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!)

App Approval 2

We did an update to the FTP Picture Upload iPhone app, so once again I get to see what the testers at Apple uploaded to our server when reviewing the program.  

These are even more awesome.

    

Wow.  

Future iPhones

My guess for Future iPhones.

Really the size is about right.  Big enough screen to be useful, but small enough to fit in a pocket.  It could get a fraction bigger by having less border, but that's about it.

The biggest unused space on the whole thing is the back.  My crazy guess is double-sided, with identical screens front and back.  With motion detection (easy to detect a 180 degree flip) and/or the same "it's close to your face" type sensors, it would be able to figure which side is up and active.  My screen after months doesn't have a scratch so is plenty durable.

This would get around the only one program running at a time limit (well, increases it to two.)  Use the program, flip to use a different one, flip back.  Crazier things have happened :)

(Added 2/7/2009)

After reading about the new updated Kindle coming, I thought, maybe put a small bit of the "e-paper" sort of thing it uses on the back as the 2nd screen.  Not sure if that's cheaper than a whole full-size screen--but it probably is.

I don't think the e-paper stuff needs electricity to show stuff the way a regular screen does.  Would be perfect for text messages, showing new emails, etc.

That would be cool too!

First Email Address

I read that our new president is keeping his Blackberry for friends and family.  Assuming it isn't b_obama@blackberry.com, it makes you wonder what (hopefully) ridiculous name he had to choose.

prez44?  treklover61?  bearsfan873?

App Approval Process Dinner

Pete and I made another "quick" iPhone app, FTP Picture Upload. (Quick only because of the months putting together FTP On The Go and it re-uses big portions of that.)

It lets you take a picture with the iPhone camera and upload it to your website. I provided a test FTP server so the people reviewing it at Apple could upload photos.

Of course I can see what was uploaded to our server. They were apparently working over a dinner of shrimp fried rice at about 8pm on a Friday night...assuming they're in California. Could also be lunch Saturday in some other time zone.