How to make iPhone Apps and Influence People » Other Stuff

New host, new iPhone, new iPad, New Delhi

Jesse — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 13:41:34 +0000

So much to update! Watch this space, as soon as I sort out the server issues there will be pretty pictures and graphics from all the work I've been up to the last 8 weeks.

My Favorite TED Videos

Jesse — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 23:32:09 +0000

TED is awesome

Prior to November 2008 I'd never heard of TED, TED.com or anything like it. It was only while reading Chang-Won Kim's Web 2.0 Asia Weblog and noticing a technology event called TEDxSeoul (that Chang was talking at) that I worked it all out. If you don't know, or haven't heard about TED then read the Wikipedia entry on it.

Any spare time I've had since leaving TEDxSeoul in November I've been watching TED talks. I'm also keen to get to the next TEDxMelbourne (I watched the one recently live online), and I'm dead keen hearing about what goes on at on TEDxSydney.

As well as watching TED videos, I've also been telling everyone I know about them and sending them links on facebook. In the future I will direct them to this post.

Here's a list of my favorite TED videos in no real order, I've never watched a bad one...

Hans Rosling

Hans Rosling is fascinating with his statistics, and desire to get the world's publicly funded data accessable and searchable for everyone.

More on Hans Rosling and his gapminder data and software at gapminder.org

App Sale!

Jesse — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 00:26:07 +0000

Now that everything is up to date and Seoul City Metro has been up on the App Store for a few months I think it's time for a sale! I've orchestrated some facebook advertising, updated the Seoul City Metro Website and given the App Store time to propagate both the 1.1.2 update and the new price.

Seoul City Metro and Busan City Metro are now on sale until March 22nd!

I've decided to finally attack the $1 price point, as well as give away a premium app for free. I'm hoping this sale can raise the rankings of Seoul City Metro on the Korean App Store over and above the competition apps by being the best looking app at $1. I'm also hoping some good reviews and happy users will lead to some increased exposure and eventually sales for Seoul City Metro. I'll post results of the sale (good or bad!) next week when all the numbers are in.

Checkout the Seoul City Metro website front page for more info!

Approved in less than 48 hours!

Jesse — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 00:40:35 +0000

I just got emailed this morning that my quick point release for Seoul City Metro has been approved. That was less than 48 hours from submission. Call me impressed!

It's a total change of pace when a new binary can be pushed to customers that quickly. My "What's new in this update" stated that it was just two small bug fixes, I wonder if that had any influence on the review team that saw the initial 1.1 release only 5 days ago.

Anyway, a win! Seoul City Metro Lite is also now in review.

SeoulMetroApp announces it on twitter

Snowy days

Jesse — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 07:24:41 +0000

It's not directly related to development, but it does get in the way of development when I'm distracted by the amazing snow in Itaewon last night and today.

I've uploaded the video to Facebook, let this be a bit of an experiment in embedding FB video into the blog.

Iterations on a theme

Jesse — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 06:20:57 +0000

My attention has been divided the past week or so between the development of Seoul City Metro v1.1 and looking ahead at other cities to cover. While I spend a lot of time scribbling down ideas and drawings (and code) for SCM v1.1 - I've found myself drifting back into Illustrator to come up with some new colours and iPhone icons for upcoming cities.

I thought I'd put a few intermediate ideas here, they're just as a few iterations on the original concept.

Iterations on the SCM Logo

I finally got a Magic Mouse! yeah!

Jesse — Sat, 26 Dec 2009 09:26:29 +0000

It's taken months for this moment! I have been frequenting the Frisbee store in Myeong-dong 명동 frustratingly circling the store since October looking for signs of new Apple gear....the iMacs and MacBooks arrived at some stage in November... but no Magic Mouse. The online Korean Apple store kept changing the delivery dates too - first November, then December. It wasn't looking good...

Magic Mouse (finally!)

Anyway - just a quick update that I'm happy to finally replace my 2nd scummy Mighty Mouse.

Next I need to replace my Bluetooth keyboard with the new 2 battery version (I'm currently missing 2 keys on my current keyboard), and get my MacBook Pro keyboard and trackpad fixed/replaced.

I think I might miss the middle click that the Mighty Mouse had, but I am getting my scrolling back!

Aftermath of SCM v1.0, upcoming V 1.1, new website and cloud hosting!

Jesse — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 05:54:17 +0000

As I thought, this might be the case. Upon releasing the initial version of Seoul City Metro into the wild my work has load only got more intense. Two days after SCM hit the store the main Korean competition app unleashed a new 3.0 release and a price reduction - and in addition to this almost all the feedback I received pointed towards one or two features I had deliberately left out of the initial release. So since SCM wen't live on the 10th I have been frantically preparing my infrastructure to handle timetables and Google maps (via the MapKit framework). I am also working hard to streamline the viewing, cacheing and organisation of the 'Routes' part of the app.

I'm not worried about implementing MapKit because I have previously mapped all 440 stations and their GPS coordinates - but it's been managing the almost half a million pieces of time table data that has taken so much more time that I had originally anticipated. Although the details of the timetable data are relatively boring, I find the statistics quite interesting.

468,000 individual trains mapped equalling 17MB of SQL data.
1,600 pages scraped, totalling 48 MB.
The addition of this data almost quadruples the total size of the app (originally 5.7MB)

This leads to an interesting problem with the app bundle size. Apple limit the maximum size of an App you can download over 3G to 10MB. Personally I think keeping an app (if possible) below 10MB is really important, as it allows your app to capture the impulse purchase. I'm currently considering several options about how to manage this, including providing only the basic data with the app and allowing users to download the additional data as an SQLite adon-on, or by providing a web service that can be queried from within the app. There's advantages and disadvantages in each case (which I might outline in a later post) but in my opinion, most people will only need the first and last trains departing each station anyway.

New SCM Branding

In other news, I've been working with Steven Miller (@yargalot and from TheNetocracy) on some new branding and a new website for SCM and I have to say I'm pretty chuffed at what he's come up with. I had pretty specific ideas in mind when he asked me if he could help design a website and he met all expectations when he came up with a clean, stylish design almost instantly. We spent more time making sure we had the markup optimised for search engines that we did on design elements - and it looks great. The website now exists at http://www.seoulcitymetro.com (previously http://seoulmetroapp.com) and is hosted with a swish new slice purchased the other day from Slicehost (Slicehost Referral link).

With the idea in my mind that I would possibly serve 17MB downloads to SCM customers or provide a XML/JSON feed for individual station timetables - I had upgrade the hosting to something more flexible. Enter Slicehost. With the help of Jacob (@jacobch) we now have seoulcitymetro.com and our git repositories running on a speedy clean Ubuntu Karmic Koala slice. So far we're totally impressed with both Slicehost and Ubuntu and we hope to run more services from this in the future. I can definitely envision a public bug tracker and documentation wiki for SCM and other upcoming projects.

There's heaps of work to be done! I'm hoping to have the next SCM version 1.1 submitted to Apple by 1/1/10. Watch this space! To the minute updates can be found on twitter by following @seoulmetroapp . Seoul City Metro is available on iTunes for $1.99 iTunes Store (iTunes link)