Having your own iPhone app for your website or blog is becoming an increasingly common way to promote and extend your brand. However, actually creating that application and getting it into the App Store can be a lengthy and expensive process, especially if you have little development experience. Today PointAbout is launching a new product called AppMakr, which is designed to make creating your own iPhone app simple and inexpensive.
AppMakr is a streamlined system that creates a native iPhone application out of your existing RSS feeds. You can customize elements of the app and the artwork and then submit it directly to the App Store. You can even embed ads from places like AdMob directly into the app.
AppMakr made this demo video showing off how fast it was to create an app for Mac|Life.
Yet for all his hanging out with copywriters and industrial designers and musicians -- and despite his anticorporate attire -- make no mistake: Jobs is all about business. He may not pay attention to customer research, but he works slavishly to make products customers will buy.
He's a visionary, but he's grounded in reality too, closely monitoring Apple's various operational and market metrics. He isn't motivated by money, says friend Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle. Rather, Jobs is understandably driven by a visceral ardor for Apple, his first love (to which he returned after being spurned -- proof that you can go home again) and the vehicle through which he can be both an arbiter of cool and a force for changing the world.
The financial results have been nothing short of astounding -- for Apple and for Jobs. The company was worth about $5 billion in 2000, just before Jobs unleashed Apple's groundbreaking "digital lifestyle" strategy, understood at the time by few critics. Today, at about $170 billion, Apple is slightly more valuable than Google.
Its market share in personal computers was plummeting back then, and the cash drain was so severe that bankruptcy was a possibility. Now Apple has $34 billion in cash and marketable securities, surpassing the total market cap of rival Dell. Macintoshes make up 9% of the PC market in the U.S. today, but that share is increasingly beside the point.
With 275 retail stores in nine countries, a 73% share of the U.S. MP3 player market, and the undisputed leadership position in innovation when it comes to mobile phones, Apple and its CEO are no one's idea of underdogs anymore.
In 2006 Disney paid $7.5 billion to acquire Pixar, the computer animation film studio Jobs had nurtured and controlled. Jobs, in turn, became a Disney director and the blue-chip company's largest shareholder. His net worth, solely based on his stakes in Apple and Disney, is about $5 billion. Other executives have had stellar decades but none can compare with Steve's.
With Jobs back at the helm of his company, plenty of challenges lie ahead. Will the Goliath role suit him nearly as well as playing David clearly has? How will he respond to the competition he has awakened, particularly in smartphones, even as the personal computer fades in relative importance? Has he fashioned an organization that can succeed him? Can he possibly be as dominant in the decade to come as the one that is ending?
The "decade" of Steve actually began in 1997, when he returned to Apple after having been ousted a dozen years earlier. That was a year of triage, of a humbling investment from Microsoft, of paring Apple's product line to a bare minimum of four computers.
How's this for a gripping corporate story line: Youthful founder gets booted from his company in the 1980s, returns in the 1990s, and in the following decade survives two brushes with death, one securities-law scandal, an also-ran product lineup, and his own often unpleasant demeanor to become the dominant personality in four distinct industries, a billionaire many times over, and CEO of the most valuable company in Silicon Valley.
Sound too far-fetched to be true? Perhaps. Yet it happens to be the real-life story of Steve Jobs and his outsize impact on everything he touches.
The past decade in business belongs to Jobs. What makes that simple statement even more remarkable is that barely a year ago it seemed likely that any review of his accomplishments would be valedictory. But by deeds and accounts, Jobs is back.
It's as if his signature "one more thing" line now applies to him as well. After a six-month leave of absence in the early part of this year, during which he received a liver transplant, he is once again commanding a 34,000-strong corporate army that is as powerful, awe-inspiring, creative, secretive, bullying, arrogant -- and yes, profitable -- as at any time since he and his chum Steve Wozniak founded Apple in 1976.
Superlatives have attached themselves to Jobs since he was a young man. Now that he's 54, merely listing his achievements is sufficient explanation of why he's Fortune's CEO of the Decade (though the superlatives continue). In the past 10 years alone he has radically and lucratively reordered three markets -- music, movies, and mobile telephones -- and his impact on his original industry, computing, has only grown.
Remaking any one business is a career-defining achievement; four is unheard-of. Think about that for a moment. Henry Ford altered the course of the nascent auto industry. PanAm's Juan Trippe invented the global airline. Conrad Hilton internationalized American hospitality.
In all instances, and many more like them, these entrepreneurs turned captains of industry defined a single market that had previously not been dominated by anyone. The industries that Jobs has turned topsy-turvy already existed when he focused on them.
He is the rare businessman with legitimate worldwide celebrity. (His quirks and predilections are such common knowledge that they were knowingly parodied on an episode of "The Simpsons.") He pals around with U2's Bono.
Consumers who have never picked up an annual report or even a business magazine gush about his design taste, his elegant retail stores, and his outside-the-box approach to advertising. ("Think different," indeed.)
It's often noted that he's a showman, a born salesman, a magician who creates a famed reality-distortion field, a tyrannical perfectionist. It's totally accurate, of course, and the descriptions contribute to his legend.
By the following year Steve's regime had kicked into gear. Jobs completed the hiring of a new management team, which included several executives from his previous company, Next. Those top players would form the nucleus of the Jobs brain trust for nearly 10 years.
Then came the first Macintosh after Jobs' return, the iMac, a breakthrough all-in-one computer and monitor that heralded Apple's return to health. The success of the pricey iMac, coupled with drastic cost cutting, allowed Jobs to build a cash cushion. By repairing Apple's balance sheet, he prepared the company for big investments to come, a shrewd business move if ever there was one.
Jobs laid the foundation for Apple's leap from stable to stratospheric when things looked darkest. In 2000, Apple missed its financial targets in a September earnings announcement, sending its stock price plummeting in subsequent months to the equivalent of $7 in today's prices. Yet Jobs by this time had set in motion the key elements of Apple's rejuvenation.
Over the course of 2001, as global markets fell and the world headed into recession, Apple launched the iTunes music software (in January), the Mac OS X operating system (March), the first Apple retail stores (May), and the first iPod (November), a 5GB model that Apple bragged would hold 1,000 songs.
The market didn't catch on quickly to the significance of those events. iTunes was just music-playing software embedded into Macs and lacked an online store that sold music. The new operating system, though impressive, powered a niche product. The iPod was a snazzy MP3 player in an established market.
As the company's stock languished, takeover rumors appeared from time to time. What was never reported was that Jobs seriously contemplated taking the company private with the help of newly formed buyout group Silver Lake Partners. An Apple buyout would have been the deal of the century, but according to people familiar with the talks, Jobs ultimately shut them down.
That was actually the second serious proposal to buy Apple. In 1997, Jobs' friend Ellison, later an Apple board member, lined up financing to take over the company on the assumption that Jobs would run it. In a recent interview Ellison said Jobs didn't like the idea of being "second-guessed" if it looked as if he'd returned simply to make money. "He explained to me that with the moral high ground, he thought he could make decisions more easily and more gracefully," says Ellison.
For those paying attention after Jobs' return, the CEO was telegraphing Apple's trajectory. "I would rather compete with Sony than compete in another product category with Microsoft," he told Time in early 2002. "We're the only company that owns the whole widget -- the hardware, the software, and the operating system. We can take full responsibility for the user experience. We can do things that the other guy can't do."
Jobs was convinced that the masses would turn to Apple, but only if he could speak directly to them -- and not just to faithful Macintosh users, a club that included mainly artists and students. The strategy of building company-owned retail stores, so integral to Apple today, was derided at the time as a risky cash drain.
"He did this with a nervous board," says Bill Campbell, a former Apple executive who went on to become chairman of Intuit and an Apple board member. "He knew that this is what customers wanted." What's striking looking back is how little there was to sell in the original Apple stores. Jobs knew how he'd fill them.
Jobs made it his business to know everything about Apple. "He's involved in details you wouldn't think a CEO would be involved in," says Ken Segall, a former Chiat/Day creative director who has worked with Apple on and off for years. Jobs commissioned the iconic "Think different" campaign, says Segall, well before any of Apple's new products were introduced -- or even described to the ad team. "He'd say, 'The third word in the fourth paragraph isn't right. You might want to think about that one.' "
The rare pairing of micromanagement with big-picture vision is a Jobs hallmark. Early in his return to Apple, he recognized that gorgeous design was a differentiator for Apple in a computer industry gripped by the successful blandness of Dell, Microsoft, and Intel.
"I cannot count the number of clients who have marched in and said, 'Give me the next iPod,' " writes Tim Brown, CEO of product-design consultant Ideo, in his new book "Change by Design." "But it's probably close to the number of designers I've heard respond -- under their breath -- 'Give me the next Steve Jobs.'"
Jobs also has a knack for pouncing at the right moment. The music industry had failed repeatedly to develop its own digital-music sales site before Apple came along with iTunes, which was by then prepared to become a store for buying music.
Jobs cleverly made his pact with the record labels when iTunes worked only on Macs, which in 2002 had a personal-computing market share in the low single digits. Apple's humble position -- before iTunes became compatible with Windows, expanding its potential market share to nearly all PCs -- was a virtue. This made iTunes an experiment rather than a destructive paradigm shift.
"I don't understand how Apple could ruin the record business in one year on Mac," said Doug Morris, the head of Universal Music, according to "Appetite for Self-Destruction," a new book about the record industry's ills by Rolling Stone writer Steve Knopper. "Why shouldn't we try this?" Writes Knopper: "By the time Steve Jobs came around, he was the last resort. He was merely smart enough to know it. He played tough, but not any tougher than any lawyer for a major label who had negotiated an artist contract in recent decades."
A key Jobs business tool is his mastery of the message. He rehearses over and over every line he and others utter in public about Apple, which authorizes only a small number of executives to speak publicly on a given topic.
Key to the Jobs approach is careful consideration of what he and Apple say -- and don't say. Harvard professor David Yoffie estimated that in the months between announcing and selling the first iPhone in 2007, Apple received $400 million in free advertising by not making any public statements, thereby whipping the media into a frenzy.
Jobs himself is careful to avoid overexposure, preferring to speak only when he has products to promote. He didn't disclose his 2004 cancer surgery until after it occurred, and then only in an employee e-mail that was strategically released to news outlets. Similarly, he told the world of his recent leave in another employee missive, with no additional comment from him or anyone else at Apple.
Nobody in Jobs' sphere speaks without the permission of the company's media relations team, which reports directly to Jobs. Apple declined to make Jobs available for an interview for this article. It did bless the participation of some people in Apple's orbit to speak about him, while nixing requests for others.
The secrecy has rankled corporate governance experts, who insist the health of such an indispensable CEO warrants greater disclosure.
Jobs was initially mum as well about a stock options backdating scandal that embroiled the company's former finance chief and general counsel. In an eventual SEC filing, Apple said Jobs was aware that the company had adjusted option grant dates so that the grants were more profitable for employees. Jobs apologized for the backdating, calling the episode "completely out of character for Apple."
Jobs manages the money, the message, the deals, the design, and more. Consider the case fairly made that the long-ago enfant terrible of the computer industry has built up impressive business chops and that his company is peerless. But if nothing else, his recent illness is a reminder that Steve Jobs is mortal. When he's gone, how long will his company thrive without him?
Apple's future.
This past September, when Steve Jobs made his triumphant return to the public eye, he thanked precisely one Apple executive by name: Tim Cook, Apple's chief operating officer.
At an event to introduce a new line of iPods, Jobs first informed a crowd of journalists, analysts, and Apple developers that he now possessed the liver of a "twentysomething liver donor who had died in a car crash." Then he thanked Cook and the rest of the management team for "ably" running Apple in his absence. Cook, in turn, led a standing ovation for Jobs, his arms raised over his head from the front row of a San Francisco auditorium.
With Jobs back at work, the conversation has been postponed as to whether Cook, or anyone else, is prepared to fill Jobs' shoes. "At Apple the hierarchy is determined by who Steve calls," says a former Apple executive. "There's a lot of value in 'Steve said.'"
Larry Ellison, a CEO known to dislike the topic of succession, says of his friend, "He's irreplaceable. He's built a fabulous brand. He's got a wealth of products. Whenever he leaves, I hope he retires in good health and he's sailing off in his yacht in the Mediterranean. But they're going to miss him terribly, because it's a consumer products company. The product cycle is so fast."
There are signs that Jobs has inculcated the troops enough to last awhile without him. "The organization has been thoroughly trained to think like Steve," says someone with contacts among the Apple executive team. "That's why the six months went so smoothly. People could envision, 'This is what Steve would do.'"
Jobs, in fact, inspires far beyond Apple. Larry Pag
The evolution of music is, in essence, a study of how human culture, tastes and technology have evolved over the course of thousands of years. From ancient Indian music to Beethoven to Lady GaGa, music has embraced new instruments and scientific advances in the search for the perfect harmony and melody.
While most of society thinks of music in terms of voices, pianos and woodwinds, perhaps the world should get ready for the rise of a new instrument: the iPhone. While composing computer-generated music is nothing new, the iPhone’s unique mobile capabilities, accelerometer, compass, GPS and hardware have already made it a musical instrument (e.g. the Smule Ocarina iPhone App). But that’s nothing compared to what’s in store for us in the future; a recent concert at Stanford University pushed the limits and our perception of what is possible with music.
On Thursday, December 3, a small group of students and faculty performed as the Stanford Mobile Phone Orchestra (MoPhO). Wearing gloves that act as speakers and only wielding iPhones as instruments, the orchestra put on a show before a packed room. i, MoPhO was an exploration of not only musical melodies, but of how far mobile technology has come.
The musical tones were unique, and while some harmonies didn’t match, others blew the audience away. They did things that no orchestra on Earth can do, such as “passing” musical sounds to one another and using the iPhone’s directional capabilities to provide a truly surround sound musical experience. While it was clear that iPhones won’t be replacing the London Philharmonic Orchestra anytime soon, it was also apparent that this small team from Stanford was just scratching the surface of the possibilities of mobile phone and musical technology.
I had the distinct honor of attending, and while I did not record all of the compositions, I did record HD video of five of the pieces. I have included each, along with the name of the compositions, below. Please let us know what you think of this concert and, more importantly, the convergence of music and technology in the comments.
After trying dozens of programs to backup and transfer my ipod touch music,apps and photos to my computer i had almost given up finding the right software and to tell the truth i've been getting pretty tired of downloading and deleting software after finding out it only did part of what i wanted it to do or to find out that i can only transfer something like 100 songs then i have to upgrade and buy the full version to be able to transfer the rest, i can finally say to you that you can now throw away all those applications you've downloaded.
You only need one program and it truly is free with no catch whatsoever and what little nugget of software gold am i speaking of? Im talking about Sharepod, im completely in love with this tiny little app, it's gone above and veyond all the others i've tried and i really dont need itunes anymore except for my apps, watching videos and listening and buying music, the important stuff like backup, transfering all or part of my library to my computer, restoring and adding and editing playlists among other things.
Check it out and im positive you'll agree that it's the best freeware ipod and iphone software out there by far.
SharePod is easy to use and works! Heres some of the main features:
Add & remove music and videos from your iPod
Add, remove and edit playlists
Add & remove album art
View and backup photos
Copy music, videos and playlists from your iPod to PC
Import music/videos into your iTunes library, including playlists and ratings
Tag editing
Drag n' drop to and from Explorer
Simple, clean interface
Quick to load and use with no unnessary complicated features
Support for iPhone and iTouch (Thanks to Nikias Bassen, Paul Sladen, Jonathan Beck, and Christophe Fergeau for making this possible)
Nano 5G support
And whats more, SharePod is completely free! SharePod was designed from the start to be lightweight, quick and responsive, it has all (well hopefully most...!) of the features you need and none of the features you dont.
A couple of weeks ago, the first iPhone worm appeared, spreading on jailbroken devices with the SSH application installed (vulnerability being the fact that many users haven’t changed the default root password). As far as worms go, this one was quite benign, merely “rickrolling” users; i.e., changing the background image on the device to an image of Rick Astley.
Now, according to early reports of strange activity by Dutch ISP XS4ALL, and later confirmed by Sophos, there’s a new worm in the wild, and this one is far more malicious.
The new worm is called “Duh” or “Ikee.B”, and it uses the exact same vulnerability as the first one. The fix is thus identical – change the root password in the SSH application to something other than the default, which is “alpine”.
Failing to do so might result in very serious consequences. According to Sophos, Ikee.B is “designed to connect to a server in Lithuania and to follow orders from remote hackers.” It can find vulnerable iPhones on a wide range of IP addresses, including IPs in several different countries, for example the Netherlands, Portugal, Australia, Austria, and Hungary. Furthermore, it changes the root password on the iPhone to “ohshit” (as discovered by Paul Ducklin, head of technology in Sophos Asia Pacific.)
Users who haven’t jailbroken their iPhone or haven’t installed the SSH application are not affected by this vulnerability.
What if you had a nickle for every time you heard: "I have the perfect idea for a great application!"? It’s the buzz on the street. The iPhone has created unprecedented excitement and innovation from people both inside and outside the software development community. Still for those outside the development world, the process is a bit of a mystery.
This how-to guide is supposed to walk you through the steps to make your idea for an iPhone app a reality. This post presents various ideas, techniques, tips, and resources that may come in handy if you are planning on creating your first iPhone application.
1. Have an idea – a Good Idea
How do you know if your idea is a good one? The first step is to even care if your idea is solid; and the second step is to answer the question does it have at least one of the indicators of success?
Does your app solve a unique problem? Before the light bulb was invented, somebody had to shout out “Man, reading by candlelight sucks!” Figure out what sucks, and how your app can make the life of its user more comfortable.
Does the app serve a specific niche? Though there aren’t any stats on the App Store search, the usage of applications is certainly growing with the explosion of App Store inventory. Find a niche with ardent fans (pet lovers, for example) and create an app that caters to a specific audience.
Does it make people laugh? This is a no-brainer. If you can come up with something funny, you are definitely on the right track and your idea may be the golden one. Heck, I hit a red “do not press” button for 5 minutes yesterday.
Are you building a better wheel? Are there existing successful apps that lack significant feature enhancements? Don’t be satisfied with just a wine list, give sommeliers a way to talk to their fans!
Will the app be highly interactive? Let’s face it, most of us have the attention span of a flea. Successful games and utilities engage the user by requiring action!
Action: Does your app fall in to one of these categories? If yes, it’s just about time to prepare the necessary tools.
2. Tools Checklist
Below is a list of items you’ll need (*starred items are required, the rest are nice-to-have’s):
download and install the latest version of the iPhone SDK if you don’t already have it.
a spiral bound notebook*
Action: Load up on your required supplies.
3. What Are You Really Good At?
What skills do you bring to the table? Are you a designer whose brain objects to Objective C? A developer who can’t design their way out of a paper sack? Or maybe you are neither, but an individual with an idea you’d like to take to the market? Designing a successful iPhone application is a lot like starting a small business. You play the role of Researcher, Project Manager, Accountant, Information Architect, Designer, Developer, Marketer and Advertiser – all rolled into one.
Remember what all good entrepreneurs know – it takes a team to make a product successful. Don’t get me wrong, you certainly can do it all. But you can also waste a lot of time, energy and sanity in the process. Don’t go crazy, reference the checklist below and ask yourself: What roles are the best fit for you to lead? Then find other talented people to fill in the gaps. The infusion of additional ideas can only enrich the product!
Skills Checklist
Ability to Discern what works/doesn’t work in existing iPhone Apps
Market research
Outlining App Functionality (Sitemap Creation)
Sketching
GUI Design
Programming (Objective C, Cocoa) (we assume here that we are creating a native application)
App Promotion and Marketing
Remember to have contractors sign your non-disclosure agreement. Having a contract in place tells your contractor "I’m a professional that takes my business and this project seriously. Now don’t go runnin’ off with this idea."
Action: Select skills that are a good fit for you to lead. For those roles where you cannot lead, hire professionals.
4. Do Your Homework: Market Research
Market research is a fancy way of saying "Look at what other people are doing and don’t make the same mistakes." Learn from the good, bad and ugly in the App Store. Coming up with creative solutions in the app concept development and design starts with analyzing other (maybe similar) applications. Even if you encounter a lot of poorly designed apps, your mind will reference these examples of what not to do.
Action: Answer these questions:
What problem does your app solve?
What products have you seen that perform a similar task?
How do successful apps present information to users?
How can you build on what works and make it unique?
What value does your app bring to your audience?
5. Know the iPhone/iPod Touch UI
If you want to create an iPhone app, you need to understand the capabilities of the iPhone and its interface. Can you shoot a .45 caliber bullet out of your iPhone? No. Can you shoot videos? Yes!
The good news is that you don’t have to memorize the encyclopedic Apple User Interface Guidelines to get a feel for what works and what doesn’t in iPhone Apps. Download and play with as many apps as you can, and think about what functionality you want to include in your product.
Take note of:
How do well-designed apps navigate from screen to screen?
How do they organize information?
How MUCH information do they present to the user?
How do they take advantage of the iPhone’s unique characteristics: the accelerometer, swiping features, pinch, expand and rotate functions?
Action: Download the Top 10 apps in every category and play with all of them. Review the Apple Guidelines for UI design and list at least 5 features you’d like to incorporate into your app.
6. Determine "Who will use your app?"
We assume here that you’ve already determined that your app will bring value and that you will have a raging audience for your app. Well, fine, they are raging fans, but who are they really? What actions will they take to achieve their goals within the app?
If it’s a game, maybe they want to beat their high score. Or perhaps they are a first time player – how will their experience differ from someone who is getting a nice case of brain-rot playing your game all day?
If it’s a utility app, and your audience wants to find a coffee shop quickly, what actions will they take within the app to find that coffee shop? Where are they when they’re looking for coffee? Usually in the car! Do present an interface that requires multiple taps, reading and referencing a lot? Probably not! This is how thinking about how real-life intersects design.
Action: Line item out the different types of people who will use your app. You can even name them if you want to make the scenarios you draw out as real as possible.
7. Sketch Out Your Idea
And by "sketch" I mean literally sketch. Line out a 9-rectangle grid on an 8.5 x 11 sheet of paper and get to sketching!
Ask yourself:
What information does each screen need to present?
How can we take the user from point A to point B to point C?
How should elements on the screen be proportioned or sized in relation to each other (i.e. is this thing even tap-able?)
Thumbnailing your ideas on paper can push your creativity far beyond where your imagination might stagnate working in an sketching application! You can also buy the iPhone Stencil Kit to quickly sketch out iPhone UI prototypes on paper.
Action: Create at least one thumbnail page of your application per screen. Experiment with various navigational schemes, the text you put on buttons, and how screens connect. If you want to transfer your sketches into digital format, iPlotz is a good tool to check out.
8. Time for Design
If you are a designer, download the iPhone GUI Photoshop template or iPhone PSD Vector Kit. Both are collections of iPhone GUI elements that will save you a lot of time in getting started. If you’ve solidified your layout during sketching, drawing up the screens will be less of a layout exercise and more about the actual design of the app.
If you are not a designer, hire one! It’s like hiring an electrician to do electrical work. You can go to Home Depot and buy tools to try it yourself, but who wants to risk getting zapped? If you’ve followed steps 1–3, you’ll have everything you need for a designer to get started.
When looking for a designer, try to find someone who has experience designing for mobile devices. They may have some good feedback and suggested improvements for your sketches. A few places to look for designers: Coroflot, Crowdspring, eLance. When posting your job offer, be very specific about your requirements, and also be ready to review a lot of portfolios.
Action: If you are a designer, get started in Photoshop. If you are not a designer, start interviewing designers for your job.
9. Programming
Even though this how-to is sequential, it’s a good idea to get a developer on board at the same time when you line up design resources. Talking with a developer sooner than later will help you scope out a project that is technically feasible and within your budget.
If you are a Objective C/Cocoa developer crack, open Xcode and get started! A few forums to join if you haven’t already:
If you are not a developer, you know what to do – find one! Specify the type of app you want to produce – whether it is a game, utility or anything else. Each type usually requires a different coding skill set. A few places to look for developers: Odesk, iPhoneFreelancer, eLance and any of the forums listed above.
10. Submit your application to Apple Store
OK, so how do you submit your application to Apple Store now? The process of compiling your application and publishing the binary for iTunes Connect can be difficult for anyone unfamiliar with XCode. If you are working with a developer, ask them to help you:
Create your Certificates
Define your App ID’s
Create your Distribution Provisioning Profile
Compile the application
Upload to iTunes Connect
Action: If you are a developer, map out a development timeline and get started. If you are not a developer, start interviewing devs for your job.
11. Promote Your App
If a tree falls in the middle of the woods and nobody was around to hear it does it make a sound? Apps can sit in the store unnoticed very easily. Don’t let this happen to you. Be ready with a plan to market your app. In fact, be ready with many plans to market your app. Be ready to experiment, some ideas will work, others won’t.
Strategies for maintaining/boosting app sales:
Incorporating social media. If your users make the high score on his or her favorite game, it is a good idea to make it easy for the user to post it to Facebook or Twitter. Think about how your app can incorporate social media and build that functionality into your app. At a minimum, set up a fan page for your app on Facebook and Twitter and use them as platforms to communicate with your users and get feedback on your app.
Pre-launch promotion. Start building buzz about your app before it has launched. E-mail people who write about things that relate to your app and see if they will talk up the upcoming release of your app.
Plan for multiple releases. Don’t pack your app with every single feature you want to offer in the very first release. Make your dream list for the app and make sure that the app is designed to incorporate all of the features at some time in the future. Then periodically drop new versions of the app to boost app store sales.
Action: Make a list of 20 promotional strategies that target the audience for your app. Take action on them yourself or hire someone who can!
11. Stay Focused and Don’t Give Up!
It’s easy when you are working on your first app to get all AppHappy, dreaming up a zillion new app-ideas. Dream, but don’t get sidetracked by new ideas. Your first app needs to make a big splash and getting involved in too many projects at once can dilute your passion for making your first application a success.
Earlier this year, Apple submitted a spec to the IETF for live streaming multimedia content over HTTP, leading some to suspect that a live video protocol would soon be making its way to iPhone and iPod devices. With the new 3.0 version of the iPhone OS, that HTTP live streaming protocol became a reality, and while there were already a handful of live video apps on the iPhone, they’re presumably now a lot better.
This list is a round up of some of the live TV options available on the iPhone. Most of these apps work best over wifi (and a few won’t work at all over 3G), and generally live streaming is a big drain on battery life. Still, being able to catch up with live television or out-of-market broadcasts when you’re not near your TV is a great option for iPhone owners to have.
Available in both free and paid options, netTV offers live streaming access to over 200 channels from around the world, including a larger-than-usual number of channels from the US. The quality is generally pretty good, though I did experience some issues when first connecting to a channel, and of course it varies from channel to channel (depending on the source of the video stream).
TVUPlayer plays live TV for over 300 channels, though only a handful of channels broadcast at the right bandwidth to play well. Some of the video feeds come in choppy or with audio syncing issues (I actually couldn’t get audio to work at all), a result of the iPhone’s hardware limitations according to the developers. Still, the app offers an impressive line up of live international television channels, even if many of them are strange.
WorldView Live isn’t exactly TV, but it is live streaming video. The app provides access to thousands of live web cams from around the world. Only a handful (about 60, according to the developer) are actually live video, but the app does offer an interesting, if voyeuristic, view of the world for armchair travelers.
The $2.99 Television application isn’t live TV, but it offers access to an impressive line up of television video catch-up services. The app, which only works over wifi, lets users watch on-demand video from HBO, ESPN, NBC, FOX, CBS, Comedy Central, CNN, Sky and more.
The live application from France’s channel 24 news offers live, video-on-demand streaming from the network in French, English, and Arabic over wifi, 3G, and even Edge! Of course, the video will be pretty choppy and low quality over Edge, but it’s unique among live video applications for even offering that option at all.
Al Jazeera’s iPhone app, from Livestation (), has 24/7 live streaming of its English-language news channel over wifi and 3G. The quality is very impressive and the app is under active development — so bugs don’t stay unsquashed for very long. If you are streaming over 3G, though, be aware that every 10 minutes you watch takes about 7.2mb of bandwidth, which is important to know if you’re not on an unlimited data plan.
Livestation offers a live streaming video app for BBC World News, as well, but the €3.99 application is only available in the UK (so I wasn’t able to try it out).
Major League Baseball’s MLB.com At Bat 2009 application may be pricey at $9.99, but it’s well worth it for die-hard fans that want to keep up with their team or out-of-market teams on the road. The app offers live audio broadcasts of every game to all owners of the app, and two games are offered over live video each night. For MLB.tv subscribers, however, every game can be watched live via the iPhone app (excepting those blacked out due to local market restrictions). The quality of the video streamed by the app is very impressive, especially over wifi.
The last of the pro golf tour’s yearly majors, the PGA Championship, is next week at Hazeltine National Golf Club and the Professional Golf Association is making sure everyone can watch the tournament no matter where they are. The app gives users access to live video streams of four marquee groups (think big name players like Tiger Woods, Phil Mickelson, and Padraig Harrington) on Thursday and Friday, and two more groups on the weekend. You can also watch the entire field play through the course’s par 3 holes during the whole tournament.
This is actually the third live video app the PGA has put out this year. They also had iPhone apps for tracking the Masters tournament and the US Open, and in March, CBS put out a March Madness application with live video of the year-end NCAA college basketball tournament. We’d expect both organizations to do the same in 2010.
If you like Norwegian football, then the free TV 2 Sporten app is for you. Jam-packed with live news and score updates, the app also has a live video section with goals and other game highlights. Of course, it will all make a lot more sense if you speak Norwegian.
