Our iOS apps industry is so old that I have trouble remembering when it all started – so I made this handy timeline / calendar. Feel free to download an editable copy & insert your own apps release dates etc as you look fondly back to distant 2007. The numbers under the year are estimates of all [...]
FAM Score – Evaluating Ideas for Game Projects
November 28, 2011 By 2 Comments
We have a hundred ideas for games but we’re only two full time people here at Focused Apps. So how do we choose what to work on next? What ideas do we spend time prototyping, and which projects do we push forward to market? We developed our own ‘points out of ten’ scoring system called [...]
360iDev iOS Dev Conference Denver 2011
July 26, 2011 By 2 Comments
360iDev 2011, the friendly iOS developer conference is coming in September to Denver CO. I’ll be there with the entire Focused Apps team (so that’s me and Rob ;-), and we’re presenting on ‘How to be an iOS Consultant’. I attended the first 360iDev in March 2009, it was a fantastic place to learn what was going [...]
Name the Hit Tennis Players
April 7, 2011 By Leave a Comment
iOS gamers, you can contribute to the iPhone game Hit Tennis. We’re adding new players and we want fans to name them. Anyone can go to http://www.facebook.com/pages/Hit-Tennis-2-for-iOS/212023335489769 and comment on the new player pictures with name suggestions (you have to ‘Like’ the Facebook page first). Feel free to suggest your own name if you want millions [...]
Designing and Marketing Hit Games
January 22, 2011 By Leave a Comment
How do you make a hit game? Here’s an essay by Tony Downey that comes as close to a recipe for success as I’ve ever seen: Indie Games: Designing to Succeed. READ IT. Following his advice is going to be very hard work, but making your game without following most of this advice will be [...]
HJCache: iPhone cache library for asynchronous image loading and caching.
January 11, 2011 By 124 Comments
A free library for iOS for making apps that download images or other data from URLs. Includes caching, easy memory management, etc.
Santa’s Lil’ Zombies – Our first Unity 3D iPhone game
December 11, 2010 By Leave a Comment
Santa’s Lil’ Zombies is our first free iPhone game build with Unity 3D, it’s out now in time for Christmas! We’re releasing it in 3 versions: Free to play on the web Santa’s Lil Zombies Free, with 3 levels and iAds. Santa’s Lil Zombies, 99c with 8 epic zombies blasting levels. This casual iPhone game is [...]
iPhone Development Books 1: Learning iOS Programming
December 4, 2010 By 4 Comments
I own 91 books covering iPhone app programming, design, marketing, and business, and I’ve browsed plenty more. From all those books I’ve picked out the ones I consider to be the very best. My recommendations are split into four parts: Learning iOS Programming (below) Design for iPhone and Mobile Apps Building iPhone Games & Unity [...]
iPhone Development Books 2: App Design
December 4, 2010 By Leave a Comment
I have a handful of books on user interface & app design, and one shining star is ‘Tapworthy, Designing Great iPhone Apps‘ by Josh Clark. Josh takes the reader through a journey to understand what makes great iPhone apps. Josh examines how real people use their iPhone and their apps, what thrills them, how people [...]
iPhone Development Books 3: Games & Unity 3D
December 4, 2010 By 1 Comment
As game players we all think we can design games, but to make a great game you really need to step outside your own enjoyment of playing games, think about what makes games fun and more, how games generate an emotional experience for they player. ‘A Theory of Fun‘ by Ralf Koster is an easy [...]
iPhone Development Books 4: Marketing & Business
December 4, 2010 By 2 Comments
If you’re making iPhone apps to try to make money, then marketing is key or only your friends will ever download your app. When most people hear the word ‘marketing’ they think of telling people about a product after its been built, but I see marketing as much more than that, and in fact I [...]
iPhone @2x Graphics, scale, and iPad
July 4, 2010 By 4 Comments
Here we look at how to use @2x graphics file to draw for the iPhone 4 high resolution retina display, explore how to use the new scale property to determine at run time which resolution to use, and how this works for an iPhone app running on the iPad.
Xcode on a 2010 Macbook Pro High Res with SSD
June 20, 2010 By Leave a Comment
I got a new MacBook pro with high res display and a solid state drive and for iPhone development. For development tasks the new machine is 2-3 times faster than the old one, and it has enough screen space to comfortably run Xcode and the simulator side by side…
Increase iPhone App Downloads by A/B Testing App Names
April 21, 2010 By 14 Comments
I’m about to outline the single most powerful thing you can do to improve sales/downloads of your iPhone app. I know this is a bold claim, but read on and I will justify it. I first presented this at 360iDev San Jose 2010. Apple made us an amazing market for our software and threw in [...]
iPhone Conference 360 iDev San Jose April 2010
February 3, 2010 By Leave a Comment
Are you going to 360 iDev San Jose in April? Its by far the best iPhone developers conference I know of. It will be packed with iPhone insider knowledge and will be totally fun. At $599 for 4 days with 40 sessions and a killer $99 hotel package its amazing value…
Tweeting from an Ad on the iPhone Using URL Schemes
January 18, 2010 By 4 Comments
Lately I’ve been experimenting with promoting out app ‘Friend Focus (for Facebook)‘ by ‘turning out the vote’ – ie getting our existing users to help us promote Focus. Once I’ve found a formula that works well we’ll implement the scheme in app and figure out a way to reward users for helping us, but for [...]
iPhone Memory Debugging with NSZombie and Instruments
January 14, 2010 By 55 Comments
How to debug memory crashes in your iPhone app using Instruments and NSZombie. If your app is crashing with ‘BAD ACCESS’ its because your retains and releases are screwed up and you are calling a method on an object you already deleted. This is the easiest technique to figure the problem out.
Focus for Facebook iPhone App
December 7, 2009 By 2 Comments
Focus for Facebook is a new free iPhone app that streamlines facebook while you’re on-the-go. It features an app spam filter to automatically filter out posts from games and quizes, and it shows your facebook in a compact view so you can quickly scan through new post & comments to see what you want to read, and then ‘mark all as read’ when you’re done.
Debugging Tip – objc_exception_throw breakpoint
August 29, 2009 By 4 Comments
If an exception is thrown when debugging an iPhone app, without your own exception handling code, that exception won’t stop the debugger until the call stack has totally unwound. On that journey through the call stack it gets caught and disguarded in the event loop. That’s a bummer because then the debugger can’t show you [...]
Memory Management Basics Tutorial Video
July 18, 2009 By 27 Comments
This article is a screen cast video of my tutorial for beginner iPhone programmers, it’s about the basics of memory management in Objective-C. Memory management is a tough nut for the beginner to crack, particularly in Objective-C and Cocoa for iPhone. Check out my iPhone memory management reading list for more voices on memory management. [...]
iPhone Memory Management Reading List
July 18, 2009 By 4 Comments
It’s a topic that can be explained several different ways, so keep reading and experimenting till it clicks for you.
… Books Learn Objective-C on the Mac Cocoa Programming for Mac Programming in Objective-C Online Practical Memory Management from Apple Memory Management Guide from Apple Dr Dobbs Mac Developer Tips Memo.tv mauvilasoftware.com Stepwise.com Tristan O’Tierney Mac Developer Network Video O’Reilly and here Cocoa Dev Central Cocoa Dev HyperJeff’s list of resources WikiBooks Devplace Woojijuice Peter Dikant
6 Months of iPhone App Sales Stats, Cause and Effect.
May 19, 2009 By 38 Comments
Hit Tennis has been out for six months now, and here I share sales figures for those six months. Recently sales have been in decline, but I managed to boost sales over the last month with a variety of marketing tactics: price drop to 99c, release date trick, translation into French, hitting the top 100 paid games…
Fixing Blurry Subviews
May 17, 2009 By 8 Comments
Custom UIs on the iPhone are made from UIView containing subviews, I ran across a problem where the subviews were being draw with an annoying blur. Here’s what was happening and how to fix it…
Understanding App Store Top 100s
May 12, 2009 By 7 Comments
Understanding the unique ways the app store works is critical in deciding app store marketing tactics and understanding the spikes and drops in app sales figures. This article explores how the top 100 lists in the app store work, and a future posting will look at how this applies to real sales data.
Sales Stats Tools for iPhone Apps
April 17, 2009 By 26 Comments
AppViz charts all your app store sales reports for you, and for a huge time saving it logs in to iTunes Connect for you and downloads them automatically. An added bonus (assuming you can stomach reading them) is that AppViz will download all your app reviews too! AppViz charts new downloads, upgrade downloads, all downloads, [...]
Screen Capture Tools for iPhone Apps
April 16, 2009 By 4 Comments
PhoneFinger and SimFinger are handy tools for making demos of iPhone apps using the simulator with screen capture software…
Duck You Undo! for iPhone
April 10, 2009 By 1 Comment
Does iPhone’s auto-correct sometimes change words in your emails without you noticing? Out new app Duck You Undo adds a popup toolbar so you notice ever auto-correct, and you can tap to undo or redo. In the app store now.
iPhone 3.0 As the Accessory to …?
March 20, 2009 By 2 Comments
Apple’s iPhone 3.0 announcement included the news that 3.0 apps will be able to use bluetooth and the dock connector to talk to accessories, eg control your HiFi. Instead of thinking just about accessories for iPhone, what about making the iPhone an accessory to another contraption – it provides a great touch screen, can update the UI and content, and it’s a micro-transaction platform. Eg interactive toys that bluetooth to an iPod touch, …
Ad Hoc Distribution to Windows and Mac – zipping the build
March 10, 2009 By 6 Comments
Ad-hoc distribution on the iPhone is super tricky. Here I explain how you can fail at the last hurdle so Windows users won’t be able to install the app. It’s because of the Mac resource fork getting into the zip archive, but you can avoid this problem…
What Color is My Pixel? Image based color picker on iPhone
March 6, 2009 By 50 Comments
iPhone’s cocoa touch doesn’t seem to have a call to get pixel color from the screen or an image, which I needed to make a simple image based color picker. Here’s a solution to do this using an offscreen graphics context we can use to get pixel by pixel data from the image. I’ve wrapped up the technique in a new class ColorPickerImageView and there’s a complete demo XCode project you can download to see it in action.
