amdev

Xcode sucks in some ways but I think you're missing a few things.

Version 4.3.0 was the biggest piece of crap and crashed all the time. The current version, 4.3.2, is stable. I've not had a single crash since it hit. And I use it 10+ hours a day.

The project file stuff isn't so bad -- don't edit the file yourself and drag stuff in. Need to move something in the project but want to keep the layout the same as on disk? Remove it from the project, move it on disk, then add it to the project again. Does it suck for version control? Hell yes it does. It's terrible in that regard.

No simulator related issues here but I've seen it fail to launch on the device b/c of some stuck process. A reboot usually fixes this but it's very rare on 4.3.2. Major pain when it happens, though.

Storyboards are an iOS 4 only feature. ARC works on iOS 4. And iOS adoption rate is very good relative to other mobile OSes. Not sure what your beef is. Backward compatibility is pretty much always ugly. Especially if you use static libs and want to go back to iOS 4.0. But you really should weigh the cost of supporting OS versions that old against your development costs and your user base. You may not need to, based on your situation.

You're making IBOutlets way too hard on yourself. Use the two up view with IB on the left and your header on the right. Ctrl + drag from your control to your header and let go. Give the outlet a name and Xcode declares the property, synthesizes it, and sets it to nil in viewDidUnload. You can do the same thing for events (right click the control and drag from the event in the context menu to your header).

Eclipse is fine but it's hardly the best IDE. Its refactoring features are nothing short of amazing but it's dog slow on modern hardware. All of its preference/settings dialogs are convoluted at best. Finding things you want to change is usually a matter of digging through trees. No fun.

My partner and I started return7 with $800 (mostly design, Apple dev fee, etc.) in 2008 when the App Store opened up. BillMinder, our main app, is profitable.

Self proclaimed Apple fan here. Apple's App Store revenue is a drop in the bucket. I don't think that's the reason iOS5 is on the 3GS. iOS5 is on the 3GS because it's Apple's low end phone and still available for sale. It has to run iOS5 so folks can use their new software incentives to sell the phone itself (i.e. iCloud).

Well done.

Don't sweat it. This happens to our app, BillMinder, every release. Typically pirates won't use your app long and probably wouldn't have paid for it anyway so there isn't much lost revenue. Annoying but not the end of the world.

These things are still used in legacy systems on farms and such.

I checked to make sure it wasn't already April 1 again.

Admittedly more familiar w/ the iOS SDK but I've build a few Android apps. I find iOS controls easier to use and customize.

iOS, actual app sales

I work at MailChimp. I don't worry about that.

I work at MailChimp. The answer is nope.

Nice article. Liking the clean new look.

I think most developers were seeing 3 day approvals at times last year. I recall Apple boasting about their fast turn-around at some point (high 90th percentile in 7 days, IIRC).

Fair enough. I'm certainly going only from my own experiences and the review process certainly is opaque. I asked @pschiller so perhaps he'll grace us with some info. :)

Sure, but why not grab low hanging fruit?

The app doesn't currently attach sounds to email, but it does allow one to send an invitation with one's blipr id via email. Perhaps this is something we should consider as well. :)

Thanks. Looking at the quality of some "top 10" apps, it really makes one wonder how much of it (if you aren't taptaptap) is just dumb luck. I wish there were some way to quantify that.

Thanks for the idea. We added a Christmas sound pack. We probably should add one for Valentines day as well. :)

Yea, we definitely have. I think we spent between $800-900 (modest budget, I know) on ads in 2009. That includes advertising on various iPhone blogs as well as taking part in reddit's ad program beta. None of it helped. Sales stayed the same or went down.

Review articles on Macworld and TUAW helped boost sales temporarily (2-3 days) but the only sustained sales were a result of having our best seller, BillMinder, featured by Apple in "What's Hot." It was great (and appreciated!) but definitely not on the level as the awesome taptaptap or tapbots. :)

My pleasure. We initially sold the app for $1.99, subsequently lowered the price to $0.99 and eventually gave it away for free in hopes of building the user base then charging. We also hoped it would grow virally but that didn't really happen. It's still free right now.

It's not comprehensive but I like FizzBuzz.

--------------------- Write a program that prints the numbers from 1 to 100. But for multiples of three print "Fizz" instead of the number and for the multiples of five print "Buzz". For numbers which are multiples of both three and five print "FizzBuzz". ---------------------

From http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000781.html

We have some on our blog post from being featured (blog.return7.com) but the difference is not nearly 78x.

No. When our app, BillMinder recently featured under "What's Hot", we were not contacted. It just sort of happened (no complaints :D).

I should mention the cost of our app is $0.99. It would cap out at about $2.99. I don't think asking for a dollar a year is unreasonable given the cost of the app.

IMO, this breaks down due to the App Store's volatility. To compete, one generally (there are exceptions) has to lower prices to silly levels. That's fine and dandy when you're selling a couple hundred copies a day, but as soon as you fall off the chart in your category, you fall into the pit of selling 0-5 copies a day. At that point, not having a subscription model becomes unsustainable. There are 75k+ (and growing) apps on the store and a very small percentage of them actually get noticed. When they do, they often fall back into obscurity quickly. Very few apps maintain a solid rank for a year. You can't bank on getting sustained sales forever because you take the risk of having to foot the bill for the server yourself when the sales stop, VPS or not. Anyway, the feature is optional and the app works great without it. Apple recently added a listing that shows apps pulling in the most revenue. I think their hope is it will help alleviate this "race to the bottom" pricing. Time and market will tell.

As for push, there are two bits: client<-->server interaction and opening a socket connection to shoot data to APNS to send the notifications themselves. It was pretty fun to get together and really the hardest parts dealt more with business rules than integrating with Apple's service. I would personally have preferred APIs to hook into the phone's calendar app, but push is useful for IM apps and the like, in lieu of background processes.

You find that it's a great time to have your server in the cloud and be able to upgrade easily :D

We'll definitely do a follow up post with that info :)

Up now, sorry for the downtime

Yea, apparently. Working on it. Sorry. :D

Yep. I'm not sure if any other kids games white list (instead of black list) chat, but as I mentioned, kids are clever little buggers. They do things like "SHe Is very Tall" or "on to tree for" -- you get the idea -- so the white list alone is not nearly enough. :)