When in the course of human events a large company drives up to your house with a dump truck full of money, nobel ideals such as independence lose out to more visceral notions like greed, entitlement, and living the American dream. As an independent iPhone developer, how could I not accept the cash, build a mansion, and fill a swimming pool with Cristal?
- Jeff Scott
As the end of the year approaches, small business owners should start thinking about one of the less pleasant aspects of entrepreneurship: Filing taxes. Tax Day might not be until April 15, but the sooner you get a head start on your payroll and small business taxes, the better off you’ll be.
- Jeff Scott
During the past few weeks we’ve been publishing our “Best of 2009″ series in which we’ve shown you the best WordPress themes, fonts, icons, and Photoshop Tutorials. In this article, our focus is on jQuery. Over the past couple of years jQuery has been growing in popularity, which means more and more plugins are being created to make web designers’ lives easier. Here are our favorites from 2009.
- Jeff Scott
After what seemed like an endless parade of media stories highlighting the early “lottery winners” in the App Store, the inevitable backlash is now in motion. People are now starting to see the App Store as more of a game of craps than a gold rush. While craps is probably closer to the truth, you can significantly swing your chances with some smart plays based on knowledge of the system, and a dollop of brute force.
- Jeff Scott
I recently sat down (virtually) with iPhone application developer Arend Hintze to do a Q&A his approach to programming. Here are his unedited responses to my inquiries
- Jeff Scott
A year and a half after Apple launched its iPhone App Store, there are over 100,000 apps available, the Store has already seen more than 2 billion total downloads, and the App Store is now being discussed as Apple's most important invention ever. Those staggering numbers could inspire even the least tech-savvy business owner to hop on the iPhone-app-bandwagon. Hundreds of small firms and freelancers are now specializing in building apps specifically for the iPhone. These developers take your vision, combine it with their knowledge of Apple's platform, and come up with a program that should create a compelling and interactive experience for your clients.
- Jeff Scott
At the recent GCAP conference, our CEO Rob Murray gave a presentation targeted at game studios, about our journey from being a pure work-for-hire studio, to self-publishing our own titles Flight Control and Real Racing. We’re very grateful to Souri from Tsumea for videoing the presentation and making it available on YouTube, check it out below and make sure you visit Tsumea for more videos from the conference including Tim Stellmach’s keynote!
- Jeff Scott
From the moment of its launch App Store was traditionally considered to be a great market giving opportunities to earn money even for those who can invest nothing but just ideas, skills and talents. We heard a lot of fairy-tale stories when a young talented unknown developer had prospered in one moment just by suggesting an unusual and high-quality product. These success stories attracted a lot of developers to the iPhone applications market. And as a result the rules of the game have changed.
- Jeff Scott
John was particularly interested in the responsiveness and native-like interaction of flinging through long lists, the fact the address bar is completely hidden, and the possibility of having a toolbar fixed to the top of the page. PastryKit makes all of these things possible and implements them better than anything else. And the result is nearly indistinguishable from a native app. Here’s a video I made of the iPhone user guide in action, powered by PastryKit. This is running on Safari – it’s not a native app!
- Jeff Scott
Probably one of the most useful sets of icons you can get your designer hands on. This massive collection of vector symbolism has been crafted over several years and cover themes like; web, communication, navigation, structure, files, devices, tools and just general sleek rounded awesomeness. But really, with this base set of shapes you can create almost anything. I find myself using these daily
- Jeff Scott
Web developers have gone to great lengths to create Web-based applications that can match, or at least mimic, the look and feel of native iPhone apps. The "look" part isn't all that difficult to accomplish with some clever CSS tricks, but the "feel" part has been mostly impossible to replicate, due to limitations in MobileSafari. But now it looks like Apple has already solved that problem with an as-yet-unreleased framework called PastryKit.
- Jeff Scott
IPhone app developer Tapulous says its sales have approached $1 million a month, providing fresh evidence of the growing success of start-ups designing programs for Apple Inc's mobile device.
- Jeff Scott
Today I interviewed the cofounders of Nextstop http://www.nextstop.com about their mobile strategy. They decided to do a web app instead of building a native iPhone app and here's their reasons that they chose H
- Jeff Scott
Carl Carter reveals the unbridled hell of getting your game published - and noticed - on Apple's iPhone App Store “You should write an iPhone App,” suggested my friend. It was mid-2008 and Apple had just announced it was making the iPhone SDK available to the public. The prospect of tapping into the App Store was tempting: a massive distribution network with millions of potential customers and generous terms to boot, with Apple declaring that it would pass on 70% of turnover to developers.
- Jeff Scott
[Freeverse designer and programmer Justin Ficarrotta recounts what went right and what went wrong with the development of the iPhone game Top Gun -- particularly focusing on how fans should always be in mind when working on a licensed game.] When we, at Freeverse, got the opportunity to create Top Gun and Days of Thunder for Paramount Digital Entertainment, we knew we had the right franchises to create something really fun and awesome. Top Gun has become especially popular, so this is a closer look into how the game came to be.
- Jeff Scott
One of the many companies which has been working out how to combine its existing mobile business with the likes of iPhone during 2009 has been US-headquartered, Russian and Belarusian developer-centred PressOK Entertainment. It recently announced its iPhone game Finger Physics had been downloaded 1.9 million times in terms of free and paid games.
- Jeff Scott
I've been unhappy with every single piece of software I've ever released. Partly because, like many software developers, I'm a perfectionist. And then, there are inevitably … problems:
- Jeff Scott
How do you educate a generation of students eternally distracted by the internet, cellphones and video games? Easy. You enable them by handing out free iPhones — and then integrating the gadget into your curriculum. That’s the idea Abilene Christian University has to refresh classroom learning. Located in Texas, the private university just finished its first year of a pilot program, in which 1,000 freshman students had the choice between a free iPhone or an iPod Touch.
- Jeff Scott
How do you educate a generation of students eternally distracted by the internet, cellphones and video games? Easy. You enable them by handing out free iPhones — and then integrating the gadget into your curriculum. That’s the idea Abilene Christian University has to refresh classroom learning. Located in Texas, the private university just finished its first year of a pilot program, in which 1,000 freshman students had the choice between a free iPhone or an iPod Touch.
- Jeff Scott
At last count, there are more than 106,000 active iPhone apps ready for download (according to 148Apps.biz, a site that monitors Apple's candy store)
- Jeff Scott
I’m not sure if you’ve ever had a look at the prices on some non-stock photography sites (pictures of Gummy bears for $769.00 anyone?), but they reach far beyond the budget of the typical designer/developer. However, many places online allow you to obtain high-quality stock photos for free, giving the average starving artist a chance to create wonderful works of art/design without having to use next month’s rent on stock photos.
- Jeff Scott
I often hear questions about using navigation controllers (UINavigationController) and tab controllers (UITabBarController) in the same app. Xcode has a project template for a “Navigation-based Application” which uses a UITableViewController under a navigation controller and for a “Tab Bar application” that creates a tab bar with two regular UIViewControllers that you can switch between. There is no template that creates a tab bar application with navigation based tabs like the iPod app.
- Jeff Scott
This won’t apply to many other people, but it’s worth jotting some quick notes on, as it gave me a bit of a panic moment when I spotted it last night. I may have mentioned somewhere before that our Apps needed a “Retro Dreamer” keyword to show up on searches in the App Store, since the description and copyright fields in the App Store aren’t indexed. Sneezies and Eyegore’s Eye Blast are published by Chillingo and Clickgamer respectively, so there’s no obvious way to show them together on a single page in the store without adding a shared keyword.
- Jeff Scott