TwizShow Free Download Week
It’s by birthday this week and to celebrate I’m giving you a present! :)
For this week only, TwizShow, my latest iOS game, (normally $1.99) is a free download on the App Store. I’m currently brainstorming some improvements and would really love to see a large download spike and to hear some feedback about the game.
TwizShow is a new game for iPhone and iPad that tests your knowledge of your Twitter friends. Who has more followers, who authored a given tweet, who did you follow first? It’s your own personal game show.
Find out how well you know your social network on the TwizShow!
So please, spread the word, download the game, and let me know what you think.
Thanks again!
Posted on: July 9, 2011 – 5:58 PM | Comments (0)
Q&A with Steve Jobs, WWDC 1997
It’s 1997. Apple had just purchased NeXT Computer. Steve Jobs is back at Apple but is not yet CEO. He is an advisor to current CEO Gil Amelio. At the annual developer conference it’s typical to have open question and answer sessions at the end of the week. This is such a session.
YouTube: Steve Jobs’s Closing Keynote at WWDC 1997
Running time is about an hour and the video quality is a little lacking but wow is this content insightful. There are lots of interesting takeaways from this video but for me one of the most interesting ones is how the interaction between Apple and developers has changed over the years.
I have a much longer post on this topic but it’s currently a rambling mess. I don’t want to postpone linking the video though so here it is. Credit to John Gruber for my original introduction to this.
Posted on: July 1, 2011 – 11:10 AM | Comments (0)
Conferance Season
I addition to being able to attend WWDC a few weeks ago I have a handful of other conferences lined up this summer, some I’ll be speaking at.
First, here in my hometown of Philly, I’ll be attending the Wharton Web Conference July 12 to the 14. The conference has three main tracks and opens with full day workshops covering HTML5, jQuery, and UI design. Really anxious to catch up with some web development technologies that I’ve been lax about learning since spending the last year or so doing iOS stuff. Should be fun.
Next I’ll be in Washington DC for iOSDevCampDC. This a one day, single track get together. Here I’ll be speaking on how to Monetizing Your App, giving lots of hard learned lessons from my own app offerings. Should be a fun day catching up with @louielouie and others.
Finally I’ll be going to SecondConf in Chicago, September 23-25. There I’ll be doing a blitz talk (5 min, 20 slides) covering The Philadelphia Coworking Story. Having been a long time MacHack and later C4 attendee I’m really anxious to catch up the Chicago contingent and see how things are going.
After a few recent years being a hermit of sorts it’s great to get back out there and catch up with everyone. I’m even considering a few road trips to nearby CocoaHead meetups (NY? Pitt?) if they’ll have me. We’ll see.
Posted on: July 1, 2011 – 9:42 AM | Comments (2)
Interview with TUAW/MacTech
During WWDC, TUAW and MacTech teamed up to do developer interviews; asking for keynote reactions and how they might relate to our products. I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to sit down with them and the video has now been posted.
If you’d like to see other developer interview such as BBEdit wizard Rich Siegel check out the WWDC category on TUAW.
Thanks again to Victor, Neil and everyone else for having me.
Posted on: June 27, 2011 – 1:51 PM | Comments (0)
TwizShow Cocos2D Donation Drive
To help celebrate the release of TwizShow and to help raise money for Cocos2D, the framework that helped make it possible, we are holding a donation drive of sorts.
If you buy TwizShow and forward the iTunes receipt to support@clickablebliss.com with the subject line “Cocos2D Donation” we’ll add $2 to our donation bucket which we’ll be sending off to the Cocos2D team July 15th. Yes, we are eating the Apple surcharge on this purchase but it’s all for a good cause.
If you’d like to donate to Cocos2D directly that’s cool too.
Again, a huge thanks to the Cocos2D team for such a great open source framework. I really enjoyed using it for TwizShow and hope to do more with it in the future.
UPDATE: August 7, 2011 I didn’t see as many donation emails as I’d like but none-the-less today Clickable Bliss sent off a donation of $250.00 to the Cocos2D project. My thanks again to everyone who helps make Cocos2D possible.
Posted on: June 21, 2011 – 11:23 AM | Comments (0)
TwizShow set to launch Tuesday, June 21st
After months of hard work we will be releasing TwizShow this upcoming Tuesday, June 21st.
TwizShow is a new game for iPhone and iPad that tests your knowledge of your Twitter friends. Who has more followers, who authored a given tweet, who did you follow first? It’s your own personal game show.
Find out how well you know your social network on the TwizShow!
For you lucky blog readers, you can get a sneak peak of the splash page, which includes screenshots and a gameplay movie. TwizShow will cost $1.99 and is a universal app that works for iPhone as well as iPad.
Like other small developer out there, we depend on word of mouth advertising. If you do decide to pick up TwizShow on Tuesday and like it, please consider posting a tweet or blog post saying so. iTunes reviews are welcome as well.
Thanks for your interest and support!
UPDATE: App is now live on the App Store!
Posted on: June 16, 2011 – 2:50 PM | Comments (0)
WWDC 2011 Notes
Returning to WWDC after a multi-year hiatus I was really excited to catchup with old friends and see what’s in store for the Apple platform. I didn’t arrive to San Francisco with many expectations but left excited and with a strong desire to do some prototyping. I’d say that’s a good sign.
I won’t attempt to do a full, detailed WWDC recap here considering most of the show is under NDA but I would like to share a few things that I’m excited about.
ARC (Automatic Reference Counting)
ARC was not covered during the Keynote but is publicly documented elsewhere. In short, ARC is a memory management solution. Rather than using Garbage Collection (which cleans up memory usage during the runtime) ARC, instead, will synthesis the needed releases and autoreleases in your code during compile time. The end result, when using ARC you no longer have to worry about memory management.
It sounds too good to be true but apparently it’s working well for a few friends who have migrated their projects. The particularly cool thing is that it is backwards compatible for 10.6 and iOS 4 so it’s something people can start to use right away, even if they need to support older OS releases.
iCloud
People have long wanted an iOS companion app for ProfitTrain and while I’ve spent the last year learning iOS I sadly didn’t see the point of an iOS ProfitTrain until I got the syncing problem settled. I tried to roll my own solution and it just didn’t work as well as I needed it to. I investigated other options but never saw something I liked. Now with Apple doing iCloud, there is a new hope.
Being able to be at this specific WWDC was great. I got to ask some hard questions in the labs regarding iCloud and while I won’t be able to give a firm conclusion until I get some prototyping done I am at this point hopeful. The only better thing would have been to have had access to iCloud pre-WWDC so I could have approached the labs with real code but oh well.
I also really like that there is a free 5GB account as well as a hinted paid options. There were some past sync solutions built on MobileMe but I didn’t want to put that subscription burden on my users.
Game Center
The final public topic I wanted to share my enthusiasm for is the improvements to Game Center coming in iOS 5. Overall these are great and are going to continue to help people expand their friend list and find new games. For developers it’s going to let us create asynchronous multiplayer games without the need to build and manage the server infrastructure to run them. The only down side to this is a complete lack of any Mac availability. I was really hoping to see this come as a late Lion addition but sadly it is not the case. I still hope to port TwizShow to the Mac in time but removing the Game Center leaderboards and achievements will be a bummer if not available.
Final Thoughts
Overall WWDC was a blast and totally worth it. I’m actually excited to maybe attend a few more conferences in the coming months. What can I say, this community is intoxicating.
Posted on: June 15, 2011 – 8:42 PM | Comments (4)
iAd Policy Change: No more kid-focused apps.
Dex is a utility for browsing Pokémon on your iPhone. It has been a huge success. One of the nice things I’ve been able to do is make the app available as a free download, supporting its continued development primarily by using Apple’s iAd platform. I supplemented this with ads from AdMob (when the iAd system doesn’t have an ad to show1) and also added an in-app purchase for those who want to show support for future development and turn off ads. I’ve documented my setup during the monetization presentation if you want more info. To sum it up, most of the money came from the iAd network.
Having Dex as a free download really helped its exposure. Dex has been downloaded by over 500,000 users. Tons of these users are young kids with iPod Touches who can’t make app purchases on a whim. They have a blast using Dex and I’m happy to see it get the widest possible audience.
Last Thursday I had a particularly awful iAd fill rate of 5%. This isn’t new, I’ve had problems before. Then on Friday a 0% fill rate, then on Saturday another 0% fill rate. I emailed Apple and posted a question to the company’s developer forums. Today I finally got a reply:
Follow-up: XXXXXXXXXXX
Hello Michael,
We periodically review the apps in the iAd Network to ensure that all apps receiving ads are aligned with the needs of our advertisers. Currently, our advertisers prefer that their advertising not appear in applications that are targeted for users that are young children, since their products are not targeted at that audience.
We appreciate your understanding.
Best Regards,
iAd Network Support Apple, Inc. 1 Infinite Loop Cupertino, CA 95014
And that’s how an iAd supported version of Dex died. No warning, no notice and inevitably no respect to the developers who have cenetered their app’s revenue model around the iAd platform.
Apple should target their ads better. I would have loved to have seen some ads that were better suited to kids in Dex. It’s a shame they don’t have the inventory to do so. However the manner in which they’ve made this policy change just stinks.
Furthermore there is no documentation of this change. Nothing is on the iAd developer page to alert people that the current fill rate for apps and games targeted at kids is zero.
As for what will come of Dex, in the short term it will remain the same: a free download, showing ads (now only from AdMob network) with an in-app purchase to show support and turn off ads. For the future, Dex will have to move to a normal pay per download model or lock some of the major features behind the in-app pay wall and continue to give out basic functionality for free. I’m leaning toward the latter but won’t make a decision until I’ve finished shipping my new iOS game TwizShow, which until recently was going to show iAds.
Today was another harsh reminder we iPhone developers are making a living at the beck and whim of a powerful platform vender. Be careful putting all your eggs in his basket.
1 Dex’s average fill rate (the precent it got an ad after asking the iAd system for one) was 16.5%. AdMob’s fill rate is much greater but the value of the ads are typically much less than with iAds.
Posted on: May 10, 2011 – 3:25 PM | Comments (8)
SMFM: Sandvox 2
Stuff my Friends Made: Sandvox 2, by Dan Wood (@danwood), Terrence Talbot (@talbchat) and Mike Abdullah (@mikeabdullah).
Sandvox 2 was released today! Grats to everyone at Karelia Software.
Sandvox is a Mac OS X app that lets you build and manage websites. It’s built similar to a word processor and should be an attractive solution to those people who don’t want to get involved in the code side of things but still want to make a good looking and effective website.
I did a fair amount of testing during the development of Sandvox 1 and eventually came to help Dan and Terrance design and produce the introduction screencast. It’s been redone for Sandvox 2 but a lot of the overall writing and design is still there.
Dan gave me a sneak peak of Sandvox 2 a few weeks ago and it was exciting to see them continue to improve the experience of making a new website. In particular I liked the Amazon widget that let you drop in product URLs to easily make associate links. Would be good for someone who reviewed books or video games.
Dan gave me a coupon code to pass along as well. Use code “BLISS” to save 20% off, good till May 20th.
Again, congratulations to Dan, Terrence and Mike. Looks like a strong release.
Posted on: May 10, 2011 – 10:16 AM | Comments (1)
Philly Tech Week Software Showcase
Philly Cocoa’s own Philly Tech Week event is set for Thursday, 6-8pm @ IndyHall.
The Made in Philly Software Showcase will put our locally made software on display during Philly Tech Week. Taking over a wing of IndyHall during the party Thursday night we’ll have tables set up and local vendors ready to demo Philly Made Software including games on the various mobile consoles (iOS, Android, NintendoDS), utility apps, emergency response training tools and more. APRIL 28th 6PM-9PM @ IndyHall, 20 North 3rd Street Unit 201, Old City | FREE
A sneak peak at the vendors showcasing:
http://phillycocoa.org/made-in-philly/
If you’re local and want to stop by please RSVP so we can get a good headcount and beer:
Posted on: April 26, 2011 – 5:02 PM | Comments (0)
Hi. My name is Mike Zornek (
