61–70 of 93 posts
For some excellent examples of apps in the vaunted league that he mentions, check out Beautiful Pixels. http://beautifulpixels.com The user interface is everything if you want to compete in the major leagues (e.g. top 100).
Are there many examples of iPhone apps that are simultaneously (and somewhat objectively): (1) beautiful, (2) easy to use, and (3) useful, that still don't go anywhere? I've been trolling around the app store for awhile trying to understand the market and what I see are tons of novelty apps, fugly apps (by anyone's standards), buggy apps, and apps that break usability in all kinds of ways. And judging by the lack of…
I would say my puzzle game ( http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/combination/id300288142?mt=8 ). It got good reviews from people who played it, a good review on ArsTechnia ( http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2009/04/minireview-comb... ) and was 99 cents. I only sold a couple of hundred, and after months of trying to get more publicity and sales I gave up and made it free.
do android developers have many of the same issues?
My app is for film-makers, and it's called Acacia (https://market.android.com/details?id=com.ephemerald.cameraa...), and I'll fix the bugs when I have time :)
Are there many examples of iPhone apps that are simultaneously (and somewhat objectively): (1) beautiful, (2) easy to use, and (3) useful, that still don't go anywhere? I've been trolling around the app store for awhile trying to understand the market and what I see are tons of novelty apps, fugly apps (by anyone's standards), buggy apps, and apps that break usability in all kinds of ways. And judging by the lack of…
I would say my puzzle game ( http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/combination/id300288142?mt=8 ). It got good reviews from people who played it, a good review on ArsTechnia ( http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2009/04/minireview-comb... ) and was 99 cents. I only sold a couple of hundred, and after months of trying to get more publicity and sales I gave up and made it free.
I'm curious: did you make the puzzles by hand or generate them algorithmically?
Although not an iPhone app, we've spent a lot of time in both developing and marketing our iPad game. But the revenue doesn't justify building another game which we would've loved to do. Developing an app is only half the battle, the other half is marketing it and as developers we are very bad at marketing.
Our criteria for a success was: Polished Graphics, Engaging Gameplay, Sense of Humor and a Cool Trailer.
Paddle Battle for iPad:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xP2gnq6z3Fc
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/paddle-battle/id415463249?mt=...
Are there many examples of iPhone apps that are simultaneously (and somewhat objectively): (1) beautiful, (2) easy to use, and (3) useful, that still don't go anywhere? I've been trolling around the app store for awhile trying to understand the market and what I see are tons of novelty apps, fugly apps (by anyone's standards), buggy apps, and apps that break usability in all kinds of ways. And judging by the lack of…
I have $420 revenue from 285 sales (started $3, dropped to $1) in 6 months from my side project. http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/alcohology/id437180278?mt=8 . Getting attention is hard. Ridiculously hard. Insanely, impossibly hard. I couldn't get a review from a single website. I submitted the app to dozens of review sites, food/drink blogs, and tech blogs and didn't get a single response. Actually, that's not true. I…
I am not a designer, but you should get one to give you some suggestions. In any case, I just bought your app......happy to help out a fellow HN-er :) Hopefully this will help improve my cocktail-making skills.
PS> Check out a book called Tapworthy.
Are there many examples of iPhone apps that are simultaneously (and somewhat objectively): (1) beautiful, (2) easy to use, and (3) useful, that still don't go anywhere? I've been trolling around the app store for awhile trying to understand the market and what I see are tons of novelty apps, fugly apps (by anyone's standards), buggy apps, and apps that break usability in all kinds of ways. And judging by the lack of…
I would say my puzzle game ( http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/combination/id300288142?mt=8 ). It got good reviews from people who played it, a good review on ArsTechnia ( http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2009/04/minireview-comb... ) and was 99 cents. I only sold a couple of hundred, and after months of trying to get more publicity and sales I gave up and made it free.
Despite that I do think you prove the point that the previous poster requested. Unfortunately yours is one of many examples of well-done apps that doesn't get traction.
Do forgive the critique, I hope it will be helpful to you in going on to make ever more amazing apps. And I'll curtail my suggestions here. :)
Are there many examples of iPhone apps that are simultaneously (and somewhat objectively): (1) beautiful, (2) easy to use, and (3) useful, that still don't go anywhere? I've been trolling around the app store for awhile trying to understand the market and what I see are tons of novelty apps, fugly apps (by anyone's standards), buggy apps, and apps that break usability in all kinds of ways. And judging by the lack of…
Polished and went nowhere. Breaking the top 25 for an indie dev is hitting the lottery. It takes a big Ad budget and great PR.
But the reason why developers are shackled to Objective C is to make sure processes finish in human time, and this is fundamentally a performance bottleneck in mobile hardware. I use monotouch. Compiles to ARM assembly. Not seeing any problems. For a generation of coders accustomed to limitless managed memory, high-level programming abstractions, and thousands of deeply functional opensource libraries, mobile is a st…
I've done native development for iOS, Android, and WP7, and I'd be interested to see what advantage MonoTouch brings.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would say my puzzle game ( http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/combination/id300288142?mt=8 ). It got good reviews from people who played it, a good review on ArsTechnia ( http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2009/04/minireview-comb... ) and was 99 cents. I only sold a couple of hundred, and after months of trying to get more publicity and sales I gave up and made it free.
Hey, I bought this after the Ars review. Thank you for your work on it! I got well more than 99 cents of entertainment value out of it. I'm curious: did you make the puzzles by hand or generate them algorithmically?
Algorithmically. The game actually came out of a research project into generating and automatically ranking the difficulty of puzzle games.
I have a long term plan to write a new game, with different puzzle games in it, using the same technique. The main slowness is a) Playing around with HTML5 and b) Figuring out how to make money off it (as with a webapp, you can actually lose a lot of money with hosting and servers, instead of the $100/year cap from Apple!)