InsideMobile will be in San Jose, CA on August 26-27, 2009. It’s looking like it’s gonna be a great show out together by the 360|Conference team and O’Reilly. Tickets are cheaper on a first come, first served basis, so buy your tickets ASAP at http://insidemobile.eventbrite.com/ to get the best possible price.

360|iDev will be in Denver, CO on September 27-30, 2009 and is also run by 360|Conferences. 360|iDev tickets are also on sale now at http://360idev.eventbrite.com/ at a currently discounted rate.

We are looking forward seeing you at our sessions at both InsideMobile and 360|iDev!

The Tempest * 431 Natoma * SF

Sponsored By: Metafy, Double Encore, 360iDev Conference, Xcellent Creations

The students will be presenting their work at the Spring 2009 Engineering Student Design Open House. The event is open to the public and we would encourage anyone interested to attend.

• WHO: Engineering Students
• WHAT: Public Open House for Display of Senior Design Projects
• WHEN: Friday, May 15 from 10 a.m. to 1 .p.m. Awards are announced at 1 p.m.
• WHERE: North Classroom Atrium, Auraria Campus, University of Colorado Denver

Parking is available for free in Lot R, which is at the corner of Auraria Parkway and Speer Boulevard.

Fast forward to now. Unfortunately, I must report that the situation is similar if not worse. Each week, my team receives a tremendous number of requests from individuals looking to strike it rich with the iPhone and App Store. The vast majority are “me too” copy cat ideas which lack creativity, and worse have limited utility. Which begs the question: Does the App Store really need another iFart Mobile?

The enthusiasm and entrepreneurial spirit sparked by the iPhone and the App Store is truly amazing. Yet most of the entrepreneurship is hollow and uninspired. The focus is on the developer and profits, not creating something special that consumers will love to use and recommend to all their iPhone-toting friends.

The formula isn’t rocket science. It just takes a level of careful consideration that the “get rich quick” crowd isn’t used to. To make the case for building inspired apps look at ConvertBot by TapBot. Founders Mark Jardine and Paul Haddad have managed to make something as mundane as unit conversation sexy, and dare I say FUN. It is time for app developers to step up and embrace the ConvertBot example.

Strive for excellence by holding yourself accountable:

• Work harder to make your app better
• Focus on interface simplicity and beauty
• Optimize for performance and memory
• Crashes aren’t acceptable, even rarely
• Don’t rely on the simulator over device testing
• Poor connectivity happens, handle it as well as you can
• Silos are bad, so ask for feedback before and during development

It is humbling for us to participate in such an explosive space. Yet we talk every day about how important it is to build better apps, higher quality apps, and more innovative apps — inspired apps. That’s our goal, and we think it should be yours too.

You can use minimumFontSize to constrain how small the label will shrink your font. If you constrain the font size and your text doesn’t fit, standard line break rules will apply such as Tail Truncation or Word Wrap.

One caveat: there appears to be a bug in UILabel that prevents the resizing from working if numberOfLines is set to a value other than 1.

UILabel *titleLabel = [[UILabel alloc] initWithFrame:CGRectMake(0, 0, 300, 60)];

// adjustsFontSizeToFitWidth only works if numberOfLines is set to 1
titleLabel.numberOfLines = 1;
titleLabel.adjustsFontSizetoWidth = YES;
titleLabel.minimumFontSize = 8.0f;

If you want a multiline UILabel, you might have to give up some screen real estate and resize the label’s bounding frame horizontally depending upon the length of text.

Johnny Appleseed was out driving recently and while waiting at a stop light something caught his eye. A sign attached to a telephone pole read:

Johnny thought that sounded pretty good. He quickly jotted down the telephone number listed and rushed home so he could see if this was the big break he’s been waiting for. After what seemed like 20 rings, a recording came on the line.

Johnny pressed ‘1′ and learned the secret to making $5000 per week from home. The message said to build a simple, useless application for the iPhone and publish it to the App Store. After that Apple would do the rest to ensure that thousands of people would buy the app every day. Johnny could hardly contain himself and immediately conjured up hundreds of iPhone app ideas. Brainstorming turned to daydreaming as Johnny imagined his future on a sandy beach sipping margaritas. All thanks to iPhone.

With the new world comes a wave of opportunists like Johnny who are blinded by dollar signs and not prepared for the challenge. Developing apps is hardly a cakewalk as is evident by the inventory of poor quality apps that liter the App Store.

Consider any other market segment in the business world. Startups come and go. Those that survive and thrive may not have had a unique idea. Entrepreneurs often talk about this. Ideas, they say, are a dime a dozen. Execution is what determines success or failure.

I have a few suggestions for anyone consideration iPhone app entrepreneurship:

• Choose the right monetization strategy

To determine price, you need to first figure out who your target market is. Hint: for most apps, your target market is probably not “all iPhone users, everywhere.” Far too many apps are priced for volume on the App Store despite not having a larger enough target market. If your niche app can command $9.99 from those users or industries that would benefit from what you offer, why price your app at $0.99? All you are doing is reducing your chance of breaking even and turning a profit.



• Respond with haste to all support issues

If someone tries your app and has a problem, your ability to respond swiftly will set your apart. The majority of iPhone app publishers don’t have rapid turnaround time for support issues. This is understandable since most of the 10,000 apps on the store today were built by independent developers. This is a great opportunity to differentiate, turn someone’s problem around, and ultimately earn their trust. iPhone users have been burned by sub-par paid apps so word of mouth advertising has become very important. Think of great support as a great way to generate referrals.



• Set a very high quality threshold

Resist the temptation to ship to the App Store just because you have basic functionality in place. Is your artwork perfect? Is the app stable? Is your user experience right? A great quality filter is to try to think like Apple. How would your app be different if Apple built it? Strive for that bar.



• Don’t forget the rest of the world

iPhone adoption internationally is growing quickly. Localizing your storefront description as well as text in your app can go a long way to increase the size of your target market. This doesn’t mean you have to support every single language out of the gate, but have a strategy in place to roll out additional language support over time as you find reliable translators.

The App Store is remarkable example of entrepreneurship in action. However, it is vital to recognize that like all other ventures the App Store isn’t a free ride. If you aren’t willing to approach your app idea as a business, don’t expect the impossible. If you are willing to invest the required time, energy, and money to get it right then the App Store offers a tremendous amount of opportunity.

• User Experience Design - finding the right balance between the iPhone’s natural user interface with app specific innovations
• App Store Analytics - market trends and competitive intelligence
• App Store Optimization (ASO) - enhancing store placement
• Marketing Strategy - extend an app’s presence beyond the App Store
• Rapid, High Quality Development - save time and preserve quality through iterative development

We believe that each aspect of Start to Market is vital to differentiating on the App Store. As important though is our belief that this approach to iPhone development doesn’t work without a strong client relationship.

With PencilBot project, the relationship with ERI began seeking to understand their vision for the iPhone version of PencilBot. Next, we conducted a design and strategy session in Denver. Tangibly we came away from the session with key user experience decisions made, a pricing strategy defined for the apps, the groundwork for a marketing strategy, and finally a plan for developing the first three apps in a rapid, high-quality fashion. Most importantly, we left the session feeling like one team — not two separate companies.

As development kicked off in full, we worked together to enhance our marketing strategy based upon App Store market trends. Even as the apps passed quality assurance and were submitted to Apple, our work with ERI hasn’t stopped. We have been collaborating closely on the international launch strategy and initial planning for subsequent work together.

Hundreds of app ideas are pitched to us each week. The lesson from entrepreneurship is that good ideas are a dime a dozen. Execution is everything. What are you doing to execute on your vision and make your app idea reality?

With Start to Market, Double Encore is helping clients execute in full, not in part. Do you want your app to be just another good idea lost in the weeds of the App Store?

At the end of the day though will an Android powered device somehow displace the iPhone as the must-have mobile device? We’re skeptical. The Android-powered T-Mobile G1 reminds us of all the attempts to deliver Linux to the consumer space. An extremely powerful and capable operating system to be sure, but lacking of the spit and polish found in a mainstream consumer operating system like Mac OS X.

Maybe the better analogy would be the Zune versus iPod. Microsoft has managed to produce a device and software stack that provides 90%+ of the iPod feature set and functionality, but lacks the 10% “special sauce” that wins the hearts and minds of iPod users everywhere. We’re not sure the T-Mobile G1 is even good enough to be the Zune of the phone space but surely some future Android device will claim that title.

Apparently we’re not alone in our view. Investment Bank Piper Jaffray believes that the G1 will have little to no impact on the iPhone.

We’ve made no secret about the fact that we believe the iPhone is a fantastic business tool and I am looking forward to discussing this topic further this week at the Apple Store. At the heart of the matter is the rich software stack that makes up iPhone. While there is much fanfare and noise about how wonderful iPhone is as a gaming platform, I see great potential to target a very different customer.

I think back to my time as co-founder and CTO of Terra Soft Solutions, Inc. We delivered high-end mission critical solutions to the Department of Defense and Department of Energy based upon Apple hardware. At the time Apple was known as a niche player for “graphic designers” yet we had great success targeting a very different customer.

I believe that the iPhone platform represents a similar but even more exciting opportunity that I can’t wait to speak about this Wednesday at the Apple Store. See you there!

While I think that many of the “must have” features mentioned aren’t real show stoppers nor available in most of today’s corporate devices, it is a good read into some potential barriers nonetheless.

We are also actively recruiting and hiring for both Senior and Junior-level iPhone developers for our team based in Denver, CO. If you are interested or know someone that may be interested, please see our Jobs page.

Talk to you soon!

Today started out with fantastic breakfast burritos provided by one of the sponsors. Breakfast was followed by several fantastic sessions including a talk by Brent Simmons creator of NetNewsWire and Bill Dudney author of a book on Core Animation. Next was lunch, provided by yours truly Double Encore, Inc. Talk about some tasty pizza!

After lunch we had some really fantastic demos of a few apps that are currently on the App Store. One particularly cool apps demoed was Radius, a unique 3D game that takes advantage of the multi-touch UI. Another neat app was Checkout SmartShop, which makes it easy to use iPhone to compare prices of products.

All in all, an eventful day and plenty of interest in iPhone! I would suggest that Colorado has one of the stronger “iPhone Communities”. The rest of Day 2 should be great, and we are all anxious for an action packed Day 3!

It does makes me wonder. With a platform that almost serves innovation on a silver platter, why are there so many uninspiring apps on the App Store? Okay. We all know the reason. A reason that invokes imagery of the Richie Rich-style “money room”.

I get that the App Store has created a new economy that people are rushing to get a piece of but the platform makes innovation a breeze. Don’t people realize that iPhone owners can “feel” what makes a an app special? If you commit the extra time to leverage the likes of Location Services or Core Animation or just show that you thought through the small details of your user interface customers will be that much more inclined to recommend and rave.

It isn’t rocket science and that’s what makes it so mystifying.

In this time of uncertain economic conditions it would be easy to hunker down and focus on the day job. Instead people are brainstorming and innovating. Now to be clear not all of these ideas will materialize, but the mere fact that iPhone is fostering so much entrepreneurial activity is fantastic. It is compelling evidence that the mobile market will look very differently in six months than it does today and a refreshing glimpse into the human spirit.

We set out to build a company that brings out the entrepreneur in us every day. I am thrilled that iPhone is inspiring those outside our company in the same way. What exciting times!

No doubt the iPhone platform has huge potential, but think how much greater it would be if there was a thriving Open Source community. Open Source would provide a proving ground for aspiring iPhone developers who are struggling to get up to speed with the quirks of Xcode and Cocoa.

My company is willing to do whatever it takes to support Open Source on iPhone. We’ll pay for technology, provide web hosting, sponsor projects, and contribute our own code when possible. I call on other iPhone shops to do the same. It is in all of our best interest as Open Source can go a long way in producing a healthy pipeline of great developers that can be our future employees.

Updates: A comment referred to the NDA Apple has with developers that may currently preclude Open Source iPhone applications. The point of the article is more of a long-term view. Let’s make sure we focus not just on the App Store Economy, but other means of making this platform take off as well.

When I first read the press release I was genuinely impressed until I started breaking down the stats and thinking about my own experience from the past three days. Ten third-party apps per phone, right? Wrong. Remember, all prior iPhone and iPod touch owners have the ability to upgrade to the 2.0 software which contains the App Store. Even if only 1 Million of that audience upgraded the 2.0 and explored the App Store, the average number of third-party apps per phone cuts in half to just five.

Moreover, based upon my own experience I know that app downloads do not correlate to active usage. For example, Loopt (free) and Cro-Mag (paid) remain idle on my phone. I’m not in love with either app so they are just serving to clutter my home screens.

In the case Cro-Mag got their money so they likely don’t care that I am not using their app. Loopt is different. The app that was built as a means to create a service. One they no doubt hope will be indispensable for an iPhone user thus driving up their valuation. Not the case for me so far.

The App Store is a fantastic delivery vehicle, but quality and utility will be the key to winning the hearts and minds of users.

I wonder why more third-parties are not acting like the best of third-party vendors on the Mac. The ones that “act and feel” like something that could have come out of Cupertino. Comic Life immediately comes to mind. The iPhone SDK is so rich that it is very shocking to see apps like Cro-Mag shipping with a “Settings” menu that looks like it was drawn by a second grader.  A second grader who could have built a better menu via the built in interface elements in Interface Builder.

Double Encore offers a rapid iPhone application development service.  In just eight weeks, we take your idea through a full design and development cycle. From the drawing board to completion, we deliver a high quality final product from our expertise, processes, commitment to excellence.

I have some experience in Open Source, so I am compelled to opine. In 1999 I co-founded a Linux company. Terra Soft Solutions, Inc. is the developer of a flavor of Linux for IBM’s POWER microprocessor family intended for the High Performance Computing market segment.

Over the last decade, the company has seen some amazing accomplishments. Our customer list includes every Department of Energy national lab, all the major defense contractors, and corporations such as Boeing. One of our proudest moments was landing a contract with Lockheed Martin and the US Navy to provide a complex sonar solution that was deployed on-board the US Navy Submarine fleet.

All this and more from a small technology company out of Colorado. How did we do it?

From Day 1, a core value was to do right by the Open Source community. In return, the community supported us. The benefits were numerous and priceless. For example, our Navy contract faced a major technological challenge. A deal breaker if it wasn’t solved. The challenge was well outside the reach of even the best Linux engineers. Despite all that, we were able to find a skilled engineer with a one-of-a-kind skill set who devised a solution. Even the most successful engineering companies on the planet would not have had such quick access to critical talent and timely resolution. What a powerful force!

Nobody talks about the thousands if not hundreds of thousands of jobs that exist because of Open Source. But Andy wants his billionaire. Only then will Open Source be validated. I am certain that the movement has created tangible and intangible value that is more widespread and long-term in impact than one billionaire.

These days I often speak to people about my experience running an Open Source startup as the backdrop for a broader conversation about entrepreneurship.

We learned how to build a company with a strong and healthy soul. At the heart of which are principles that all entrepreneurs should consider when building a company:

• Define what you believe in.
• Live your core values in everything you do.
• Invest the time necessary to build strong, enduring relationships.
• Work for something greater than yourself.

Building a company from scratch is no easy task to be sure, but I am convinced that a strong company soul will better prepare you to survive the key tests along the way.