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!

It had been grating on me over the last couple of weeks knowing that Seoul City Metro and Seoul City Metro Lite were not up to date with the new train stations opened on Line 1 (Dangjeong Station and Seodongtan Station) and Line 3 ( Garak Market, National Police Hospital and Ogeum). I held off an immediate update when the stations opened because I wanted to wait for the SMRT.co.kr maps to be updated properly and I wanted to include a few tweaks to the route detail interface.

New stations on line 3

As weeks moved on I was feeling increasingly  like my apps were out of date, and the SMRT maps still hadn't been updated to reflect the new stations. So yesterday I just had had enough and pushed new stations, updated timetables and a manually modified map to both Seoul City Metro, and Seoul City Metro Lite. I was reluctant to manually update the maps because I don't have them in vector format but I was quite happy with the end result. Both updates were approved for sale in under 11 hours - and are available for download das you read this. (iTunes link)

I also managed to include one minor tweak to the route interface, allowing easier access to the timetables for a particular route. Although the timetables are far from where I want them, this is a step in the right direction. Also, the door side is now shown for the destination station the same as it is with transfers. (See screen shot below)

You can click the blue disclosure button on route start and transfers to see the next trains departing.

In other news:

Custom Map to scale in early stages

I've been building my own custom subway map for Seoul that will appear in upcoming versions of Seoul City Metro that will release me from the constraints of the SMRT map. It's well on it's way, you can see images of it's progress via @seoulmetroapp and here.

Busan City Metro is on sale this week too, I've reduced it to $0 as more of a test of the waters. (iTunes Link)

Oh, and I'm back in Melbourne for the time being.

It's been a long slog, I have to say. It took a solid six weeks of development and many hours of dead ends and frustration but I finally managed to pull together a complete, stable release that made it through the approval process.

There's still lots to do, and since Saturday morning I have already sent for approval Seoul City Metro Lite, and Seoul City Metro V1.1.1 wich contains a few small bug fixes.

Busan City Metro is also in the works, I expect that to be running on the Seoul City Metro V1.1.1 code in the coming days and up for sale soon.

There's lots more to write on the extended development period of SCM 1.1, but for now I'll let everyone get the update and I'll take a deep breath!

Current iTunes Connect status

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)

Seoul City Metro

I'm excited to report that Seoul City Metro has gone live on the Apple App Store!

You can purchase a copy on the world wide store right here for $1.99 US.

Now that the iPhone Application development cycle has been completed - it's time to start some promotions to drum up some sales! I have @yargalot and myself working on a proper website, and I'm looking into promotions on Facebook, and around Seoul itself.!

Wow, what a month!

It really was about 10 times more stressful than I had planned.

Here I was plodding along with the development of Seoul City Metro (@soulmetroapp) thinking I had another couple of months but all of a sudden the iPhone was approved for sale and then released in South Korea in the same two week period! I had to push everything forward...

So over the last couple of weeks I have more or less shut myself off from everyone except my twitter feed and a few friends keen to test some development releases (thanks to @jacobch for some great feedback). Due to the announcement of imminent iPhone release in South Korea I just had to try and get everything running ASAP.

Unfortunately Seoul City Metro missed being ready for sale on iPhone launch day (it was never going to happen) but as a consilation I managed to make it to TEDxSeoul at the last minute  for a day of eye opening talks from a wide range of awesome Korean innovators. I had no expectations for TEDxSeoul (how did I not know about TED ?)  but it left me with a mind spinning with excitement and positiveness about releasing software in South Korea. I wish I had had some business cards to hand around and some infomation on the app ready - but getting to go was just a bonus.

Seoul City Metro

But I'm now happy to write that I have finally got there! As of Tuesday morning I have completed an initial working version of an iPhone app and submitted it to the App Store. With submission only four days after the release date in South Korea I am pretty happy with my efforts. This is  is a really  important milestone because it's taken me so long to get past being completely overwhelmed by the whole process of becoming an iPhone developer. In fact it's taken me  two trips to WWDC, two iPhone releases (3G , 3GS release), two new computers (a laptop and a Mac Mini) and countless days and weeks of feeling overwhelmed and lost at where to start.

New Business Card (back)

Regardless of the outcome (approved or not) I'm feeling like I have reached my goal. While I wait for approval from Apple I'm running at a slightly slower 80 km/h getting promotional material ready for it's launch. I'm hoping with some relevant, informative tweeting on my behalf via I can rustle up some interest over Twitter and Facebook, there's also a website up at seoulmetroapp.com and I have printed flyers and business cards for some real life promotions.

I'm attending the Seoul Writer's Workshop Masquerade Ball this Saturday night in Itaewon and hope to bump into some people there.

Watch this space for all kinds of things I've learnt over the iPhone development process, and updates on what I'm calling the City Metro Ecosystem - a suite of apps encapsulating apps for Hong Kong, Beijing and Shanghai.

More details coming soon