Dear Mach,

Why do guys wait until after having sex to break up with women?

Perplexed in Preoria

Dear Perplexed,

I write iPhone apps, people! Okay, I also do visual effects work in the computer graphics industry. But what the heck do I know about relationships?! I’ve only ever had one girlfriend and then we got married. So breakups are not something I have much experience with.

But since you asked … I dunno. Guys like sex and it seems like they’re a lot more likely to get it before breaking up than afterwards, amirightoramiright? Haha… Seriously, though, I think it has something to do with intimacy issues. Guys aren’t really good about opening up and talking about their true feelings. So perhaps physical intimacy leads guys to confront the issues in their relationships that they were theretofore suppressing, thence leading to the breakups.

My advice? If you’re in a relationship with a guy and you think there are problems, train him to suppress his emotions by pretending to fall asleep and snoring loudly after sex. “But Mach, what if he says to me, ‘Honey, we need to talk about our relationship’?” No. This is not a thing you have to worry about. No guy will ever say this.

Mach

Have an iPhone question? Feel free to email me and I might answer in a column like this! Heck, I’ll probably answer non-iPhone related questions, too.

I’ve used up my $100 credit from Google towards AdWords and at the end of it all, it doesn’t look like it made much of a difference, if any.

The chart shows roughly what my revenue has been per day for the last couple months (which also shows why I’m just doing this as a hobby — can’t quit the day job on $20-$30 a day!). That’s the red line. The green line is how many visits my website gets. And the yellow shows my little ad campaign over the last week or so.

A couple of observations: There’s some between revenue and visits as I suspect a number of people buy my apps and visit my website once out of curiosity. (Welcome, new visitors!) Occasionally, my website will get significantly more traffic if something I post gets picked up somewhere (like the Loco Roco Nursery by Joystiq or my Iron Man video by StumbleUpon). But those visitors rarely buy my apps because they just happen to be here for that one thing. The other observation is that ads don’t seem to make a difference, at least not the way I was using them. I think people tend to buy apps more based on what their friends suggest or based on reviews and articles.

Well … one dragon, anyways. My goal when I started playing We Rule on the iPad was to get to level 20 and build a dragon den. I managed to do that over the weekend so now I’m going to be playing a lot less frequently. But if you’d like to see what a dragon looks and sounds like in the game, check out my kingdom. My username is “MachWerx”.

I got this silly idea, just in time for the Iron Man 2 premier:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kAq5UTPPmyE

I created a couple images for it by grabbing a screenshot from the trailer, adjusting the color a bit for my skin tone, and darkening around the edges to make it blend:

Here’s what you need to do:

• download the images to your computer
• put them in a folder in the picture directory that iTunes uses
• connect your iPad to your computer
• in iTunes, go to the Photos tab and be sure the folder you created is included
• sync your iPad
• go to Settings -> Picture Frame on your iPad
• set it to use the new folder you synced
• now hit the picture frame button when you turn on your iPad
• amuse your friends with the fact that you turned a $500 device into a costume prop

Enjoy!

I started running a Google AdWords campaign on Saturday using a free $100 credit I got from Google. The bottom line: Man, I’m glad I’m not spending my own money! But, I did find out some interesting stuff.

The chart shows how many units per day I’ve sold of Mach Dice (the amazing dice rolling app for the iPhone and related devices, buy it now!), how much went into advertising, and how many people clicked on the ad. I also included the previous week of data for context. For some reason, Saturday seems to be the biggest selling day.

As you can see, the first couple days didn’t seem to make much of a difference. And they cost a lot! But by the third day (May 3) I figured out how to limit how much it would bid per ad. (Note to self: spending $1.10 for someone to click on an ad for a $0.99 app is not good business.) Also, I changed the link from my Mach Dice web page to the iTunes purchase link. I actually prefer the former link because it’s got a video and everything. But I’ve heard that in sales, one of the most important principles is to reduce the number of clicks that a potential customer needs to make in order to purchase something. So, while I like my video and want people to see it, people are possibly more likely to purchase the app if they’re taken directly to the iTunes store.

I don’t have sales numbers for yesterday (Tuesday, May 4) yet, but so far 142 people have clicked on the ad, so that’s a pretty good sign, right?

I’ve mentioned a few times that I’ve tried using Google AdWords to advertise my apps. It seems a little counter-intuitive to spend over $1 per click to advertise something that at most gets me $0.70 per purchase. But hey, Google gave me a free $100 credit so I might as well try to use it.

But for the longest time I couldn’t manage to get Google to accept my ads. At first, they didn’t like my use of the trademarked term “iPhone” in the ad, which makes it difficult to sell an app that’s only available on iPhone OS devices. So then I tried using “iPhone™” but no luck. Finally, I hit on the idea of putting the ad only on iPhones and related devices and saying “this device”. Sure, it’s a little kludgey. But at least the ad is making out there and I’m using my free credit. In a few days I’ll see if it’s worth while.

I recently had a baby. From what I understand, it’s similar to having a dog (which I’ve never had). Taking care of a baby basically consists of doing three things:

• feed the baby
• burp the baby
• change the diaper

Unfortunately, the baby’s only form of communication is to cry. So if you’ve got a crying baby, you just have to cycle through those three things to try to figure out what’s going on. But sometimes doing the simple things doesn’t seem to work, in which case I’ve had some success with a few other techniques:

• finger switcheroo — sometimes babies don’t take bottles even when they’re hungry, like they’re too excited to drink properly, but they’ll calm down if you offer a finger knuckle to suck on
• tummy time — putting babies on their tummies makes them squirm around and sometimes that releases more gas … or poop
• shower time — for some reason, Baby Mach 2 really digs warm showers … no matter how upset he is, that always calms him down; so if your baby is crying inconsolably, give that a shot

I recently started creating another iPhone / iPad app. From what I understand, it’s similar to running your own business (which I’ve never done). Making an app basically consists of doing three things:

• coming up with the idea
• developing the app
• marketing the app

Coming up with the idea is by far the easiest part. I mean, I’ve got three apps that I want to work on right now, but other stuff keeps on coming up. Developing the app is hard, but it helps if you’re technical because there seem to be way more artists out there than programmers. The main thing is to keep at it. Try to work on your app at least a little every day, even if it’s on a piece of paper doodling ideas and user interfaces.

As for marketing … that’s a whole other thing. The main principle thing to keep in mind is that your marketing budget should be proportional to your development budget. If you’re doing a small app, it doesn’t make much sense in spending a huge amount to market it. For example, Google Ads? Just getting someone to click on the ad could cost upwards of $5 and there’s no guarantee that they’d buy the app. And I’ve heard from friends that print ads, even in iPhone specific magazines, don’t make a dent in sales. For small apps, your best bet is to give out free promo codes to reviewers and hope that one of them reviews it on their website. In addition, you should always have some way for people to see what your app is about, either with a demo video or a lite version of an app.

I recently picked up “We Rule“, a simulation game for the iPhone / iPad. From what I understand, it’s similar to Farmville (which I haven’t played). The game basically consists of doing three things:

• grow crops
• build buildings
• place them in an aesthetically pleasing manner

My kingdom’s layout is sort of inspired by where I work. There are a couple rows of trees in front of rose bushes, just like at work. There’s a river where the parking lot sometimes floods during heavy rains. There’s a little bakery that’s under construction…

The brilliant (or insidious) part of this game is that it’s got a built-in addiction cycle. You plant the crops and then stop playing. But you have to come back and play to harvest them or your crops die. You could plant crops that take longer to grow, but they’re not worth as many points and then you’ll have to wait longer to see the new stuff. And the more friends you get hooked on heroin get to join, the more money and experience points your buildings make.

Anyways, I’m not an expert by any means, but I have been playing a lot of it these last couple days and thought I’d share some tips:

• The iPad version is a little flakey with the friends list, but if you log into the iPhone version it will sync the friends list.
• Cheaper crops and buildings generally give you the best income per hour, but they also require you to play more frequently. There are even spreadsheets on this stuff.
• Use Twitter to make “friends”.

What if you’re like me and only know a couple people who play? You could use the in-game option to send out a Twitter message to all your followers. But really, how many of them are going to be playing this game? So that’s not very effective. But what if we reverse the polarity?! (Okay, that doesn’t really make much sense, but I always wanted to use that phrase.) Anyways, instead of trying to tell everyone else to play, go the other way. Do a Twitter search for “we rule iphone” and you’ll find a ton of statuses like this:

MachWerx Let’s play We Rule on the iPhone! My gamername is ‘MachWerx’. http://bit.ly/d4seUk

And bam! You’ve instantly got a list of hundreds of people who will be happy to be your friend in the game.

Last time, I posted a starfield video which demonstrates an iPad being used to look around in a virtual 3D environment. So how is this done? The basic idea is to line up the xyz coordinate system of the iPad to the xyz coordinate system of the world. Well, the world doesn’t really have an xyz coordinate system, but we’ll call “z” the direction that lines up with gravity and “y” the direction that lines up with North.

The first step, as you might guess, is to use the iPad’s accelerometer and compass to find out what direction gravity and north are in. Then, it’s a matter of taking those to vectors and rotating everything so that the iPad’s z-direction (which is initially pointing perpendicular to the screen towards you) to line up with the gravity vector and the iPad’s y-direction (which is initially pointing to screen right) to line up with the north vector. Here are the steps involved:

• rotate z so that the iPad’s new xz-plane lines up with the gravity vector
• rotate y so that the iPad’s new z-direction lines up with gravity
• recalculate the north vector in this new coordinate system
• rotate z again so that the iPad’s new y-direction now points north

But how do you know how much to rotate by? Well, that’s where trigonometry comes in. Let’s call your gravity vector . If that happens to be <0, 0, -1>, that means your iPad is lying flat on a table or something and you wouldn’t have to do anything. But for anything else, you’ll want to line up your new xz-plane with this . In other words, you need to figure out the angle between and <1, 0>. You do this by taking the arctangent of Gy over Gx, or “atan2(Gy, Gx)”.

The rest is left as an exercise for the reader…