Just iPhone Art is a great new site our friends over at JAMM have launched. I’m fascinated by the incredible art people are producing on their iPhones. The JAMM team’s new site delves into this phenomenon and focuses on this cool new artisitc medium.
Definitely pop over and check it out!
If any casual game iPhone developers are listening I gotta rant a sec. Hey, guys! Show the clock! I play casual quick games when I have a few minutes to spare but don’t want to dig into anything too complex. If you hide the clock (the Status Bar if you want the technical name) it means I have to exit the application to see if my few minutes are up.
The Status Bar really doesn’t take up that much screen real estate, and it isn’t going to detract from your really sweet graphics. And don’t worry about whether this will limit how immersed in the game I get – I don’t play casual games for immersion – I play them for a quick bit of entertainment when I’ve got 5 minutes to kill.
And if for some reason you really, really, really can’t show the Status Bar, at the VERY least, save my state when I hop out to check the time. Besides being one of the HIG guidelines, it’s just good development. Trust me. If I lose my progress too many times because of a phone call or checking the time, the game isn’t going to have much of a lifespan on my device.
OK – my rant is complete. You can return to your casual gaming.
I’m glad Palm is giving the Pre everything they’ve got but I gotta tell you, I’m a little worried. Current estimates place the sales at around 150K units sold. Not bad, but that’s around 1/2 of what the original iPhone did in two days two years ago. (Although it’s pretty close to the Android sales numbers.) meanwhile, the SDK still isn’t out, and the hints we’ve seen of it suggests that we could face some pretty powerful development limits.
The latest announcement of a million downloads is nice and all, but considering the apps are free, that means each of the 150K users have downloaded 7 free apps. The most impressive thing about this is that Palm is actually doing a pretty darn good job of convincing the tech blog sites that this is a big deal.
To put this in perspective, Apple has over 2,700,000 downloads each DAY for the past year*. And many of these are paid apps.
It might be hard to believe but really, I DO want Palm to succeed at this. I’m just disappointed because I’m just not feeling confident that they will. I’d LOVE to see another strong handheld in the market – it’s good for business! I just feel like maybe we’re seeing more of the same problems that have plagued the company for the past few years.
I figured I’d drop a quick post about this. Over a week ago we sent a new version of eWallet with minor OS 3.0 compatibility updates to Apple. As you might have guessed we’re still waiting on approval. I’m sure they’ll get to it soon. In the meantime there isn’t anything about eWallet that doesn’t work ion 3.0. There are just a couple of oddities we smoothed out. For example, in one screen the keyboard *pops* into view as opposed to sliding into view. This new update lets it slide again. That sort of thing.
Anyhow, we’ll let you know (as will Apple)
I’ve seen some complaints online recently about people no longer being able to buy iTunes Gift Cards to be sent by email, or that iTunes Gift Card amounts are now being limited. In fact, our account is one of the ones affected by this: our company iTunes account suddenly became unable to buy Gift Cards on iTunes. We get the message:
A little research (links here and here) makes it clear that
Now, before everyone leaps to the wrong conclusion, I’m completely in favor of this. I’ve seen plenty of credit card fraud, and whatever anyone can do to fight it has my complete support.
So, to help out anyone who’s affected by this and hasn’t figured out what to do about it yet, here’s our simple workaround that Julie figured out.
I hope Apple will be able to come up with a solution that lets us go back to doing everything online, and I’m definitely still hoping that Apple will implement “Gift this App” for iTunes apps. But meanwhile, the above works fine.
The good people over at AppCraver read my blog post about pricing and asked to do a short interview. They asked some great questions that further illuminate the challenges iPhone developers face. If you’d like to take a look you can find the whole article here.
