Why I’m Developing for iPad

I have been pretty vocal in the past about my issues with the app store, Apple, Apple’s development tools, the app market, and so on.  Leading up to the release of the iPad, I goofed on it with everyone else, and scoffed at the idea of developing anything for it.   And yet, here I am, developing apps for it.

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A Handy Guide

Free App Strategies

A couple weeks ago I thoroughly bummed out a lot of iPhone developers with real, hard numbers from the app store.  Selling apps is a ridiculous gamble, but free is still on the table.  Today I’ll talk about some free app strategies, for those who haven’t abandoned the app store just yet. Read more

The Elusive Female: Developing for Women

Females have long been an untapped market when it comes to tech and software.  Game publishers know this better than anyone, but nearly every corner of entertainment software would like to attract more female customers.  Glowdot Productions “Zen Jar” app for the iPhone seems to have accidentally stumbled onto the secret.  I’ll take a look at why the app appeals to women. Read more

Making an iPhone game using only Interface Builder

Can you make an iPhone game using only the interface builder and no additional libraries? Yes, and I’ll show you how. Read more

AdMob: Our Experience

I decided to run a short AdMob campaign to promote an iPhone app I wrote for my sister, called Are You Compatible?.  Link below, if you want to see what app I’m talking about.   In short, it is an app that lets you enter in two people’s astrological signs, then gives you a rating of the relationship compatibility for those two signs.  It sells for $.99.

AreYouCompatible?

To start, I funded my account with $50.  While setting up the ad, I decided to target US traffic only.  The minimum bid for this target was $0.20, which threw me a bit, but I figured it was worth it with this kind of targeting — not just US eyes, but only iPhone users who are also app users.  Hard to beat that, right?

I created the ad, set it, and went away.  A short bit later, I got an email saying the ad was approved and was up and running.  I jumped in to my AdMob account to see how things were going.

All funds depleted.  After 30 minutes.

Whoah.

For my money, I got 200 clicks, for only 30,000+ impressions.  That’s an incredibly high CTR, but again it is highly targeted, so I let it slide.

Next day, I check my stats.  How much did it affect sales?  NOT AT ALL.   Zero.  Nada.  Did nothing for me.  $50 out the door.

I don’t want to judge AdMob too harshly based on one $50 run of ads, so I just re-funded the account with another $50, this time I set it to target globally, and set the minimum bid at $0.03.  We’ll see what happens.

[UPDATE]:Again, in 30 minutes all funds were depleted.  This time, I got 1600+ clicks for my $50.  Lesson #1: do not believe the $0.20 minimum bid bullshit.  They clearly can’t fill their inventory, so bid low.  You aren’t bidding against anyone.  I’m a bit upset by this, because AdMob essentially lied to me.

Tomorrow morning I’ll report the effect this run had on sales, but I’m not holding my breath.  Remember, if there is no jump in sales, it means $100 and 2000+ clicks directly to the app store are utterly useless.  I’m hoping this is not the case.

[UPDATE 2]: Got the sales figures.  No change in sales whatsoever.  It is now confirmed that AdMob is a total waste of money.

I invite someone from AdMob to get in touch with me and explain this.   There is some serious, serious click fraud going on here, or an abundance of accidental clicks, or something. Something is terribly wrong with your system.  I am now getting reports from a lot of other people saying their experience was identical.

An iPhone Rant Follow-up

One of the reasons I wrote the iPhone rant three weeks ago is that I wanted to lay out my initial reactions to the iPhone SDK, XCode and developing for Apple products in general.

It has now been three weeks since I made that post, and in the meantime I have finished 5 iPhone apps — one of which is in the app store, 3 that are in the pipe, and one which will be submitted shortly.  I also have 3 more in development.

Let’s start there: in three weeks, I’ve built 5 apps.  Fast development is something I’ve always loved about  developing for mobile platforms.  This is especially true when developing games.  While there are developers out there building complicated game engines for the iPhone, I see a huge opportunity for small, simple, one-man projects that can be conceived, developed and shipped in a matter of days.

The app store seems to agree with me.  The top games for the iPhone over the past couple months have been simple modern-day updates to retro game concepts (example: iShoot) or casual/puzzle games (example: Blocked).

That’s all wonderful, but not necessarily unique to the iPhone.  What is unique to the iPhone is the huge market they’ve created — a market of people willing to spend a buck on a temporary diversion.

So what about XCode?  I’ve started to become accustomed to working with XCode, but I have to say the little annoyances have become big ones.  Again, I think I’ve become spoiled by well thought-out IDEs like Visual Studio and even Eclipse.

So in short, I’m getting used to it.  Stay tuned for blog posts announcing my iPhone projects, as soon as I figure out how to link to iTunes.

An iPhone Rant

It’s been a good bit since I’ve contributed anything to Stromcode.  Been busy lately, but I do plan on writing some more tutorials, and it looks like a number of them might be on iPhone development.  For those looking to get into building apps for the iPhone, a really great resource is icodeblog.com.

At any rate, I would like to rant a bit.  First off, let me say I’ve been really excited to get rolling on the huge list of iPhone app ideas I’ve been sitting on since I bought my iPhone.  And I did expect developing for it to be a bit of a change up for me — I’ve been developing for Windows for over 10 years, and building web apps for about 5, but I’ve never done any Apple development at all (save for my college assembly language course, which was inexplicably taught against Motorolla processors on the Mac).

Objective-C, and the whole iPhone platform, is inexcusably dumb.

Let’s start with Apple.  Do you guys realize the number of really talented programmers that exist out in the world who would be more than willing to work on small, cheap apps in their spare time?  The vast majority of programmers out there are either working in Java, C++, or C# (or PHP if you want to count web developers).  And yet you didn’t bother to offer support for any of those languages?  Really?

Instead, you decide to go with Objective-C — a language that Mac developers know, but no one else has any good reason to know.  Who’s decision was this?  I have no problem with supporting Obj-C to make things easy for existing Mac developers, but couldn’t you have at least offered C++ as an out-of-the-box option as well?  One of Microsoft’s greatest strategies has been to not tell developers what language they should or shouldn’t use, but rather to support as many languages as possible.  Granted, Microsoft loves to suggest which language we should be using, but they are always there with options.

And speaking of Microsoft: Apple could really learn a thing or two from Visual Studio.  VS is an absolute dream to work with.  XCode, on the other hand, is an unmitigated nightmare of windows and hidden messages.  Why must Apple insist on popping up 4 new windows whenever you want to make a small change somewhere?  And why aren’t errors and warnings displayed in a frame in the main window?  Didn’t any of the beta testers complain about spawning a new window to view the error list?  Good God I hate XCode.  It’s one of those programs that just makes you feel like it’s deliberately crippling you.

And Objective-C.  Where to begin?  What an idiotic language this is.  What, pray tell, were the designers of this language thinking when they decided to rename everything?  True/False?  Nope, YES/NO.  Null?  Nope, nil.  Class?  Nope, interface.  Oh, and good going on that one.  Not only did you change the name of something from what every other language calls it, you gave it a new name that has a totally different meaning in every other language.  Brilliant!

I’m totally down with learning a new language.  But every time I have learned a new language, there has been an immediate and apparent benefit to that new language — some advantage over what everyone used before.  PHP made web development infinitely easier than working with CGI and Perl.  C# built on C++ to add garbage collection and true OOP.  Java added a virtual machine and again true OOP.  What exactly does Objective-C bring to the table?  I’m baffled.  It’s like a giant leap backwards.

End rant.  I’m still plowing my way through this whole mess, but my first (and second, and third) impression is that Apple has made this much harder than it needed to be.