First Day Results

Touchmines was only released yesterday at 3pm, but the response has been amazing! I've already had over 4000 downloads on the first day alone! One thing that struck me was the lack of downloads from the foreign markets relative to the english speaking countries like the US, Canada, and Great Britain.

If you're an iPhone developer, you really need to keep in mind the global audience you're releasing to. My next major step is to localize the product descriptions into as many languages as possible, as well as either localize the app or eliminate the text entirely. I'd rather just use icons for the whole interface, as it reduces the amount of work required for localization and is hopefully more elegant for everyone.

Now I just need to find people willing to translate a few paragraphs into their native language for a beer or two, and maybe ask some experienced developers about their own localization processes. I'm most afraid of using symbols or colours that would be seen as distasteful or unlucky in a foreign culture, since I'm a fairly sheltered north american!

TouchMines is available for download!

Over at my SpaghettiForge site, I've made some updates and included information on how to play the game (if you've never played minesweeper before). Here's a direct link to the iTunes App Store page.

No looking back...

Well, I've done it. I've submitted my first iPhone application to Apple. At first I didn't realize I'd need to come up with a company name and create a website for said company. Now, witness the birth of SpaghettiForge! The name is a little self-deprecating humour about every coder's ability to sometimes turn perfectly good ideas into a tangled plate of bad compartmentalization.

The app I've submitted is called TouchMines. It's a minesweeper clone that's completely free, while the other 3 available minesweeper apps cost $0.99. The other developers shouldn't be too worried about my undercutting their prices, because my 1.0 release is very feature-bare and really can only compete for free. When I release future updates, there may have to be come friendly competition and innovation going on (let's hope!).

I also hope this is the just the first of many free, relatively useful apps that I'll release over the coming year.

Vintage Commercial

Sometimes Apple commercials just blow me away in their bluntness. Of course there are many things you can only do with deep and powerful configuration of your system, the reason i have windows and linux up and running on my laptop. What got me is the idea that there will ALWAYS be a market for the simple devices. Some people will always pay a premium for something whose simplicity blows away any lack of functionality. The day every consumer becomes a coder I'll eat my words with a fair helping of glee.

Do I need an intervention?

As I previously mentioned, Monday was WWDC keynote day, and I worked all day in a place with no internet. How to keep up with the most important news EVER?

Well, I own a prepaid brick of a cellphone with no internet, so no-go there. But wait, I have unlimited free incoming SMS messages? Hmmmm.

My carrier (like most) has a special email address based on my phone number, which truncates emails to 160 characters and forwards them to my phone as an SMS message. Imagine an automator script that takes the unread rss articles from Mail.app and copies each to a new mail message which is sent to the SMS bridge address? 160 characters is sure limiting, but the headlines all come through at least. Then you just use launchd to have this script send the new articles every 30 mins, and you have "push rss" for free. Albeit kinda clunky and annoying that you only get to read the headlines.

Just a little bit of work to get my Apple news?