Business

[Note: This is a guest blog post written by Martin Nguyen (@iMaddin on twitter), an OS X- and iOS developer based in Austria, about his Mac app Gestimer]

Gestimer Icon

I don’t like to keep too many thoughts in my head at the same time. Also, my short-term memory isn’t the greatest. If I had to cook dinner and then went back to my Mac to continue whatever I was working on, I’d probably forget about my dinner.

That’s especially true while coding where I have to be completely focused. Other unrelated thoughts are too distracting when writing code. I feel comfortable knowing that an app will take care of such thoughts as its memory is most likely better than mine.

Not too long ago – while I was at university – I noticed that todo apps weren’t entirely fitting all my needs. Sometimes I had these little tasks like reminding me to make dinner (because I’d forget and be too busy or focused with other things) or that I had to leave for a lecture in half an hour. It was too much of a hassle to set alerts for those tasks that have a short lifespan. To me it just feels slow to enter numbers with a keyboard for inputing dates and times, especially without a num pad.

As the type person who sits at my Mac most of the time, I decided to make a Mac app to work around this problem. After a couple of months and failed attempts at such an app, the idea that later became Gestimer popped into my mind: “Wouldn’t it be great if I could just drag down from the menu bar to create a quick reminder?” This seemed so simple and fast. It was the perfect solution.

Development

With this idea in my mind and a few sketches in my notebook, it was time for the execution. This was back in 2012 when I had just begun learning to code. As every beginner knows, coding is frustrating. Everything can break easily and you have no clue why. Objective-C was also not the easiest thing to learn without any prior programming knowledge. Additionally, making Mac apps appeared to be much more difficult than making iOS apps.
I shelved the project. There was nothing that was anywhere close to Gestimer out there so it was impossible finding resources that would help me realize the app.

With iOS 7, Apple introduced UIKit Dynamics. It seemed like a fun way to make interactions so I played around with it. I noticed that UIKit Dynamics allowed me to easily do something close to what I had in mind. It was only available for iOS and not OS X but it still allowed me to produce a version of Gestimer, even if it wasn’t in the intended environment. Here is the iOS version which was available from 2013 to 2014:

Gestimer_iOS

Gestimer for iOS didn’t do too well but that’s okay. I didn’t do any marketing as I simply put it up on the App Store and I was already happy to have an app that I made and used every day. Creating the iOS version taught me a lot and as I learned from more projects over the last couple years, I felt comfortable enough to tackle the Mac version again. I was especially motivated by the announcement and release of Swift.

I made some good progress on Gestimer for the Mac during the summer of 2014. The idea never changed: drag & drop from the menu bar to create a reminder. I worked on the app on and off, whenever I felt like it, whenever I slept off the frustration and head-scratching of the previous day.

As there was no UIKit Dynamics for the Mac, it was a lot more difficult to imitate the iOS version and to get things behaving as intended. By late 2014 I had a rough but useable version. I was never in a rush to release Gestimer. In fact, I stopped working on it for a couple months after that. I was again content with having an app I made and used every day. It also gave me time to simply use the app and think about if it truly did the things well that I wanted it to do.

If you haven’t seen Gestimer yet, have a look at a short clip here.
https://vine.co/v/ehEwHbWKhUj/embed/simple

Marketing

Sometime around mid-April 2015 I started sharing a beta of Gestimer with people who I thought might be interested. Besides gathering feedback, it got me excited about the prospect of launching and hear what even more people will say about it. That’s where I decided to do some proper marketing. I won’t go into detail about this here as it would double the size of this post but I took marketing very seriously.

The basic outline of what I had:
– a short 10s clip of the interaction on the website
– collected email addresses for launch day
– made a YouTube video (currently over 50k views)
– a nice press kit
– localized Gestimer into 9 languages (now even more!)

Launch

There was little press coverage on launch day, but I had Gestimer up on Product Hunt thanks to Matthias who kindly sent me an invite. Someone had also posted the app to Hacker News. Both sites led to a lot of traffic. At the end of the day Gestimer was sitting on the 3rd spot on Product Hunt. To this date, the PH submission for the app has received over 400 upvotes. Twitter also helped a bit, though I believe people overestimate its effectiveness.

More press coverage followed and an increasing number of people spread the word. During launch week Gestimer reached the #1 spot in the Top Paid charts on the Mac App Store in multiple countries including the US, UK, and Germany. While sales numbers on the Mac App Store are small compared to the iOS App Store – even if you reach the top charts – it’s still been good. It’s nothing to complain about.

The reception for Gestimer has been overwhelming and I would have never imagined it becoming this successful. It makes me very proud to have done all the design, code, and marketing work on my own.

If you’d like, you can find out more about Gestimer here.

——
Martin Nguyen (@iMaddin on twitter) sometimes works on iOS and OS X apps and lives in Austria. While he enjoys coding, he is still trying to figure out the next step in his life.

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[ Note: This is a guest blog post written by Frank Gregor (@TheCocoaNaut on twitter), an OS X- and iOS developer based in Austria, about his Mac app Review Times ] Review Times Icon

Once upon a time… No, only fairytales start that way. And this is no fairytale. It is a “true story”, like, I’m sure, many other developers have experienced one way or another. (-:

Some time around Christmas 2014, I stumbled upon a tweet, linking to appreviewtimes.com. Many of you may know about this website already. It gives you the average time Apple is currently taking to review apps for submission on the iOS and Mac App Stores.

I thought, hey, that would make a nice little Mac tool. So I asked a couple of developers on Twitter what they thought of such an app. The response I got was great. Without exception, everyone I asked wanted something like that. I had had some free time on my hands, so the idea manifested.

I wanted to build a small app that would live exclusively in the menu bar and offered a Today Widget. The information I would display in the app I would get from appreviewtimes.com. So I contacted Dave Verwer (@daveverwer on twitter), founder of Curated and publisher of the well-known iOSDevWeekly newsletter. He was the contact listed for the Shiny Development team, who are the creators of appreviewtimes.

I asked Dave if they perhaps already had such an app available or in development, and if that wasn’t the case, if they’d mind if I developed the app and used their data for it:

Hey Dave,

I found you as contact for Shiny Development, the maker of App-Review-Times. So I think it would be a great thing to have a little OS X tool that shows in an app extension the current review times via Notification Center. I’m building exactly such a tool and I have to grab and parse the website to get all the needed data.

So, to make things easier for development: Would it be possible to get all that raw data (iOS & OS X) as JSON or XML? Would be really great! (-;

Cheers, phranck

Dave answered promptly:

Hi Frank

I’m afraid that we don’t have either JSON or XML feeds of the information.

Please feel free to scrape the HTML though, as long as you include a link back to the original site.

Thanks Dave

Great! Now nothing stood in the way of me selling this App on the App Store (though I would learn better later). I got to work and within two days, I had a working prototype.

The fact that this app would run as a menu bar tool was very beneficial to me. I had been working on a piece of open source code, which does exactly that: place an icon in the menu bar and display a popover when clicked. This gave me a very good reason to further develop and improve the open source code.

Screenshot of Review Times Popover

Now was the time to tweet some screenshots, to whet the appetite of potential customers. It worked well. I received a lot of inquiries about what the app was about. This way, I got my first beta testers.

Review Times Today Widget

All in all, about three to four weeks went into developing the app and I believed the app was ready. I needed a nice icon that should really catch the eye. I made the acquaintance of Dan (@derpixeldan on twitter) and he created something truly wonderful at an unbeatable price… (-;

Around Mid-January, I submitted the app to the Mac App Store. Excitedly I waited for the notification on my iPhone that the review process had begun. About three weeks later, I received the message I longed for.

It didn’t take long and the review team contacted me again. But this message wasn’t what I had hoped for. My app got rejected! The reason Apple gave me was

…featuring speculative information about Apple products/services…

which I didn’t find reasonable at all. I was shocked. Every developer who ever received a “Rejected” notice knows this feeling of unease. I was annoyed and angry at the same time. Why in the world… ?!?! Did I go about this entire thing too naively?

Appstore Rejection

If you are familiar with Apple, you know they like to have control. And speculative information – like the average time it may take for Apple to review an app until submission to the App Store, shown by an app by some developer – well, that was completely out of their control. So Apple showed me, who’s boss.

That took the wind out of my wings in respects to this tool. I didn’t want to get into a discussion with Apple, it wouldn’t have lead anywhere anyway. I vented on twitter and let the whole thing rest for a couple of days – until, again on twitter, I received inquiries about what had happened to the app and how I would proceed with it. There were two possible options for me: 1) publish it as open source code 2) sell it outside of the Mac App Store from my website

On Twitter, I asked for input.

Since previously, people had stated their interest in paying for this app, I decided to go with option 2. After some research and testing how to best implement selling it from my website, I came to the conclusion that I should use Paddle. Their integration into an app is absurdly easy to do and they have first-class support.

All said and done, it took three more days of coding and testing and then everything was ready. I built a one-page website, wrote to many Mac-Blogs and magazines (none of whom replied!) and announced the release on twitter. Since so many developers wanted this tool, I was preparing for incredible sales-days… (-:

Poppycock. Virtually nothing happened. I sold a couple of copies, but all in all it went very, very slowly. Even after two months – with heavy-duty tweeting about it – I didn’t even make up for the cost of the icon. Reality had its grip on me again. So I had to act. Without thinking about it too long, I deleted all license- and purchase-handling code and released the app for free from my website.

Now everyone can download and install the app from http://reviewtimes.cocoanaut.com. Since then, I’ve had about 1-2 downloads a day.

—
Frank Gregor (@TheCocoaNaut on twitter) is an OS X- and iOS developer based in Austria. Among others, he is responsible for the Mac apps Review Times, Nekrologger and the iOS app f4analyse.

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Glimpses App Icon

Glimpses 2.0 for Mac

After a lot of hard work, I’m very happy to finally be able to announce the immediate availability of Glimpses 2.0 (formerly known as Briefly) on the Mac App Store.
The app has undergone some major changes, and I wanted that to be reflected in the app- name and icon (wonderful work by the very talented Alexander Käßner).

What Does Glimpses Do?

Still Motion videos typically show photos for not much longer than the fraction of a second.
Glimpses is designed to let you create these videos with just a few clicks, with stunning results.

The app produces high-quality video with a resolution of up to 4K and lets you add a soundtrack to make your video really sing.

Glimpses with soundtrack selection

What’s New?

– Soundtracks: Glimpses 2.0 makes it much easier to add multiple soundtracks. It also lets you select the parts of the soundtracks you really like to make your Still Motion video really shine.
– Face Detection: Glimpses analyses your photos for faces and places the photos in your video accordingly for much nicer and more personal results.
– 4K Resolution: Going beyond 1080p, Glimpses now renders your videos with a resolution of up to 4K.
– Projects: You can now save your projects. Up until now, the app only remembered the last used photos and soundtrack.

… as well as many more, minor improvements (like improved support for panorama photos) and fixes.

Details

Soundtracks

Soundtracks are a vital part of a Still Motion video. Glimpses makes it so much easier to add and edit one or several soundtracks.
With its new selection feature, you can select just the part of a song you like best that should be used for your video.

If a soundtrack is too short, you can either loop it or add another one. The order of appearance can be changed at any time.
Should a soundtrack be longer than your video, Glimpses will automatically fade it out at the end without you having to do anything.

Face Detection

In earlier versions, Glimpses used to center your photos within the video’s frame.
Glimpses 2.0 is much smarter and analyses your photos for faces and if detected, moves them into the video’s frame, resulting in much nicer and more personal videos.

Briefly without and with face detectionA still from a video created with Briefly 1.5.2 (top) compared to the same video created with Glimpses 2.0 (below)

Resolutions and Video Settings

With cameras getting better and better, it was only logical to include new resolutions in Glimpses 2.0 – the app now goes beyond 1080p and adds support for 2K and 4K resolutions. You can set the resolution manually or let Glimpses decide, based on the smallest photo.

Glimpses Video SettingsGlimpses Video Settings

A photo’s duration can be set from 0.1 seconds up to 4 seconds in 0.1-second-increments, an improvement that allows for more fine-grained control over the resulting video. Glimpses can also automatically do it for you, based on the duration of the soundtracks you selected.

Pricing and Availability

Glimpses is available exclusively on the Mac App Store (click) for the introductory price of $9.99 for a limited time (about 60% off), after which the price will revert to $24.99.
A free, 15-day trial can be downloaded from the website (click) (direct download). If you’re from the media and would like to get more info about the app, please download the press kit (click), thank you.

Glimpses Website: http://eternalstorms.at/glimpses
Glimpses on the Mac App Store: https://itunes.apple.com/app/glimpses/id637565340?mt=12
Glimpses Demo Download: http://eternalstorms.at/glimpses/Glimpses.zip
Glimpses on Twitter:https://twitter.com/GlimpsesApp
Glimpses Press Kit: http://eternalstorms.at/press/Glimpses-2-Press-Kit.zip
Glimpses on Product Hunt: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/glimpses

Thank you for your time, I hope you enjoy this great new version of Glimpses 🙂

If you have any feedback or questions, please be sure to let me know via twitter (click) or eMail (click). I’m looking forward to hearing from you.

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In an effort to bring some personality to my apps, website and blog and make them easily recognizable by “connecting” them visually I rolled out a minor re-”design” of my website and blog yesterday.

The Color Scheme

The entire color scheme is based off the Eternal Storms Software logo.
Up until now, neither the website nor this blog reflected those colors. As a matter of fact, the only place that had some of this personality was the iOS part of Transloader. In its “About” screen, you’d see this:

IMG 9025Screenshot of Transloader on iOS

It’s immediately recognizable – and not only by the logo.

The Website and Blog

It was about time I brought that over to the website, because it looked like this (please excuse the missing text and bezels, I took this from the Wayback Machine as I stupidly don’t keep old websites around):

Old eternalstorms.at websiteeternalstorms.at before the re-“design”

At the time, I had a good reason for it. I wanted the user to be able to see all my apps at once, without any distraction. But it lacks a certain “je-ne-sais-quoi”. It has no identity. You don’t know who it’s from. Heck, there’s not even a logo anywhere to be seen.

Lo and behold, the new website looks like this:

Untitledeternalstorms.at after the re-“design”

It’s probably not the best website you’ve ever seen, but it’s certainly an improvement over the old one.

The Apps

Now I can’t go in and make all my apps purple. That would look ludicrous (or would it?). But I still want to carry over some of this into my apps, and I believe the best place to do this is in the apps’ About windows. Currently, they look like this:

Briefly's old About WindowBriefly’s About window before the re-design

It has all the necessary information in there, but it could be more personal, more fun, if you will. Here’s what the new one will look like:

Briefly's new about windowBriefly’s About window after the re-design

It will roll out in all apps with future updates. The nice thing is that it’s very much a drop-in replacement for the standard about panel Apple’s providing in Cocoa. It takes all its information from the app’s Info.plist file and additional information (like twitter, Facebook, Acknowledgements, Credits) can be provided in a strings file which will then be used in the about panel. So I just drop it in, change some strings in the strings file and I’m done, I don’t need to touch the xib in Interface Builder. Perhaps I’ll do a blog post about it some other time.

App Store Screenshots

All this kind of raises the question – should I brand my App Store screenshots as well? I’m leaning toward “no”. Definitely no logo or slogan, though. That would just distract from the product. Perhaps I could color explanation text accordingly, or put them in colored overlays. Or create an Eternal Storms Software Desktop Background Image that will be present in all App Store screenshots, that would definitely be a more subtle way of doing it. I might try it out on an app and see how it does.

But in general, I am against branding of App Store Screenshots. They should present the app. A description of the company could always be put into the last paragraph of the App Store App description. That’s a nice place for it.

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