Posts Tagged ‘Applications’
|Tower, a new Mac client for Git
Monday, November 1st, 2010
I know, I know, enough with these Git clients, use that damn Terminal app! I see your point but for a lot of designers and non-terminal people, having a user-friendly client can be a great way to be introduced to Git. A few weeks ago I was asked to beta test Tower, a soon-to-be released Git client for OS X that is easy to use yet very powerful. The interface is a little more elaborated than other clients like Gity or Gitty, but it that doesn’t seem to affect the ease of use. At the same time, if you like minimal interfaces, you may like Gity’s simplicity better.
On top of the regular Git functions, some of the nice features offered by Tower are a repository manager to keep track of your repos, direct integration with Github, and a stash support.
Tower should be released in November, if you want to read more about it you can visit http://git-tower.com.
Tags: Applications, Git, Review
Posted in Developing | 2 Comments »
Apple announce App Store Volume Purchase Program
Monday, August 9th, 2010
Apple just sent to all their developers an email announcing a new App Store Volume Purchase Program that will allow educational institutions to buy applications in bulk for their students at a discounted price.
We’re pleased to announce the App Store Volume Purchase Program. Education institutions in the United States now have a new way to purchase your apps in volume for distribution to their students and faculty. You can also elect to offer special education pricing on your app when purchased in volume.
Developers will be able to choose to offer special pricing that is 50% of their list price to education institutions when they purchase 20 or more copies of their app.
Tags: App Store, Applications, Education, iOS
Posted in Apple | 2 Comments »
Things I use: my menu bar collection
Friday, May 28th, 2010
As you can see from the image above, I have a quite few application icons in the menu bar of my Mac, so I decided to write a post about them. I think those are really great application and I’m sure some of you could find them helpful too. From the left:
Notify: It’s a really minimal email client, that completely run from your menu bar, you can read and send email, perfect for quick emailing, and it also links you to your mail application. Perfect if you use Gmail or other web email services.
Dropbox: This is my main file sharing platform. I use this daily to share files with the rest of 39′s team so we always have the latest version of what we are working on. And you don’t have to do anything, just add it to your Dropbox folder and it just works.
Little Snitch: It’s a great application to make sure that anything can go in or out from your Mac without your permission, and also monitor your network usage.
CloudApp: This is another file sharing tool, just simply drag a file to the icon and it will be uploaded to a server and the link to it will be placed in your pasteboard. I mostly use the screenshot feature, so that every time I make a new screenshot, it automatically uploads it to the cloud and creates a link to it.
Snippets: I use this application to manage all my snippets of code or portion of test I need to use often. It has a great shortcuts support and it makes writing boring stuff (code included) much faster.
Alfred: This is a quicklaunch application (similar to Quicksilver), really fast, beautifully designed. I’m so used to it that I use it even to switch to already opened applications.
Air Display: This is the latest addition to my menu bar. This application lets me use my iPad as an external monitor over wifi. Really handy if you ask me.
I hope some of these apps could help you as well. Now the question is: what’s in your menu bar?
Tags: Applications, Review, Software, Things I use
Posted in Apple | No Comments »
Gity, a Git client for OS X
Wednesday, May 26th, 2010
Since we started working on Get Apps Done, I had to deal with Git. I never used Git before that, but Heroku, a great platform for hosting Ruby on Rails projects, forced me to. Using Git isn’t too complex, but when you start getting errors or merging problems, then a nice interface would be very helpful. The first client I tried was Git GUI, not really an eye candy but it was getting the job done, but still it didn’t offered me a nice and clear interface for Git. GitX, another Mac OS X Git client, was definitely a great UI improvement, but it was somehow incomplete for what I needed. Finally I recently discovered Gity, in my opinion, a very well done Mac OS X client. The interface is very Apple-ish, and it makes easier to solve problem even for a designer like me. While it had a $18 price tag until recently, now Gity is free and open source, and you can download it from Mac Endeavor’s site.
Tags: Applications, Git, Review, Tools
Posted in Developing | 6 Comments »
New iTunes App Store design
Friday, December 11th, 2009
I was checking as usual how my apps were doing in the store when I notice that Apple just released a redesign of the application pages in the App Store. I definitely think this is a great improvement and I think it will improve sales for everybody. Here is what’s new:
- They got rid of the huge link to your company name. Nobody was clicking on it to see your apps so it was just a waste of space and it was confusing people.
- Simple horizontal scroll to see the screenshots. This means that if you have a decent size screen you can actually see more than one screenshot at the time.
- Excerpt of the description. Developers will have to make sure that the most important stuff are written in the first part of the description.
- Links to the company site and support page more prominent.
- More importance to the “What’s New in Version…” section.
- An area with the links to few other apps from the same developer. This is great to help cross promotions of your apps. Even after they get old, this is a good way for people to find the.
- This is also helped by a new big “Customers Also Bought” area at the bottom. Of course this won’t help you on your app page, but it will help you when your app will appear on your competitors’ page
Overall I would say this is a great update by Apple, that seems doing a lot of things lately to please users and developers as far as iPhone OS apps.
Tags: App Store, Applications, iPhone application
Posted in Apple | No Comments »
Thirtynine’s first flash cards app
Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009
Here’s a quick demo of Thirtynine’s latest application, a flash cards application.
We really wanted to keep it as simple as possible. This is going to be just the first one of a series of educational applications.
Tags: Applications, Education, iPhone application
Posted in Apple | 4 Comments »
Go big or go free: how to price your iPhone application
Tuesday, September 1st, 2009
One of the most common questions from new iPhone developers releasing their first application is what price they should sell their application for. Well, my answer is simple: go big or go free.
And here’s why.
If you decide to sell your application, I don’t believe $0.99 is the best price in most cases. Usually, the $0.99 applications are perceived as being simple, not very well done and cheap-looking. Users will question how much time and effort was really put into such a cheap app. Once the user has passed the invisible barrier between free and paid, the difference between $0.99 and $1.99 isn’t a major one for them, but it could be a significant difference for you, the developer.
While going from $0.99 to free may mean going from 100 sales/day to 5,000 downloads/day, going from $1.99 to $0.99 may increase your sales as little as 10%. So, if your app is currently priced at $1.99 and you average 100 sales/day, if you were to go from $1.99 to $0.99 you would earn $77/day instead of $140/day (after Apple has deducted their commission). And, if your application isn’t crappy of poor quality, don’t be afraid to charge even more, you would be surprised by how much money you could be missing out on by not doing it. Don’t get me wrong, I have a few $0.99 applications myself, but it’s because I don’t think they are worth more than that or because that’s the price tag people are generally expecting for those kind of applications.
On the other hand, free applications, if well marketed, can pull huge numbers. My application iShotty was downloaded about 80,000 times because it was free and didn’t cost a dime to try it out; there was no risk involved. Keep in mind that free applications with a good retainer rate can generate significant income from ads.
So, if you want to distribute a very cheap application, give it away for free, and find different revenue streams for it. Otherwise, don’t be afraid to charge what your iPhone app is really worth.
Tags: Applications, iPhone application, Making money
Posted in Apple | 2 Comments »
Some people really doesn’t get it
Thursday, November 13th, 2008
Last friday I went to a networking event and I met this lady who has a mobile marketing company.
When we start talking I was really interested in her opinion about mobile marketing because lately I’m dealing with several mobile projects, but after 2 minutes I understood she really didn’t get it.
For her company “mobile marketing” really means “text messages marketing”. They are missing it big time. Who cares about those impersonal text messages we receive once in a while about special offers?
I think companies should seriously start considering to tap those 35 millions iPhone users in the US, plus all the millions of people that already have different type of smartphones. Mobile marketing should be more about interaction and customer engagement, forget about cold text messages.
There are tons of possibilities with all these new mobile OS. Just think to a simple game where your product or your services are the main focus. Are you marketing some sort of soda? Just make a small app where the user can see drink recipes and maybe “mix” the ingredients right in the phone creating an iBeer effect. I guarantee you people will download it, people will use it and people will share it.
Do you get it now?
Tags: Applications, Marketing, Mobile
Posted in Marketing | 4 Comments »
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