Coming Soon... LogMyRun Pacer

The Squibner team expanded into a family endeavor in 2010.  Owen, Squibner's lead developer, and Finn, whose focus is design, were joined by me, John, as part time developer and head of business and marketing.  LogMyRun Pacer is my first iOS application, which I designed and developed with some key assistance from Owen.

 

LogMyRun Pacer, was submitted to Apple for review on December 4, 2010 and we hope to have it in the App Store by Christmas.  What is Pacer?  It is a FREE ad-supported calculator for runners.  With Pacer you can calculate the pace of your last run, figure out how far you could run the next time you head out the door or determine your next race time at a particular pace. RunLog Pacer is easy to use and a great complement to a runner's daily running log. Try it out today for free!

LogMyRun Pacer is a FREE ad-supported calculator for runners.  With Pacer you can calculate the pace of your last run, figure out how far you could run the next time you head out the door or determine your next race time at a particular pace. RunLog Pacer is easy to use and a great complement to a runner's daily running log. Try it out today for free!

Stopwatch Timer Tutorial

I found this cool tutorial on www.iphonedevx.com.  Hope you like it:

Support a Great iPhone Icons Designer

Joseph Wain, who runs Glyphish.com, is a great designer who has made a bunch of terrific iPhone icons available free to the iPhone dev community.  Wain has has a Kickstarter project going on over here.  If you are interested in participating and pledge $25, you will:

Get 130 awesome Retina display 2x size icons, PLUS new symbol icons also in 2x size, PLUS a cool Glyphish dingbat font in OpenType format.

In addition, Wain has said that if he reaches 500 supporters, he has a special bonus in store for those who make a pledge.  Check it out and support a great designer!

iAd Tutorials Recommendation

Since iAds went live on July 1st, the reports of instant riches reaped by devs have begun to role in.  Undoubtedly there are a lots of users clicking on iAds right now because of their novelty, which has inflated revenues in these early days, but iAds are nonetheless an intriguing alternate business model for developers.

 One nice thing about iAds is the ease with which you can integrate it in your apps. If you are interested in trying iAds, I recommend taking a look at the tutorials on Bees4Honey and Ray Wenderlich's awesome blog.  And while you're at it, download the free 2010 WWDC videos and check out Session 112 on integrating iAds into your app. 

Here at Squibner, we are working on two apps for runners. The first is a simple utility designed to cross-promote our more ambitious offering that is due out later this year. The initial thought was to offer the utility for free or perhaps $0.99. Instead, we have used the utility as an opportunity to get our feet wet with iAds.  Stay tuned for future posts on how our experiment with iAds turns out.......

Big Evernote Database of iPhone SDK Materials

Since around the time of WWDC last year, we have amassed a collection of iPhone SDK tutorials, tips and links in an Evernote database.  To celebrate this year's WWDC, we have made our iPhone SDK Evernote folder available to all.  You can check it out here: http://www.evernote.com/pub/johnvoorhees/iphonesdk

Dapp: A Great iPhone Wireframing App

Dapp (iTunes Link) is a great new iPhone app from Kerofrog that can help you design and prototype your next app. Prototyping is a great way to find out how your app will look and feel on an actual device before you dive in and start coding. Dapp has a great library of user interface elements that can be configured in a countless number of ways. One of my favorite features is that it can not only export to PDF but also objective-c that can then be compiled. After downloading, I was able to have a successful prototype for an app I'm working on up and running in 20 minutes. I recommend it to any developer who needs a quick and easy way to prototype their next app. It is available on the app store now for only $10. 

iMockups for iPad

This looks like a great app for wireframing your next iPhone and iPad ideas.  iMockups can also be used to mockup your next web page.  I haven't had a chance to give it a try, but plan to do so shortly and report back.

iAds: A Huge Economic Engine for Devs

Check out this great post from Jeremy over on Tapity.  The Wall Street Journal reports that Apple will charge advertisers that use iAds one cent per impression and $2 per tap.  The math is simple.  With Apple sharing the proceeds 60/40 with developers, each impression will generate .6 cents and each tap will generate $1.20.  

If your app generates regular usage, it's easy to imagine that developers could generate far greater and more sustainable revenue through iAds that charging a buck or so for their apps.  What's more, if the economics turn out as Jeremy suspects, that will help slow the perceived pricing race to the bottom that has plagued the App Store raising realizable app prices for those that devs who do not want to display ads too.

And don't forget to check out Tapity's Grades app.  The design is beautiful and it is a great companion for any student.

Steve Jobs' Open Letter On Flash

A thoughtful piece by Steve Jobs on why Flash is not on the iPhone/iPad.  In Jobs' own words, it comes down to the following:

Besides the fact that Flash is closed and proprietary, has major technical drawbacks, and doesn’t support touch based devices, there is an even more important reason we do not allow Flash on iPhones, iPods and iPads. We have discussed the downsides of using Flash to play video and interactive content from websites, but Adobe also wants developers to adopt Flash to create apps that run on our mobile devices.

Jobs closes with, to paraphrase: Flash is yesterday's news.  Get over it Adobe and embrace HTML5.  I couldn't agree more.

Link to Cool Game Development Tutorial

Over at the Things That Were Not Immediately Obvious To Me blog, there's an epic tutorial that is just coming into the home stretch.  In what is so far an eight-part tutorial that starts here, you can work your way through the code to create the classic Minesweeper game.  Pretty cool and a great introduction to game development on the iPhone.