Thoughts on the iPad

The iPad was released yesterday. I've had a day to play with one and I have a few thoughts.

What is the iPad and what do you do with it?

iPhone owners, iPod Touch owners, and perhaps other smartphone owners will understand quite quickly what the iPad is. It is a large iPod Touch.

But more importantly, what does one do with an iPad? If you are one of the group of people I just mentioned, this will be pretty obvious. You use the iPad for all of the things that you use a smartphone for when you are home and your computer is on the other side of the room. The activities fall into two categories; quickly done and cheaply done.

Quickly done
- You are sitting on the couch watching a movie and you wonder what other movies an actor is in? There is an IMDB app for that.
- You wonder what movies are playing at the local theater. I like the Flixster app for that.
- You want to post something quickly to Facebook. There is a Facebook app.
- You want to check the score for the latest game. There is an ESPN scorecenter app.
- You want to check how the stock market did today. There are many apps for that.
- You want to see if the weather will be nice tomorrow. There are apps for that.
- You want to check if you have received that email you were expecting. The Mail app can do that.
- You have a feeling that there is a 9am meeting tomorrow and want to check your calendar. There is a Calendar app for that.
- You remember something that needs to be done tomorrow and want to put it on your to do list. There are many ToDo apps for that.

All of these things are quickly and easily done on an iPad. What, you don't have an app for that yet? No problem. The app store app lets you find a good app in just a couple of minutes. And this leads me to my next point.

Easily done

Let's say that I want to play a quick game as a diversion. Nothing so time consuming as the latest entry in the Halo or Super Mario Brothers franchise, but something simple and fun. Think Tetris, Solitare, or just about any arcade game from the 80's. The App Store delivers that.

I can virtually browse the isles and find something fun to do for just a few dollars. Not a game person? The iPad has books. Lots of them. Some of them for free. Want to spend some time getting the news? There are a lot of good apps for that in a format that is even better than the iPhone.

This is what the iPad is all about. Quickly and easily done.

Developers leaving the iPhone? Not yet.

There have been a number of articles written lately about developers leaving the app store in frustration. ArsTechnica Facebook Developer The reality is that these folks leaving are very much a minority and will make very little difference in the short term. It is kind of like an employee that leaves a company because the employer is treating the workers like crap. The question is why do the other folks not leave? And will that change?

The reason is that there are over 50 million iPhones and iPod Touches. iPhone sales numbersOver 50 million potential customers. No other app store can match this right now. Trism

Fast forward 12 months. Because Android isn't locked to just one carrier or even one manufacturer, the number of Android devices will grow significantly over the next year. Apple is leaving money on the table by locking themselves into AT&T. Sure, they are more profitable per handset sold, but the cost of not having sold twice as many devices will catch up to them within a year.

Back to my employee/employer example... If an employer abuses its employees when the economy is down and workers can't leave, it will catch up with them as soon as the economy picks up. Apple will find themselves in this situation a year from now. A year from now the Android numbers will be high enough to make it every bit as appealing of a platform to business on as Apple's. At the end of the day it is all about the numbers.

Mockapp: quick iPhone app prototyping

I stumbled on to Mockapp the other day. It is a series of graphics wrapped up in ppt slides, designed to enable you to easily and quickly create visual mockups of an iPhone app.

I used it yesterday to put together a mockup for a customer. It was awesome! I used to do this the hard way using cut and paste with screenshots and other graphics. This is so much better to have all the standard widgets already sliced up for you.

Here is a link to their website. http://mockapp.com/

The two App Stores

Marco Arment wrote this great article on the app store. http://www.marco.org/208454730 It is highly recommended reading. It does a great job of summarizing the need for market analysis. But mostly I like it because he so eloquently summarized my thoughts when I read Ged Maheux of the Iconfactory whining http://gedblog.com/2009/09/28/losing-ireligion/ about his latest app not doing well. Sometimes people just over think things when they put their app together.

Evaluate your iPhone app competition

I develop apps for other people. Often they will come to me with their app idea and their dream to make a lot of money on the app store. Seldom have they actually done any research on the app store about their potential competition.

I came across an article today that was well thought out in this regard. http://timcascio.wordpress.com/2009/09/03/how-to-determine-which-of-your-iphone-app-ideas-has-the-most-merit/ The key part I am quoting below. On a side note, for me, the lack of the ability to examine the competitive landscape is the biggest reason that I have not done anything for the Android platform. You have to have a device, and a cell plan to support it in order to browse the Android store.



"Close evaluation of the competition is critical and often forgotten step. You can have strong development, design and great marketing, but overlooking the competition can prove fatal.

The iPhone App Store is an open book with over 65,000 apps. Use this to your advantage. Scour the store for apps that appear to compete with yours.

Download free and paid versions to kick the tires.
Focus first on those with the highest number of reviews.
Read the reviews to see what people like about the apps and what they don’t.
Pay close attention to the feature requests.
Read the application descriptions to see how your competition is positioning their app and consider how you should differentiate yourself.
Make comparison of pricing and feature sets offered by your competitors.
Once you’ve identified your short list of competing apps, search Google to see how those apps are being promoted outside of the App Store via YouTube, Twitter, forums, publicity and websites.
Create a competing apps spreadsheet or database to capture all of your competitor information in one place and update frequently over time."

UIScrollView with controls

Apple has created a number of samples on how to use a UIScrollView control. But all of them are for scrolling graphics and not for controls. What I wanted to do was to have a view that was taller than the device and allow the user to scroll through the controls on the page. And I didn't want to use a TableView to do it. I wanted to use IB.

I finally found the right clues in an old discussion forum post. http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=9060384

Here is the Cliff Notes version.

Create a new ViewController. Open the xib in interface builder. Delete the view control and replace it with a UIScrollView. Be sure to link the UIScrollView as the view for the File's Owner.

Go back to your code and add a UIScrollView reference in your .h. e.g.
@property (nonatomic, retain) IBOutlet UIScrollView* scrollView;

Don't for get to link it up in IB.

Now in your viewDidLoad method, add the following line:

scrollView.contentSize = CGSizeMake(320, 700);

Now you can add all the controls you want to the UIScrollView control over in IB. Labels, buttons, everything.

I'm surprised that there isn't an easier way to do this in IB. And if there is, it isn't obvious to me how to do it - so please share.

Fight the race to .99

There was some talk a while back about the race to the bottom, the pressure to price your app at $.99. There was a lot of talk about various things that some people thought would help. I thought most of the things that were suggested might be helpful. But really what the developers need are marketing tools that allow a developer to leverage a good app into good tools. A lot of this centers around brand success. Here are some simple things that I think would help a lot.

1. Allow developers to link to their apps as a group.

Let's say that I have a good app. People like it and use it. I would like to provide a link from this one app, to my other apps. It sounds simple enough, but isn't possible today. Check out Digital Chocolate. They have implemented a special word in their app descriptions - dhoc - in order to allow them to search for just their apps. The problem is that the iTunes app on the device only lets you link directly to an item and not to a publisher/artist.

Let me build up my brand.

2. Encourage users to rate apps that they run regularly.

My Pinch Media stats tell me that less than 10% of users rate apps that they have purchased. Give users a special app that lets them rate the apps that they run regularly. Make it easy to rate apps.

3. Let developers link directly to the app ratings system.

The NYTimes app attempts to do this. If you run their app a few times successfully (a challenge), then it will prompt you to go to the app store to provide feedback. They did this because it was easier than fixing their buggy app - but I digress. The problem is that the only thing you can do is link to the app description. I would like to be able to put the user right at the screen where they rate the app.

Why is that important to take them right to the app? I have had more than one friend buy my app and say they love it! Then I ask them if they have reviewed my app. They give me this confused look and ask how to do that. These are technical folks too. Engineers, IT folks and such. It is just to easy to give negative feedback on an app and to hard to give good feedback.

4. I'm going to write an app that does this one.

5. Provide some sample code to the developers on how to do the above items easily.

Encourage the developers to do it in a uniform manner.