hackSignal .. my hacking diary

iTunes Connect now shows app review status history log

Looks like Apple is making baby steps in making the app review process better. I logged into iTunes Connect and found a new link that shows the status history log. I'm not convinced that this helps in improving the app review process a whole lot.

Copycat, the way to the Appstore

So it's officially 100,000 apps in the Apple AppStore. Apple was happy to announce that and I'm sure developers don't share the same feeling. To me, it just means there are 90,000 crappy apps that no one cares about.

Having started a company trying to thrive on the success and genius of the iPhone for 5 months now, I still say that the Appstore to be a giant blackhole. Many have came up with theories and thesis on how to climb your way to the top but I feel no one has come up with that secret recipe yet.

Today, I took a routine check on the top 25 apps. Sitting at #2 was Pocket Devil, a game that was branded as a copy cat of the very successful Pocket God. It has 2.5 stars for reviews and people are giving bad reviews telling others to not buy it. Despite that, it's still climbing up the top 25 list and now at the #2 position.

That really got me thinking. Why? I have always thought that getting good reviews is essential if you want your app to at least have the chance of getting into the top 100s. But here's Pocket Devil with tons of bad reviews and it looks like they're on the way to the top spot.

Apparently the copycat wins big. To date there's numerous flight control copycats and harbor master was one of the successful ones. It never did get into the top 25 but was among top 25 for games at a point.

So with all that said, what am I actually trying to say here? With all that noise in the AppStore, it no longer matters how well your game or applicaion is. All it matters is getting your name out so everyone knows about. Good press, bad press, it's gonna help getting people to know about your app.

Weird

Sent from my iPhone

So you want to be a mobile developer?

As a software developer, the world of technology is evolving so fast. In less than 2 years, the iPhone has completely change the mobile device industry. Before, there was no device that only has a full touchscreen, multi-touch was no where close. With the iPhone as the current leader in this "class" of device, I'm not talking about mobile phone, Android was announced shortly and then the Palm Pre.

I made a career change from developing world class consumer electronics for brands like Sony, Bose and Samsung, to now developing games for the iPhone. I consider that a huge leap from embedded systems to game development. So here's a personal advice to any developer out there who is thinking of taking that leap, which platform should I go with?

Indeed.com has a nice job keywords trending feature and I used the keywords, iphone, android and palm pre, and guess what, the answer is pretty clear.

 

http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=iphone%2C+android%2C+palm+pre&l=

iPhone developers in danger of excessively playing the blame game.

There is a growing trend that I've been seeing with the iPhone developer community and it's bothering me. Blame Apple this, blame Apple that. Playing the blame game. I've already done that a couple of times. There are valid ones that Apple did did a bad job in communicating with App developers and I've read horror stories on how apps are being held up in Apple's review cycle for months and later was rejected for a trival violation of their UI guide.

As a matter of fact, I've personally have had that experience with smackBOTS Challenge, our light version of smackBOTS. smackBOTS Challenge had gotten the notice of unexpected delay and went into limbo for 2 months. One fine day, I got a phone call from Apple's legal department and the Apple representative on the other side told me that the delay was due to the fact that we mentioned prizes in our App description and that's not allowed. He suggested we removed all references of any prizes in our description and he will forward the app review to the reviewers. 2 days later, smackBOTS Challenge was approved. I blamed Apple for this because it took them 2 months to communicate such a minute detail that was taken care of in a matter of minutes.

So alright, enough with my own stories but seriously, because of the way app reviews have been and the way that the appstore functions, developers everywhere are trying to push updates out as soon as possible. This practice is fine until app developers do that to the extend of sacrificing the quality of their apps, ie. releasing buggy software. So what prompted me this write all this rant? Well, another rant by Joe Stump that got posted on Techcrunch. Apparently, Joe has inside connections at Apple and he tried to work those connections to get more insights to why his app review was getting delayed. While it's great that Joe has his connections but imagine the number of developers like us, who did not. But I was happy to hear that his inside connections just referred him to email app reviewers instead and that's just being fair and not playing favors.

 

Hackers, here's an idea for your next startup.

So you think you can hack? As an entreprenuer/hacker, I constantly have a dozen of startup ideas in my mind and since I'm working on my current startup, an iPhone Mobile Gaming Studio, plus I have an immediate itch that I need some scratching, why not give this idea out to some follow hackers out there to figure it out and hey if you made it, send me a Thank you card or a special tribute page on your site works too.

So what is the this idea you have, you might ask. Whenever a service gets popular enough, you'll see spammers trying to exploit the service. Twitter is definitely exploding  like crazy now and Twitter definitely has their own set of problems (hint: whales) keeping their developers buzy. The last time I was at their Twitter API meetup, if I did not hear wrongly, they actually have people dedicated for fishing out the spammers. Seriously, their "in-house" solution will not scale given the increasing amount of spammers that I saw on my followers list just this week.

So you think you have hacker's chop to take a swing at this problem? Go for it and I can guarantee that you will definitely be on the radar of @ev and @biz. If you can come out with a decent solution, not perfect, you should have a million dollar acquisition in the works. Twitter has shown that they will go out and buy startups that add value to the Twitter ecosystem. For example, summize. They're got Twitter into the world of real time search.

There are existing solutions for fighting spam on Twitter, such as follow verification or even the Block button on your twitter home page, but that is way too many steps for lazy Twitter users like me. With the openness of Twitter's API, I think it's possible to come up with a decent spam user detection. So there you go, start hacking away. I have some ideas of my own on how spam detection could work for Twitter, so if you're interested in a discussion, follow me and DM me. @khangtoh

UITableView separator not hiding for you? Here's why.

So I was having "fun" with UITableView trying to skin a TableView for smackBOT's multiplayer lobby. We're using a grahical separator and so I happily set the separatorStyle to UITableViewCellSeparatorStyleNone. Compile, build and run.....  and yes, the separator is still there. What's going on?

I google a little and checked the SDK docs in Xcode, every thing looks right. Customizing UITableView has been done before, it's nothing new. So what could be wrong?

Using my very analytical thinking (sorry if it sounds like I'm boosting), I looked through the UITableView properties and trying to make an "analytical" guess on what could have cause the separator being drawn even though the separatorStyle was set. Immediately, the UITableView style caught my attention. There's basically 2 different style you can have UITableView play, plain or group. I was using group and techncally it shouldn't have matter. However, in the world of software development, we can it a bug. So I set the UITableView style to plain and voila, it now works.

UITableView *tview = [[UITableView alloc] initWithFrame:CGRectMake(8, 125, 466, 180) style:UITableViewStylePlain];

So if you're having problems with "removing" the UIViewTableCell borders? That might be your problem. If you're UI design requires UITableViewStyleGroup, then I guess you're out of luck with hiding the separators without doing it in a hackish way.

A lite version that's actually 99c

Sent from my iPhone

Designing an iPhone game? Here's how we got our users talking.

We spent a lot of time thinking about how we want to make smackBOTS and how the fighting system works, and along the way, we came up with ideas like the berserk mode, the combo moves, etc. That's all great but we're always thinking what we can do to get feedback straight from our users on what's cool and what's not. As an indie game studio, we do not have the huge budget to go out and conduct user play tests, focus group studies, etc. So what are we doing to get good honest feedback on smackBOTS?

 

Where to find your users?

We went straight to the gamers. There are many blogs, forums and sites out there building communities just for iPhone/iPod touch gamers. One such sites is touchArcade. touchArcade has a very lively forum with forum sections dedicated to general iPhone game discussions, upcoming game introductions as well as a section just for developer type conservations. Before you jump straight into any online communities, my advice is to start getting involve in the community first by engaging with exisiting conversations first. You definitely don't want to project yourself as a forum lurker and start off with the wrong foot.

What to ask your users?

Two weeks ago, we had a talk with Matt Humphrey, one of AlphaLab's advisors. Matt is a serial entrepreneur and he has started a few startups and is now currently working on his fourth (I think), Kickball Labs. During the session with Matt, he emphasized on the importance of user testing and what strategies to take to get the most out from your users. What stucked with me the most was simply asking your users what sucks about your app , in our case, the game. I really like this approach *a lot*. So I literally posted a forum thread on touchArcade with the title " Tell us one thing you hate most about smackBOTS, please!!!!! " .

The Result?

Initially, I was a little skeptical about submitting such a thread cause you never know what to expect and this was the first time for me personally taking such an approach. Great points and comments came through. I was really glad that we did that. Everyone was very engaged and told us what's the single one thing they did not like about smackBOTS and some feedback even has a list of stuff they did not like. On top of that, many replies include things that they would like to see in smackBOTS including suggestions for features that we had planned for multi-player and so that helped us in validating what we're planning for.

In conclusion, this method worked out really well for us and I think it's bacause I've personally invested in being part of the touchArcade forum community. Maybe that wouldn't have matter at all but I believe it definitely helped in getting all the great, helpful and honest replies from the community.

smackBOTS hits top 100 on action & kids category for games

Hopefully this will make multi-player gain more traction when we release 2 weeks from now.

Sent from my iPhone