"appstore" entries

Windows Mobile apps are more expensive than iPhone apps

The mean app price for the Windows market is nearly two times higher than the App Store.

The Windows Marketplace for Mobile now has about 1,400 apps spread across 16 categories. In this short post I'll provide some basic statistics and compare it with the grandaddy of app stores: the U.S. iTunes store.

Popular iPhone games stay highly-ranked only for a few weeks

With 40,000+ Games to choose from, the list of Top 100 free and paid games are frequently scanned by iPhone gamers. In this short post, I'll share some basic statistics on popular games sold through the U.S. iTunes app store.

What brand of freedom would you like?

Apple's restrictions and Google's openness have more in common than you might think.

Apple is closed and Google is open, right? Not exactly. Marc Hedlund says Google is at least as restrictive about the data on its servers as Apple is about the apps in its App Store.

Four short links: 10 March 2010

Four short links: 10 March 2010

Publishing Business, Google Apps Marketplace, iPad Design, and Visual Communication

  1. The Future of Book Publishing Business Models (Stephen Walli) — some good thoughts about the book publishing industry and ebooks. When does Amazon create the iPhone/Android app and the programme that will allow bookstores to receive a cut of every Kindle edition they sell? I scan the book’s in-store barcode with my smartphone, and I get the Kindle edition delivered, and the store gets its cut. Why is this different in concept than Borders on-line store being run on Amazon, or any of the independent book sellers that front through Amazon? It’s not the normal book mark-up, but people already browse bookstores and buy on Amazon. This is better than no revenue. (When was the last time you went to a travel agent?)
  2. Google Apps Enterprise Marketplace — this is sweet. It looks like the play is to become the home page for authenticated apps rather than to make commissions from selling the apps themselves. This may be the Google business model vs the Apple business model in a nutshell. (via Marc Hedlund)
  3. iPad Application Design — some fantastic notes about the kinds of UI design that iPad encourages. I’ve avoided covering The Second Coming of The JesusPhone but this is interesting because of the middle ground it stakes out between phone and laptop. The primary warning about designing for the iPad is: more screen space doesn’t mean more UI. You’ll be tempted to violate that principle, and you need to resist the temptation. It’s OK to have UI available to cover your app’s functionality, but a bigger screen doesn’t mean it should all be visible at once. Hide configuration UI until needed. Look like a viewer, and behave like an editorThere’s been a history of modes getting some bad press on the desktop. The issue is that they trade stability (things always being in exactly the same place in the UI, and not changing) for simplicity (not having too many controls to look through at once). On the iPad, it’s clear where the winning side of the balance is: simplicity. Modes are completely appropriate on this device. (via Marc Hedlund)
  4. The Howtoons Visual Creation Guide — we teach grammar and spelling in schools but not visual communication. This short booklet is a good start to remedying that. (via BoingBoing)

Can't Get Approval for your App? Sell the Source Code

We just released 17 O'Reilly books as standalone iPhone Apps (The Twitter Book looks fantastic — and as a bonus #hashtags in the text are clickable), and so I've been looking at various options for monitoring sales and popularity (AppViz, AppFigures, and MajicRank have proven quite useful), and was eager to find something I could use right from my iPhone….

Four short links: 13 July 2009

Four short links: 13 July 2009

  1. IDEO’s Human Centered Design Toolkit — methodology and toolkit for inspiring new solutions to difficult challenges within communities of need. Full PDF of manual and cards available for free download.
  2. Bentham and the Privacy of the Grave[M]uch of what Bentham meant to address in the context of his Panoptic structures we now take for granted. In Bentham’s lifetime, Parliamentary deliberations were confidential. Bentham’s arguments forced them into the sunlight. Legal decisions and statute books were accessible only to lawyers and judges. Bentham’s arguments led to codification of the law, and increasingly accessible legal rules. Bentham was far ahead of his time — the first modern information theorist. The idea that all actions of government would be presumptively available for public review did not become part of U.S. law until the passage of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) in 1967. As we speak, it appears the English parliament is only now learning Bentham’s message about publicity. Bentham was an early transparency advocate, economist, and character. I first read of him in the excellent A Brief History of Economics: Artful Approaches to the Dismal Science. (via carlmalamud on Twitter)
  3. Curated Twitter Feed for Projecting Over Speakers — Guardian developed it for their “Activate Summit” and it’s since been used in two other events. They’ve open sourced it.
  4. Android Market Problems — take heed, all ye who would build “the iPhone App Store of …”, it’s not easy to deliver a great customer experience.

The Next Wave of iPhone Apps

This is the biggest week of the year for iPhone users, as Apple released iPhone OS 3.0 on Wednesday and will be launching the new iPhone 3GS on Friday. The iPhone OS 3.0 Software Update provides a significant number of enhancements to the operating system including spotlight search, cut, copy, & paste, voice memos, support for landscape keyboard usage in Mail, Messages, Notes, and Safari, MMS and tethering for carriers that support these features (AT&T late summer for MMS, tethering TBD), and dozens of other improvements.