on creating apps

I’ve been lucky lucky enough to do extensive travelling from my early twenties and this situation served as a launching pad to start travel writing. Researching the next destination is very inspiring to me and at some point I thought, “If I’m doing all this research for myself, I might as well share it with others”.

The following are some notes  I’ve taken while working on the content research for Gayjin Travel Guides:

• It is essential to get things down accurately and double-check the names and details such as locations of a place on the map. If you are not sure if the place is where you want to put it, do not include it. Recheck it. Google Maps Streetview option is very helpful.
• All the written material has to be double read by the writer and then proofread by somebody else. Grammar check is compulsory.
• The biggest challenge both during research and the writing process is clarity. It is easy to get lost in your notes, numerous browser tabs, what you actually want to say about the place you are about to describe, and how the result will be perceived by the reader.
• If you are just starting on your own and do not have a publishing house contract, to make the ends meet you’ll have do other non-travel-related work. This tends to drain your creative resources. Take a break and energy will retun.

The most important thing for me is to keep travelling, writing and remain open to new experiences. I see travel writing and research as a liberation from the non-travel-related work before I’ll get back on the road again.

Yesterday we got our first revenues from iAd network - 0.15 usd for the single click. Also this was the first day we have processed in-app purchase within our apps. What’s interesting - it was in-app purchase for disabling ads :)

Yesterday was the first day when DrinkControl Lite is in AppStore.

One of the most surprising thing during last three months are ratings for DrinkControl - average ratings in most countries is more than 4.5 stars, all recent comments with feedback has 5 star rating. You can check them (we’ll update page time from time) in DrinkControl feedback page.

It is especially surprising seeing that even great, iconic apps receive quite large number of negative comments.

I think this is small bright side of being unpopular - only people that really need DrinkControl functionality has found the app. When people know what they want there is not a big surprise they are satisfied. 

If the user has paid for popular app just because it is just popular, without some effort considering if app can be useful for him it may happen that a weeks later when asked for ratings he is not ready to give a great score.

Of course we putted great effort to make app description as concrete as we can and carefully selected screenshots for covering all aspects of the app. I suspect than another source of negative rating is under-describing and over-promising app features in App Store without showing all relevant app screens in app description. 

On March 8 we received email from Apple that DrinkControl is approved and is in processing for the App Store. After all those late nights and weekends for last half a year it was a great feeling seeing that our app is available across the world.

The idea of DrinkControl is very simple - it is an app for a moderate drinker. If you are interested in what is considered moderate alcohol consumption, or if you want to understand how much you are spending on alcohol, or you’d like to understand your drinking habits, then DrinkControl will be interesting to you. [iTunes link] ($1.99 until the end of April, $2.99 afterwards)

Now, after a full month in App Store the question is - how did it go?

First. We decided to give away DrinkControl for free to our friends and those people who has left their email on app’s landing page (that was online from February 22) and therefore for 13 and 14 of March made it free for everyone. We sent email to our friends, colleagues, our Facebook contacts and Twitter followers.

Second. We decided to set DrinkControl price $0.99 for March and $1.99 for April and only from May 1 app will get it’s regular price - $2.99.

Third. Unfortunately on March 13 we found critical bug in app related with daylight-saving time. That totally crushed our promotion plans for first month- instead of sending app press releases and materials we had to focus on fixing this bug and hoping that App Store review process for bugfix will be fast enough to make fix available before March 27 when most of our existing customers in Europe should adjust their clocks. Bugfix was available in App Store in March 24. Huh. 

Fourth. As app has to be rated 17+ (because it contains references to alcohol), Apple does not provide promo codes (that allows to get app for free for person who has a code). Which means that a lot of review sites- big and small are not interested even look on DrinkControl.

Fifth. On April 4 thief broke inside Arts (who is making all XCode work) apartment and stole his MacBook and iPhone among other things. Thank’s God there is Dropbox for his personal data (still some photos was lost) and SubVersion repository in the network for all code of DrinkControl and other projects we are working on. Still a big loss both materially and mentally.

Numbers

• 1237 downloads (95,4% of these when DrinkControl was free)
• 605 updates (these are real users, still keeping app on their iPhones)
• $59 in revenues

So it was a very hard, demanding month full of bad surprises and not very encouraging results. On the bright side- we launched (remember, version 1 is the loneliest number). We got real feedback. We learned what we have to improve in DrinkControl. We got good rating and some great reviews from users in AppStores across the world. We have ideas how to make DrinkControl more valuable for the user. We know what should we done next. Version 1.3 is on the way (it just will be more harder and slower than we expected).

Today we are submitting or DrinkControl app to App Store (fingers crossed!) and wanted to thank all people in software development community that helped us to get so far.

Our thanks to Alex Fajkowski from Apparent Logic for his OpenFlow library. Starting from early DrinkControl mockups we felt that CoverFlow-like interface is the right one for our app. Alex just made it much more easier for us and it worked like a charm! Thank you Alex!

Big thanks to Keith Lazuka from The Polypeptides for his excellent KAL library. If you want to implement iOS-like calendar in your application, KAL is the right choice! Thanks Keith!

Thanks for the contributors of core-plot : Cocoa plotting framework for Mac OS X and iOS. Charts on iPhone are much more easy with your framework!

Sharing to Facebook from DrinkControl is made using libraries and APIs from Facebook  and YFrog. Thanks to developers of these libraries!