iPhone AdHoc Provisioning Tip

Has anyone experienced problems with AdHoc provisioning on iPhone SDK 4?
I had a problem that took me while to overcome. Each time I dragged my app into iTunes I got a message saying:

"A provisioning profile named embedded.mobileprovision already exists on this computer. Do you want to replace it?"

I had a perfectly working setup to create AdHoc distributions of iPhone apps. What has changed?
The only difference was that I created a new Target within the same project. Luckily, I had one target that still worked as AdHoc built. I could boil it down to a missing property in info.plist of the new target.
Adding LSRequiresIPhoneOS and setting it to true did the trick.

If you have a similar problem please check out also this blog entry.

jTribe looking at China markets

jTribe will be part of Games Mission to Shanghai. http://en.chinajoy.net/

We are looking forward to create great contacts in the Chinese Gaming community.

We will demonstrate some of our new games at the expo and Patrick Dockhorn will be available to meetings at the expo.

As our Touch Board games is quite a success in China we hope of following up with some more games soon.

Different behaviour in iOS4 for NSError and NSURLConnection

After running some of our apps now on iOS4 we were surprised that there were much more crashes. This little code section is what caused the crashes:

NSURLRequest *request=[NSURLRequest requestWithURL:[NSURL URLWithString:requestStr]

cachePolicy:NSURLRequestUseProtocolCachePolicy

timeoutInterval:10.0];

NSURLResponse *response;

NSError *error;

NSData *responseData = [NSURLConnection sendSynchronousRequest:request returningResponse:&response error:&error];

if(error) {

NSLog(@"error: %@", [error localizedDescription]);

}

After hours of debugging we could narrow it down to the line of code that initialises the NSError. Setting it to nil did remove the crash. So make sure your code looks like this:

NSError *error = nil;

We are currently investigating more issues we have with code that ran perfectly fine in 3.x and now starts crashing with iOS4. The above line fixed approximately 80% of our problems.

Good luck making your apps ready for iOS4.

iPhone Development Training at OpenHub

The three day Melbourne intensive workshop at the OpenHub, May 21 -23, from 10am-6pm covers the fundamentals and advanced feature of iPhone development, enough material that you should be able to develop your own iPhone application and upload it to the AppStore. The workshop is limited in size and features hands on exercises under the supervision of the instructor and teaching assistants.

Instructors:
Paris Butterfield-Addison & Jonathon Manning, Secret Lab co-founder

Paris Butterfield-Addison is a founding partner and producer at Secret Lab, an innovative Hobart-based Mac, Windows, and iPhone game and application development studio. Paris holds First Class Honours degrees in Computer Science. Throughout the past 5 years, Paris has held multiple Apple-funded scholarships through the Apple University Consortium. A frequent speaker and trainer, Paris speaks at the foremost Apple evelopment conference in Australia, /dev/world, on a yearly basis and has presented training on topics ranging from REALbasic, to iPhoneDevelopment to 3D Game Development for audiences ranging from high-school to senior citizens to corporate executives.

More recently, Paris, together with business partner Jon Manning, has been engaged to write the book "iPhone Game Development for Dummies" together with Neal Goldstein (the successful author of "iPhone Application Development for Dummies"), to be published by Wiley in January 2010. Paris is an expert developer turned educator and producer, and is particularly fond of the Cocoa and iPhone platforms. He is also currently mid-way through obtaining a PhD in Human-Computer Interaction, with a focus on the use of iPhones.

Jon Manning has been freelancing since high school, and in 2005 came to Objective-C development. Jon's company, Secret Lab, was one of the first developers on the App Store, with their release of Culture, a puzzle-strategy game that was released on the first day of the store's launch.In addition to development work, Jon is a PhD student at the University of Tasmania, where he researches location-aware mobile social software. Jon has run several Apple development courses, and has presented at the Apple University Consortium's developer conference for two years running. Jon specializes in mobile application development and in the design of intuitive, enjoyable user experiences.

To reserve a seat go to: http://aus2.eventbrite.com/

jTribe awarded prize for iPhone app for parks

jTribe has been awarded a prize at he WORLD PARKS APP COMPETITION 2010.

Our competition entry is an iPhone application that uses our content delivery platform jellymo.com in the context of parks.

We are very pleased and thank the World Parks App Competition panel.

Our thoughts on Augmented Reality published in NETT Magazine

The March edition of NETT Magazine is out and this month contains a feature on Augmented Reality. We were interviewed for the feature to provide our thoughts as iPhone and Android developers.

Digging beneath the (shiny) surface

Daniel Bradby is co-founder of jTribe (jtribe.com.au), a mobile apps development company for iPhone and Android. He is also excited about the prospects of augmented reality.

"We've been looking at bringing static, physical geo-located information to life with augmented reality, such as animating a billboard, " he says. "Obviously , you can add things like a game or a giveaway, to get the user to engage in the product or brand itself, as opposed to a static piece of advertising that they just take in."

He believes there are many interesting applications beyond marketing, though many of these fall into specific niches.

"I work with architects and urban planners and the Victorian Government is interested in getting their geographic system information onto the phone," he says. "You could provide good information for architects and planners, to augment what they're looking at with planning information on top, such as zoning or heritage listing of a property."

However, Apple's restrictions on augmented reality applications on the iPhone are holding the technology back.

"The iPhone platform's way of offering augmented reality is allowing you to overlay animation over the current video source," he explains. "You can't process that video that's coming in and saying 'I recognise that shape and I'm going to overlay information on that'."

Krafty Kuts uses DJ iPhone app developed by jTribe at Summafieldayze

jTribe developed recently an iPhone app for Krafty Kuts.
Check out this video of Krafty Kuts showing off his new Against The Grain DJ Tools iPhone application at Summafieldayze on the Gold Coast during his recent 2009/10 Australian tour.

iPhone apps re-invent Magazines and News Papers

Paper Magazines and News Papers started to discover the iPhone as a platform to distribute their content. There is a new trend towards custom iPhone apps that complement the paper issue of magazines.

A magazine on an iPhone creates new revenue streams and is an easy door opener into a demographic of users that uses their iPhone for everything lifestyle.

It has already started
Here are two great examples of Magazine that have been converted into iPhone app. Vogue's online version style.com is available as an iPhone app.GQ has just recently released a colourful iPhone app too. Interestingly the sales of GQ will be counting towards their total sales. So paper version and iPhone app count equally. That's very important for advertisers.

An earlier review of the Top Magazine iPhone apps in May 2009 shows some other good examples including Wired, Epicurious, Elle, Spin.com, OK Magazine, Car and Driver, FHM, People Magazine.

A Packaged Solution for the Media and Publishing Industry
We realise that many media companies and publishers are looking for solutions that could rapidly produce high quality iPhone apps.



At jTribe we worked hard developing a platform for iPhone Magazines and News. Our jellymo for Media and Publishing offering makes development of custom branded iPhone apps affordable and fast. The news and magazine apps allow to present constantly fresh content in a branded iPhone app with social elements and even in-app purchase of content.

jTribe developed DJ iPhone app for Krafty Kuts

jTribe is proud to announce our first music related iPhone app. The app was developed for award winning DJ Martin Reeves AKA Krafty Kuts. We worked closely with Against the Grain and we had a lot of fun when playing with the app prototypes in our office.

The DJ-Tools app is simple and effective, and is targeted towards DJs who want to use an MPC-Style device for their performances.

"I wanted to produce a sampler style app which could actually be used by DJs in clubs, on radio or even at home", says Krafty Kuts.

jTribe presents iPhone development tools at VITTA conference

This week we went to the VITTA conference to run a workshop with IT teachers as an introduction into iPhone development tools. The session was booked out and I was excited to see how big the interest in Phone development is in the IT teacher community.

I have added the presentation to slide share...

jTribe iPhone Development Tools Overview

View more documents from jTribe.

The success of the iPhone and iPod touch should be carried into the classroom to enrich student's learning experience with technology they accept and know well.

Young people already use devices like the iPhone to interact socially with their peers by sharing information. Sharing learning content through the same means is an oppurtunity not to be missed.

Students can now work on projects anywhere at anytime. The iPhone combines a great data gathering tool with social media aspects. Photos, videos and audio can now be gathered by students in collaborative project assignments and combined in an engaging manner.

I am excited to see that IT teachers are keen to use the iPhone in the classroom.

Update of Pinpoint now in AppStore

A new update of Pinpoint Lite and Pinpoint Pro are now available at the iTunes AppStore.

These two simple utility apps have started as an experiment to show how free and paid app perform in the AppStore. The apps became more popular than we expected and that's why we push out some regular feature updates. Pinpoint Lite is currently ranked 36 in TOP FREE APPS under Navigation. The free version allows sending a location via email where the pro version (currently US $0.99) allows to copy past the location into any other iPhone app like SMS or a twitter client.

The two improvements are:

1. Choose between Satellite view and Map view
2. Send email straight from within the app

The app is simple but useful. Check it out at the Apple AppStore: Pinpoint Lite and Pinpoint Pro.

iPhone dominates the smart phone market in front of Nokia

The latest AdMob report for August 2009 shows that the iPhone has overtaken Nokia in the smart phone race. This is surprising even for us who always thought that the iPhone will rock the Nokia foundation but we expected that this would happen not before 2010.

Here is a slideshare with our own predictions and trends around Mobile OS and Mobile Browsing Platform.

Mobile OS and Mobile Browser Trends and Prediction

View more documents from jTribe.

Four steps to turn an iPhone idea into a successful iPhone app

From Idea To iPhone Application

View more presentations from jTribe.

Android Market Monthly Revenue Revealed

The Apple App Store is worth $200M monthly says GigaOM compared with $5M in the Android Market Place. The guys over at Larva Labs estimate it's even less and we agree. We've now managed to calculate that number and it comes in a lot lower than expected.

We've been collecting data on the Android Market for the past 8 months and publishing it on androidstats.com. We have been able to watch the Android Market grow to it's current size of just over 7000 apps and almost 3000 publishers, recording every movement made within the market.

The Android Market also gives an indication how many times an app has been downloaded, for example RetroDefense has been downloaded somewhere between 1,000 and 5,000 times. It is important to remember that Android users are able to try out an app for 24 to 48 hours without their credit card being charged. Therefore the actual sales an app is making is somewhat lower than the reported download count.

Considering all this, along with app price and days on sale within the market, we have been able to determine the monthly revenue from the (US only) Android Market to be closer to $1M USD.

Android has a long way to go to get anywhere near the size of Apple's App Store both in terms of revenue and size. Apple hit 65,000 apps in July compared to 7,000 apps in the Android Market Place today. We have plenty more data from androidstats.com which we plan on releasing regularly on this blog so make sure you grab our feed.

Can a free version boost sales of a paid iPhone Applications in AppStore?

Many iPhone publishers found that a dual release of a free lite version and a paid pro version of an iPhone app pays off.

Our own experiment...

We wanted to see if the free/pro approach works and have released a location sharing utility called Pinpoint for the iPhone. The Pro version of Pinpoint was released 3 weeks ago with expected download figures. The app was prices at US$2.99 and had reached approximately 150 downloads in 3 weeks.

Our experiment was constructed to see whether a free Lite version of Pinpoint could increase the sales figure of the paid Pro version. We also wanted to see whether we could boost the downloads of the paid app to get it into one of the Apple top lists. So we lined up three things

1. new free lite version

2. drop the price one tier (from US$2.99 to US$1.99)

3. Show messages on our existing apps to our existing user base

As @quamen pointed out it would be not trivial to see the impact of the free app because we have changed 3 variables at the same time. So, to isolate the the impact of the free app we have experimented with prices drop (2) and promotion messages (3) before and know what the impact of each of those changes is. So we should be fine to filter out the impact of the free app release (1).

after 5 hours...

Pinpoint Lite was approved by Apple on the 11th of August and reached 100 downloads within the first 5 hours. For tracking and user notification about the newly released app we are using shoutmob.com.

after 12 hours...

Over the last 12 hrs people have downloaded Pinpoint Lite more than 300 times.

Downloads in Pinpoint Pro have more than doubled. Knowing the impact of the price drop and promotion messages we can say that the impact of the free app alone was approximately 100% increase in paid app downloads.

So far we can confirm the boost and the effectiveness of shoutmob user notifications.

after 2 days...

I did not expect that the Lite version would be so popular. It made it in less than two day in the AppStore to #30 in Australia under Free Navigation apps and #46 in the US. That's a nice side effect but was not goal of the experiment.

The Lite version was downloaded 630 times so far.

So, how is the Pro version going after 2 day?

The conversion rate is lower than we thought. We are converting less then 10

% of the Lite users to upgrade to the Pro version. The price drop should start wearing off by now and all the downloads from now onwards come from Lite to Pro upgraders.

For the Pro version we can see the same download figures as in the first 3 days in the AppStore. The graph shows the downloads in the last week for the paid app. The impact of the price -drop and Lite version release are quite obvious.

[UPDATE]

after 3 days...

The Lite version is still on the "new Releases" page in the AppStore. Downloads decreased slightly compared to yesterday. I would expect that once we get on page 2 that downloads will decrease by 50% - lets see.

Pinpoint Lite ranks #42 in US and #28 in Australian free navigation apps.

Pinpoint Lite was downloaded 1000 times within three days with approx 340 new users a day.

The Pro version is almost unchanged. Even the price-drop should have worn off by now we see similar download numbers as in the previous two days.

The paid app is still going OK and I suspect that most downloads come from people

upgrading from Lite to Pro. Here are some graphs based on

shoutmob realtime analytics.

The total usage per day which trends upwards.

[UPDATE 2]

after 4 days...

The Lite version is no longer on the "new Releases" page in the AppStore. As expected, the number of new has decreased.

Pinpoint Lite ranks #43 in US (-1) and #27 in Australian (+1) free navigation apps.

Pinpoint Lite was installed 1300 times within four days. With 280 new users on day 4 which is 80% compared to the day before .

The Pro version the same user rate as the day before.

From here it will be really hard to stay in the top 100 with the free version.

More downloads than installs

One interesting fact is that the Apple reports show higher numbers than shoutmob. Where Apple reports showed 480 downloads shoutmob showed 350 users. So some 130 users have downloaded the free app but never used it. While Apple's report shows download numbers shoutmob shows the number of app that have been used. So there seem to be people who download free apps but do not use it. Looking at my own app download behaviour I sometimes download in iTunes but may take another day before I synchronise with the iPhone. Maybe that is what other people do too.

[UPDATE 3]

after 5 days...

Pinpoint Lite ranks #44 in US (-1) and #32 in Australian (-5) free navigation apps.

Pinpoint Lite was installed approx 1500 times within five days. With 260 new users on day 5 which is 92% compared to the day before .

The Pro version has now increased the number of users by 33% compared to the previous day.

New website released with focus on iPhone development

After a busy week in Sydney at the CEDIA Expo where we launch of our universal remote iPhone app we have finally found some time to revamp our website.

The new website focuses on our core services around iPhone and Android application development. The design is kept simple and clean and we hope that helps advertising jTribe's iPhone development skills and capabilities.

iPhone Universal Remote app for HAL unveiled

Remote controlling everything in your house from your iPhone is the dream right? Well yesterday we unveiled an app that brings us a step closer to a universal remote for the iPhone. At the CEDIA expo in Sydney we unveiled an iPhone app that lets you control devices like Foxtel, DVD, TV and tuners throughout the house. It integrates with some new hardware (HAL) from OzHifi which handles the routing and amplification of audio and video.

The iPhone app starts up and shows a overview of all the rooms (or zones) configured in your house and lets you control basic functions such as power, volume and mute. Clicking the info button for each zone takes you to a remote control for the device that is currently playing in that room. The screenshot below shows a Foxtel remote being used but the user could also select another source such as a DVD player or tuner and a different remote would appear. You can also link zones together to have the same thing playing in multiple rooms (party!), again all controlled from the iPhone.

The hardware will start shipping late this year so look out for even more features from the iPhone app before then.

Pinpoint Pro for iPhone - an app that finds you and shares your location

Pinpoint Pro uses the new maps on iPhone OS 3.0 to pinpoint your location.

The key feature is that you can select your location interactively using the map. If you want to share your current location the automatic location service does a great job. However, if you are in an area without GPS (e.g. in your office) then the iPhone gives you only an approximate location. With Pinpoint Pro you can adjust the location interactively. Move the map so that the crosshairs pinpoint your desired location - done.
Share the locaiton and address via Email or paste it in any iPhone app e.g SMS or Twitter.

Positioning the map interactively is great if you like to send someone an address to meet at.

I spent much time figuring out the best possible way to email a map. Sharing via the email feature attaches an google map to the email so people can see straight in their email client where you are.

Sharing via SMS is almost as simple as the email feature. Unfortunately, the Apple SDK still does not allow to send SMS programatically. So the only choice I had was to copy the location and map link into the clipboard. Now, the address and map can be pasted in any other iPhone app.

I am using it since one week and may say that sending a location with Pinpint is so much easier than via the Apple map application. If you have tried to drop a pin using the map app you will know what I mean.

I am really proud of the way you can pick a location on the map. Actually, the whole map can be moved using touch gestures. The crosshairs give visual assistance in positioning the map accurately.

More details at firepin.com

jTribe's secret iPhone app will be revealed mid July

Hey, how cool is it to have a secret iPhone project.

We developed an iPhone app for home entertainment automation. That's as much as we can say.

The app will be revealed on the 15th of July 2009 at the CEDIA Expo in Sydney. So more info about the app after the launch date.

Twitter friends on a map - there is an iPhone app for that

I released Mapee Lite. A free show case that demonstrates the map feature of the iPhone OS 3.0. Mapee Lite shows Twitter friends on an iPhone map. The lite version is limited to up to 10 friends on a map.

The experience was great: Flying pins & movable maps using the iPhone MapKit, Twitter API via JSON and Google Map API for Geo-Coding (yes, MapKit does only reverse geo-coding). The twitter profile most likely contains some text describing the location of the user. I need to ask Google what the geo-code for that location text would be (latitude/longitude) and then pin in on the map. I thought it would be simpler.

The pro version of Mapee will be coming out soon. It's basic idea is firstly to show your own tweeps and secondly to discover and follow other tweeps based on location.