Apple just rejected my latest iPad app, Starfield 3D, because “Apps that are not very useful or do not provide any lasting entertainment value may be rejected”.

This is one of the hardest parts of being an iPhone developer, the possibility that all your efforts and creativity may never see the light of day because someone else doesn’t like it. That’s true of a lot of things in life — so much depends on whether others see the same potential that you see. So when something like this happens, you have to choose between getting discouraged or pushing on and hoping for better next time. Right now, it’s a little hard not to feel discouraged, but I think I’ll keep trying eventually.

But hey, if you’d like to see this app on the iPad, please comment on the YouTube video. Maybe if there are enough comments, Apple would be convinced that there’s a market for this sort of thing.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovIxz1yTXPc
… wherein I discover that certain things are much more difficult to do when half your face is numb.

I’m getting a bunch of fillings replaced today; enough that they’re numbing my entire mouth. Theoretically, it shouldn’t have any effect on my driving so I shouldn’t have a problem riding back to work. But, it definitely will have an effect on my ability to talk. Normally, this wouldn’t be a problem. But as it happens, I’m meeting with some people from an outside company at 2pm. This could be interesting. I just hope I don’t drool on them…

I wanted to make my latest app (Starfield 3D) free because it’s just such a simple idea: tilt and turn your iPad to fly through a field of stars. That’s it. It didn’t seem like something worth charging people for. But I did want to make some money off of it. I was also curious about ads and in app purchases so this seemed like a perfect opportunity to learn more about them.

It turns out that in app purchases are a little bit tricky. Fortunately, I found some info on the web. Here’s a general overview on mugunthkumar.com. And stackoverflow.com had a tip about one error I was running into and another tip about the PaymentObserver.

When I was a kid, grownups would ask, “What do you want to be when you’re older?” The other kids would say things like “astronaut” or “firefighter” but I’d always say, “tall”, which would make people laugh, although I didn’t understand why. (Oh wait, now I get it…)

Anyways, I never got my wish, but my baby just got measured at the pediatricians and he’s in the 75th percentile for height! Ah, it warms my heart that he towers over three quarters of his peers. Hopefully, he’ll have more interesting aspirations than I did.

I was having a rough time with something last night and a friend said, “Go home and kiss your baby.” And you know what? It worked.

I just managed to beat the Sunday deadline and submitted Starfield 3D to Apple! Hopefully, it’ll get approved in a week or so.

It’s my first free app and it’s sort of ad supported in that I’ve got ads for my own apps in there. I’ve also put in an in-app purchase to remove the ads. I’m curious to see how much a free app gets downloaded, if it has any impact on sales for my other apps, and how many people will pay to remove ads.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5_AOZ2je4c
I love watching Starcraft 2 strategy videos so I thought I’d try making one myself. Of course, I’m not actually any good at playing Starcraft so I started with an easy one: strategy tips for playing Starcraft vs a baby.

On any given day, about a dozen people around the world buy a copy of Mach Dice. But on Monday, a whopping 44 people bought copies of my dice app! That was pretty surprising, so I checked around to see if I could see what caused the bump.

There was a nice article on 148app.com that mentioned Mach Dice last week, but it didn’t have that much of an effect on sales. And I couldn’t find any other recent articles on it. But then I looked at the sales report and noticed an unusual icon.

Apparently, some educational institution purchased 31 copies of my app. Pretty cool, eh? So they get my app at half price and I get a nice little bump in sales. And if you happen to be one of the people who got Mach Dice through the educational discount, let me know! I’d love to hear more about it.

Remember that starfield app I was working on? The plan was to make a free iPad app that had iAds on it. But there’s one little snag. iAds is only available on iOS 4.0 and later but the iPad only goes up to iOS 3.2 for now. So in the interim, I’m creating ads for my own apps with links to buy them in the app store.

This does bring up an interesting question, though. Once iAds is available for the iPad, will I get more revenue from running other people’s ads or from running my own and having people purchase one of my other apps?