Demian's Tech Blog » App Store

Mobile workers can discover best places to work

demianturner — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 11:28:48 +0000

Thanks to Pam for the heads up about this new app in the app store, WorkSnug.

WorkSnug uses Augmented Reality to connect mobile workers to the nearest and best places to work in the city. We’ve visited and rated hundreds of workspaces, assessing noise levels, power provision, community feel, even the quality of the coffee. London has been launched first. San Francisco, New York, Berlin, Madrid and several other cities are on the way in the coming weeks

Covered recently in Web Worker Daily, check out the video to see the app in action.

Baby Maker Success Story

demianturner — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 09:26:21 +0000

Another case of iPhone devs reporting the full lifecycle of their AppStore experience. These guys used a third party to develop their app and earned back their $5k dev costs quite quickly.

An interesting read.

In App Purchase Hacks

demianturner — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 13:38:02 +0000

Here’s an interesting way to hack IAP in the AppStore, reported by Kevin from ablepear.com. Am surprised this is possible.

Group: iPhone Developers - www.iPhoneintouch.com
Subject: New comment (14) on “Are “in app” purchases successful?”

I especially like the model that Storm 8 impliments – and it’s a strange one indeed, but works around a “limitation” of the in-game “store-kit” limitation. That is to say that, as Steve Jobs said, “Free games remain free.” So there should be not charge to this. Well Storm 8 has a series of games that have made it into the top 10 several weeks running. The game is free, but there is a certain type of currency that you can purchase “in-game”.

The currency comes in the form of an additional app you download from the App Store, basically the same app with a little hook to say that your account has downloaded one of it’s packages and to add a certain number of “coins” to you main account. Once this has happened you can delete the “second” game or the “first” as they are both the full game.

A very interesting use of the app space and somewhat bypasses the in-game purchasing.

Use Delicious? Got an iPhone? You need this app

demianturner — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 15:47:47 +0000

Read Later is an app that lets you save web pages on your iPhone/iPod for offline reading. Not the first app to do that? Well it’s integrated with delicious.com so any bookmarks you tag with a to_read tag (or any tag of your choice) are detected by the app and downloaded for offline reading.

And when you’re finished reading the article on your iPhone, hitting the ‘mark as read’ button sends a request to delicious and your read_later tag is removed. Nice, simple and clean. And currently free in the AppStore.

The articles are a pleasure to read on the iPhone. All flashing ads, graphics and irrelevant distractions are removed for you. You just get the cleaned text for easy reading. The app’s description says it best:

All web pages are cleaned and stripped of irrelevant adverts for easy reading on the iPhone.
Store hundreds of webpages on your iPhone
Read Later remembers which article your were last reading
Sync your iPhone with your Delicious account to get our latest bookmarks

Apparently there are currently 1.5m “to_read” and similar tags on delicious so there must be a lot of folks using this system to flag articles for later reading. Check it out.