Rainbow Effect
I’m getting closer to submitting… I just implemented a rainbow type effect to tint the image. The colors shift subtly as you tilt the device. If I can get far enough along in the next few days, I’ll look into doing ad-hoc provisioning to allow for beta testing. But to be honest, provisioning is a really frustrating and time consuming process for me so I’m not making any guarantees. My priority is to try to get this app submitted as soon as possible.
May 18th, 2009 at 2:18 pm
Looks very nice. Why is your priority to rush it? That doesn’t sound very sensible 🙂 Is there a competing app about to appear? Are you about to go broke? Much better to get people to test it in case you’ve missed a bug. Imagine if it’s a bug that affects a tonne of users and then you get negative reviews and the potential success of the app is destroyed by word of mouth! (OK – I’m being over-dramatic, but I just think a bit of time spent figuring out provisioning will reward you in the long run.)
Also: have you considered additional copy protection? (Since the protection built-in by Apple has been universally cracked and a lot of developers report that the majority people using their app got their paid-for app for free!)
For my own app I thought about doing this by comparing the size (or a checksum) of the installed binary against the “correct” value. The problem is that I wouldn’t know what the correct value was until the app was distributed, since the binary gets wrapped in Apple’s (broken) DRM for the App Store. So the value to check against would have to be made available online and my app would have to connect to my server for a sanity-check. Far from ideal. Rip-Dev sell a plug-in solution to this but it’s not cheap. However, if you believe their figures, it pays for itself:
http://ripdev.com/kaliap
May 18th, 2009 at 3:09 pm
I’m only doing the iPhone stuff as a hobby. I’m on vacation now, so I can pretty much work on the app all day. But once I start work again, I might not get a chance to do iPhone stuff for a long time. So I either get it done in the next couple weeks or it might not come out.
Also, thanks for the piracy info but I’m not that concerned about it. I don’t make apps for the money, it’s more about the joy of making something kinda cool. Besides, people who pirate apps are generally not the type of person who would pay for your app even if they couldn’t pirate it.
Or to put it another way: I’ve got about ten days left of iPhone development and I’d rather spend those days making my apps as good as they can be than to try to do something just to increase my profits.
May 18th, 2009 at 5:24 pm
That all makes sense.
And I kind of agree about people bootlegging apps. It annoys me when record companies complain they’ve lost $x dollars by multiplying the estimated number of downloads by the retail price of a record. They just don’t seem to get that most of those people would never have bought their record in the first place.
Then there’s the whole issue of DRM only hurting your customers – since the people who don’t want to pay always find a way to avoid it. And finally – those who download a cracked version of an app will still talk about it and tell their friends if they liked it. Yeah…maybe I won’t concern myself with it either, when it comes to it.
May 19th, 2009 at 11:47 pm
Good luck Mach. I am sure racing against the clock makes it all the more exciting. I can’t wait for Apple to update the Macbooks so I can get a new one and start learning all about this app fun. The joy.
May 22nd, 2009 at 7:59 pm
hey Mach, given the 3d nature of the app, are you also messing around with shadow gradients to give a sense of relative depth as you move the device? Seems like this would help enhance the holographic qualities?
And if you’re not crazy about UDIDing people, why not just make it free for the first few days to avoid the negative “Not worth the money” reviews, and gather opinions for later fixes & updates?
May 24th, 2009 at 9:20 am
Actually, I did get the ad-hoc provisioning worked out so I did end up doing a beta test with the people who sent me their UDIDs. As for making it free for the first few days… those days tend to sell about 10 to 50 times as many units as normal so it’s a bit hard to justify.
Another issue is that free apps get downloaded waaaay more than paid apps, like maybe 100 times as many. That’s generally a good thing but it also means 100 times as many emails, complaints, comments, and requests to respond to. As an independent developer who only gets to this this part-time, I’d rather focus my limited time available on addressing the concerns of people who were actually willing to spend a buck on my app.
Oh, I did try a couple tests similar to what you suggested regarding shadow gradients. I couldn’t get looking as good as I wanted yet, but I’ll keep on working on it and maybe I’ll include it in a future version.