After incorporating iAds in the latest version of Egg!, people that weren't on iOS4 were experiencing crashes. I have since fixed this issue and so regardless of what iOS you are running, Egg! will run without crashing. Thanks Mike Park for first bringing this to my attention (or should I thank Lydia?). Also, Apple seemed to push this update through much faster than normal. Thanks Apple.

I finally got around to updating Egg! last week to use Apple's new iAds. It's supposed to generate more revenue for developers and make developing free apps profitable. We'll see how that goes. If you haven't already downloaded Egg!, now is your chance.

Next up are graphic improvements to support iPhone4 displays, if I can ever get my hands on an iPhone4...

Also, a friend was telling her friend about Egg! So her friends downloads it and says "my kid loves it." It turns out it wasn't even my app, but a copycat app. Now I know what the original creator of the fart app feels like! Hahaha.

Just got the all clear from Apple. Egg⁴! is now up on the AppStore. If you haven't seen the demonstration video take a look...

I received e-mail from Apple today, that FlashCardz 2.0 & QuoteKeeper 2.0 have been approved. So look for them on the App Store. These new versions have much better stability than the previous versions (no more random crashes). If you're a developer and are waiting for your apps to get reviewed, send an e-mail to the App Review team and they will likely review your app faster (this has been my experience anyway).

A new feature in both of these, includes the ability to hide individual cards or quotes.

For a student this means that you can build up a stack of cards throughout the semester, then after each exam, you can hide the cards from that exam, but still have them around for the final. This also allows you to hide cards that have memorized to focus more on the ones that you haven't.

Capping off a productive weekend. I was able to update QuoteKeeper to benefit from some of the common changes in FlashCardz. So another app is off for review. In particular, the data handling has much greater stability; so no more random crashes. Also, added the ability to hide individual quotes from the stack (similar to FlashCardz)

So I spent the weekend looking into some stability problems I was seeing with FlashCardz. In my frustration, I completely gutted the data handling portion of the code and reworked it. This took most of the day Saturday, and I was still having problems getting things working properly. I revisited it Sunday morning and got it to work. Since it is such vast improvement over the previous version, this new release will be 2.0. In addition to the stability improvements, I incorporated a change that will allow users to hide certain cards in the stack. I believe that this feature will greatly improve the usability of the app for users.

FlashCardz 2.0 has been submitted and is waiting for review.

Egg⁴! is on it's way to the Apple App Store. I was able to get it in working order this week and just submitted it a few minutes ago. So, it should be up some time in the next week, if all goes well.

Egg⁴! is the iPad friendly version of Egg!, and lets you race against your friends and family members to see who can break open the Egg⁴! first. It is a universal binary, so it will run on both the iPad and the iPhone/iPod Touch. It will look like an ad-free version of Egg! on the iPhone/iPod Touch, but the real fun is on the iPad. In the U.S., Egg⁴! will be $0.99.

Thank you to everyone who helped test Egg⁴!

On a side note, the original Egg! has been well received world-wide. It reached #1 in Indonesia, Israel, & the Philippines; #2 in Costa Rica; #3 in Poland; and #5 in the UAE. I can only hope, Egg⁴! will be as well received.

So the big question that I've had since iAds was announced was, "How much $ will developers get for using iAds?" Because, if it is not more than what they currently get, there's not much incentive to switch to iAds. A recent MacRumors article says that Apple is charging advertisers $0.01 for each Ad impression and $2.00 for each click. With this information, we can get an idea of what this means for developers.

Taking some data from my Egg! app which is ad-supported by the banner Ads at the top, this is what I have for the past 30 days.

209,697 impressions & 6,507 clicks for a click through rate (CTR) of 3.1%

To get the revenue from these numbers using iAd prices:

209,697 ($0.01) + 6,507 ($2) = $15,110

Of this total, Apple takes 40% and developers take 60%, so:

$15,110 (60%) = $9066

If the numbers being reported are correct, then this is a significant increase over the $158.21 that I actually received (or will receive) from my current advertisers. What would I give up if I switched to iAds? Analytics & custom ads that promote my other apps. What do I gain, over 57 times my current ad revenue. This could be a real game changer. I guess now would be a good time to start integrating iAds into Egg!.

My calculations assume that I will get the same fill rate and CTR that I get now. This may be affected by how many advertisers actually sign on with Apple. If only a few companies sign on, then people will only see those same advertisements over and over again and the CTR will likely drop. If you notice, the revenue from clicks makes up 86% of the total revenue. With impressions alone, I will still get close to 8 times my current revenue; $1257 vs. $158. Not bad at all.

UPDATE: 

iAds is very easy to integrate. All you have to do is add the framework to your project, initialize the ad-view, set the ad-view delegate, and add the ad-view to the viewController. 3 lines of code. Once OS 4, is officially released I might post a simple tutorial.

I'm in the process of creating a new version of Egg! for the iPad. It's not a straight port where I just resize images, etc. I'm taking the opportunity to redesign the code & underlying classes, as well as, adding additional functionality specific to the iPad. One of the interesting bugs that cropped up in the process had to do with UIView animations and their transformation matrices. If you've taken a course in Matrix Math, some of this will sound vaguely familiar.

All UIViews have a transform property that you can set, that will be applied to that view.

UIView *myView = [[UIView alloc] init];
myView.transform = CGAffineTransformIdentity;

Here I set the transformation matrix of the view to the Identity matrix.

The CoreGraphics API on the iPhone has a bunch of functions that will create a new transformation matrix and let you apply those transformations to your view. These are things like:

CGAffineTransformMakeScale, CGAffineTransformMakeRotation, CGAffineTransformMakeTranslation, etc

Read the rest of this post »

So one of the big news items last week in the Apple world was the introduction of iPhoneOS 4. A big part of Steve Job's presentation had to do with mobile advertising, and in particular Apple's solution iAd. When I was releasing my apps, I did some research into different advertising platforms because I wanted to release a free app that would generate ad revenue for me. I eventually decided to go with Moblix and have been very pleased with the developer support and the analytics that they provide me.

Apple's iAd model gives 60% of the revenue to developers and they keep 40%. Will I make more money using iAd or sticking with Moblix? I don't know yet. I guess it depends on what Apple charges advertisers. If I do make more, how much more? Steve didn't mention any support for analytics that tell me how many people downloaded my app, how many people clicked the ads, or how much ad revenue I made on a particular day. Another drawback is that there didn't seem to be any built in support for custom advertising. At the present, I have my own ads promoting some of my other apps; they show up 2-5% of the time.

For the time being, I'm not ready to jump on the iAd bandwagon. That may change if moving to iAds means 2 or 3 times more Ad revenue, but it will still be hard to give up the analytics and custom ads.

Steve Jobs is right about one thing, a lot of mobile ads are garbage. Hopefully, ad agencies will create more compelling, higher quality ads.