My friends at Freeverse, who were featured in an article in Crain’s New York. They’re also the publisher of my Mac app, Sound Studio 3.
From the article: their Skee-Ball game made $90K in two weeks in the beginning of October. That was when it was going from #4 to #2 in the charts, before it became the number 1 top paid app in the entire US store. Congrats to Freeverse!
The latest update to my Transit Maps app was just approved after 8 days in the queue by Apple! At the same time on Twitter there was some debate about Apple’s role as publisher and gatekeeper to the iPhone App Store.
Apple has been good to me. My apps generally get approved in 7 to 10 days, and I’ve only had a couple rejections, and those that came with clear explanations of why it was rejected and what I had to do to fix it. Other developers have not had such good experiences, and it certainly makes for good drama on the Internet and good fodder for blog rants and TechCrunch articles.
What I see is a lot Mac developers who are discouraged about writing for the iPhone because they hear these horror stories of apps being rejected or spending months in review and conclude it’s not going to be any fun. I say, you should write an iPhone app because you have passion for it, not because you want to make a quick buck or become famous. And you should jump in and decide whether it’s fun after you’ve released a couple iPhone apps, rather than spending time reading blog posts complaining about the App Store review process.
I’m assuming that most people use Tumblr the way I do: from the Dashboard, where you don’t see any themes — unless you’re new to it or catching up with someone’s — so the theme is a chance for a bit of whimsy.
During 360iDev in Denver a couple weeks ago, I learned that if you use [NSDate timeIntervalSinceReferenceDate] to get the time, and for example use the result to calculate the elapsed time, you might see time go backwards because the iPhone get the current time from the cell phone towers, and sometimes that value will jump backwards or forwards because the towers aren’t synchronized. Or they’re just set to the wrong time. Either way, it’s something to watch out for.
I just wanted to note that I just finished this new theme based on Mac OS 9, which you can’t see unless you go to felttip.tumblr.com.
Couch to 5K has been #4 in the charts for the Health & Fitness category of the US App Store for the past couple days. The app, which was released May 25, first charted at #25 and has been on a steady climb ever since.
Most apps have a brief period of popularity followed by a slow decline into obscurity, but my app, along with some others such as Tweetie and Drum Kit, seems to have bucked the trend.
(Graph showing US chart position from May 25 to September 11 from MajicRank.)
There’s a bug in [NSDate timeIntervalSinceReferenceDate] which can sometimes return bogus values. I was using it each time the NSTimer fired to calculate the elapsed time in my Couch to 5K app, and because of this, the elapsed time would jump around erratically on the iPhone 3G on OS 3.0. I’ve changed it so that the elapsed time is advanced by a constant amount each time the timer fires, even though it might be less accurate if the timer isn’t fired exactly at the same rhythm.
Chart of six months of being on the iTunes App Store. The y-axis is revenue for each app. It’s the area under the graph that matters, not the peaks.
Couch to 5K has been consistently in its category’s top 10 for the past 2 weeks, and in the top 25 since it came out.
and it made me think of how when I had just one successful Mac app in the market, how I thought maybe I was just lucky and I’d never be able to do it again. Then I started making iPhone apps.
I had a hard time starting. I signed up for the iPhone developer program as soon as it was announced, but I couldn’t get my ass in gear and seriously start writing an app until around October. That app never saw the light of day. It sucked. I started over in January on the same app idea but with a different implementation, and it finally came out in March. Even that one sucked. (It barely makes it into the top 100 in its category.)
But I didn’t give up. When I browse other people’s apps the App Store and look for what other apps they’ve done, I see a lot of people who have only one or two apps, and they never been updated. I wonder if they’ve just given up because they didn’t strike gold on their first or second try.
My second try was even worse. I hired a graphic designer and put a lot of work testing and fine-tuning it, and of my 3 paid apps it’s the worst performing. It’s made less than 15% of what I spent on the app. (This one doesn’t even show up in the category’s top 100 list.)
My third app was a little one-week job that I wrote for myself and I released for free. I get a lot of feedback and praise for that one, and I figure if people like this app, they might look at my other apps. (It’s also in the top 40 in its category.)
It was my fourth app that finally was successful, and the best part was that the idea came from the graphic designer I hired for my least successful app.
Which just proves Merlin’s points. You must start. You must keep at it. You will think you suck, and most of the time you’ll be right. You must listen to feedback. And you’re still going to suck and now people are telling you and showing you how much you suck.
“You don’t this stuff because it’s easy. You do it because it’s hard.”
I’ve updated Sound Studio to version 3.6, and it’s out now.
Freeverse’s Sound Studio the popular audio editing and sound creation Mac application developed by Felt Tip Software, has been updated to version 3.6 and is available now. The newest additions to the software include more Core Audio formats and introduce IMA 4:1 for iPhone development. AudioUnit plugins and Resampling have been tweaked for maximum efficiency and new shortcuts and toolbar adjustments make the program even more streamlined. With sample rate converter quality now at maximum and other various performance enhancements, Sound Studio is the premier Mac sound editing software for any digital audio project.
