Codesign Error

Apple Reaches 3 Billion App Downloads, What Does it Mean for Businesses?

2010-01-06T08:18:00.001Z

Yesterday Apple announced that more than three billion apps have now been downloaded from its App Store. There are now more than 85,000 apps available, to the more than 60 million devices.

This is particularly impressive when you consider that the App store has only been in existence for 18 months. The rate is accelerating as the 2 billion downloads milestone was only in October. Currently there are over 10 million apps downloaded each and every day.

Reason for Success

The App Store really has reinvented what you can do with a mobile handheld device. In addition a large part of the store's success is perfection of the impulse purchase. It's ridiculously easy to find an app while you're in line at the bank for instance and hit "buy!" Why not, it's only two euro!

The Competition

None of them will be catching up any time soon. The statistics speak for themselves;

800 apps available for Palm Pre

4,000 apps available for BlackBerry,

18,000 available for devices running Google Android

This is a drop in the ocean compared to where the Apple App store currently is.

What Does It Mean for Businesses?

There is a huge, and growing, international market that can easily be reached.

You will instantly open your product/service to a global market the world over.

It is a new channel to engage with existing customers.

A more cost effective way to provide a service to existing customer base.

Association with one of the most iconic brands in the world today.

If you are thinking about bringing an app to market, I am available to discuss, advise and work on potential projects. Feel free to get in touch.

Approaches To iPhone Development and The Irish iPhone Developer Community

2009-12-18T16:34:00.001Z

I recently gave a talk at the Enterprise Ireland iPhone event, entitled "Approaches To iPhone Development & The Irish iPhone Developer Community"

My presentation covered;

Why iPhone?

Web Apps versus Native Apps

In-House Development versus Outsourced Development

The iPhone Developer Community in Ireland

OS3 - Enterprise Ireland - Approaches To I Phone Development & The Irish iPhone Developer Community

View more presentations from Damian OSuilleabhain.

Please feel free to email me if you have any questions.

Build a Twitter iPhone Client - Slides and Code

2009-12-15T13:49:00.001Z

I recently gave a presentation to DevDays Galway which was a walkthrough of Building a Twitter iPhone App.

The goal was to give a grounding in the fundamentals of an iPhone app development. The presentation covers;

Project Tools and Design Patterns

Use Interface Builder to visually design your application's interface

Responding to User Input

How to connect your code to your interface elements

OS3 - DevDays Galway - Introduction To iPhone Development

View more presentations from Damian OSuilleabhain.

Any questions, drop me a line.

App Store Safe Three20 for 2.2.1

2009-12-07T19:08:00.001Z

Recently Apple started running a static analysis on iPhone App submissions to detect the use of Private APIs. The Three20 framework has several references to private APIs in test code and so apps using the framework were rejected.

The issue has now been resolved in the main Three20 project, however the main project has only supported iPhone SDK 3.0 and above for some time now. Not good if you want to support users who haven't updated to 3.0

I have taken the last release of Three20 which still supported iPhone SDK 2.2.1 and cleaned up the private API references.

I've submitted an app using this which has now been approved (Food Heaven)

You can get my Three20 version here here.

Any questions give me a shout.

BizCamp 2009

2009-09-22T23:04:00.019+01:00

BizCamp Dublin is a conference (or un-conference) for start-up companies and entrepreneurs featuring attendee generated content. It took place on Saturday September 9th in the Guinness Storehouse. It was a fantastic event with lots of interesting talks, interesting people and a real buzz. Here is a quick run down on my thoughts on what I attended.

Raising Money - Gerard Brandon
The day kicked off for me with a talk on raising money. Gerard gave a very interesting talk on his approach to raising money which I would summarise as follows;

Preparation is key.
Investors are not interested in a 'one man band'. You have to have a team.
Your idea has to dramatically improve the customer experience, not incremental.
You need to be aiming to deliver 10 times what you are asking for within 3 years.
You need to have a story so compelling that the listener is hooked within 2 minutes.

A very good point was to remember that Investors want to know three things;

What is in it for them?
How much could they lose?
Who are you?

Gerard concluded his talk with some insights into good alternative sources of investment, including your accountant, solicitor, management team, and partnering with universities.

For someone like me who has never been involved in raising money, this talk was a real eye-opener.

Financial Projections - Brian Flanagan
Brain gave a very enlightening talk on his approach to financial projections. A key lesson was to always work out your projections from the bottom up, not from the top down. For example don't say you are going to corner 1% of the market which is worth x amount. Start with projected sales month by month based on market research, number of sales people and industry norms.
An interesting ratio mentioned was that your sales / marketing budget should be 10% of sales.
Brian also directed people to a handy business plan template on his site which I will certainly be making use of.

Creating Value Using The Left and Right Brain - Adrian Avendano
Adrian gave a very interesting talk on how the human mind works, drawing on examples from both successful and failed marketing campaigns. While not immediately practical for me, it is always fascinating to learn more about how we work and how some of our behaviours and responses are more programmed then we realise.

At this stage I was seriously regretting having skipped breakfast, and so I headed down to the Storehouse cafe to enjoy a tasty sandwich and a kick-ass tourist video on the big screen.

The difficulties of Time Management - Kate O'Beirne
First up after lunch was this talk which I was really looking forward to. Unfortunately Kate never turned up, ironically enough.

LinkedIn - Krishna De
Although I have been using Linked in for a long time, I still picked up some tips I hadn't been aware of, like how to export your profile incase you ever loose it. Well worth doing!

Marketing - Tibbs Pereira
Tibbs gave a true master class on marketing. He talked about the importance of having, in writing, a clear vision and goals for your business. And how from that follows your objectives and strategy and your action plan to achieve these.

He stressed the importance of having a clear Value Proposition, how this is the foundation of everything you do, and discussed the elements of a value proposition.

Tibbbs finished his talk by giving his model to build and manage a sales pipeline.

I thoroughly enjoyed this talk and certainly will be applying a lot of what I learned here to my own business.

Interviewed By Marie Boran of Silicon Republic
I took a break next from the talks to be interviewed on camera about OS3 and what we offer in terms of iPhone development. I was absolutely delighted to be asked and can't wait to see the video.

Public Relations - Jack Murray & Eoin Kennedy
My final session of the day was was two very well delivered talk on PR in Ireland. Jack went through his 7 steps to success which was entertaining and highly informative.

While he talked about a lot of aspects of PR, his hints on a good press release stood out for me;

What's the news value
Write a great headline
Answer the key questions in the first paragraph, who, what, where, when, and how.
Importance of a good professional photo
Tailor your message to each audience

Eoin then talked about PR in a Social Media context. He discussed the importance of new media, podcasts, video, and the importance of SEO'ing your press releases.

Conclusions
While there seems to be an every growing list of conferences, camps, open coffees, seminars etc etc, BizCamp really stood out as one of the most enjoyable, and informative I have attended. I certainly will be attending again and I would highly recommend it to anyone starting their own business. Well done to the BizCamp team on a first rate job.

Mac Blogging Clients - State of the Nation

2009-08-07T23:28:00.001+01:00

OK, having decided to start a blog, my next step was to consider the options around blogging clients. I ruled out web clients straight away, as I was something that I can use off-line. A quick review of what people are saying online, led me to to the top two contenders, MarsEdit and Ecto

MarsEdit

My initial thoughts of MarsEdit were very positive. Its a powerful, well thought out application, with a very clean pleasant interface. The main editing window may not be to everyone's taste in that it is not WYSIWYG. Instead you have direct control over the html tags. For a control-freak like me, perfect!

It was all going so well, and then I decided to try uploading a photo to my blog. Photos you add to your blog are uploaded to Picasa, which is fine with me as my blog is hosted on Blogger (both Google Apps), however photos are uploaded immediately full size when you add them without any option to edit or resize them first! Unbelievable! My photos in iPhoto start from about 1MG in size and go up from there, so a post with a couple of photos quickly gets unmanageable. The only solution seems to be to do your resizing before uploading. What year is this? 1995? This limitation is a deal breaker for me unfortunately.

Ecto

Next I tried the other leading contender, Ecto. It does everything MarsEdit can, and probably more. My initial impression was that the UI wasn't as polished and more cluttered. The editor has a WYSIWYG more which some would prefer. On testing adding photos I was delighted to find that it does have the facility to resize photos. Hallelujah! The sting came when I attempted to publish. It can't upload photos to Picasa or MobileMe, only to Flickr. So the only solution was to go and open a Flickr account. Of course you can't open a Flickr account directly anymore, you have to open a Yahoo account. Great, another email account I don't need. Halfway through the Yahoo sign up process I stopped and said to myself, there HAS to be a better way. So I went back to searching and came across a very interesting application, Blogo.

Blogo

Blogo is a new contender in the Mac blogging stakes, and seems to have a very polished, no clutter interface. I say seems because unfortunately it wouldn't run under Snow Leopard, so that ruled it out for me. I mailed them and they were very prompt to reply informing me that they are working on a fix. So I will revisit when the fix is released.

Acceptance of the Flickr

It seems that if you want to do something crazy, like have photos in your blog, then it's a lot easier with Flickr. So I bit the bullet and created a Yahoo account to get a Flickr account. My quest then became, is there an iPhoto plugin for Flicker that will quickly and easily resize and upload selected photos to Flickr? Thankfully there is, the Free Flickr exporter iPhoto Plugin (FFXporter), which does the job nicely. Once I embraced the Flickr, I revised MarsEdit and discovered it has quite nice support for Flicker, and the lack of resizing isn't a problem if I resize when I upload from iPhoto.

Conclusion

Having gone through the above, my workflow for a blog post with photos is as follows

Select photos in iPhoto and export to Flickr, resizing on the way with FFXporter.

Write the blog using MarsEdit, and include photos from Flicker.

Publish to Blogger.com within MarsEdit

Workable, but not quiet the seamless experience I would like. I think blogging software has a bit to go before it reaches maturity. Or am I wrong??

Decided To Start a Blog

2009-08-05T18:44:00.001+01:00

So, to mark my imminent move to indy-pendance as a full time freelance iPhone developer I've decided to start a blog to record my progress and lessons learned along the way. I don't expect that anyone will actually read this, but you never know. Mainly I'm writing this for myself. I find that writing about something helps me clarify my thoughts.

I'll be writing about iPhone development and related happenings, software development in Ireland, and whatever else takes my fancy.