Ideas, Thoughts and Discussions of a self-employed developer
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GameTimer mentioned on “The Spiel” podcast
GameTimer got a nice mention on Episode 171 of “The Spiel” podcast, a show about games and the people who love them. (If you want to listen, here is a direct link to Episode 171, and the discussion of GameTimer starts at about 2h20m.) The hosts Stephen and Dave think it’s a good idea to…
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Producing a Demo Video for your iOS app
My new iOS app GameTimer is getting closer to a release. The app has been submitted to Apple, so I’m now working on generating some interest on review sites. I’ve read the helpful “Pitch Perfect” by Erica Sadun and Steven Sande from TUAW. They make it clear that it’s important to stand out from the tens…
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Using imageNamed to pick the right image file
When designing an iOS app for different devices in the iOS family, there are a lot of different sizes (and corresponding image files). Rather than having to code all the different cases, UIKit’s UIImage imageNamed can take care of it. This is achieved by using naming conventions, so that UIImage can choose the “right” image…
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“Free Initial Release” discussed on CoreIntution
One of my favorite tech/developer podcasts, CoreIntuition by Daniel Jalkut and Manton Reece, discussed the “Free Initial Release” strategy on their Episode 75. As fas was I understood them, the episode title “Please Don’t Make The Same Mistake” does not refer to “FIRST” – even though they were quite critical of the idea. As I’m not…
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Promote an iOS app with a free initial release
My next iOS app GameTimer is getting closer to release and I’m thinking how to generate more interest for the app. One idea I’ve been considering is to do a free initial release. This blog post goes into some more details and pros and cons of this strategy. As I love to come up with…
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GameTimer – Getting closer to a “Beta Release”
As I’m not working on a project in January, I was able to spend some more time on GameTimer. To recap, GameTimer is a multi-person timer allowing you to measure how much time each player spends during a board game. Progress I’ve spent a lot of time designing the interface. A good part of it…
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Next iPhone app: GameTimer
Recently, I’ve started to work on my next iPhone app. The working title is “GameTimer”. It’s purpose is to keep track of how much time each player in a multi-person board game uses for his/her moves. Game Timer: Usage Scenario GameTimer is very much a “scratch-you-own-itch” app: My wife and I love to play board…
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Duplicate Contacts – Where do they come from? (Or: McFly, you’re a slacker)
When dealing with data quality issues such as duplicates, the question people usually focus on is “how do I get rid of the duplicate records?” While this is important, this does not remove the cause of the problem and usually leads to ongoing or recurring cleaning efforts. Therefore, if you really want to resolve a…
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Low Data Quality in your iPhone Address Book – Why care?
As with all data quality issues, it is important to understand the consequences of a low quality address book. Too often this discussion is skipped, resulting in only half-hearted efforts of cleaning up and quickly slipping back into old habits. Here are a few scenarios that show the impact of low data quality in your…
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Getting Feedback on SmarterContacts before Releasing
One of the main points in the “Lean Startup” line of thinking is to get feedback from “real” users as soon as possible and to use that feedback to improve your product before going to market. Before releasing my next iPhone app, I tried to follow this advice, talked to a few potential users and…
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