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.

Lost Ark

We watched Raiders of the Lost Ark over the holidays.

So at the very beginning, how exactly did the Aztecs make a light-sensitive trap?  Wouldn't it go off every night?  I suppose it's just magic.

A Stupid Name Idea

I keep waiting for the perfect project to use my silly name idea--to use a bunch of the "hot" name suffixes and prefixes over the years in one big awesome name.

iTwipediadangosterzilla

Been keeping that for a couple years, so likely will never come.  Maybe somebody else has a product that needs a crazy name...