Davide Di Cillo

Today I want to share with you a simple tutorial on how to make a cool shiny button in few seconds. The quality of the video isn’t the best ever, so I suggest you to watch it full screen in order to see where I click.

Click here to download the psd file of the tutorial.

For the June South Florida iPhone Meetup Ben Bloch, gave a very interesting presentation about the integration of Facebook Connect and iPhone applications.

I personally believe that the integration between iPhone apps and existing social networks, like Facebook or Twitter, could really play an important role in your marketing strategy for your applications. Some of my applications already let you post your scores on your Facebook wall and I’m planning to integrate Facebook Connect on almost all the remaining ones.

A special thanks to Mobuilt for sponsoring again our meetup.

Click here to see the videos

Today, I received an unexpected phone call from an Apple representative to confirm my iPhone reservation because I reserved two phones, and they wanted to make sure it wasn’t a duplicate reservation.
So, considering it’s legit to reserve multiple phones, it should be possible to buy more than one device per person (each with its own contract of course).

During my conversation with the Apple representative I also asked if there was going to be a separate line for those who reserved the iPhone. I guess I surprised the Apple guys because at first his answer was that there would be a line for those who reserved an iPhone, then he corrected himself by saying that there will be multiple lines, and then correct himself again saying “let’s just say there will be a line for who made a reservation.”

So, for sure, if you reserve the iPhone, you are going to join a separate line. In theory, it should also be a faster line because during the reservation process they gather all the information you’ll need to buy the iPhone, and considering how slow and painful the line was last year, that’s the line I want to be in.

I just wonder if when he said there will be multiple lines, if he meant that there will be more than two. It could be possible they are going to divide people in 3 lines: those who reserved the phone, those who didn’t reserved it but has already an AT&T contract and those who need the complete package (usually the slowest customers).

Well, I’m happy I reserved my phone, and hopefully this time I won’t wait 4 hours in line before being able to get my shiny new toy.

Did you reserve your iPhone already? Are you going to?

Next friday the new iPhone 3G S will be available for sale and the iPhone OS 3.0 will be released. All this will have a huge impact on the iPhone applications’ market.

In-app purchases
This new feature will allow developers to keep making money even after selling an application and we’ll start seeing a lot of applications engineered to be expandable. Another (positive) effect is that it might “clean up” the iTunes store. Right now there are many applications that could be easily combined in a container application plus additional modules.

For my project Art for iPhone, in order to sell each individual artist, I had to release one application for each of them. Of course that made feel good the artist for having an application with their own name, but at the same time is much harder to promote the applications and to cross promote the artists.

In the iTunes store there are plenty of other examples like tourist guides or other applications that could work better if assembled in a single one. If I buy a tourist guide with the Italy module for it, next time I’ll have another trip I will most likely buy another module from the same application instead of going digging again between 50,000 applications to find another guide.

More power, less market
Yes, the new iPhone is an incredibly powerful portable gaming platform, and now software houses can start releasing games with even better graphics, but I don’t think they will go all the way with this. If they start releasing games that works only on the new iPhones they are cutting out a 40 millions devices market, and that would be plain stupid. So my guess is that they will wait until there will be more iPhone 3G S around, and that the iPod Touch will be updated.

Video support
A lot of application will have finally access to video recording. Right now the iPhone is the most used mobile device for uploading pictures to internet, also thank to a killer editing interface iMovie style.

I bet soon it will be also the most used device to upload videos. For sure there will be a massive number of updates from applications like Twitter clients, and that will make flourish a number of sites dedicated to short videos, space currently dominated by Qik, Seesmic and 12seconds.

GPS Navigation device
Thanks to the compass now the iPhone can finally be used as a full GPS Navigation device. this could be a big shift for all the GPS device companies out there as they will probably more software oriented than manufacturing hardware.

Do you think the iPhone 3G S will bring big changes to the mobile market? If so, how? Don’t be shy and leave a comment.

To help those people whose offices blocked search.twitter.com I made this page where they can follow live twitter updates about WWDC and iPhone. I hope it helps.

Update:
Thanks to everybody who visited this post during the WWDC keynote! Time to shut down the Twitter tracker now.

Few days ago David Bisset (@dimensionmedia) gave a great presentation about BuddyPress at Refresh Miami.
If you have never heard about it,

BuddyPress is a suite of WordPress plugins and themes, each adding a distinct new feature. BuddyPress contains all the features you’d expect from WordPress but aims to let members socially interact.

It’s basically a very cost effective (it’s free…) way to build your own social network, and because it’s based on Wordpress it has the great advantage of having plenty of plugins and themes already available (some might need some modification in other to work), and a great community of developers behind it.
Click here to see the videos

Last week (yes, I know, it took me a week to upload the videos, mea culpa), at the South Florida iPhone Meetup Group we had the pleasure to have Ben Hopkins present his iPhone game, Eat Will Grow (iTunes link).
Ben, who has been writing software for 14 years on a variety of platforms ranging from game consoles to desktop to mobile.
In his presentation, Ben also spill a couple of very good tips that I personally didn’t know, like places where to submit Apple related press releases or applications to check your daily rank.

I also had a chance to announce my next project, Get Apps Done, a no-frills job board where iPhone developers and people/companies who need iPhone applications developed can meet each other. If you in one of those two categories or you are just curious, please sign up at www.GetAppsDone.com to find out when we’ll go live or read our blog blog.getappsdone.com for more information.

If you are in South Florida and you are interested in iPhone developing (you don’t need to be a developer), don’t be shy and join us.
Click here to see the videos

UPDATE: since I wrote this post AppFigures managed to add review downloading from all 77 app stores around the world, automatic rank trending from the four major app stores, and show your app’s rank inside both daily and weekly email reports. Good job guys!

I always say that the iPhone applications business is all about downloads, so being able to track your sales is key.
So far I’ve been using three tools to track my sales: AppSales, AppViz and AppFigures. AppSales isn’t developed anymore and they suggest to use AppViz so I won’t even bother reviewing it. Too bad cause it still has few features I wish AppViz and AppFigures had.

Let’s start with AppViz.
AppViz is a desktop application for Mac, it costs $29.95, but after the month of trial i decided it was worth the money. Apple only provides those ugly and unreadable spreadsheet files and I really don’t have time every morning to go thru the to see how much I made in sales. AppViz can download all the reports with just a click, and it organizes the informations in easy-to-read graphs. It also let you download all the reviews, a great way to keep track of your users’ feedbacks.

PRO:

• One click reports download
• Easy-to-ready graphs
• It let you download and track reviews
• Great customer service

CONS:

• $29.95 (it is worth the money but free is always better)
• You can’t directly compare different applications

AppFigures on the other hand is a pretty recent web application, and it’s completely free. AppFigures imports reads the text-file reports that Apple provides developers through iTunes Connet and transforms them into structured data. Reports can be uploaded manually, by syncing with iTunes Connect, or automatically on a daily schedule using Auto Import. While is missing some of the functions that AppViz offers, it has what is my most favorite feature: email reports. Every morning when I wake up I just need to reach my phone and check my emails to see how many sales I made the day before. You can choose between daily and weekly reports, and if you want the stats about all your iPhone applications or only some of them. You can also choose multiple recipients. Pretty damn sweet I’d say.

PRO:

• It’s completely free
• Automatic reports download twice per day (in case the first attempt fail)
• Easy-to-ready graphs
• Email reports (daily or weekly)
• It shows profit by region
• You can compare different applications in the same graph
• Quick response to the community feedback

CONS:

• Sometimes it is buggy and doesn’t handle very well too many applications at the same time

Auston Bunsen, founder of Mobuilt, gave a great presentation at South Florida iPhone developers’ April meetup on how to build an iPhone application in 20 minutes using frameworks like or Safire, builded by Auston, or PhoneGap.
Safire should be released in the next couple of weeks, and I’m really looking forward to trying it myself.

Check out also my presentation “Marketing thoughts about the iPhone apps business” from the same meetup

Last night I gave a presentation at the South Florida iPhone developers meetup, organized by me and Ben Bloch. It was really nice to see all those people and I hope everybody had a great time as I did. I also learned a great lesson: it’s “bribe” not “bride”, but I guess people now is used to my typos… I can always blame it on being Italian. Here’s the video of my presentation, I’m sorry it’s missing the first 4 slides but luckily they were just some stats.