I’ve gotten to know both Joe and Charles from spending time with them at conferences over the past year or so. They’re both great guys. If you have any interest at all in indie software development you should subscribe to their weekly podcast.

The episode is about 30 minutes long and you can find it at http://releasenotes.tv/16-shane-crawford/#more-145

One Day At a Time

At first it was hard. I mean going from a “normal” diet to having nothing more than 4 quarts of juice and water or herbal tea every day was a shock to the system. In fact, for the first 4 or 5 days all I wanted to do was curl up in bed and sleep. There were headaches, cravings, slight nausea, and a little light headedness. My body was detoxing in a major way. Staying with it took some will power. But around day 4 I started to gain some energy and things started looking better.

During the tough times I would tell myself that this was just something that I was doing for a short period of time. A few weeks. A month or two. That was a short period of time in the grand scheme of things. Somehow for me that little bit of perspective works wonders and in short whatever the challenge was would pass. I’m sure it would be different for everyone. Look for and find your own mantra for inner strength. Whatever works.

Up to the first 20 days I experienced various periods of headaches and low energy. These are all symptoms of the body detoxing years worth of gunk from the cells and organs. I would also experience periods of high where I felt like I could sprint up Mount Everest. Whichever the state just go with it. Tired? Then sleep. Energetic? Do something productive.

After the first 3 weeks or so my energy levels started to level out. But at a higher and more sustained level prior to starting the juicing. I carried on with my daily activities just as I always have. Only I was juicing on a regular basis throughout the day. Around day 30 I really started to feel a great sense of well being. My skin was soft and supple. My eyes bright and clear. People were starting to notice and ask questions.

The Basics

The basic mechanics of a juice feast are actually quite easy. Drink at least 4 quarts of fresh fruit and vegetable juice a day. Preferably organic. Within those juices be sure to get at least 2 pounds of green leafy vegetables. Lettuce, Kale, Collard Greens, Parsley and the rest. This equates to 10 or more pounds of produce a day. Way more than you could ever eat. In addition to the juices, drink a couple of quarts of water per day. Herbal teas are also ok if you like them. Any vitamin supplements that you feel are necessary are also ok. Personally, I took MSM, Vitamin-C and a superfood green supplement called Boku. That’s it. Simple.

Where does the protein come from? Believe it or not it comes from all of the green leafy vegetables. Raw greens have a tremendous amount of amino acids, the building blocks of protein. In fact, since the protein in green juice is already in the amino acid state it is highly bio-available and is readily absorbed by the body. It is important to note that you should rotate your greens in order to avoid toxin build up from the natural alkaloids present in the greens. In other words don’t just use baby spinach all of the time. Maybe use spinach one week and then move on to kale for the next. Or, like me, just keep the variety going full-time.

In order to make all of this juice you’ll need a juicer. We have three. The 30+ year old work horse Champion Juicer that I previously mentioned is great for carrots and other hard veggies. Second, we have an Omega HD VRT350 juicer which is very finicky and takes a fine touch to keep it from getting clogged. The Omega can also create a pulpy juice which caused me to usually run the extracted juice back through a second time. But, it creates a delicate juice and is excellent for soft fruits and green leafy veggies. Finally, we use a Breville 800JEXL Juice Fountain. The Breville quickly became the goto juicer for its wide feed shoot, quick cleanup, and good quality juice although it can be a little on the loud side. With all of that hardware sitting on the kitchen counter I can still say that you really don’t need an armada of juicers. Just run down to Costco and pick up a $100 Jack LaLanne juicer and you’ll be fine.

It should be said that while a juice feast such as this one can go for an extended period of time it is not a lifetime diet. Rather it’s a reboot of your system. A way to reset your body, clear out the muck, and start over from scratch. We all need this from time to time.

The Results

Over the course of the 40 days I lost a stunning 25 pounds! That’s approximately 0.6 lbs per day. That’s incredibly fast weight lost. Around day 20 I had the good fortune of visiting with my brother-in-law who is an MD. He took my % body fat measurements through some device which he claimed was as accurate as a submersion measurement test (which I took was the gold standard of tests). I visited him again just after day 40 to repeat the test. Over those 20 days I dropped 4.3% body fat and most interestingly I added 3 pounds of muscle during that period of time. I attribute this to the high intake of greens which as previously discussed are the major source of protein on the juice fast.

But the results weren’t all about the weight. My general well being was improved. I was much better hydrated. My hair and skin were soft and shiny. My energy was high. And my blood pressure had lowered to 117/69 which is excellent (prior to starting my blood pressure read in at 135/91).

What would I do differently?

This being my first long term juice feast I must admit that I didn’t do everything perfectly. Firstly, I would exercise more past day 20 or so. I think that my weight loss would have been much more dramatic had I added in more light exercise such as biking or walking. I got some in just not enough. I also would be much more diligent about getting in all 4 quarts or more of juice a day. There were a number of days where I only got in three. Not because I didn’t want them but more that I had just gotten busy and forgotten about them. To help reduce this effect I think it’s important to start your day off early with a juice. This will make it easier to hit your 4 juices or more in a day. Another downside of only getting 3 juices in a day is the reduced ability to get in 2 full pounds of green leafy vegetables. You really need that 4th juice to get in all of those greens.

I would also come off of the juice feast in a more gradual manner. I did ok but I feel that I started back with more full solid food a day or two early. The recommended way to break a juice feast which has lasted over 20 days is to take 6 days and gradually add back in solids while maintaining your juice intake. The first 2 days you add about 8 oz of prunes soaked overnight in water. The second 2 days you add in soft fruits such as strawberries, mango, etc. The third two days you add in a light salad. I pretty much did this but rushed the salad part a bit I feel.

All in all juicing for a long period of time was a very positive experience for me and once rolling it was fairly easy to stay on course. I most definitely will be doing this again in the future.

“Fat, Sick, and Nearly Dead” This is a documentary film about two different guys who transform their health by juicing. It’s an incredibly inspiring story. I watched it numerous times during my juice feast as inspiration and to help give me a mental boost when I needed it. As of today it is available via Netflix streaming – go watch it now!

Be Your Potential The YouTube channel of Matthew Armstrong and Victoria Whitehead. This couple is currently undertaking a 100 day juice feast and recording a ~10 minute video each and every day recording their progress. There is a ton of information in the videos not to mention getting to watch their ups and downs as well as body transformations throughout the 100 days.

JuiceFeasting.com The website of David Rainoshek the originator of the term Juice Feast. Lots and lots of information on how to correctly juice feast.

From this point forward this blog will be used for more personal posts. Perhaps there may be something technical which doesn’t fit on the company blog. But, the lions share of posts will be my experiences, photos, and observations. Hopefully the writing will be intriguing.

Thanks.

Shane

So now we have a LinkShare clicksynergy link with our custom signature attached. Right? If not then go back and read the last post on setting this up. All that we need to do in order to start tracking clicks is to start using our links in strategic places. Some ideas on tracking data is to use custom signatures for links off of your website, links used in press releases, links you send out on Twitter, and of course ‘Buy Now’ links from within a Lite or Free version of your app. It is the later case that I’ll be using for this discussion. The astute reader may recognize that this could be an opportunity to explore pay-per-click advertising with Google Adwords or the like since the clicks can be tracked all the way to a sale (needed to monitor profitability). However, with the low price of most apps in the AppStore I have my doubts as to the efficacy of this approach.

You could start using the clicksynergy links directly and be able to get the needed data. However, a slight improvement in the method can give you some real-time stats to feed your need to monitor app activity. Quite simply you can plug the clicksynergy link into a url shortening service, such as bit.ly, that allows you to track clicks on the link. For example, I have created a signature for clicks from a Lite version of my app, Mathemagics, and plugged the link into bit.ly. I then use this shortened URL within the app itself. Whenever a user clicks on the ‘Buy’ link within the app bit.ly picks up on that click and tracks it immediately. No need to wait for the LinkShare report in order to get an idea of click-through activity for the day.

There are a lot of url shortening services out there these days and bit.ly is only one of them. Be sure to use one that allows you to track stats and even better has an API that you can play with. It should be noted that using a url shortening service adds one extra level of redirection into the path between the user click and showing your app in the AppStore. It also will ensure that mobile Safari is launched and then redirect to the AppStore for links within an iPhone app. It’s not absolutely necessary to use such a service but being the data junkie that I am it allows me to keep a close watch on activity with my apps.

Ok, enough about setting all of this up. Let’s get at the data. After you’ve been tracking stats for a while it’s possible to download the raw click and sales data from the LinkShare website. Simply login to LinkShare, click the ‘Reports’ tab, Advanced Reports, and then select ‘Signature Orders’ from the report type drop list. Also, be sure to set your desired date range. Here’s an example of what the data looks like:

The ‘Member ID’ column is actually the signature used in your link (in this case ‘mathemagics_lite’). There are other interesting columns in the report such as the transaction date, commissions, and sales. It would be great if the SKU was actually useful but it appears to be mostly the same for every transaction with only a few variances. Ideally, it would be the actual SKU of the product purchased (remember those mostly useless SKU’s that you entered in when submitting your iPhone app?). This is probably a good place to mention the Achilles’ heal of this whole methodology. You pretty much have to take it on faith that a purchase at the price point of your app is in fact a purchase of your app. This gets even more complicated if you’ve been changing around the price of your app. Keep records and you should be able to use the transaction date to sort it out. At the time of this report Mathemagics Lite was on sale for $1.99. So, I know that those sales for $22.95, $.99 et al are not for my app. I still get commissions off of the sales (yea!) but they need to be removed when analyzing the data with respect to my app.

To get the data and actually use it take a look at the bottom of the table and find the ‘Download’ link. You can download to Excel, as data, or as MHTML. I’ve been downloading ‘as data’ which gives me a file with a .csv extension. But a csv extension is about all I get since the data is actually tab delimited. A quick pass through “tr ‘\t’ ‘,’” and all is right with the world since I like to import the data into Numbers. One final bit of peculiarity with LinkShare is that the download link only grabs the data from the visible page. If you want all of the data from your entire report then you’ll need to navigate to each page, download the data, and then merge it all together. Draconian, I know. But, at least it can be had.

The final missing piece of the metrics puzzle is the total number of clicks on the link. This can be had via the same LinkShare reporting tool by running the ‘Signature Activity’ report over the same time period. Simply find the intersection of your signature and the clicks column. If you used a url shortening service you may also be able to get this data there as well.

In the next and final article I’ll present the above numbers from Mathemagics Lite for the month of March 2009 and calculate the Conversion Rate for sales of the full version as well as a few other stats for the app.

]]> http://shanecrawford.org/2009/145/tracking-appstore-conversions-part-2/feed/ 7 http://shanecrawford.org/2009/119/tracking-appstore-conversions-part-1/ http://shanecrawford.org/2009/119/tracking-appstore-conversions-part-1/#comments Tue, 31 Mar 2009 21:52:21 +0000 http://shanecrawford.org/?p=119 As developers we tend to live in our code bases. However, in order to make a living, so we can write more code, it is important to focus at least some of our time on the dreaded marketing side of app publishing. To be honest, just using some of the terminology weirds me out a bit. But if you’re going to make a run at app development be it iPhone, Mac, or whatever you need to get wet so why not dive in feet first.

If you’re like me you like optimizing things. Tweaking the sales of your apps upward is no different and can be accomplished through effective marketing (and a little luck). The key word here is “effective”. Without data to support our efforts we’re really just shooting blindly in the dark. In this series of posts I’ll outline a way that we can get raw data on the effectiveness of our online and in-app marketing efforts for iPhone apps. The technique to be discussed was originally mentioned on MobileOrchard and if you want a good overview of the process I highly suggest you take a look at the article. I’ll be doing a deep dive into creating the necessary links, obtaining the data, and finally analyzing it. We’ll start with details on collecting data and end with some real numbers for one of my iPhone apps.

Our ultimate goal, at least for this article, is to determine how many application sales result from a particular marketing effort. On the web this is fairly easy to do with the help from our friends at Google. However, on the iPhone the sales channel is obscured by the iTunes AppStore. Once a user clicks into the AppStore their actions enter a black hole and we can no longer determine if they bought our app. Or so we thought. There is in fact a way to determine if a particular user click resulted in a sale of our application. This mechanism is found in the iTunes affiliate program available through LinkShare.

If you haven’t signed up for the iTunes affiliate program through LinkShare go do it now. Not only will it allow you to track your app marketing efforts but you’ll get an additional 5% on each and every sale that you refer as defined by their program. This not only includes your own app but any other app, song, movie, or whatever the user purchases after clicking your link. Even better you will continue to garner 5% from all purchases of that user for the next 120 days or until someone else refers them back to iTunes (these are known as ‘Return Days’ in LinkShare terminology).

So the extra 5% is great but how does that help our marketing data efforts? LinkShare provides an additional mechanism known as ‘Signatures’ that thankfully Apple supports. Signatures are the missing link that will allow us to see into the iTunes AppStore and determine whether a particular user click resulted in a purchase of our application. This linkage will then allow us to calculate a Conversion Rate from which we can begin to understand how effective our marketing effort is.

It should be noted at this point that there are a few gotchas and the system is not perfect. In fact, due to some reporting peculiarities with LinkShare signature reports the data can really only be taken in aggregate over a longer period of time (say a month or more). From the LinkShare help manual, “Most reports are based on the transaction date—the date the transaction actually occurs. The Signature Orders report, however, is based on the process date —the date that LinkShare receives and processes the transaction data sent by the advertiser“. As it works out it happens to be the Signature Orders report that we’re looking to use. So, since the data slides slightly based on the process date we can aggregate the data over a longer period of time and any temporal issues should be minimized. With that being said I have observed that the data from Apple appears to be processed within a day or so (as in all things YMMV).

Now, it’s finally time to set up a LinkShare signature so that we can start collecting some data. It’s really pretty easy. The first thing to do is create the standard LinkShare referral link. Basically, all that you need to do is grab an iTunes link for your product and then paste it into the LinkShare link builder.

The LinkShare link builder is available after logging into your account on the ‘Links’ tab. From this tab I have been using the ‘Deep Linking’ feature to just plug in my iTunes URL, fill in a signature and generate the clicksynergy URL. If you already have clicksynergy links created never fear. All you really need to do is add a ‘&u1=<your_custom_signature>’ to the end of the url. You can also modify the signature value whenever you want without ever going back into LinkShare since it will get picked up and tracked automatically. The value of the signature parameter can be whatever you want but I do suggest making it meaningful since this is all you’ll have in the report to figure out what link was clicked on.

Well, that’s it for now. Next up we’ll get into using our clicksynergy link and getting at the data the signatures give us. Then after we know how to collect and process the data we’ll look at analyzing it. At which point I’ll show real metrics as gathered from one of my iPhone apps.

In most cases a UIView is as large as the iPhone screen or smaller. But, in a few cases you may want a view that is larger than the normal iPhone screen size. Such a case might be when using the view within a UIScrollView which is a view that can manage subviews of arbitrary size. Interface Builder makes it exceedingly easy to configure views in the majority of cases but in special cases it falls flat and specifically in the case of the views size. The issue arises when a UIView is associated directly to a UIViewController.

As you can see from the screenshot the view labeled ‘SampleView’ is shown in IB as a subview to a view controller. Interface Builder seems to like to treat a UIViewController as some sort of pseudo view which can contain subviews. This is fine from a conceptual standpoint but this pseudo view has no controlls for size, location, etc. What ends up happening is that the views size is locked into a maximum size of 320 x 480. Again this is fine for most cases but falls short for those times when you want a view larger than is standard. What’s worse is that the Inspector for a UIView will allow you that change the width and height of a view attached in this way but in reality it is limited. You can see this when running your application. This behavior also makes it impossible to design anything but the top 480 pixels of your view in Interface Builder since it will only display a view design window that is fixed to what it thinks is the maximum size. In short attaching a view as a direct ‘subview’ of a view controller in Interface Builder can lead to some major limitations.

The solution to all of this is actually quite simple. Simply do not add your view as a subview to the view controllers ‘pseudo view’. Instead add your view as a standalone view in your NIB.

As you can see from the second screenshot my view is not listed as a subview of the view controller but rather as a standalone view in its own right. You can then associate your custom view with the ‘view’ outlet of the controller. Now, your view can be resized to any size that you want, you can design the entire view in IB, and it will show up with the correct size when you run your app.

I was floored. For however brief a second you can see it in the latest iPhone commercial titled ‘Read‘ or the one that featues the sweet book app Classics (also from tap tap tap). The Babelingo icon shows up at the very begining of the commercial as the hand swipes through the second screen of iPhone apps.

Update

Babelingo also makes a brief cameo appearance in the commercials ‘Fix’ and ‘Check’.

“However, the NDA has created too much of a burden on developers, authors and others interested in helping further the iPhone’s success, so we are dropping it for released software.”

Since I have been mainly focusing on iPhone development for the past few months my posts of Cocoa related development have fallen off. Now that it appears that we can write about released portions of the iPhone SDK I hope to be writing more about Cocoa Touch and of course Cocoa. I truly hope that the lifting of the NDA will help to build the iPhone developer community along a path parallel to that of the Mac developer community. I think that a golden opportunity has been missed to create the same sort of Mac developer goodwill and attitude in the iPhone developer community because of the NDA. Hopefully, now that developers are free to discuss the platform a rich and vibrant developer community will form with the same dedication to helping each other out.

I have always promoted open communication and discussion and I am no stranger to feedback. Yet, the one-way, anonymous, and often eviscerating nature of AppStore reviews shut down open communication and further degrade any sense of community. Both positive, negative, and often misguided reviews suffer from this affliction. I guess I could chalk it up to human nature in an anonymous environment, competitor “App Rolling”, or even immaturity. But, I think the system itself could be tweaked in order to increase the quality of reviews without compromising users ability to express themselves.

First, identify users in the reviews that have purchased the product from those who have not. I don’t necessarily agree with the often bandied about idea of blocking out anyone who has not purchased a product. Users may see a feature that they need or some interface peculiarity that they would like resolved prior to purchasing. While the best way to communicate this type of information is to contact a products support team directly folks seem reluctant to do so, whether for time and effort of for other reasons. Clearly identifying users who have purchased a product from those who have not would allow review readers to mentally place a weighting on the validity of a review. All of the information is in the system to make something like this work it just needs to be made a priority.

Second, make reviews semi-anonymous. Allow the public facing nickname of a review to stay in place and remain anonymous. However, give access to reviewer email addresses to the owner of a product. In this way, a developer can directly encourage or rebut reviews by directly communicating with the reviewer. Alternatively, in order to address privacy concerns in this area a form could be enabled for developers which would send an email or message to a reviewer by keeping their direct contact info private.

Finally, encourage reviews to be revisited from time-to-time. This could be handled in several ways from deleting old reviews to notifying a reviewer when a new version of an app has been released. In addition, reviews could be removed, hidden, or the user notified when a certain threshold of ‘No’ responses has been obtained to the “Was this review helpful?” question. Currently it seems that a review made in the AppStore is immortal but even bad credit will roll off of a credit report in seven years.

As a developer I like to communicate directly with my users as anyone who has emailed Babelingo’s support well knows. A lot of that communication can and does happen via email and a products blog. However, AppStore reviews are by far the most direct and most read form of product communication. Software is not like most songs or movies. The best stuff comes from community involvement by feeding back constructively into the work itself. The AppStore review system short-circuits the needed feedback loop by being both anonymous and one-way. While the list of improvements that I’ve outlined here is by no means exhaustive I think it would provide a good start at helping us all to both create and purchase quality software on the AppStore.

Check out the Babelingo website for a short 40 second demo. I tried out Vimeo for the embedded video and I’m a little less than happy with the rendered quality. It’s a little grainy. I may switch to a different service but I liked that fact that with Vimeo I could remove all controls initially except for the play button. The sound quality is a little rough too in my opinion (anyone have a professional recording studio that I could monopolize for a short while?).

I have a lot of features that I could implement in Babelingo for a next major release. The trick will be in picking the right ones to keep the app simple and focused. More languages and phrases are a given for a 1.1 release. I will, however, need to keep my development wanderlust in check. I seem to have developed in a keen interest in the excellent Box2d physics engine… who knows where that is headed