We’ve very much had our heads down for many months at Bonobo, shipping a fairly enormous amount of products for clients and ourselves. We’re excited to announce that the much anticipated version 2 of Zilla will be shipping next week including:

• Choose from 5 new color schemes (in-app purchase required).
• Customize Zilla to match your ride
• Now you can configure metric and imperial units separately
• Performance and UI enhancements
• Added a setting to auto-calibrate Zilla on startup, for our die-hard fans who always keep Zilla running in their car
• Lateral G display corrected
• Smart switching & data logging coming soon.. stay tuned!

Check out the trailer above and thanks to the hugely valuable and detailed feedback we’ve received from Zilla fans!

We’ve been working with Jammbox for some time now on one of their hit titles Discovr. It’s been in the press a bit recently and rightly so, it’s awesome! Now, I’m not sure what’s happened in the past few days but the press articles have been getting increasingly strange in relation to our involvement. Like this one I was just sent from one of our partners. There are multiple inaccuracies in this story but the one that concerns us is that Filter Squad isn’t a spin off and isn’t ours. Jammbox has just changed their name to Filter Squad.

It’s just one example of many articles published in the past few days with pretty major inaccuracies and I was pretty embarrassed to find out about our new spin off in this way (Again, Filter Squad isn’t a Bonobo spin off. Sorry for the confusion Bonobo employees, friends and partners), but I find myself imagining how this experience translates to bigger news stories like say the Groupon IPO. What is the best way to deal with inaccuracies in the press? Do you brush it off with a witty blog post like Groupon – you said it commenter 1 – “so full of win”. Or do you keep it real and go on an all out offensive like Charlie Sheen – probably more win than the average person can take.

Coding’s my thing so I just opened textmate and wrote a Discovr like embeddable graph control to express my frustrations. Try it out. You should be able to click on the nodes of the graph up top. My apologies in advance if it doesn’t work in your browser but it was just something I hacked together quickly with graphviz, node.js and some hints gleaned from canviz.

What’s your thing? Is there a company or individual you think handled some negative or misleading press particular well? I’d love to keep updating this post regularly with PR success stories as a kind of PR cheat sheet we can refer back to when we blow it up like Charlie Sheen. #fastball

PS. We might be quietly thrilled that our involvement with Jammbox is exciting enough to write about!

As fun as it sounds to take on Apple, we don’t have the time or will power to do it for a free app. So the a has become an er, welcome Unretiner:

We also added our most requested feature, now you can drag images straight onto the dock icon.

Update from the Mac App Store, or grab it here.

Rok on.

It has come to our attention that your app, Unretina, is currently using Retina in the app name in a manner that is not consistent with Apple’s trademark guidelines, as required by the App Store Review Guidelines :

Please make the necessary changes to your application’s title by end of day Monday, April 4th , 2011, or we will need to remove your application from sale.

Surely you can’t trademark ‘Retina’? But sure enough they did:
RETINA – Trademark by APPLE INC. CUPERTINO, CA – Serial Number: 85056810

Interesting enough though, it’s only for hand held games:
Electronic hand-held game units other than those adapted for use with an external display screen or monitor; hand-held electronic games and apparatus other than those adapted for use with television receiver only

I have an issue with this for a number of reasons:
1. Our app has nothing to do with mobile game units.
2. It’s an app to help develop apps exclusively for Apple’s mobile OS.
3. It’s totally free, we don’t profit from it at all.
4. Why is it only an issue now, 6 weeks later?

It’s another reminder that if you play in Apple’s home ground you have to play by whatever rules they feel fit.

For now we are going to stand our ground and argue our point, but in the end Apple can just pull the app from the store, so we obey their decision and change the name, or just pull it from the store.

Edit:
Looks like Apple have another trademark that is a bit broader.

So looks like we need to change the name, any suggestions?

By his predictions Apps will have overtaken songs downloaded by March. When you start to consider that the App Store has existed for less than half the time iTunes has been selling music, that is a staggering figure.

Even more staggering is the rate at which it is growing, to quote Horace:

“The amazing story of this chart is not that apps are running at above 30 million download per day, but that the figure is growing. Growth like this is hard to get one’s mind around. Not only are downloads increasing, but the rate of increase is increasing.”

“The number of apps downloaded for iPhone/iPad/iPod touch is running at more than 60..”

It should be noted that many of these apps are free, but a very large percentage aren’t. Looking closely, you’ll also notice that among the top grossing apps 1/3 of them are free (yes, you read that correctly).

Can’t play guitar or sing very well? You aren’t the only one, but you can still be bigger than The Beetles.

See it in the AppStore.

Unretina is a handy utility to resize images for iOS developers, not a massive audience, but a good target audience for initial adopters of the Mac App Store.

So how did it do? Not too bad at all, it was featured at the top of developer utilities:

And with over 80 tweets (generally positive), 14 store reviews (again generally positive), a stack of rankings average 4 stars we were blown away.

We were expecting maybe 100 download on the first day, hopefully 1k or so would find a use for it over time….

Wow. And given it was only open for a few hours in countries like Australia, we expect there should be some good numbers tomorrow as well.

The Mac App Store is an amazing user experience, no installers, great utilities, easy purchases and seamless updates. Imagine what it will be like in 12 months time.

EDIT: Here are the stats for day 2

The Mac App store launched moments ago and there are mixed developer opinions flying around the interwebs. Quite a few articles are speculating it will have dire implications for traditional Mac developers who make their dough by selling software at seemingly oldschool prices of $20 to $60. Some choice quotes from ZDNet:

———

“Tomorrow, the sky will fall.”

“iOS developers are The Flood. They will annihilate everything in their path, and what’s in their path, starting tomorrow, are all the developers who’ve made a living off Mac software since the 1980s.”

“Tomorrow, the Mac App Store opens and traditional Mac developers are in for a world of hurt.”

———

Articles at ComputerWorld and the Washington Post have similar sentiments although not quite as dramatic as the above from David Gewirtz at ZDNet (who’s article is in good humour).

The concern is that iOS developers will march into the Mac App market with 99c price points and destroy existing consumer behaviour (paying higher prices). Combined with the 30% revenue Apple take, some Mac software companies are freaking out that it’s all over.

We beg to differ. In fact, we are quietly confident the exact opposite will happen. The Mac App store will make already amazing Mac software accessible and easily monetizable to the masses. Sure, the product may have to be repriced and if you have spent 10 years telling your customer your product is worth X and suddenly overnight its worth Y that may be difficult to pitch. But things change – innovate or perish.

The whole situation is a little reminiscent of the way Nintendo approached and changed the perception of the games market. The pre Wii era thinking of “There are heaps people who play games, that’s fantastic let’s sell them some games.” was transformed into “There are heaps of people who play games, but wow there is a hell of a lot MORE people who do NOT play games – let’s engage with them.” (There’s a lot of gold coins in all those new pockets). The success with which they engaged this new audience was fundamentally built on design choices that lowered or removed perceived barriers – for example designing the Wii controller to look and feel like a TV remote, a familiar non-threatening object to non-gamers. In much the same way the Mac Store will employ design that makes purchasing and installing software non threatening in way unseen before.

There are a lot of people out there (ie. iPhone and iPad owners) who would never have considered purchasing apps for their Mac apart from maybe iWork or Office. With the Mac App store they understand the whole app purchase process because their iPhone/iPad experience has taught them how and built their confidence.

Being in the tech industry it is also easy to forget how confronting something like finding and installing software (let alone purchasing) is for most people. The Apple ads with the tagline “There’s an app for that” are a deliberate tactic to encourage people to explore the App Store when they come across everyday problems. Apple knows that is the first step in enlightening someone about how apps can help make their life easier/fun (and help them part with their hard earned cash too). The Mac App store will lubricate this experience in exactly the same way as the iOS App Store did.

More great software for Apple users, more customers for developers and more revenue for Apple. Everybody wins.

What do you think? Hit us up in the comments.

—

Further reading: Markus Nigrin has a great post on some of the culturural and pricing issues with the Mac App Store.

When we added iPhone retina support to iBoost we really stretched this limit. After adding all the new images to the application we ended up with a 35MB binary. So we spend hours cutting, trimming and squishing and finally got it down to 19.9MB, we patted ourselves on the back and submitted. Two weeks later Apple approved the app, we checked and it was 20.1MB! Damn it! What happened? In Apples own words:

When your application is delivered to Apple, it is encrypted for DRM purposes and re-compressed. When the encryption is added, the size of the compressed file will increase. The exact size of the increase will vary from app to app, however, the size increase can be large when the binary has a lot of contagious zeros in it. We are unable to guarantee the size of your file after the encryption has been added.

Ah well we thought, won’t make that much of a difference will it? Yes it did, 40% DROP IN SALES.

Maybe people didn’t like the new version? Maybe our run had come to an end? We went back and trimmed a little more, got the app down to around 19MB and the sales bounced back!

The lesson? Always try and keep under the 20MB limit! Especially apps used on the go, and mostly impulse buys, like iBoost.

For me, applications I use every day must be a desktop or mobile application, whether its Twitter (Tweeter for Mac, Twitter for iPhone/iPad), Dropbox (Mac OSX/iPhone/iPad), Evernote (iPad/iPhone/Mac OSX), Skype (iPhone/Mac OSX), Email (Mac Mail), Pulse (iPad/iPhone) the list goes on.

Are you a developer? Do you use Git or Subversion? You probably have it hosted in the cloud, but do you checkin/push/pull via a web interface or via the command line or tool on your desktop (Versions, Finder plugin, Tortoise SVN etc)? No doubting it’s nice to have the web interface, but if that was your only option I think you’d be looking for an alternative.

Almost every web app I have tried, for every day tasks, I lose interest after a few weeks. Why? Because having 20 tabs open in a browser is not efficient way for me to work, also most of them can only ever tell me something has happened by spamming my inbox, give me growl notifications, push notifications or icon flags any day.

The most painful part of using Pulse or Twitter is having to open a web page. Other content is always prefetched and cached for me, but then I have to click on a hyperlink, wait, wait, it renders. Same with Dropbox, would I use it it if I had to log into a webpage to upload and download? Rarely.

I went to a fantastic talk by Tim Elleston a few weeks ago. One of his points was we are disconnected, but not unconnected, in fact we have never been so connected. We are always consuming things from the cloud, but:

(Image courtesy of Tim Elleston)

As a consumer this is how I work, I am always consuming information from the cloud, over multiple devices using native apps.

There are also some fantastic web applications, applications such as Basecamp are amazing products for collaborating with clients. Imagine if, as an every day user, you also had native apps to the same standard, where selecting a new tab, or filtering was instant.

For me web applications are fantastic for things I do every now and then, like eBay, Amazon etc, but if you are a business productivity app, or a social networking app, or anything else I am going to use on a daily basis you need a kick arse native apps to get my eyeballs and win my business.

To me the web is for discovery, apps are for consumption.

Are there any web apps you are using every day and have you stuck with them over multiple months? Does HTML5 solve this issue? I’m yet to be convinced until they provide more effective ways to prefetch and cache data, as well as provide better notification systems.

But now one third of the top grossing iPhone applications are free. These apps use in app purchasing to unlock features of the apps.

We recently tried this with iBoost with interesting results. We decided to add some new ‘pro’ gauges which can be purchased for 99c within the app.

The pro gauges now account for approximately 20-25% of iBoost revenue. Below is a chart of sales (dark blue) vs in app purchases (aqua).

We have also done quite a bit of experimenting with making applications free for short and long periods of time. We have found this “see-saw” rankings by swapping from paid to free and back a few times effective. Here are a few examples from different apps of ours:

We have found, even after a large initial spike, the applications when free attract 10-30x more downloads than when they are 99c.

So what does this mean? If you can convert 20% of downloads into in app purchases, and can get 10-30x more downloads as free, potentially you have a lot more revenue.

Does the theory hold true? Are users who download free apps as likely to make in app purchases?

We’ll let you know.