monkey_slap

Could not agree more with you.

I'd further suggest that creating apps for clients is incredibly profitable. You don't necessarily need sales on apps to make money. Businesses, organizations, and people have problems that they are willing to pay to get solved with an app. Take your time selecting the right problem and you can make a good living and enjoy what you're creating at the same time.

This is really sad to me because I aspire to run my own shop just like this one day, creating apps and software for ourselves and clients. I too see myself as a maker, not a business developer, so maybe this is a red flag to reevaluate.

Most of the apps that Agant has produced appear to be aggressively priced (seems most are around £9.99, the most recent at £24.49). Though, they do target a rather niche market. I'm very curious as to whether the apps did not sell well or simply did not cover the cost of operation. Whatever the case, now that Dave is the sole employee the revenue of the existing apps will not hurt.

Finally, I'm also wondering if Dave ended this adventure simply because he was not enjoying it, or if Agant was spiraling into debt. I can't really tell from this post. He does mention that making it in the App Store is difficult, but that some of the apps were created for clients (some being partners). I can't imagine that there wasn't enough good work out there for a talented team of proven developers+designers.

I'd be curious why you'd recommend an AppleTV over a lightning-HDMI adapter. When we demo our iPad apps the direct connection is perfect. Spotty, shared wifi can hurt Airplay sometimes (and yes, it is awful that it uses a Wifi connection...)

I actually prefer doing all of the design and drawing myself and avoid things like NIBs and Storyboard. It's not really difficult, just takes time to absorb all that there is because there is so much customization you can do. And watch out for iOS 7, especially with animations, there are loads of new options.

Congrats! Would you be willing to post anything about your success post launch? I'm an app developer as well and I love reading about other people's strategies such as this.

This is my thought as well. Even at his previous $20-30/day seems quite reasonable. If the author could keep that sustainable, that's adding nearly $10k/year in passive income, definitely not a figure to shy away from. If adding a $.99 IAP with a 2% conversion works as well, that would be even more.

As an app developer, overall I feel these posts only encourage the current app store ecosystem of free or freemium.

My free app is seeing about 500 downloads/day. When it was featured in the "New & Noteworthy" it was about 1500/day. However my IAP conversion is holding at about 2% which, to me, is quite bad.

Another thing to point out is that the author has about 4k Twitter followers, so he does have an existing network of people to expose this app to. It's not much, but its a (free) start.

It becomes much easier over time. I'm at a point where I could certainly accomplish this, especially now with great projects like CocoaPods. Experienced web developers can create a simple CMS lightyears faster than I can, its all relative.

Now what I find most interesting is that the author doesn't seem to have a large portfolio of apps. The "More by this Developer" link only shows this app, while his website only points to Discovr (http://discovr.info/) which I can't imagine he's the only developer for. I'd be curious to learn more about his expertise.

What is this in response to?

I've come to the conclusion, after my latest release, to just make apps that I will use everyday (aka quit dogfooding), not spend a dime on marketing, and release them for $3-5. I just want to make things that people will actually get some benefit from.

I'm not sure I'm understanding the point of this tool. It looks trendy, but it takes notes. No syncing. I mean, this is the guy that wrote NetNewsWire. Wouldn't an app like this be doable in a weekend?

I honestly want to find something new that the app does that is supposed to change my workflow, but there is just nothing. A cynical part of me feels like this exists (especially with the $5 price tag) just to ride the fame coattails of Gruber+Simmons+Wiskus.

I don't condemn them for taking the opportunity of their current notoriety. I'm coming off of week 4 of an app launch that completely failed to garner any reviews or growth, so it does really hurt to see reviews of this app that are nearly 4,000 words long: http://www.macstories.net/reviews/vesper-review-collect-your...

I'm attempting to create a podspec, but the script/bootstrap part stuck me. Not sure if Cocoapods has capabilities to do that. Would be nice to just strip out all of the submodule parts and include the dependencies.

I'm surprised Cocoapods isn't being used with this.

PlaceIt does just that and is awesome http://placeit.breezi.com/

Ya setting shouldRasterize = YES would be bassackwards for animating CAShapeLayer. I actually found animating the path attribute incredibly easy and performant with CAKeyframeAnimations.

Another note with -drawRect and animations, I messed around with CADisplayLink and -drawRect to make animations. Beware of doing this, it was a performance hog. It was a simple animation in a large rect, and by the time I had optimized the drawing area, I could have finished the entire project.

I wonder, would CAShapeLayer become more of a resource hog with more points in the path (or more complex arcs), or does it happen with the overall size of the path?

This man speaks the truth. Though I think the advice of "stick to the highest level API for your needs" holds true here as well.

(Hi oc, its Ryan!)

I've found this tool helpful to "minify" my image assets: http://imageoptim.com/

This is a wonderful article. I've been swapping different methods for performance here and there, but not really settled on a concrete strategy. It looks like drawing definitely has its edge with animations, but for static content CALayers are king. On my weekend project (https://github.com/rnystrom/RNRippleTableView) I found CALayers, especially CAShapeLayers, to be incredibly efficient even during animation. Overriding -drawRect can be fun and rewarding, but its starting to seem like its less and less useful.

I'd love to hear others thoughts on how they use -drawRect nowadays.

I want to make this now

The drag/drop part is just supposed to change the rhyme suggestions. So if you you're doing AABB and on line #4, it finds the last word in line #3 and rhymes with that. However if you changed to ABAB line #4 suggestions will now look at line #2. I had a really hard time figuring out a good way to explain that, in the UI, description, and landing page. Agreed its a little confusing. Any suggestions on how to improve that?

The idea is definitely to be more of a "game" than your go-to poetry text editor. I spent some time focusing on the design to make it seem more light. I agree, its not for writing.

And as far as trying goes, its free. I've done some Android dev before at my day job, and its just not my thing. I'm a big fan of writing iOS apps so that's what I went with.

Hey everyone, creator here. This app has been a huge learning opportunity as far as app design and marketing goes. The app is fairly straightforward, but I spent far more time writing releases and emails, as well as examining and critiquing each different UI. I'm planning on writing a report in two weeks on the success or failure of my efforts, with detailed metrics on conversions, retention, and sales.

I'd love to answer any questions or address any feedback you might have.

This landing page and documentation is just beautiful. Simple hashtag nav, soft colors, great header, and good examples. Only suggestion would be to have a way to link to individual methods in the docs w/ hashes. I really commend the effort here.

Agreed. Doing a freemium model where you can save only save 1 poem. Unlocking adds theming, Facebook+Twitter connection, and unlimited poems. Worth $.99? That's subjective, but this entire app is more of an experiment than a business. Just going to iterate and improve on the next one.

Thank you :)

Poetreat. Aiming for May 7. Week of polish then submission. http://poetreatapp.com/

AppAnnie (http://www.appannie.com/) gives some good insight in how well apps are doing.

I'm going to be doing a similar writeup as my app launches in 2 weeks. I've got a small budget. All the design+dev was me, but I'm spending about $300-$400 on marketing. We'll see how that goes.

If anything I believe you should be spending more on marketing nowadays. There's no real way, at least to my knowledge, to search for a niche hole with keywords. I do, however, like to think of an app idea and then spend an hour search various keywords and seeing the results/competition. https://appstorerankings.net/ is a good website to find the keywords of an app. I combined common keywords in the app that I'm releasing with common keywords that are missing among competitors that yield few results.

Again, I haven't launched this app (my 7th) yet, but I'll be doing some analysis of its success using the marketing budget and keyword research.

SEEKING WORK - Remote only

I'm an iOS developer. I've been making apps for about 2 years and work full time as a lead mobile dev (iOS & Android). Looking to do some short term gigs. Smaller apps would be nice. I put a lot of effort into interaction and polish, thus don't really have time to invest in a $100k+ app.

I've got experience and skill in the full iOS stack including Core Data, unit testing, high quality custom controls, networking, etc.

I'm also available for consulting on iOS codebase architecture, design, and testing as well. If you've got some code you think needs improved or checked out by a professional I'd love to.

http://whoisryannystrom.com/

https://github.com/rnystrom

rnystrom [at] whoisryannystrom.com

I was in the same boat as you. Now I'm nearing 2 years into being an iOS developer and I am in a ridiculous love affair with Objective-C + Cocoa. It is verbose, but so what? I've shown my code to non-iOS devs and even though they may not know how to make iOS apps, they could understand what every line of code of mine did.

iOS also helped solidify a lot of basic Computer Science concepts that other languages seemed to hand-hold me through. I'm extremely grateful for taking on learning Objective-C because I feel it matured me professionally.

I like Ruby, it's a great language, but I think projects like RubyMotion and Phonegap are born out of either fear or unwillingness to learn Objective-C + Cocoa. To me, unless RubyMotion is officially adopted by Apple, there will always be drawbacks to using it.