All Articles Tagged app store

This cool piece of video came to us from a email tip from 18 year old Josef Průša. Have some time to spare? Have a old remote control car laying around? Well that’s what Josef had and he and his brother took “only one afternoon” to get this up and running!

As for controlling the car, you simply have five buttons. Four of which can be used to drive and the fifth button is used to toggle control via the accelerometer on and off, similar to any of the current racing games in the App Store. Pretty cool trick indeed…

If you want to try and give this a shot be sure to head on over to Josef’s blog for the full how to guide, which can be found here (Note, you will need to have a PC around to act as an intermediary between the iPhone and the RC car).

Now I’m off to see if I can find any old R/C cars laying around…

[Thanks to Josef for the tip!]

One of the last “advantages” CDs had over music downloads (like iTunes or Amazon MP3) is the printed extras they could include in booklets, like photos, art, lyrics, and other assorted bonus material.

Well, get ready to kiss that goodbye. According to TechCrunch, who bills the story as “Apple Puts One More Nail Into the CD Coffin”:

Apple will make [an App Store application] available to users in tandem with the release of Snow Patrol’s upcoming album, A Hundred Million Suns. The app will add the extra features to more iTunes albums over time, but because it will be made available through the company’s App Store, it will only provide the extra content on the iPhone and iPod touch.

Release date is on or around October 27, and it sounds (and looks!) good to us! Now if only the woefully out-of-touch recording industry would stop punishing legitimate consumers and provide DRM-free, 256-bit MP3’s to iTunes the same way they give them to all its rivals, they might actually figure out a working 21st century business model!

The self proclaimed World’s Toughest Programmer, Mike Lee, who left Delicious Monster to work on iPhone apps for Tapulous has revealed on his blog that he and the Tap Tap Revenge and Twinkle maker have parted ways, and not on the best of terms:

So it came to pass that when my Engineering and Design team had irreconcilable differences with where the company seemed to be headed, I was asked to make good on those promises. Serving as the team’s reluctant spokesman was not in my best interests, but honor dictated my actions. I delivered the team’s message, and was invited to resign.

And what direction exactly was Tapulous headed? The always outspoken John Casasanta, MacHeist creator and iPhone developer, says:

…we’re about to experience in the iPhone world is going to be a bubble along the lines of the one in the late 90s / early 2000s. The vultures are out and and they taste blood. The iPhone’s one of the hottest things around right now and there’s little sign of its popularity letting up anytime soon. And the venture capitalists want in… badly. The fact that the iFund™ exists is overwhelming evidence of this.

Read on for more after the break…

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People are remarkable. We can spend time figuring out precisely what we’re not allowed to do. Spend even more time doing it. Then spend triple that complaining when we suffer the foreseeable and reasonable consequences of our informed and deliberate actions. Heck, Dr. Phil has amassed a money-bin throwing us up on TV for just such spectacle.

Witness all the PR flackery and blog blustering (present posting included!) going on about the strategic geniuses who decided to go ahead and make an iPhone App Store-optimized engine for navigating and displaying specially formatted comic books.

Was their debut feature a family friendly installment of the Tremendous Super-Spider? Nope. It was “Murderdrome” and it was rejected. Find out why after the jump!

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It’s happened to a lot of us, I know. You’re in a new city and you’re hungry but you don’t know where or what to eat. You delay the decision, growing edgier by the second and maybe even a little dizzy. Finally, you give in and order McDonald’s or Pizza Hut or any fast food joint you can eat anywhere in this world when a great local spot was right next door. But of course, you had no idea.

With LocalEats, that scenario no longer exists. You’re in a new city, you’re hungry, you fire up LocalEats on your iPhone to find a great restaurant. You eat at said great restaurant. Don’t be mistaken, this isn’t a comprehensive food-review app like Yelp but rather a program that points you to the best restaurants when you need it most. To quote our own Dieter Bohn about LocalEats:

“It’s [really] spot on!”

LocalEats uses a team of experts to find the best tasting restaurants in each locale. It’s currently limited to 50 cities nationwide but there are plans for more. Click the Read Link to learn more about LocalEats or download the paid app HERE.

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Panic makes killer Mac apps. I use Coda daily, and Cabal Sasser designs UI the way they’re meant to be designed. Likewise, Steven Frank’s recent blog post on the double-edged sword that is Apple’s App Store is one of the best descriptions I’ve seen on the subject from a developers point of view:

I’ve been trying to reconcile the App Store with my beliefs on “how things should be” ever since the SDK was announced. After all this time, I still can’t make it all line up. I can’t question that it’s probably the best mobile application distribution method yet created, but every time I use it, a little piece of my soul dies. And we don’t even have anything for sale on there yet.

The App Store is definitely a Hobson’s choice when it comes to virtue and compromise. Sorta like being let loose in the fields of plenty after being bound and gagged and given a swift kick in the tenders.

If you’re a developer, how’s your soul holding up?

 

 

App Avalanche 5 promises more new, popular and free apps to check out and download to your iPhone at your whim. What you WON’T get is any mention of apps costing $999 — these apps are far more affordable and useful. If you don’t have the time to sift through hundreds of apps at the iTunes App Store, just take a look here for a summary. Read on for iPhone App Avalanche 5!

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Box Office is back. Only it’s been rebranded as Now Playing. Only you can’t find Now Playing in the App Store. But you can find Box Office. In iTunes. But not on the iPhone. Sorta.

Confusing much? We’re right there with you. We figure the name change is messing with the search systems, which will hopefully sort themselves out shortly. In any event…

Rumors have swirled since Apple pulled Box Office a few weeks back, covering everything from the name “Box Office” itself creating trademark issues, to Rotten Tomatoes objecting to their data being scraped, to the “donate” button violating the SDK, to Steve Jobs hating the exact shade of gray used for the inner bevel of the 3rd line down. There doesn’t seem to be any hard info yet on what the real reason was, though developer Cyrus “Metasyntactic” Najmabadi pegs the long (re)turn around time squarely on Apple (via Ars Technica):

I’ve gotten confirmation that they’re working to restore my app on the store, and I got an apology for the length of time it took to respond to me. I’m very happy by this turn of events, and I’m glad that apple will be letting me stay in the store

Najmabadi also promises several more improvements when (and hopefully not if), version 1.3 is released.

Don’t care about the why and what, just want to get it? Hit up the App Store (iTunes link) and let us know how you like it!

Confession 1: Soon as the App Store opened, I started downloading. Free apps mainly, but I bought more than I thought I would as well.

Confession 2: I don’t use most of them regularly. I mean, I use the built-in apps all the time, daily if not near-constantly in the case of Phone, Mail, and Safari. But the App Store stuff? Eh…. A couple have become regulars but most are occasional at best and some I no longer even bother to store on the iPhone (i.e. they’ve been relegated to iTunes purgatory.)

60 million downloads, 30 million in sales, and Steve Jobs thinks it could be a billion dollar business. So somebody must be using them, right?

Om Malik consulted Greg Yardley of Pinch Media (which tracks user behavior and provides statics based on that behavior for iPhone Apps) who says that, based on their sampling (which they themselves say currently consists of only a few developers), less than 20% of users return to an App at least once a day, and of them, the average time spent on an App is 5 minutes.

By way of contrast, however, Casey already posted some pretty staggering numbers from the big players like Facebook and Loopt who are seeing tons of usage.

UPDATE: Greg Yardley, in the comments below, points out that Facebook numbers are not necessarily inconsistent with Pinch Media’s.

Hmmm… Could it be that the App Store is still in its honeymoon, right smack in the middle of a little developer gold rush, where for every Apple Remote there’s a dozen (okay, 3 dozen) “I am Rich” / Flashlight applications? Since there’s no demo or beta, its easy to download free apps and moderately easy to take risks on under $10 apps, and come up less than thrilled.

All usage numbers tell us for now is that there aren’t — yet — enough really killer apps, but at the same time so many developers and companies are becoming involved, the odds of another — and another — killer app coming are getting better and better.

So, no I’m not using my iPhone Apps a lot, but I expect better apps to come along that demand I use them a lot more.

So you’ve been running on iPhone 2.0 (hopefully, 2.0.1) for a while now. And you’ve all enjoyed the plethora of quality apps at the App Store, but did you know how well the App Store was actually doing? Well, according to one of those old reputable printing press companies, pretty darn well.

The App Store holds a current pace of earning a revenue of over a million dollars a day, which roughly translates to $360 million a year. Steve Jobs issued some resounding statements about the App Store saying,

“This thing’s going to crest a half a billion, soon,” he added. “Who knows, maybe it will be a $1 billion marketplace at some point in time.” and also said, “I’ve never seen anything like this in my career for software”

Though the WSJ doesn’t believe Apple will be able to derive much profit in this current 70/30 split since they only make enough money to cover credit card transactions and maintaining the App Store itself, Jobs believes that having such a direct pipeline of apps will be able to sell more iPhones much like how iTunes enabled more sales of iPods.

So yeah, that App Store is doing great. Who would have thought an easy-to-use, iTunes-like interface would revolutionize the mobile software industry? Best of luck catching up RIM, WinMob, Android..

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