Chili Dawg Blog

Egg! Updated

2010-08-18T10:06:00.001-04:00

After incorporating iAds in the latest version of Egg!, people that weren't on iOS4 were experiencing crashes. I have since fixed this issue and so regardless of what iOS you are running, Egg! will run without crashing. Thanks Mike Park for first bringing this to my attention (or should I thank Lydia?). Also, Apple seemed to push this update through much faster than normal. Thanks Apple.

Posted via email from Chili Dawg Software

Egg! 1.2.1, now with iAds

2010-07-16T10:50:00.001-04:00

I finally got around to updating Egg! last week to use Apple's new iAds. It's supposed to generate more revenue for developers and make developing free apps profitable. We'll see how that goes. If you haven't already downloaded Egg!, now is your chance.

Next up are graphic improvements to support iPhone4 displays, if I can ever get my hands on an iPhone4...

Also, a friend was telling her friend about Egg! So her friends downloads it and says "my kid loves it." It turns out it wasn't even my app, but a copycat app. Now I know what the original creator of the fart app feels like! Hahaha.

Posted via email from Chili Dawg Software

Egg⁴! sneak preview

2010-05-11T00:09:00.002-04:00

It's not out yet, but it should be out any time now. Here's a little sneak preview.

FlashCardz 2.0 & QuoteKeeper 2.0 have been approved

2010-05-07T14:51:00.001-04:00

I received e-mail from Apple today, that FlashCardz 2.0 & QuoteKeeper 2.0 have been approved. So look for them on the App Store. These new versions have much better stability than the previous versions (no more random crashes). If you're a developer and are waiting for your apps to get reviewed, send an e-mail to the App Review team and they will likely review your app faster (this has been my experience anyway).

A new feature in both of these, includes the ability to hide individual cards or quotes.

For a student this means that you can build up a stack of cards throughout the semester, then after each exam, you can hide the cards from that exam, but still have them around for the final. This also allows you to hide cards that have memorized to focus more on the ones that you haven't.

Posted via email from Chili Dawg Software

QuoteKeeper updated...

2010-05-03T01:15:00.001-04:00

Capping off a productive weekend. I was able to update QuoteKeeper to benefit from some of the common changes in FlashCardz. So another app is off for review. In particular, the data handling has much greater stability; so no more random crashes. Also, added the ability to hide individual quotes from the stack (similar to FlashCardz)

Posted via email from Chili Dawg Software

FlashCardz 2.0 out the door

2010-05-02T12:23:00.001-04:00

So I spent the weekend looking into some stability problems I was seeing with FlashCardz. In my frustration, I completely gutted the data handling portion of the code and reworked it. This took most of the day Saturday, and I was still having problems getting things working properly. I revisited it Sunday morning and got it to work. Since it is such vast improvement over the previous version, this new release will be 2.0. In addition to the stability improvements, I incorporated a change that will allow users to hide certain cards in the stack. I believe that this feature will greatly improve the usability of the app for users.

FlashCardz 2.0 has been submitted and is waiting for review.

Posted via email from Chili Dawg Software

Egg⁴! is coming soon...

2010-04-30T01:46:00.001-04:00

Egg⁴! is on it's way to the Apple App Store. I was able to get it in working order this week and just submitted it a few minutes ago. So, it should be up some time in the next week, if all goes well.

Egg⁴! is the iPad friendly version of Egg!, and lets you race against your friends and family members to see who can break open the Egg⁴! first. It is a universal binary, so it will run on both the iPad and the iPhone/iPod Touch. It will look like an ad-free version of Egg! on the iPhone/iPod Touch, but the real fun is on the iPad. In the U.S., Egg⁴! will be $0.99.

On a side note, the original Egg! has been well received world-wide. It reached #1 in Indonesia, Israel, & the Philippines; #2 in Costa Rica; #3 in Poland; and #5 in the UAE. I can only hope, Egg⁴! will be as well received.

Posted via email from Chili Dawg Software

How much $ from iAds?

2010-04-29T11:56:00.001-04:00

So the big question that I've had since iAds was announced was, "How much $ will developers get for using iAds?" Because, if it is not more than what they currently get, there's not much incentive to switch to iAds. A recent MacRumors article says that Apple is charging advertisers $0.01 for each Ad impression and $2.00 for each click. With this information, we can get an idea of what this means for developers.

Taking some data from my Egg! app which is ad-supported by the banner Ads at the top, this is what I have for the past 30 days.

209,697 impressions & 6,507 clicks for a click through rate (CTR) of 3.1%

To get the revenue from these numbers using iAd prices:

209,697 ($0.01) + 6,507 ($2) = $15,110

Of this total, Apple takes 40% and developers take 60%, so:

$15,110 (60%) = $9066

If the numbers being reported are correct, then this is a significant increase over the $158.21 that I actually received (or will receive) from my current advertisers. What would I give up if I switched to iAds? Analytics & custom ads that promote my other apps. What do I gain, over 57 times my current ad revenue. This could be a real game changer. I guess now would be a good time to start integrating iAds into Egg!.

My calculations assume that I will get the same fill rate and CTR that I get now. This may be affected by how many advertisers actually sign on with Apple. If only a few companies sign on, then people will only see those same advertisements over and over again and the CTR will likely drop. If you notice, the revenue from clicks makes up 86% of the total revenue. With impressions alone, I will still get close to 8 times my current revenue; $1257 vs. $158. Not bad at all.

Posted via email from Chili Dawg Software

Fun w/UIView Animations

2010-04-15T01:03:00.001-04:00

I'm in the process of creating a new version of Egg! for the iPad. It's not a straight port where I just resize images, etc. I'm taking the opportunity to redesign the code & underlying classes, as well as, adding additional functionality specific to the iPad. One of the interesting bugs that cropped up in the process had to do with UIView animations and their transformation matrices. If you've taken a course in Matrix Math, some of this will sound vaguely familiar.

All UIViews have a transform property that you can set, that will be applied to that view.

UIView *myView = [[UIView alloc] init];
myView.transform = CGAffineTransformIdentity;

Here I set the transformation matrix of the view to the Identity matrix.

The CoreGraphics API on the iPhone has a bunch of functions that will create a new transformation matrix and let you apply those transformations to your view. These are things like:

CGAffineTransformMakeScale, CGAffineTransformMakeRotation, CGAffineTransformMakeTranslation, etc

You use these, when you are creating an initial transformation matrix for a particular view. So in my code, I have a view that I want to rotate. The code will look like this:

UIView *myView = [[UIView alloc] init];
myView.transform = CGAffineTransformMakeRotation(M_PI);

Later on, if I want to apply more transformations to the UIView, I will use:

CGAffineTransformScale, CGAffineTransformRotate, CGAffineTransformTranslate, etc

Notice that these do not have "Make", because we are not creating a new transformation matrix, but instead we are operating on an existing transformation matrix. So now, I can translate my UIView with this:

myView.transform = CGAffineTransformTranslate(myView.transform, 25, 75);

To animate these transforms, I can put them in an animation block:

[UIView beginAnimations: @"rotate" context: nil];
[UIView setAnimationDuration: 2.0];
myView.transform = CGAffineTransformMakeRotation(M_PI);
[UIView commitAnimations];

This will rotate my view 180 degrees over 2 seconds.

If you don't use the correct functions, you will likely see some strange behavior and spend a lot of time wondering why things aren't working. This is what happened to me. In my particular case, I was using a "CATransform3DMakeTranslation" where I should have been using a "CATransform3DTranslate".

Once iPhone OS 4 comes out, I will have to redo the animations in my code, because, according to the documentation, "Use of this method is discouraged in iPhone OS 4.0 and later. You should use the block-based animation methods instead".

Posted via email from Chili Dawg Software

iAds

2010-04-11T16:30:00.001-04:00

So one of the big news items last week in the Apple world was the introduction of iPhoneOS 4. A big part of Steve Job's presentation had to do with mobile advertising, and in particular Apple's solution iAd. When I was releasing my apps, I did some research into different advertising platforms because I wanted to release a free app that would generate ad revenue for me. I eventually decided to go with Moblix and have been very pleased with the developer support and the analytics that they provide me.

Apple's iAd model gives 60% of the revenue to developers and they keep 40%. Will I make more money using iAd or sticking with Moblix? I don't know yet. I guess it depends on what Apple charges advertisers. If I do make more, how much more? Steve didn't mention any support for analytics that tell me how many people downloaded my app, how many people clicked the ads, or how much ad revenue I made on a particular day. Another drawback is that there didn't seem to be any built in support for custom advertising. At the present, I have my own ads promoting some of my other apps; they show up 2-5% of the time.

For the time being, I'm not ready to jump on the iAd bandwagon. That may change if moving to iAds means 2 or 3 times more Ad revenue, but it will still be hard to give up the analytics and custom ads.

But Steve Jobs is right about one thing, a lot of mobile ads are garbage. Hopefully, ad agencies will create more compelling, higher quality ads.

Posted via email from Chili Dawg Software

1 handed iPad typing technique

2010-04-07T18:34:00.001-04:00

Download now or watch on posterous

IMG_0084.MOV (2850 KB)

Posted via email from Chili Dawg Software

Egg 1.1 has been approved!

2010-04-02T17:22:00.002-04:00

Just got the e-mail from Apple. Egg! 1.1 has been approved, so it should hit the AppStore within the next 24 hours. I submitted it Monday night and it was in the "Waiting for Review" state the whole week. So earlier today I sent an e-mail to them asking them to review it before Easter. I said something to the effect, "I know everyone is probably busy reviewing iPad apps, but it will only take 2 minutes to review my app and I want it to get out before Easter." I don't know if sending such e-mails have any effect on the response time. It's very likely that my app finally made it to the top of the queue, but either way it's good news.
I think I mentioned in an earlier post the new button for getting new eggs. Another change is that once you have revealed what's inside, if you continue to tap, you will hear the sound effect again. This was not possible with the way I was handling sounds in version 1.0. I also fixed some visual glitches related to the advertising banner on top.
I hope you enjoy the changes and have a Happy Easter!

Posted via email from Chili Dawg Software

7 months later...

2010-04-02T01:28:00.003-04:00

I launched Egg! roughly 7 months ago and lately I've been noticing a spike in the ad revenues, so I decided to dig into the data that Apple provides to see what's been happening. After some hard-core Excel work, this what I've come up with. As you can see, the number of downloads has spiked dramatically in March. The total number of downloads world-wide stands at 37,087.

Here's a breakdown of the top 11 countries...

It's no surprise to me that the U.S. is first, but what is surprising is that the Philippines is #2, especially since 96.9% of that is from last month (March 2010). Prior to last month, the Philippines would not make the top 10. The same thing goes for Indonesia, Israel, Poland & UAE. All these countries had huge spikes this past month. Japan's big month was in February with nearly 80% of their total coming in that month. The UK, Germany & Brazil (#12) are pretty steady from month to month.

So here is the ad revenue for the month of March. The blue is revenue, the red line is the click-through-rate on the ads.

I have no idea what the next month will hold, but hopefully this exponential trend will continue, and people all around the world will enjoy Egg!

This is the complete list of countries in order of # of downloads (78 total):

United States, Philippines, Israel, Indonesia, United Arab Emiriates, United Kingdom, Poland, Singapore, Germany, Japan, Canada, Brazil, Costa Rica, Korean, Lebanon, Australia, Netherlands, France, Mexico, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Switzerland, Italy, Taiwan, Thailand, Sweden, Turkey, Spain, Norway, Austria, India, Argentina, Saudi Arabia, Greece, China, Kuwait, Russia, Denmark, Chile, Ireland, Egypt, Belgium, Columbia, Luxembourg, South Africa, Peru, Qatar, Czech Republic, New Zealand, Pakistan, Croatia, Ecuador, Finland, Nicaragua, Romania, Hungary, Portugal, Slovakia, Venezuela, Estonia, Panama, Slovenia, Guatemala, Honduras, Macau, Lithuania, Vietnam, Jordan, Kazakstan, Latvia, Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Sri Lanka, Republic of Moldova, Macedonia, Malta, El Salvador, Uraguay

Posted via email from Chili Dawg Software

Discovered Posterous

2010-03-31T18:50:00.002-04:00

So I discovered Posterous and decided to give it a try to handle my blogging. I started out by importing my old blog posts to it. It think because of the way blogger handles pictures, the layout of the blog posts got messed up. Going forward I don't think this will be a problem because Posterous does a much better job handling images. I'll still keep my Blogger blog, but I'll be using Posterous write the updates.

If you are unfamiliar with Posterous, the great thing about it is that it will update your twitter, Facebook, and blog all at the same time. And to post, all you have to do is send an e-mail. Previously I had to use twitterfeed to post my blog entries to twitter then use something else to get that to update my Facebook status. I don't even remember what I'm using right now to get my twitter to post to Facebook, but I'm trying to find out so I don't get multiple posts for one entry.

This is actually my first test post.

Posted via email from Chili Dawg Software

My Real Job

2010-03-31T16:15:00.001-04:00

Posted via web from Chili Dawg Software

Egg 1.1 coming soon..

2010-03-28T20:42:00.003-04:00

I finally had some time to make some changes to Egg! over the weekend. I submitted version 1.1 to Apple, so hopefully this will go through quickly. The turnaround time for the approval process is supposed to be much shorter than the original 2 week turnaround time. So maybe it will be approved in time for Easter.

I fixed a bug where sometimes you would hear the lion growl by default, this default sound has been changed. Also, I fixed the visual glitch where the background image was running up into the advertising banner.

As for new features, I added a button that will appear when the Egg! is opened, to let you get a new Egg! This is an improvement over the old way of getting a new Egg!, where you would have to keep tapping on the screen. This is what the new button looks like (highlighted state & normal state).

Hopefully, I'll get to push some even bigger improvements soon.

Egg!'s popularity continues to grow. Last time I checked there were over 3832 users. I have no idea how people find it amongst the 160,000 or so apps on the AppStore, but hopefully people will continue to stumble onto it and enjoy it.

Next thing on the to-do list is to update FlashCardz.

Copycat app

2010-02-15T20:44:00.001-05:00

So this weekend when I was showing a friend Egg! on the AppStore I noticed that someone copied my idea and released a copycat app. It's pretty clear that my app was released first. I shouldn't be surprised because this kind of thing happens all the time. But it is kind of sad. I don't know if Apple has anything in their terms of service about this and I don't even know if I want to pursue it. I guess if it was costing me millions of dollars in lost revenue that would be a different story.

I've made a commitment to donate all ad revenue from Egg! to organizations or individuals in need, so this copycat app doesn't really affect me one way or another. It is just sad that someone would take your original idea and pass it off as their own.

On an unrelated note, I'm away from my desktop so I'm writing and posting this entry completely from my iPhone.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Fiscal Year 2009

2010-01-28T15:37:00.002-05:00

$56.93 This is how much I've made in app sales for the past 6 months on FlashCardz & QuoteKeeper.

For the most part this is done with very minimal advertising. The majority of which come from the custom ads for chilidawgsoftware in Egg! (my free app).

As you may know, I also have free versions of both FlashCardz and QuoteKeeper that serve ads and generate revenue from ad clicks. So over the same 6 month period QuoteKeeper Free has generated $56.94 and FlashCardz Free brought in $15.00 for a combined total of $71.94.

One of the questions that I had at the beginning of all this was whether or not I would make more money with ad-supported free apps or from traditional paid app sales. The final answer is IT DEPENDS.

Depends? Depends on what? Well, I think it depends on the type of application. I made more $ from regular app sales on FlashCardz vs. the ad-supported version (more than double). I attribute this to the fact that people who use FlashCardz are most likely using it to study for something, so seeing ads at the top is distracting. So the demand for the paid version is higher than the ad-supported version of FlashCardz. The usage of the free version is actually very low.

However, the ad-supported (free) version of QuoteKeeper made more $ than the paid version even though the paid version was available more than a month earlier. In fact, the ad-supported version of QuoteKeeper more than doubled the revenue of the paid version. My view of this is that ads are more tolerable in QuoteKeeper because people are using it more casually.

What about Egg!? It is by far the most popular app. The ad revenue over the past 6 month period is $128.72; this accounts for 1/2 of my total revenues.

Although, QuoteKeeper and FlashCardz are valuable to people in their respective niches, Egg! seems to be more universally popular. Over the last half of 2009, a total of 3,258 people have downloaded Egg!.

At this point, it's about getting noticed. With over 140,000 apps on the app store and more being added every day, its easy to get lost. I consider myself fortunate that I can get people to see my other apps through the custom ads that show up on Egg!. I'm in the process of getting Egg! to update user's Facebook status as a way to generate more exposure. The idea comes from this blog post. Hopefully, by the end of next year (or sooner) we can add a lot of zeroes to the end of these numbers.

If I add up all app sales and all ad revenue, the grand total is $257.59 for the last half of 2009.

Financial Update - End of 2009

2010-01-20T17:30:00.004-05:00

Only posting the unit sales because I think there's a error in the financial reports that are skewing the results. The error in question has to do with the financial report from the Japan AppStore. It lists one sale, but for $81.00. So either the Japanese Yen is doing a lot worse against the dollar than I thought or there was some kind of conversion error. Regardless, this is how the unit sales have been.

As for Egg!, this is what the last 90 days looks like:

The blue bars represent daily revenue and the red line is the click through rate. It's been a while since I checked this, and at that time, I was averaging about $1/day. This has increased a little bit to $1.46/day. Still not enough to retire with.

Unwanted Calls

2010-01-12T14:45:00.002-05:00

Recently, I've been getting some unwanted calls on my iPhone. I went looking for a way to block these calls, but unless you want to pay $4.99/mo there is no good way to do this. After googling around on the internet, I found a workable solution that others may find useful:

The Silent Ringtone

Instead of blocking calls, you can add them to your contacts and set the contact to a silent ringtone.

I created a contact called "Telemarketer" and added the number of the person that has been calling. The great thing is that you can add multiple numbers to the same contact. (I don't know what the limit is, if there is one).

To get a silent ringtone into your iPhone, just google "iphone silent ringtone" and download one. Then drag the ringtone to iTunes and it will be available the next time you synch w/iTunes.

I know this solution has probably been around for a while, but most people don't look for it until they need it.

Working on new features

2009-10-19T13:41:00.001-04:00

I haven't posted in a while so I just wanted to give a little update on what I've been up to. One of a features that a FlashCardz user requested was an option to hide certain cards within a set of flashcards. So I've been working on adding this. When the update becomes available, it will require users to delete their old versions before installing the new one.

The great thing about this is that if you've already learned/memorized a card, but what to keep it in the stack for review later, you will be able to do this. It will let you focus on the cards that you don't know so well, then later bring back all the cards for a final review.

Over the course of a semester, a student can continue to add cards to a set and show only the ones that pertain to the test they are studying for. Then at the end of the semester, they can show all the cards in the set to study for the final exam.

Special thanks to Albert for requesting this feature.

Financial Reports - August

2009-09-24T13:13:00.004-04:00

UPDATE: I posted the data a little early. I have updated the chart to include sales from Great Britain, Australia, Europe, and the rest of the world. Previously, I only had the data from Canada and the U.S.

August numbers are in, and there is an upward trend in units sold for FlashCardz and QuoteKeeper.

If you notice the number of units sold more than doubled compared to July. But it is important to note that July numbers only reflect the last week in July when these apps were released. I was pleasantly surprised to see the numbers for QuoteKeeper. My original thought was that FlashCardz would be much more popular, so it's nice to see QuoteKeeper holding it's own.

As for FlashCardz FREE, the data from Apple for the month of August shows 99 downloads from 12 different countries, the majority of which (81 units) is from the United States. The total number of users is somewhere around 350 which includes September, according to the analytics data I get from mobclix. The great thing about putting your apps on the App Store, is that iPhone users all around the world can download them, and Apple will handle all the currency conversions.

QuoteKeeper FREE was released in September so these results are not available.

By the end of next month, I will be able to compare the revenue from the paid and free versions of FlashCardz. As a reminder, the free version generates revenue from advertisements. The reason for the free version, was to offer people the opportunity to try before they buy. I suspect that the paid version will generate more money in sales than the free version from ads, but that remains to be seen.

Egg! has about 1500 users now, and seems to generate a little less than $1/day. After an initial spike, the number of new users is steadily increasing. My goal is to get to over 100,000 downloads for Egg!

August is the first full month of results up to this point, so comparisons will be more meaningful when I get numbers for September.

New Features Update

2009-09-23T12:09:00.002-04:00

Over the weekend, new versions of QuoteKeeper & FlashCardz were approved. These include much requested features that I will highlight here.

1. Shake to get a random card. While viewing cards in FlashCardz or quotes in QuoteKeeper, you can shake the iPhone to get a random card or quote. This does not change the order, but jumps you to a new one in the list.

2. Shuffle the list. While in the edit mode pictured here, you can click "Shuffle" in the upper right hand corner and shuffle the list of cards or quotes. This changes the order and cannot be undone. And as always, you can rearrange the list manually, by grabbing the right side of an item in the list.

3. Shorter default text. When you create a new card or quote, the default text that appears has been shortened, so that you can more quickly enter your own text. I could have made it so that no default text appears, but it is important to maintain some sort of visual cue for users. I may explore a different solution to this in future versions.

Also, FlashCardz FREE includes these new features. QuoteKeeper FREE is still awaiting approval.

WebMD Review

2009-09-18T11:59:00.002-04:00

Hypochondriac's rejoice! WebMD has released an iPhone app. I don't normally browse the Medical section in the App Store, but when I did, I found this. This is not an app that I look at every day, in fact the only reason I keep it on my iPhone is that one day it might save someone's life.

WebMD mobile does three major things: 1. Check your symptoms 2. Check your prescriptions 3. Gives First Aid Information.

If you go to the Symptom Checker for the first time it will ask you for your age, gender and zip code. I have no idea what your zip code has to do with anything, but I'm not a doctor either.

Depending on the gender you specify you will get a person pictured like this. You can touch different parts of the body and select from a list of different symptoms. Once you build up a whole list, you can touch the "View Possible Causes" button. From there you can read up on the different possible causes for your list of symptoms.

Next is the Treatments tab, that lets you search for different drugs by name, or by shape and color. Once you find the drug you're looking for, you can read about all kinds of relevant information such as uses, side effects, precautions, interactions, and overdoses.

And finally, there's the First Aid section. Just click on the relevant situation and it will pull up the relevant article. It's probably worthwhile to read through them before you encounter these situations, but it's still handy even if you don't.

It's a well done app and as I mentioned before it could save someone's life. I also like the symptom checker and the way it was implemented.

Overall Rating:

Fun at the BMV

2009-09-17T15:24:00.000-04:00

As many of you know, yesterday was my birthday. To celebrate I thought I would head to the BMV (Bureau of Motor Vehicles) to renew my driver's license. When I get there, it turns out that I need my SS card, or some form of picture ID with my SSN. When given the option to put my SSN on my ID, I always opt not to, because if someone steals my wallet then they have my SSN too.

So, I wasted a trip to the BMV. No big deal, I'll just go back today. When I went in today, they inform me that since my out of state license expired yesterday, I now have to get a temporary permit and take a driving test, in addition to the written test that is normally required!

I take the written test. Passed on the first attempt. There are 2 other people taking that test at the same time. I finish before both of them (I'm good at tests).

I go to the next room, wait 15 minutes, and purchase my Temp Driving Permit that allows me to drive w/a 21 yr old licensed driver in the passenger seat next to me. $22 down the drain.

Back to the testing room, the man behind the desk processes my forms. (I see the same guy in the back still taking the written test.) The desk guy points to a sign on the wall and tells me to read it. It looks like this...

Keep in mind that it's been close to 20 years since I last did this, and on this particular day I drove a Toyota 4Runner SUV to the BMV. If I knew I was going to have to do this before I came, I would have borrowed my sister's MINI. Instead I roll up to the obstacle course and have maybe 4 inches on each side of the car from cone to cone. Personal embarrassment aside, if I fail this test, I have to reschedule 2 weeks later, and won't legally be able to drive by myself.

By some miracle, I navigate my behemoth of a car through the cones w/out knocking any of them over. I proceed with the rest of the road test and find myself back in the testing room. (The same dude is still taking the written test).

They send me next door, where they take my freshly minted Temp Driving Permit and $23, and give me a new driver's license.

The good news is that I found a new White Castle on the way home. I normally like to celebrate special moments with some Chick-Fil-A, but White Castle works too.

There are probably a lot of lessons you can draw from this experience:

Don't let your driver's license expire.
Study hard in school. (That same dude is probably still taking the written test).
If you have to wait a little bit at White Castle, it means fresh fries!