iPhone launched on O2 in the UK

Posted by Dave on July 11th, 2008

A queue at the O2 store thirty people deep, at 7.40am in a small provincial town? Sod that for a lark.

Did I really bother to get up early?

The iTunes App Store from a developer’s point of view

Posted by Dave on July 10th, 2008

Following on from my earlier grumble, I’ve decided that there’s quite a bit more to dislike about the iTunes App Store.

  1. Subcategories For Games Are Rubbish
  2. Developers Are Flooding The Store With Apps
  3. The Icons Are Ugly (And It’s All Apple’s Fault)
  4. The Top Apps Are The Top Apps

Read on to find out why…

iTunes App Store launches, but how do you find the games?

Posted by Dave on July 10th, 2008

So iTunes 7.7 is available, and with it the App Store. There are (by my reckoning) about 500 apps on there, of which iDrops, our puzzle game, is one. Though you wouldn’t know it.

Unfortunately, Apple have taken the approach of only listing eight games in each game category. If you are one of the eight games listed under “Puzzle / Strategy”, then people can find your game very easily, and buy it (thereby pushing up your rating in the App charts). If you’re not listed, then the only way to find a game is to search by name (which is pointless when no-one knows what’s available), or to look through the “All iPhone Applications”, “All iPod Touch Applications”, or “All Free Applications” lists and scroll through 20-odd pages. (And we didn’t think to call our game “AardvarkDrops”.)

Until this changes, we might as well not have bothered creating a game. If no-one can find it, then no-one can buy it. And if I visit the iTunes store now to see what puzzle games are available to buy, then as far as I can tell, iDrops isn’t one of them.

Grr.

Previous Articles

New iPhone / iPod Touch puzzle game, “iDrops”, on the iTunes App Store

Posted by Dave on July 10th, 2008 | 4 comments

WordPress plugin to remove the Browse Happy link in Internet Explorer

Posted by Dave on June 12th, 2008 | 2 comments

WordPress plugin to clean up pasted Word content

Posted by Dave on June 11th, 2008 | 3 comments

Audio crackles and dropouts caused by Airport Extreme 2008-001 Update

Posted by Dave on May 16th, 2008 | 1 comment

Mortgage Overpayment Calculator

Posted by Dave on May 7th, 2008 | 9 comments

Microsoft Office “Document Properties” in SharePoint 2007 search results

Posted by Dave on May 2nd, 2008 | 1 comment

Converting a JavaScript date object to an Excel date / time serial value

Posted by Dave on May 1st, 2008 | no comments

Creating a whitelist of recipient email addresses in Entourage 2004

Posted by Dave on February 26th, 2008 | 1 comment

BBC iPlayer: iTunes?

Posted by Dave on February 19th, 2008 | 7 comments

Getting “Freesat From Sky” For Free

Posted by Dave on October 23rd, 2007 | 8 comments

Expiry columns and the [Today] value in SharePoint 2003

Posted by Dave on October 22nd, 2007 | 2 comments

So does the Apple TV support 5.1 audio?

Posted by Dave on March 25th, 2007 | 27 comments

Using Subversion and REALbasic for version control

Posted by Dave on March 20th, 2007 | 5 comments

Encoding Real Media on an Intel Mac with Squeeze 4.5

Posted by Dave on February 13th, 2007 | 5 comments

22 iTunes songs on your iPod

Posted by Dave on February 8th, 2007 | 7 comments

Counterfeit iPod Shuffles on eBay

Posted by Dave on February 5th, 2007 | 6 comments

Detecting iPods programmatically (part 2)

Posted by Dave on January 31st, 2007 | 1 comment