29 10, 2013

How to Make a Killer App Icon

By |October 29th, 2013|iOS, Marketing|1 Comment|

Over the past few years in the App Store, I’ve had apps that have varied from extremely poor performance to chart topping performance with millions of downloads. One of the key factor’s to an app’s success is the app icon. There are several attributes that I have found generally lead to more downloads. I will also show you how to find the best icon designers in the world. This is the Part 2 of a 3 part series on how to optimize your app store presence. You can also check out how to write a good App Store description.

Icon Styles

I believe the best way to learn is by example, so I will start this post by showing you some of the best icons in the App Store.

Games

Candy-Crush App icon   Clash-of-clans    Game-of-war

These 3 icons are from some of the highest grossing games in the App Store. As of this posting, Candy Crush is #1, Clash of Clans is #2, and Game of War is #4.

An interesting thing to note about Candy Crush and Clash of Clans is that they both have an icon border and have a 3 dimensional component where the subject of the icon overlaps the border. This really causes the icon to pop out and get more attention. The other important thing to notice is that the subject of the icon is huge and occupies most of the icon.

What is interesting about Clash of Clans and Game of War is that [...]

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22 10, 2013

I built a Lending Club bot

By |October 22nd, 2013|Interesting Stuff, Investing|21 Comments|

Since, I haven’t posted on here in a while, you probably didn’t even know that I was using Lending Club, but now you know!

What is Lending Club?

I’ll give  you a brief intro on Lending Club if you are unfamiliar. Lending Club is a site that facilitates peer to peer lending.  Here is a common loan story on lending club:

John has got himself into a situation where he owes a lot of money at high interest rates on his credit cards. He has decided that he wants to take control of his life and pay off his credit card debt, but a bank won’t give him a loan to pay it off. He goes online to Lending Club and requests a loan from his peers that is much lower than the interest rate on his credit cards. His online peers can choose to invest in his loan in increments as small as $25. He pays off all his credit cards and now only has 1 monthly payment to Lending Club at a lower interest rate than he previously had.

peer to peer

This is a very common situation on Lending Club, but people can actually get loans for all kinds of reasons such as home improvement, starting a business, etc.

So what is this bot for?

Anyway, Lending Club has grown in popularity over the past few years since I started investing. Large institutional investors have started dumping millions of dollars into these loans and have started acquiring the best loans as soon as they are available for investors to put money in. Since the loans were getting snatched up so quickly, I was left with all of the loans that historically performed the worst. (I will [...]

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21 10, 2013

App Descriptions – 5 Secrets to Boosting Downloads

By |October 21st, 2013|iOS, Marketing|0 Comments|

If you’re reading this, you’ve probably discovered that writing a good App Description can be hard!

There are really 3 things you want your app store description to do:

  1. Convert
  2. Convert
  3. Convert

This post will explain the 5 secrets on how to write an app description that actually converts!

This is the first of 3 posts that I will be writing on the App Store that will cover your App Store presence and how to get people to actually download your app after seeing it in the store.

First of all, I wanted to say that I am going to be presenting the 5 secrets of an app description that I have personally found that actually lead to more users downloading an app. I will be teaching by example of apps that have all received millions of downloads or have been ranked in the top charts.

1.  Social Proof

One of the best ways to persuade new users to download your app is to tell them about all the other people currently using it. Hearing about others using it makes it psychologically much easier to believe that the app is really good.

Here are some good examples of what I am talking about:

“Over 3,000,000 people trust Private Photo Vault to keep their photos hidden.

Top 100 Photography App in USA, Korea, Japan, Taiwan, India, Italy, Finland, UK, South Africa, Egypt, Mexico, Malaysia, Australia, Hong Kong, France, Ireland, Germany and many more countries.”

– Private Photo Vault


App Description

 “#1 Top Paid App on the App Store

Downloaded and used by millions including Starbucks, ABCFamily, UFC, A-list celebrities, teachers, bloggers (fashion, fitness, food) and Instagrammers ALL around the world.”

– PicPlayPost™

 

If you are just launching your app, you won’t really have the ability to list [...]

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11 10, 2012

iOS 6 UIPasteboard setImages and setImage

By |October 11th, 2012|iOS, Tutorials|1 Comment|

The iOS6 sdk has some changes to it. Along with these changes come changes to the UIPasteboard. One thing is the UIPasteboard now handles most images as NSData.

Here is my solution to accessing and setting images in the UIPasteBoard.

Accessing Images:

for (NSObject* obj in [UIPasteboard generalPasteboard].images) {
if ([obj isKindOfClass:[NSData class]]) {
UIImage* img = [[UIImage alloc] initWithData:(NSData*)obj];
} else if ([obj isKindOfClass:[UIImage class]]) {
UIImage* img = (UIImage*)obj;
}
}

I saw in a comment that setImages: is not functional, here is a fix:

Setting Images:

for (UIImage* img in myImagesArray) {
NSData* imageData = UIImageJPEGRepresentation(img, 1);
NSMutableDictionary *item = [NSMutableDictionary dictionary];
[item setValue:imageData forKey:(NSString*)kUTTypeJPEG];
[[UIPasteboard generalPasteboard] addItems:[NSArray arrayWithObject:item]];
}

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21 09, 2012

Three20 iOS 6 Rotation

By |September 21st, 2012|iOS|4 Comments|

Today, I was working on updating one of my apps for the iPhone 5 and after dealing with iOS 6. I realized my view controllers weren’t rotating. All that was required was simply adding this line after the TTNavigator had been setup.

[[[UIApplication sharedApplication] keyWindow] setRootViewController:[[TTNavigator navigator] rootViewController]];

This is due to the changes in the ViewController rotation API in iOS 6. A rootviewcontroller must be set for the main window of the application.

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1 03, 2012

1st Place Startup Weekend SLO

By |March 1st, 2012|iOS|0 Comments|

Several weeks ago, I attended Startup Weekend here at Cal Poly and I worked on a project called Haberdash.

Haberdash is a clothing recommendation engine that makes clothing recommendations after  building up a profile on a user. It is essentially the equivalent of Pandora but for clothing.

My job was to build the iPhone app over the weekend and it wound up looking pretty good during our final presentation.

We had an excellent team at Startup Weekend and wound up winning 1st place.

Here is a video showing what was created by the end of the weekend:

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17 01, 2012

Most Frequently Occurring Words in the Bible

By |January 17th, 2012|Interesting Stuff|1 Comment|

I just recently had to write a program in my systems programming class to find the most frequently occurring words in any text file. After writing the program, I needed to test the program with some fairly large input, so I downloaded a copy of the bible.

My results:

The top 50 words and their occurrences (out of 13262 unique words) are:

64926 the
52167 and
35312 of
14048 to
13229 that
12891 in
10517 he
9851 shall
9130 for
9041 unto
8868 i
8563 his
8438 a
7990 lord
7490 they
7188 be
7119 is
6727 not
6695 him
6514 them
6300 it
6099 with
5672 all
5475 thou
4607 was
4606 thy
4531 god
4491 which
4372 my
4102 me
4077 but
4037 their
4008 said
3988 ye
3969 have
3865 will
3833 thee
3702 from
3661 as
3006 are
2869 when
2854 this
2837 were
2805 out
2793 upon
2761 man
2754 by
2625 you
2581 israel
2557 king

The program is written in c and runs quite quickly, taking about a third of a second to run on my 2.53Ghz Core 2 Duo.

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3 06, 2011

Minecraft Creations

By |June 3rd, 2011|Interesting Stuff|2 Comments|

Recently, in my computer science class, we had to create a data structure for minecraft blocks. Using this data structure, I have developed some pretty cool looking shapes.

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24 04, 2011

iPhone App Showcase

By |April 24th, 2011|iOS|0 Comments|

Several weeks ago, I sent in an application to Apple for Cocoa Dev Camp after receiving an e-mail from my school about it. As part of my application, I mentioned that I am currently an iPhone developer and attached the source to one of my projects.

I still haven’t heard back yet regarding whether or not I was accepted to Cocoa Dev Camp, but I was asked to participate in an iPhone App Showcase that will be held at my school this upcoming Tuesday.

I am pretty excited and  will take some photos and make sure to show post them.

 

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24 04, 2011

Grandma Shuts Down the Internet, lol

By |April 24th, 2011|Interesting Stuff|0 Comments|

This article is really funny. A lady digging for scrap metal apparently hit some fiber optic cables that were providing internet to all Armenia. As a result, most of Armenia had no internet for approximately 12 hours.

Check out the story here.

 

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