I just dropped the following message on mob4.com

Hello,

you might not know about copyright laws but the graphics in all your battery apps are stolen from my iPhone application:
http://smallte.ch/cute-battery_en.html

I trust this is just an error and will gladly grant you 48h to remove those apps from the market and resubmit them with graphics of your own creation.

After that delay I will follow with legal action.

BTW the gears icon on the top left was from an icon collection I PURCHASED from icondrawer.com. They also deserve for they work to be respected.



Best of all: he made several clones of the same battery app (always with my graphics...).

3 comments | By Santiago Lema

A good friend of mine kindly ported Bible Verses to the Android platform. So if you have a HTC Hero, HTC Magic, Motorola Droid or really any Google Android device, you can get it here.

1 comments | By Santiago Lema

I continued my experiment with iCanLocalize.com now with Chinese and Japanese.

The text used as input is the same except I fixed the standing=>standby mess. I posted them right away since I now trust them enough. I still welcome any comments on the quality of said translation from anyone who happens to be a native japanese or chinese reader.

Japanese translation by EJTrans100

Chinese

1 comments | By Santiago Lema

I recently did an experiment with iCanLocalize.com to evaluate if it was a good option. They are a rather low priced translation service that specializes amongst other stuff in translation for iPhone apps.

I tested their skills with a simple iTunes app description. The app itself is very simple and didn't require much localizing that I couldn't do myself.

The end result is pretty decent given that the translation work below costed me about 32$. It is definitely done by humans (you get the name of the translator and their origin). In terms of speed he whole translation was done by the next day with some translations arriving a pair of hours after I submitted the text.

It's not perfect but it's what a native speaker can write quickly without spending hours on it. There are little imperfections of course. If you look at the spanish it starts with the personal form and then uses the polite one. That's a mistake anyone can make.

My mother tongue is french and I speak spanish like my parents and like many Switzerland inhabitants I took german and italian in school. To the extent of my knowledge the quality seems ok in all languages. It's definitely good enough to be published in the appstore and definitely vastly better than the ridiculous dictionnary translations you sometimes see in the appstore.

I welcome any comments from native speakers of said languages on the quality of the following translations. I am particularly hoping for comments on the German since all that came out of my 8 years of learning it in school is a certain taste for beer.

English original

Spanish translation by Silvia73

French translation by Flora08

Italian translation by Silvia73

German translation by brittak

5 comments | By Santiago Lema

I just found out about AppViz, which I immediately purchased.


This nice little app will fetch your daily stats from Apple's clunky web interface and build nice graphs for pretty much everything. This is definitely better than the solution I hacked together using PHP to get a vague idea of how my sales were going and that required me to manually login and download stats from Apple's web interface.

But most of all this application downloads reviews from every appstore in the world ! This is what I have been looking for months and begging Apple about (with suprisingly no response). As a developer this allows me to stay up to date with comments from users all over the world.


It has some room for improvement (like exporting as a website for non mac users, and automating updates) but this is definitely a great start. The author seems to be a really nice guy (just reading his blog right now) so the effort is definitely worth supporting. Buy this app!

Update: Concerning automation, here's someone offering a solution with automator.

0 comments | By Santiago Lema

It looks like the Taiwanese domination on the top ten might be threatened! There are now 2 U.S. players in the top ten, including daicatuyen who is now getting close to the top player " 萬惡的扁家 " with a full three loops, pushing down the Russian and Lebanese champions one step down.

Out of curiosity, I tried to translate the top player's name with Google and this came out:
" Home of the flat root of all evil "

Maybe this is just the word for bank?

Anyway, congratulations guys, you never cease to amaze me!

Update: well it didn't take long, a few hours after this post the glorious daicatuyen managed to do a full 7 loops, in a game that lasted over 45 minutes! I am basically _floored_ right now.

0 comments | By Santiago Lema

After a few months writing iPhone apps as a hobby, I can see some interesting results in the sales stats. Of course I didn't win the app store lottery as some people call it, but for a hobby it still brings in some revenue (between 400 and 800$ per month so far) and well, it's fun!


As some other developers pointed out the U.S. seems to be the biggest market by far. However it is still possible to make some revenues in other countries. For example my TimeToLive app (originally named "You are so dead" but Apple wouldn't let it go) just didn't make it in the U.S. The comments on the U.S. app store are extremely negative. Not sure if this is due to the religious nature of the country or the general positivism of the culture over there. On the other hand that kind of dark humor seems to have found more public in Italy, which has more sales than the U.S., despite the relative small size of the market.

Also releasing a free version of my Convert Any app seemed to boost the sales a little. I am still waiting for the free CuteClock to be accepted to see it has a similar effect but I guess the free version was reviewed by a more picky person and I still couldn't get what the problem was (the mail has standard text saying it simulates failure or has non-standard compliant interface) compared to the paid version which is basically the same with an alarm functionality.

An alternative technique was to set my Fearless Brain game to free for a week. Before that it was getting a dismal 0-2 sales a day. After a free week at about 1000-1500 downloads per day, I restored the original price to 0.99$ and I am now getting like 15-20 sales a day. The free period brought in a lot of new players (including some with amazing skills) and some attention in blogs and alike, but nothing major.

I guess having a free version in addition to the paid one would help sustain sales, but the game is pretty simple so it's rather hard to think what one could remove to make a free version of it :-)

Other than that I noticed the usual: Every update brings in some additional visibility (if you update the availability date), but not enormous spikes. Also sales tend to go down over time. Convert any was free for a few weeks and got something like 4000 free downloads a day, and up to 8000 around christmas. Then I set it to 0.99$ and I got 50-70 sales a days for a few days but now after a month it's back to 8-20 sales a day. Of course there are lots of other converter apps out there, including very good ones and free ones.


So here we are, some graphics and hard numbers:
Graph for the last 40 days
Total sales per country

0 comments | By Santiago Lema

When I first played the beta of Fearless Brain I managed to get a score of about 8 and getting higher seemed impossible. I sincerely thought 24 balls should be enough for everyone since nobody would make it.

Then after training regularly I got my scores higher and even managed _once_ at five in the morning to do a full loop (under the nickname "Mémoire de Poule"). To me this was like a miracle and I guess I was just lucky.

Now I see some people have managed to go through several loops, including one guy from Taiwan who is now topping the charts with an amazing four loops. I am truly impressed.

Maybe I'll release a new version that allows for an unlimited number of balls just to see how far some people will be able to go :-)

0 comments | By Santiago Lema