [Why Apple Featured My App] | Hacker News Reader

I Have No Idea [Why Apple Featured My App]

blog.mikeswanson.com

117 pointsMaysonL21 comments

I don't know why everyone thinks that getting an app featured by Apple is some sort of huge conspiracy. If an app is of high quality and has some traction, it's not absurd for it to gain positive attention from Apple.

In the case of Halftone, the quality of the app is excellent and has significant usage. There are 1100+ reviews that average to 4.5 stars. These numbers would be considered fantastic by any developer's standards.

But maybe all these reviews and downloads came after getting featured by Apple. I surely believe that your App will be downloaded a lot more times if you are highlighted by Apple and being highlighted by Apple could mean to people "that the App is definitive worth it and good" and so they probably more likely to give good ratings.

I don't know just my 2 cents.

I'm sure there was some spike in downloads because of the feature, however, it wouldn't be more than a few thousand. This isn't very significant considering that Halftone probably has over 100K downloads (extrapolating from the assumption that 1% of downloaders submit a review). Of course this is a very rough estimation, but I think it puts Halftone's traction into perspective.

Apple often features apps of poor quality and it's not always clear why (e.g. games with 3 stars developed by big names or indie apps not working as they promise). So, yes, I understand why people are surprised.

I think, without any proof to the matter, that some of those are sponsored advertisements, especially the ones from larger development groups.

You are considering the inverse of the matter. The post is about a high quality app being featured. My comment was intended to say that it shouldn't be surprising when a quality app is featured.

In 2010 I had a free app featured that had no previous traction. At the time, the app had been in the Appstore for about three weeks, and my second update just been made available. Total downloads before being featured were under 20. To me, being featured seemed to be a random event.

At the iOS road show, Apple showed a video that I fervently wish that they would make available on their developer portal. It was one of the highlights of the day. It was inspiring. They showed video montages of some of the ADA winning apps, showing how they were so polished, so beautiful, such a great user experience. The one with the DJ app was phenomenal. You left with a smile on your face. This was the kickoff. For the rest of the day, you were overwhelmed and enthralled with the quality and depth of the technical content and expertise. They want to help you build the best Apps. And that was before you stepped into the onsite developer labs.

Apple wants you to build beautifully crafted user experiences. Google does too, but that is not their primary focus.

Tangential anecdote - I worked with Mike at Microsoft where he did some stellar work putting together all the conferences Microsoft did over the years. He was one of the few who 'got' it. Fantastic to see him get some well-deserved recognition - and that too, outside the MSFT family!

Another approach to vector art in iOS using PDF files http://mattgemmell.com/2012/02/10/using-pdf-images-in-ios-ap...

Wow, I actually had no idea you could convert paths from illustrator to Objective-C code! This just opened a whole new world for me. Thank you!

Side note: digging a little bit, here's a very useful library for converting SVG to UIBezierPaths: http://ponderwell.net/2011/05/converting-svg-paths-to-object...

Buried lede department : "I decided to build a new plug-in that exports Illustrator artwork directly to Objective-C code". There's a new product. While the Opacity app is good, it's a bit neglected. A plug-in for Illustrator would make me and my designer thrilled!

It's good he has no idea. It proves that there's no special treatment, that the App Store staff use these app themselves out of review time. The alternative is some sort of time/money/review requirement which isn't as purely effort-rewarding as this way.

One data point doesn't at all prove there's no special treatment, but it is good to hear about one case where special treatment didn't appear to be involved!

As a side note. I find it puzzling why Apple haven't included some sort of vector support natively.

Seems like such a powerful thing to be able to use more freely.

Anyone knows why that is? CPU, battery something else? (I am not a programmer)

I can only speculate but my thought would be implementation complexity. Bitmaps work fine for say 99% of interface elements and graphic elements and they are a lot simpler to implement. Vector graphics just aren't a high priority I suppose.I mean, they aren't even natively supported in most operating systems anyway.

As per resource usage, vector graphics actually use less disk space. Rendering requires more CPU than bitmaps, but I doubt it's something Apple couldn't handle with a warning in the documentation.

PDF is the OS X and iOS native vector format (and before that, PostScript). It was one of the great design decisions made by the early NeXT OS engineers, even though few people understand what "Display PostScript" or "Display PDF" really means.

Most of the toolbar icons you see in Mail, Preview, Finder, etc. are actually PDFs that scale to any size.

The OP could have (and probably should have) used PDF for his vector-based graphics. And actually, by exporting raw CoreGraphics drawing functions from Illustrator he's essentially exporting a PDF document in a custom file format.

Great stuff. I love when people sweat the details.

Are we sure the rewind list isn't decided by one staff member at Apple, who ticks a few boxes one morning at their cubicle?

Somehow I knew the app wasn't going to be free after reading the article: "I just have no idea, except maybe that's it a really quality app [that you too can feature on you homescreen for just 99 cents]".

That seems overly cynical. He designed a method of vectorising images in order to ensure quality of resized stamps - I don't think you should be complaining that he's charging for such work.

What I don't understand is why Apple wouldn't indicate why an app is featured - if for example high quality and innovation are prized then this should be lauded aloud to encourage others.

So I bought the app and checked it out. I may be cynical, but I also buy apps, (and my right to be cynical).

I made an image with the app just now: http://i44.tinypic.com/aua3ic.jpg

Review: 3 stars Good UX path on loading the app, guides you through steps. The designer of this app has done well to make a sensible interface, with only some work needed on the settings screen and the labeling choices there.

Replay value is another question. There's no sequencing layout tools or anything relating to more than the single image you're working on. Tools are not that powerful, but they do their job ok. It does one trick, and most people will probably use it one time.

Yep, the vector thing is pretty cool.

Now it just needs the ability to arrange and re-arrange multiple images, and swipe through them as a slideshow. Throw in a library of sound effects to assign each slide, with animated visual effects for little movie-making mobile graphic novels... and THEN it'd be a paid app worthy of promotion in my mind, but this is a good start.

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