Great Gifts for Wifey

My wife has been sick for far too long. (Stage 4 Endometriosis. Very painful, but thankfully surgery next month to fix the problem.)

I got her two presents as she's been spending far too much time stuck in bed.

Nintendo DS. She'll probably never let me play it. She found several good word/crossword games, along with some "hidden object" sorts and she plays it a lot.

And I just got her a Kindle. She reads a ton even when not sick, and after doing a little math, we're better off. She'll reread the earlier books in a series when the next one is out, so doesn't want to ever get rid of books. With the Kindle, we save a few dollars per paperback (and closer to $20 per hardback). Plus saving on shipping or driving to the store, plus bookcases ($100 each just going to Ikea--and running out of space to put them.)

Even decided that we'll save if I get one too...since she's never going to share.

Thank You!

To the mystery Apple employee who chose iCatchall Tools as their Staff Favorite.

Thanks to you, iCatchall Tools got to the #1 sales spot in the Business category in iTunes! I like to think we'd have gotten there ourselves eventually...but you saved us a ton of time and advertising. Our slow climbing got a huge boost starting the day the pick showed on the iTunes App Store first page.

And it's dragging iCatchall up as well, not quite the huge 20x sales increase, but still getting close to the top 20 in the Utility category. (And that's a much harder category to reach the top--the top spot there gets close to the top 100 overall...hopefully!!)


And our next app is submitted, I couldn't write a better description of how it came to be than Peter did... Six Days from Idea to App.

App Adds Own Ads...

Our free app, iHourglass Free previously used AdMob to show ads. Made a few $ per day--about enough to cover the company coffee addiction. And if they'd let us fill the 60% extra unsold ads with our own, we probably would have stayed with them. We thought the ability to show a bunch of ads for our own programs was too good an opportunity to miss.

So we made out own ad system. iHourglass Free has been in the top set of free Utilities for a really long time, so there's lots of people using. All ads we'll show for now will be for our other iPhone programs! If it works well, we will see how to open it up...


With a brand new ad system, it's easy to pick out the hits. Since until something is approved, if it's not me or my brother, it must be Apple reviewing :)

Sunday @ about 4:30pm. Hits from an iPhone that ran it a few times so saw a couple ads. Can't tell if they ran it on any without a network connection of course.

Monday @ about 3:30pm, got the notification it had been approved. Within 1/2 hour, started to see hits from people who were getting the new version! It will be very interesting to see, within a few days we should have a good idea what percent of people are using iPhones vs iPod touches; as well as what OS versions too.

(Update, the stats we got ended up in a nice article on ArsTechnica!)