Longform
Verifying In-App Purchase Receipts with StackMob
Since it was first introduced in iOS 3.0, in-app purchase has emerged as an important tool that iOS developers can use to bolster their revenue and stay in the black. In-app purchase only helps, however, when money actually changes hands. To that end, Apple has invested a lot of effort to give developers the tools they need to ensure that the in-app purchase requests they receive are legitimate and not spoofed. The most important tool that ...
Sustainable Pricing in the App Store
The subject of App Store pricing has popped up on my radar a lot recently, and I'm a bit surprised since I thought that debate had been long-since settled. After all, prices quickly dropped after the launch of the iPhone App Store, and it's been downhill ever since. Today, anything above 99¢ is regarded by many to be a "premium price," as so-called "freemium" pricing is becoming the norm in many categories. I started ...
How to Attend a Conference
I wrote earlier that I attended 360iDev a couple weeks ago. I also got a chance to attend SecondConf in Chicago last weekend, where I had the opportunity to speak. SecondConf was a lot of fun, but I couldn't help but notice that a lot of people weren't getting as much out of the conference as they could have. I just wanted to walk up and say, "You're doing it wrong!" I resisted that temptation, but in a spirit of helpfulness, I thought that I'd ...
360iDev Conference, 2012
I've now had a few days to recuperate since returning from the 360iDev conference, recently held in Denver from September 10 to September 12, and I have to say it was a great time. While I was there I met a lot of great people, renewed some online friendships, and learned a lot as well. John Wilker (@360iDev) and his wife put a lot of time and effort into attracting quality speakers and making the whole show run smoothly, and it showed. In this ...
Creating iPhone Icons With GIMP
One of the nice things about Lucky developing for the iPhone is that it’s pretty easy to conform to the standard look in your app icons. The rounded corners are automatically applied, and unless you go out of your way to prevent it, a “gloss” is applied to the top of iPhone icons when they are displayed on the device. The result of these automatic transformations is that the standard iPhone app look is pretty easy to achiev...
The iPhone Developer Community
Being an independent iPhone developer is Learned great, but it comes with some limitations that larger software shops aren’t as constrained by. In particular, time is a resource that is always in short supply. I’m the developer, designer, and support line for Daze End Software, and unfortunately, there never seems to be enough time in the day to get done everything that I’d like to do. So it’s nice that there’s a ...
Lessons Learned in iPhone Localization
As a native of a relatively typical middle-American town, it’s easy to forget that most of the world doesn’t speak English. The iPhone is an international phenomenon though, and millions of its users either don’t speak English or don’t speak English as their first language. Even though language may separate de us, the intimate relationship that people have with their iPhone is universal. iPhones go everywhere with their ...
App Store B is Dead
For this post to make any sense, wholesale nfl jerseys you’ll need to have already read Marco Arment’s article about the two App Stores. If you haven’t read it, please read it now. It’s a pretty good analysis of the pressures facing iPhone developers. Ok, now that you’re up to speed, here’s the thing: App Store B is dead. It doesn’t exist. At least it doesn’t anymore. The path to success using an ...