vinnycoyne.com

Display ads - waste of money. The return on banner/text ads is very disappointing. Google has the best CTR. Facebook are well-targeted, but are expensive (if your app sells at less than €3, then it might not be worth your while). BuySellAds allow you to purchase ad-space on some popular blogs - the service itself is great, but sites I’ve advertised on didn’t give a good CTR.

Journalists - big blogs (Techcrunch, etc) are worth contacting but don’t expect to get featured, unless you’re VC backed and have raised a bunch of money. Focus on smaller, niche blogs - for example, a Russian iOS blog caught wind of a Muud.io sale and subsequently sales spiked 400% for couple of days. Local journos are usually eager to help out too.

App review sites - a handful of the bigger ones are worth contacting. A personal email works best if possible - press releases are usually ignored. Most are a waste of a promo code however.

Apple - extremely difficult to get noticed. Build a great app and you’ve a better chance, but don’t count on getting featured. If you have any contacts in Apple, it’s worth getting in touch - you might at least get your app in front of the iTunes editorial team for review (even so, you’re still not guaranteed placement).

Twitter, Facebook, Google+ - Worth maintaining a presence. The more active you are the better. Twitter is #1 referral stream for visitors to the Muud.io website.

If you’ve never coded before, have a look first at Visual Basic, then C++ or C#. You can get Microsoft’s tools online for free. Just do a Google for Visual Studio. There are loads of tutorials online for VB and C# - I’d recommend trying out the latter as it’s probably more relevant (C# can be used for Windows Phone programming). This also lets you try your hand at programming without having to buy a Mac.

Once you have a bit of coding under your belt, you’ll be ready to move on to Objective-C, which is the iOS & Mac programming language. As you can guess, it’s an enhanced version of C, but it looks quite different. You’ll need a Mac for this, but you might as well go ahead and buy one - you’ll thank me later :)

Apple supply a huge amount of sample apps with the iOS SDK. All you need to do is fire up Xcode, click on Help and then on Documentation and API. There should be a link to Sample code somewhere on the main page of the docs. Xcode is available on the Mac App Store for free.

Apple also offer video tutorials on iTunes U. Check out the Stanford iOS course on iTunes U while you’re there. Jeff Lamarche’s blog is a great resource also.

To be honest, you could read and read, but the best way to learn is to download the Apple samples and tinker with them until you get a feel for how they work. Try out code, break your code, and learn how to fix it… Unfortunately it all takes a bit of time, but it’s worth it once you get your first app running on-device.

Some books:

Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X

Cocoa/Mac focused, but a great entry-level book)

http://www.amazon.com/Cocoa-Programming-Mac-OS-3rd/dp/0321503619

Beginning iPhone Development

http://www.amazon.com/Beginning-iPhone-Development-Exploring-SDK/dp/1430216263/

If you haven’t yet heard about my new app, Muud.io, here’s a little bit about it:

Muud.io is a music app for iPhone & iPod touch that can recommend playlists, based on a given mood.

Simply pick a mood, and we’ll build a playlist for you, using the music you love.

You can view a demo video (desktop-only for now) and screenshots over at the Muud.io site.

Muud.io is available on the App Store (and is currently on sale at half-price for a limited time).

UPDATE: Apple have marked this feature enhancement as a duplicate of 7040203

Filed as Radar # 10286028

Currently, apps have to jump into the iTunes Store app on iOS when prompting the user to purchase songs & video.

The user taps a “Buy in iTunes” button in the third-party app. This jumps into the iTunes app. The user must then tap the Buy button in iTunes and then enter their Apple ID password.

To reduce the number of user-actions and potentially increase on-device music purchases, Apple could create an in-app purchase API for music, similar to standard in-app purchases.

A native search API for iTunes could be created, which would mimic the current JSON API. A standard system UIViewController could be used to display search results and handle the purchasing experience. Songs downloaded would be added to the user’s Music / Video apps.

I found these Muud.io prototype screenshots while migrating to my new MacBook Air.

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If you’ve been following Apple news recently, it’s likely that you’ve heard the announcement that, as part of iOS 5, Apple will be introducing their own free iOS-to-iOS messaging service, called iMessage. 

iMessage is integrated directly into the Messages app on iPhone, and is also available on the iPad and iPod touch. 

If you’re an EirText user, this service may sound very similar to the EirText Push service that’s available in both the iOS and Mac versions of EirText (the latter being send-only). It is more or less identical. The obvious benefit is the integration with the Messages app - you’ll no longer have to jump back and forth between apps when sending and receiving push and SMS messages. In fact, iMessage will even determine whether to use SMS or push automatically - it’s seamless. 

So, what does this mean for EirText and it’s push service? Does this signal the end of webtext and push messaging apps?

In short, no, I don’t think so, and here’s why:

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