Revel Software

100,000 Piano Time downloads in the Windows Store

Nick Lamb — Wed, 30 Jan 2013 16:30:02 +0000

Piano Time just crossed the 100,000 download mark since the launch of Windows 8! Here are all the stats I can dig up of the first 3 months in the store. Piano Time also recently won the Apptivate.ms contest sponsored by Microsoft and Stack Overflow.

Hopefully this will help some people get an idea of where the Windows Store is headed. Feel free to chime in with your experiences in the store.

Downloads

Piano Time has averaged about 1,100 downloads a day since launch with a one-day high of 3,400 which was on Christmas day. It has been close to the top of the Music & Video – Free category since launch but has started to slip lately. The US and UK have the biggest share of downloads but it has been downloaded in every country the store is available.

Money

Piano Time is monetized in a few ways; Advertising, a Pro version, and in-app purchases.

Advertising

Piano Time has one main advertisement supplied by Microsoft Advertising. As you can see below the average eCPM is a terrible 40 cents for 1,855,017 impressions. I’m hoping this goes up as more advertisers come to Windows 8.

Piano Time Pro Version

Piano Time Pro was released a couple weeks after Piano Time and doesn’t have any ads. It also has the ability to save MP3s included in the cost. I’ve slowly raised the price from $1.99 to $3.49. So far it’s had 233 downloads with a revenue of $468.48

In-app Purchases

In the last update I added an in-app purchase to save your recordings as MP3 files for $1.99, but that has only been in the app for less than a week. It’s too early to tell if it will generate any significant income.

Download Piano Time from the Windows Store:

Windows Phone Project Structure with Scheduled Task Agent

Nick Lamb — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 17:57:05 +0000

I recently updated River Flows to support some of the Windows Phone 7.5 (Mango) featues like multiple live tiles and scheduled task agents. The new scheduled task agent updates the background images of the live tiles every 30 minutes (great post on how to generate live tile background images)

Everything was great until I went to submit my app to the marketplace. It turns out there is a list of unsupported background agent APIs that can’t be in any assembly references for a Scheduled Task Agent project. Initially I had my Windows Phone Application project structured with a class library that was referenced in both the Windows Phone project as well as Scheduled Task Agent project. I had to re-structure the solution to this:

Once I had restructured the class libraries so that my Scheduled Task Agent project didn’t reference any unsupported APIs and I was still able to have good code reuse, the marketplace submission worked.

Custom wordpress featured content slider using jQuery

Nick Lamb — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 19:17:49 +0000

We recently made a custom featured content slider using jQuery that integrates with wordpress to allow featured articles to cycle on the homepage. Here’s a shot of the final product:

jQuery UI sortable lists

Nick Lamb — Wed, 24 Aug 2011 21:51:57 +0000

Here’s an example of some custom jQuery UI work that allows elements to be sorted, dragged, dropped and searched for.

River Flows Windows Phone 7 App

Nick Lamb — Thu, 12 May 2011 16:54:26 +0000

Revel Software just released it’s first Windows Phone 7 App called River Flows.

River Flows lets you check the current flow of any river in the United States so you know the best time to get out kayaking or rafting. You can save your favorite rivers so you can check them quickly and also check flows of rivers nearby using GPS. Information available in the app: current flow, guage height, charts of recent activity and maps of guage locations.

More Info

Download for your Windows Phone Now

Our Kids Our Schools

Nick Lamb — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 22:10:29 +0000

Revel Software has been working with Our Kids Our Schools for the past year developing their web application using CakePHP and MySQL. The site allows parents to order healthy school lunches for their kids that are delivered directly to their school. They are currently serving the South Denver Metro area. Check out some screenshots below and see their recent feature on Channel 7 News.

Redeemer Christian Church

Nick Lamb — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 21:53:30 +0000

Revel Software recently set up Redeemer Christian Church with a new wordpress install and design.

Check it out here

DashboardAd Website

Nick Lamb — Mon, 13 Sep 2010 21:00:58 +0000

DashboardAd needed a new corporate website soon. We worked with them to design their new look and feel and had a quick turn-around.

Consumer Product Registration Portal

Nick Lamb — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 16:46:44 +0000

We recently worked with InterAxis Marketing Solutions to come up with consumer product registration portals for brands like Philips, Magnavox, Emerson and Sylvania. InterAxis needed a solution that would provide a customer focused product registration portal that would be user friendly and engaging. It included dynamic forms using jQuery and ASP.NET as well as an email engine that would help drive customers back into the registration portal.