Appwolf

Thank you Steve.

Thu, 06 Oct 2011 13:26:00 -0400

Thank you Steve.

The iPhone 4S coupled with iOS 5 looks like a fantastic device -...

Wed, 05 Oct 2011 07:07:00 -0400

The iPhone 4S coupled with iOS 5 looks like a fantastic device - true voice interaction, invisible cloud integration, blazing speed and apparently the best phone camera ever. So why has the general reaction to last night’s keynote been so glum?

A glance at the Apple home page tag lines for previous iOS devices might provide a hint;

iPhone 3GS - ‘The fastest, most powerful iPhone yet’
iPad 2 - ‘Thinner, Lighter, Faster, Facetime, Smart Covers, 10 hour battery’
iPhone 4S - ‘Dual-core A5 chip. All new 8MP camera and optics. iOS5 and iCloud. And introducing Siri’

I’ve picked the three most recent ‘evolutionary’ products to make for a fair comparison but the shift in language is pretty clear. Talking about chips and cores and megapixels is very much what the rest of the tech industry does and Apple very pointedly didn’t do - yet tech-verbiage is very much a part of how the 4S is being presented. The iPhone 4S introductory video actually starts with the A5 processor and then (horror) zooms into the innards of the phone to show where the A5 processor sits. Later on (more horror) we revisit these innards and get to see a visualisation of the two gleaming cores. It’s like watching an old Intel advert.

And the thing is, the 4S didn’t need to be presented as just an evolution of the 4 - it has Siri, a potentially ‘magical’ way of interacting with the device that could have been portrayed to be as ground-breaking as the touch screen. Yet post-Steve Jobs, Siri is just another feature - one of a bunch.

Now, while I would really like to avoid playing the ‘What Would Steve Have Done’ game, I can’t get away from the feeling that the 4S would have been much better spun by Jobs. There’s a good chance that in his hands, Siri would indeed have seemed magical and amazing and exciting (and would probably have a better name - it’s strange that Apple chose to stick with ‘Siri’).

That’s not to say that anyone should panic. Far from it - the iPhone 4S will sell bucketloads, as will the now cheaper iPhone 4 (and the now very cheap iPhone 3GS). However, a marketing misstep like this so soon after Jobs’ departure is just a little bit worrying.

Apps galore

Thu, 29 Sep 2011 08:46:00 -0400

Things have been pretty busy here at Appwolf - so busy that we haven’t had to time to post about the apps that we’ve been building. Since the last blog post, we’ve built apps for kids who like dress up, adults who like jewels, drinkers of tea and lovers of whiskey.

Dress The Duchess (for Ink Robin) - a beautiful iPhone app for dressing up Duchess Kate, we built this for the lovely team at Ink Robin.

Tea Drop Tea Timer (for Tea Drop) - a funky iPhone app that showcases the products of luxury tea brand Tea Drop and provides tea drinkers with a guide to brewing the perfect cup

Otara Collection (for Colombo Jewellery Stores) - an elegant iPad app that showcases the Otara range of jewellery pieces at the Colombo Jewellery Stores. The app was designed and deployed for in-store use only (i.e. it is not available on the app store).

IBTC Grand Royal (for International Beverages Trading Corporation) - a slick iPad app designed to be used by the IBTC marketing team to engage consumers in bars with IBTC’s premium whiskey brand, Grand Royal Special Reserve. [Oh, and the entire app is in Burmese]

B2B apps

Fri, 15 Jul 2011 08:40:00 -0400

Apple’s announcement yesterday about a system to sell custom B2B apps directly to business customers is particularly timely for us at Appwolf. Of late, we’ve got a number of projects to build apps to deployed within companies and to be frank, the existing options for internal deployment are a mess.

Hitherto, the only sanctioned method for a company to deploy apps amongst its employees was for the company to sign up for the Apple Developer Program. Simple enough to say but this was a real hassle in practice; the company itself had to apply and this proved challenging for some of our non-techie clients (who just wanted to have a few iPads with a custom app in their retail store). Moreover, the application process can take *forever* - one of our clients applied for the Program more than 2 months ago and the process is still not complete.

The other alternative of course it to put these apps on the app store, but in a lot of cases, companies don’t want their in-house apps accessible to all. Plus there is the ever-present problem of getting an app through app review (particularly when said app has been designed with a very narrow use case in mind).

For a time, we were seriously considering doing internal company apps on Android instead of iOS. Android app distribution is super-easy; We can just mail the app file to the client and they can install it on any Android device they liked.

However it looks like Apple has recognised the problem and is trying to resolve it. The new Custom B2B scheme lets developers create custom apps and make these available only to specific customers (apps are distributed via Apple’s infrastructure - customers are provided with a number of redemption-code based links from which the app can be downloaded). The apps still go through review but presumably/ hopefully they will be reviewed in a looser context than apps being reviewed for the app store.

Customers can access this Custom B2B scheme by just signing up for the Apple Volume Purchase Program. We’ll need to see how this sign up works in practice but on the face of it, it looks to be a lot easier than signing up for the Apple Developer Program.

The scheme is still being rolled out - currently, only US firms can sign up for the Volume Purchasing Program - but in general, this is a promising step. Fingers crossed, deploying in-house apps to companies will be a lot easier going forward.

Tiny tips

Thu, 14 Jul 2011 01:53:00 -0400

We’ve been building apps for a while now but occasionally we learn something that would have made our lives much easier if we’d known it from the outset. Here are a couple of things we only recently worked out;

JPGs are much much smaller than PNGs (in terms of filesize)

Given that most of the app’s size comes from its graphic files, we only recently discovered that we can radically cut down app size by converting our images from PNG to JPG. There’s no discernible loss of quality and you can cut an image file’s size by over 50%. The only trick is that JPGs don’t support transparency - for this, you have to use PNG

You can create an iTunes link to your app with just the app ID

http://itunes.apple.com/app/id418125178 works just as well as http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/cricket-booth/id418125178?mt=8

And iTunes Connect gives you the app’s ID the moment the app is created, so you can construct the app’s URL even before uploading the binary (which is useful if you want to include a link to the app within the app itself)

Radio silence

Fri, 10 Jun 2011 08:03:18 -0400

The problem with not writing a blog post for a while is that you get into a cycle where you have more and more stuff to report and this makes it harder and harder to sit down and write the damn post.

Which is our way is saying - sorry we haven’t blogged for months.

So what have we been doing? All sorts of things. Since we last posted, we have built an array of iOS apps;

AreaNow - a location based social network app for music lovers
A timer based game and a comedy photo app (which were outsourced to us by a London creative agency, and so can’t be named)
Cricket Booth - a cricket-based photo app to celebrate the Cricket World Cup
An in-house iPad app for Boutique Creative, a London-based events agency (the app synchronises video playback across a set of iPads)

… plus four more apps that we are just finishing and which we’ll talk about shortly.

So we’ve been busy and it looks like we’ll be getting busier. But going forward, we are going to make sure to blog. Keep an eye open.

Sites for app design inspiration

Fri, 10 Dec 2010 04:47:00 -0500

We’re always on the lookout for examples of lovely app design/ UI and just chanced across this great blog post from @birnimal where he has compiled a list of sites that showcase beautiful app design.

We’ve come across a few more in our interweb travels so here’s a list of our current favourites;

Dribbble (of course)

Pttrns (new)

Mobile UI Patterns (new)

iOS Inspire Me (new)

We’ll update this list if we go along. Enjoy

An update

Wed, 13 Oct 2010 07:44:18 -0400

It’s been a few months since the last blog update so it’s a good time to let everyone know what we’ve been up to. We certainly haven’t been sitting on our hands - in fact, the last month has has super-busy. What’s happened is that Appwolf have pivoted slightly - instead of focusing entirely on the development of our own products, we are now undertaking some contract work - i.e. outsourced iPhone app development. And this has worked out very well for us - over the last two months, we have taken on three iPhone app projects from clients in London (I can’t reveal details as we are under NDA but once the apps go live, I’ll post some links).

In general, there is a large (and growing) market for mobile app outsourcing and from what I can tell, the players in this market are pretty much like that for any type of software development - you get the large (usually Indian) firms with hundreds of coders, you get the small/niche development houses and then you get an army of freelancers. Appwolf falls firmly into the middle category - a small app design house - and will stay there; I have no intention of turning this firm into a factory. Doing a couple of interesting projects a month would be more than enough for us.

So there we are - if you are looking for someone to build a killer iPhone, iPad or Android app then drop us a line on info@appwolf.com and we’ll talk.

The Appwolf website gets an upgrade

Wed, 13 Oct 2010 07:21:53 -0400

The Appwolf website gets an upgrade:

We’ve dawdled over this for far too long (particularly given that our previous website was just a one-pager). The new one has screenshots of our apps and links to demo videos and the app store.

Our latest app - SMS Contact Sender

Tue, 13 Jul 2010 03:31:00 -0400

The SMS Contact Sender is a super-simple app that lets you send a contact number to someone else via SMS. Non-iPhone users might be surprised that we’d need to build an app for something so basic but bizarrely, the iPhone only lets you share contacts via MMS or e-mail. So if you want to send a number to someone who doesn’t have MMS or e-mail access on their phone (which is still the vast majority of people), then you need to do some fairly tricky cut-and-paste work between the SMS and Contacts apps.

Or… you can download our SMS Contact Sender and share a contact with just a few taps.

The app is available for $0.99 from iTunes - do note that it is only available for iPhones running OS 4

Singles for Foursquare - out now

Thu, 01 Jul 2010 06:30:00 -0400

Our latest iPhone app - Singles for Foursquare - is live in the app store. It’s a dating app for Foursquare users and is super-easy to use. Here’s how it works;

You download the app (and write a short personal description)
Check in someplace
See who else is checked in at your location (and whether they’re single)
If you see someone interesting, send them a private message (and if you’re lucky, maybe they’ll message back).

The app uses Foursquare for checkins but all messages go through our own private servers.

We’ve put a short demo of the Singles on to Youtube - do have a look.

The app is available free - download it from the app store and give it a try!

Mashboard 1.0 in trouble

Wed, 02 Jun 2010 16:09:00 -0400

It looks like our timing sucks. After months and months of development and UI work, we finally submit Mashboard, our dashboard widget app for the iPhone, to the app store… just in time to run afoul of Apple’s new policy that dashboard/ widget/ desktop type apps are no longer allowed.

Disaster.

We’re not the only ones who’ve been affected here. My Frame, a photo frame app with some widget-like features, was removed from sale today, much to the distress of the company that built it.

It’s not clear what Apple’s issue is with these sorts of apps; in my conversation with a member of the app review team, I was told that my app should “only show one thing at a time” but I wasn’t provided with a rationale for this - it was just policy. Steve Jobs’ e-mail exchange with the developer of My Frame wasn’t any more enlightening; the policy was clear - “we are not allowing apps that create their own desktops” - but not the reasoning behind it.

What is clear is that we got screwed. We put a huge amount of time, effort and money into building an app that played by the app store rules, only to find the rules changed, with no warning or explanation.

So how do we proceed from here? As angry as we are, Appwolf is not going to suddenly stop iPhone app development and focus on Android; despite its rapid growth, the Android market has a long way to go before it matches the revenue prospects of the iPhone market. What we will do is limit our risk; we’ll probably take more contract jobs and the products we build will be smaller and less ambitious - by limiting the time we spend on a given product, we limit the potential loss if the product is again on the wrong side of a new Apple policy.

It’s a far from ideal situation but at the moment, we see no better way to proceed. We can only hope that in time, Apple will start to take better care of its developers. Not because alienating a few developers is going to hurt Apple much (for every iPhone developer who walks away, I’m sure there are ten new ones who sign up), but because it’s the decent thing to do.

[As an aside, if you are is interested in seeing the Mashboard app in action, there is a demo video here - do have a look]