Unlike most apps, 90% of proceeds go to charity, in this case to the Tyler Foundation, helping them support families of children with cancer in Japan.

Some backstory here, one of the Tyler Foundation’s supporters approached us about creating a storybook featuring his daughter Juliette. Taking inspiration from the real Juliette’s favorite bedtime books, this original story was crafted with a very similar Juliette as the main character (we even copied her shoes!)

So far all the feedback has been extremely favourable.

Kristen Rutherford had this to say about it on GeekMom.com

The story is adorable and simple – Juliette receives a red balloon as a present from her father, and proceeds to have all kinds of wonderful adventures with it.

Each page is brightly colored and sweet, Juliette is spunky, and there are little interactive things to do as the story rolls along.

A sweet story, a darling app, and a good cause. This is a keeper.

You can see a video introducing the app on this page.

Please help us support the Tyler Foundation and buy this app!

Bailey the Therapy Dog – One of Tyler Foundation’s many
projects to support kids with cancer

The book is an enchanting bedtime story following Juliette as she goes to unlikely places thanks to her shiny red balloon and colorful imagination.

The foundation was started in Tokyo by Mark Ferris and Kim Forsythe-Ferris, whose son Tyler was diagnosed with leukemia before he was 1 month old. The organization’s mission is to improve quality of life during cancer treatment, and ensure a smooth and successful transition to normal life afterwards.

As Ferris explains, “in an immediate sense, we are focused on supporting children with cancer, however our greater mission is to provide children-in-need with psychological support … it’s about improving quality of life.”

The Foundation utilized its expertise after the Earthquake and Tsunami disaster in north-eastern Japan in March, undertaking numerous activities to help children in these areas recover psychologically.

A number of high profile supporters, including Maxi Priest, Julian Lennon and Academy Award winning lyricist Tim Rice, collaborated on an original collection of music to raise funds for the Foundation’s work.

Ferris continues, “In July we were approached by our long time supporter and friend Nick Johnston, a successful entrepreneur and philanthropist.”

“Nick’s idea was to make an iPad bedtime storybook people around the world could download, enjoy with their kids, and support a worthy cause.”

With Johnston providing initial funding, he approached expert children’s app maker Long Weekend LLC to create an original and memorable story.

Long Weekend co-founder Paul Chapman recounts “Nick wanted to do good … naturally we wanted to help. He suggested we base the character on his daughter,” Chapman continues “but we went one better and put her in the book!” Juliette is the name of Johnston’s daughter and the book features her likeness.

An original story written by Chapman and his wife Yoko, it features artwork by digital artist Andrew Onorato of the creative studio Conduct.

According to Ferris, ninety percent of all sales proceeds will go directly to the Tyler Foundation, helping fund their charitable activities including counselling and support, Shine On House, the Therapy Dog, and Smile Ambassador Programs.

Juliette and the Shiny Red Balloon is available to download for iPad on the Apple App Store.

###

Media Contacts

Joy Fajardo (Tyler Foundation)
joy@tylershineon.org
+81-3-4580-2770

Paul Chapman (Long Weekend LLC Australia)
paul@longweekendmobile.com
+61-435-490-300

Ross Sharrott (Long Weekend LLC USA)
ross@longweekendmobile.com
+1-609-388-1593

Links

Website:
http://longweekendmobile.com/get-our-apps/juliette
App Store:
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/animal-phone/id479234314?mt=8
Press Kit:
http://longweekendmobile.com/press-kits/juliette
Screenshots:

http://longweekendmobile.com/

Youtube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=

About Tyler Foundation

The Tyler Foundation is dedicated to making life better for kids with cancer in Japan and their families. Incorporated as a Non-Profit Organization in July 2006, the foundation is supported entirely by private/corporate donations and one iPad storybook.

Tyler Foundation Website
http://www.tylershineon.org
Tyler Foundation on Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyler_Foundation

About Long Weekend LLC

Founded during a five-day holiday in Tokyo, Long Weekend is a location independent developer of mobile software focusing on education and early learning. Long Weekend is dedicated to crafting unique and memorable software experiences on all sorts of mobile devices.

Long Weekend Website
http://www.longweekebdmobile.com

About Conduct

Conduct excels in creative, digital strategy and technical delivery expertise to develop mobile and web applications. Co-founded by Charlie Pohl and Simon Krambousanos, they first put Conduct on the ‘mobile map’ with award winning work on iPhone app The Hidden Park.

Conduct Website
http://www.conducthq.com.au

However, there are always ways to improve.

Japanese Flash and Chinese Flash use a modified Leitner-style SRS to help you remember more vocabulary.

Our user Murray wrote to me recently because he wanted to know which “box” the card he was currently studying was in. Currently, the progress bars at the top of the app show you generally how you’re doing, but not the current card:

Some people might think that is a good thing — “too much information” defeats the purpose of having an intelligent SRS algorithm. Then again, Murray’s request to highlight the current box’s text isn’t particularly hard to implement in code, either.

Do you have an opinion on this?

Please leave your feedback in the comments below or on the GetSatisfaction page devoted to this issue.

Preloaded with over 150 study sets, the app lets users focus on relevant vocabulary, such as word lists for the HSK and TOFCL (Taiwan-based) tests. Users can also create their own study sets out of the 100,000+ word built-in Chinese-English dictionary, which is convenient for quickly adding new words learned “in the wild” to a study list.

Chinese Flash also offers each tone pronounced by a native speaker from the popular Chinese learning site Lingomi.com.

“Lingomi’s philosophy is a balanced approach to Chinese learning; vocabulary, characters, and tones — we couldn’t agree more, and are proud to offer their great audio content as part of our product on the iOS platform,” said Mark Makdad, a director at Long Weekend, makers of Chinese Flash.

Run by 3 Western expatriates in Asia, Long Weekend also makes Japanese Flash, a top-rated Japanese language study tool for the iOS platform.

“Studying ideograph-based languages, namely Chinese and Japanese, requires a slightly different approach; we try to help native English speakers bridge the gap in learning these languages,” Makdad said.

The app debuts at USD $4.99, or 30 RMB, and can be found at http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/id486531735?mt=8

###

The first time I went through the process of cutting down a binary size, I got the .ipa file to about 19.5MB. Great! I’m done. Then I submitted to Apple and after the 10 days wait it went live at 20.5MB, over the limit. What happened?

As it turns out, Apple encrypts your compiled code before compressing into a .ipa file. The result is your code might be compressed some, might be compressed not at all. The .ipa size on your machine is not always going to be the same as the final for sale app. Given the affect on sales, this won’t do.

We can compute the maximum size of the binary possible by assuming the compressed code will get zero encryption, while all of our images and other resources have the standard compression. Here’s how:

1. Open the Organizer Window and find the Archived app you are planning to upload, the right click and select “Show In Finder”:

2. Right click the archive and select “Show Package Contents”

3. Find the App in the Products -> Applications folder, make a copy, right click and again choose “Show Package Contents”.

4. Find the compressed code, the filename will be the same as the bundle, in our case jFlash. Note the size of this file and remove it from the bundle.

5. Compress the remaining files.

6. Add the compressed files size to the uncompressed size of the removed code file. This will be the maximum size the bundle can be. Usually it will end a little smaller than this once live on the app store.

There you go. If you can get the maximum bundle size to 20MB or under, you will have no trouble with uploaded binaries being larger than you thought.

This caused us a bit of pain, I hope this helps you avoid the same issue. Happy coding!

A couple months ago we were approached by a friend of ours about making a children’s book. He knew about Animal Phone, our app that gives kids a phone with animals to talk to, and thought we could make a great children’s book. We knew that our friend was a big supporter of the Tyler Foundation for Childhood Cancer. After some discussion we decided to combine the two, 90% of this apps proceeds will support the work of the Tyler Foundation.

We recently finished the app and expect to release it at the beginning of December. You can get on the mailing list to be alerted when it is released. It’s a cute story about Juliette and, surprise surprise, her red balloon. Each page includes an interactive animation that supports the story and engages the reader. We also got voice actors to read the story, or you can choose to read it yourself. Finally, because the Tyler Foundation does it’s work in Japan, we made the app bilingual in English and Japanese.

Here are some screenshots of the app:

This was not a huge problem for syncing to your computer; sync might be a bit slow, but it wouldn’t cost you money. With iCloud, large amounts of data will now cost money, for cloud based storage and bandwidth.

Our app, Japanese Flash, downloads “plugins” to provide users with additional functionality while staying under the 20MB over the air limit for app store purchases. Apps you can purchase over the air generally make more money than those that don’t, so we are very keen to keep under the limit for all our apps.

During the iOS5 Beta period we received an e-mail from Apple:

Dear Developer,

In recent testing it appears that Japanese Flash – Study & Learn Vocabulary, Kanji, Kana stores a fair amount of data in its Documents folder.

Since iCloud backups are performed daily over Wi-Fi for each user’s iOS device, it’s important to ensure the best possible user experience by minimizing the amount of data being stored by your app.

In addition to purchased music, apps, books, Camera roll, and device settings, everything in your app’s home directory, including its Documents folder, is backed up to iCloud.

Data stored in the application bundle itself, the caches directory, and the temp directory is not backed up to iCloud. Your app should store data in these locations according to the iOS Data Storage Guidelines on .

Please review these guidelines, make any required changes to your app, and submit an update to the App Store.

If you’re not the technical contact for your app, please make sure this email gets to your development team.

If you have any questions concerning this information, please let me know.

Thanks for developing for iOS!

The plugins in Japanese Flash are read only data files so you could download them again. The problem? Prior to iOS5 the caches directory was not backed up and never deleted. In iOS5, the caches directory will be “cleaned” any time the device runs low on space. You can always download that content again, right?

Not so fast. It can take up to 15 minutes over 3G to download the plugins in Japanese Flash. Further, fully offline usage (like on trains) is a selling point for our app. Our users expect the plugins to be available all the time. We had a problem, do as suggested and annoy our users by making them redownload features at unexpected times or keep the data in the documents directory and make the iCloud backup slower and more expensive. We went with the slower backup assuming that not that many people were on iCloud yet.

The real fix – a way to store data that is not backed up, but also not deleted in low storage situations is not yet available. Fortunately, Apple saw the error of their ways and included a fix in iOS 5.0.1.

The fix is still under NDA, so we are unable to walk you through it yet. Check back here after the iOS 5.0.1 release and we’ll let you know by updating this post.

Until then, happy coding.

UPDATE:

The iOS 5.0.1 was released to the public today so here’s the fix:

First, data that should be available offline but can be downloaded again should be stored in the Documents directory – not the caches directory as the letter says.

Second, you need to mark the files as not backed up by setting the “Do Not Backup Extended Attribute”. Here is Apple’s method for doing so:

#include <sys/xattr.h>

- (BOOL)addSkipBackupAttributeToItemAtURL:(NSURL *)URL
{
    const char* filePath = [[URL path] fileSystemRepresentation];

    const char* attrName = "com.apple.MobileBackup";
    u_int8_t attrValue = 1;

    int result = setxattr(filePath, attrName, &attrValue, sizeof(attrValue), 0, 0);
    return result == 0;
}

We frequently have paths available and it seems silly to convert them to NSURL just to convert back to NSString in the method. Here is what we ended up adding to our file utils, LWEFile. This way we can use whatever we happen to have.

#include <sys/xattr.h>

//! Method to make a given file not backed up (also prevents it's deletion)
// See https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#qa/qa1719/_index.html for more info
+ (BOOL)addSkipBackupAttributeToItemAtURL:(NSURL *)URL
{
  return [LWEFile addSkipBackupAttributeToItemAtPath:[URL path]];
}

//! Sets the Skip Backup Extended Attribute for a file at a given path
+ (BOOL)addSkipBackupAttributeToItemAtPath:(NSString *)path
{
  const char* filePath = [path fileSystemRepresentation];
  const char* attrName = "com.apple.MobileBackup";
  u_int8_t attrValue = 1;

  int result = setxattr(filePath, attrName, &attrValue, sizeof(attrValue), 0, 0);
  return result == 0;
}

LWEFile is available in the LWE Dev Tools.

The points of the presentation are pretty simple:

• No cross-platform frameworks are solid enough to offer a user experience that will fool a user who is used to native apps for that particular platform.
• For the apps that do run native, e.g. Titanium, you end up writing to a new paradigm, i.e., theirs, so you’re just committing yourself and your code to vendor lock-in, all because you can’t be bothered to learn another language/SDK.
• PhoneGap could do the job, if the job wasn’t important visually but needed to run everywhere.
• Ruby hipsters are annoying.

The full video, for your sofa-and-popcorn enjoyment. Skip to 1:30 to avoid the introduction and me fumbling with the lighting:

A Developer’s Guide to Mobile Platforms in 2012 from Long Weekend on Vimeo.

But as of November 1st, 2011, Long Weekend products will no longer officially support iOS 3.x. All of our products (Japanese Flash, Rikai Browser, Animal Phone) will move to iOS4.

Now, this doesn’t mean á la Cinderella that our apps will all be updated at midnight on that day and stop working on iOS3. It means we are no longer going to make an effort to maintain compatibility.

On our very first Long Weekend, iOS3 was shiny and new; sexy with curves. Looking back now, while it’s carried us well, it is showing signs of old age.

We can’t use blocks, there are a number of missing multimedia APIs, and we’re getting tired of typing if [foo respondsToSelector:@selector(newApi)] { ... }.

It’s time to let go (we understand that less than 5% of devices in the wild are running iOS3.x; clearly those aren’t the users we’re targeting with our Awesome software, either).

You were a beauty, iOS3. Sorry that it had to come to this. We’re just trading in for a younger model.

You can now join our new, full day course From Idea to App Store in November 2011. Learn everything you need to know about the business of making apps and Apple’s App Store — the fastest moving software market in the world today.

Click here to register

Dates: Fri 25 November 2011 9:00am – 4:30pm (1 day)
Cost: Early-birds $550 (before Oct 21st), std price $850
Location: Swinburne University, Hawthorn Campus