One More Thing Conference 2012
Good day, Habr.
Recently happened to visit the One More Thing Conference 2012 . I thought for a while whether to write about it or not. In the end I decided to tell what this event was and what informative I learned there. If you are interested in the theme of development for iOS and stories linked to it, then welcome to cat.
I found out about this conference quite by accident, I came across a link somewhere on the Internet. The venue (Melbourne, Australia) turned out to be only an hour in the summer. I almost instantly decided that I would go, it would be a sin to consider myself an iOS developer and promote such an event. Looking at the list of speakers, I was convinced that it was worth it.
')
The conference is still young, held only the second time. Last time, as I was told, mostly local iOS developers and designers were performing, this time heavy artillery was used (the list will be lower).
On the first day, the so-called. mini-conferences. The speaker stands in front of a small group of people, about 30 people, sharing experiences and answering questions. At the mini-conference tickets were sold separately and cost more than the main event. I decided not to take it for the first time, so I can’t tell anything more about the first day.
On the second day, about 300 people gathered in the large hall, the speakers spoke one by one, with a break for lunch. Finally, the Q & A section. It is important to note that this is not a technical conference, no one talks about iOS frameworks, does not show code examples, or something like that. Whenever possible, people with humor tell their success story (there were no others) and share their experience first-hand. I will try to highlight the main points of each speaker’s speech, to highlight interesting points.
Croatian by origin, the creator (for a couple with his brother) the well-known game Doodle Jump . Like many other speakers, he began developing for iOS almost since the opening of the App Store. For him and his brother, it was an opportunity to work together, something they both wanted for a long time. Igor took up design, his brother - programming, having no experience with Objective-C.
Of course, success did not come immediately, before Doodle Jump were such applications as Eat Bunny Eat and AniMatch . Using the example of AniMatch, they noted for themselves the charm of frequent updates. Parents bought the game to their children and every week they waited for a new animal to appear. Such is the concept of "digital snack" (Digital Snak), a way to fuel interest in the game for some time after the first release. Now it seems obvious, then it was the first applications with this approach.
Over time, games from major publishers and companies began to appear in the App Store, Igor and his brother realized that it would be difficult to compete with them and decided to look for their own unique direction. I didn’t catch it when and how they got the idea to create Doodle Jump and didn’t remember how much time it took to develop. On the first day after the release, 21 copies of the game were sold. It is hard to believe, looking at the subsequent success of the application. Igor decided to tackle the promotion more closely and began sending letters to forums and other resources devoted to iOS (then iPhone OS) games. He recommends starting small; Do not tag right into monsters like TouchArcade . Doodle Jump lit up on small forums and the chain of reviews began to appear here and there. Then they added new themes (Christmas, space, jungle, etc.). One of the effective ways to promote Igor is cross-promotion. Doodle Jump contained references to games such as Pocket God and others. And, of course, there is little that compares with Apple's Featured.
The next was a developer from the sky. His story was about the Tapatalk app. In short, this application allows you to read and post to all your favorite forums, blogs, tapes and magazines, totaling more than 1000. Winter and his team went through 10 circles of hell, or rather, through 10 failures in publishing the first version of the application. Not only did the first refusal come only after 2 months of waiting, the subsequent ones were not much faster. In total, the first version has been searching its way to the App Store for more than 7 months. Vinter was often visited by thoughts like “is it worth it?”. You must admit that it is hard to imagine such a thing now, on average, it takes one week to consider, two - already a serious delay. The reasons for the refusal were for every taste and color, starting with the fact that the application icon contains an image of the iPhone, and ending with the fact that in the application you can see nude (of course, access to 1000+ forums!).
Tapatalk is one of the few paid social apps that sells very well and takes places in the tops. Android version is also popular, but brings a much lower income. Nevertheless, Winter believes that the Android market is ripe enough to expect serious profits from it.
Among his mistakes, Winter mentions the creation of a version of the application for Nokia and BlackBerry. If you ask the user to evaluate the application, make sure that the launch counter is reset to zero after departures. In case a serious bug crept into the application, Winter has provided the ability to turn off such reminders remotely. He showed a screenshot of his gmail account, where as many as 28,000+ unread reports accumulated under the label of the iPhone Crash Reports.
Considerable headache delivers piracy. Hacked versions appear like mushrooms after rain, however there is no effective means of struggle. Such a resource as DMCAGuardian.com , for example, does not help much.
Winter also recommended crowdin.net , crowd-sourcing for translations, completely free. Only my site never opened.
A withdrawn comrade from the UK with the sonorous name Lee Armstrong told his story. One fine morning (or evening), his wife read an article in the newspaper entitled “App Store - a gold mine for developers,” looked up from the text and asked: “Lee, can you do it?”. Well, he, in fact, could, again, without having any programming experience. Dozens of ships, ferries, barges and other vessels passed daily around the embankment of his city. He decided to create an application to track the ships and their routes almost in real time. So Ship Finder , and later Plane Finder , Plane Finder AR and the company Pinkfroot appeared .
One of the features of Plane Finder AR is the use of augmented reality to track aircraft. It is enough to point the camera at the sky above your head and the application will find all flights flying in this place. One morning, Lee woke up with the stigma of a terrorist. An article in the Daily Mail exposed him and his application as the main threat to air travel and a means of targeting terrorist missiles. In fact, application sales have increased significantly. Conclusion - there is no such thing as a bad press (there's no such thing as a bad press).
Of the highlights, Lee notes good relationships with journalists and reviewers. He began to build this relationship long before the first version of Ship Finder saw the light. In his opinion, journalists like to feel involved. From technical points, Lee noted the convenience of tools like the HockeyApp and Beanstalk .
Not without a stone in the garden Android. Approximately this schedule was in Lee presentation.
“Look,” he says, “here it is, Christmas, has arrived in the App Store. And in the Android Market, what is it? No Christmas ... And at the bottom, see? I can help and highlight the laser pointer, in — oh, there, this is not the axis of time, no, this is the Windows Phone sales schedule. ”
When a volcano erupted in Iceland and almost all flights to Europe were stopped, Lee rightly feared that few people would need the application. He was pleasantly surprised when he learned that people use Plane Finder simply as a replacement for Google Maps.
Lee comments positively on events like Apple WWDC. For him personally, it was a chance to talk to the MapKit developers and get answers to all their questions, and he had a lot of them. Lee also noted the advantages of frequent updates and featured promotions from Apple.
The next scene was taken by the serious American Adam from a company with a frivolous name Mysterious Trousers . Adam is one of the creators of Calvetica , an application that makes it easy to work with the calendar and events. According to his calculations, the creation of a simple event in a standard calendar requires from 14 to 25 tapas. Calvetica reduces this task to two screens and two or three tapas. Unlike previous speakers, Adam did not walk around the stage, stared at his laptop and shot phrases in the audience more like quotes from famous people. Be that as it may, this did not prevent him from conveying his thought. Adam noted the importance of design. Calvetica was sold in the amount of 25 copies per day, the number increased to several hundred after improving the appearance.
He also mentioned an interesting question related to major updates. If you have completely redesigned the appearance and added numerous new features to the list, should this update be made free, available as embedded purchases, and the application itself be made free, or spread as a separate version? This raises many questions. Those who have already bought the application before will feel cheated and will not want to pay a second time. Adam has chosen the path with a paid upgrade, but, looking back, he admits that the release of a separate application would be the best option. His general message is to make high-quality applications and smile less.
Finally, Adam spoke about the resource tinkerlearn.com with which he is directly connected.
The last speaker before the break was a speaker with a colorful appearance and with a special opinion - Kepa Awaye, one of the creators of Rocketcat Games . The studio is known for games like Hook Champ , only I, frankly, did not play it. Before developing Kep, he worked as a nurse, his other partner delivered pizza, but this did not prevent them from finding themselves in the role of iOS developers. His message was: “Look at us, we do not know how to do this and that, we are poorly versed in such and such things, however this does not prevent us from earning a living through the App Store. If we were able to achieve something, then nothing prevents you from doing it. ”Gradually, Kep and his colleagues began to work at the main job for only half a day, and after a while they completely switched to development. He told about the first games of their studio: “And now let's talk about our first games ... We decided to never again talk about our first games.” That is, like many, the first pancakes are lumpy.
In some of his statements, Kep directly contradicted the other speakers. “Don't bother with updates at all,” he says. Released the game, proceed to the next.
He considers his games to be niche, so he keeps a fixed price of $ 2.99 on them and never deviates from this policy. For niche games, there is absolutely no difference in the price of $ 1.99 and $ 2.99, more precisely, it does not affect the number of purchases in any way, but of course $ 2.99 brings more money into your pocket. The point of view on niche markets is this: you have a sales ceiling right from the start, there is no point in selling at $ 0.99, it is unlikely to make your product less niche.
Engage in promotion on such resources as toucharcade.com. After a couple of successful releases, it will be easier to get an overview of your new games. Never make a new release on Christmas, at this time all the big sellers are doing discounts and your game is hopelessly lost. Cross-references are definitely a good and useful approach.
Sean spoke first after the break. A distinctive feature of his presentation was a magnificent pixel art. Sean shared a link to all art on his twitter.
Sean was involved in various web projects before trying himself in iOS development. His Last Rocket application has never been in the tops and has not had a resounding success. The development took about 140 days, instead of the planned 30. Sean recommended that you participate in game marathons, the very ones where in 48 hours you need to come up with an idea and create a working version.
The next speaker was Dave Howell from Avatron Software , known for such a product as Air Display .
Dave noted that he is the only “aged” speaker. Throughout his career, Dave has been developing in one way or another connected with Apple. At first it was development for earlier versions of Mac OS, after he worked directly at Apple and the next step was to create his own company. Dave made a couple of critical remarks about Apple, starting with the company's internal kitchen and ending with the application review process. The early version of Air Display was not accepted in the App Store, because the icon depicted a rectangle resembling an iPad. Oddly enough, after they turned this rectangle 90 degrees, the similarity with the iPad suddenly disappeared. The sad fate befell their other Air Dictate application for cunning keyboard manipulations (the application superimposed its interface over the keyboard, moved it somewhere else, and when the user pressed a button in the application, he actually pressed the Siri icon on the keyboard hidden behind the external layer). Nevertheless, this is a completely permitted approach, at the moment there are many other applications that work on the same principle, so Dave just once again sighed and said "there is no point in fighting, they cannot be defeated." One of his tips is to register a trademark in the name of your applications.
Canadian Julian Lepinsky, one of the authors of Pano , an application for creating panoramic photos, stepped onto the stage. Their story began with an amateur rock band rehearsing in a garage. Once they were driving in a car and the idea of ​​Pano was born during the discussion. Drummer Mike slept soundly in the backseat, so there were only 3 people in the company, not 4. The first version of Pano was developed in Hakintosh. When the guys got their first check from the App Store, they went and bought an Apple laptop for further development.
Julian gives one useful tip: “The best way to motivate your designer is to say that you do everything yourself. When I just write, “You know, don’t worry, I’m now riveting the interface myself,” after an hour, the psd file neatly divided into layers comes to me in the mail.
At some point, Julian returned to Ph. D., the rest of the team began building careers in other directions. Julian believes that this was a mistake, at the moment he left his studies and returned to the development on a permanent basis, like his colleagues.
A few more tips: “Talk about your application anytime, anywhere. Updates are important. Do not be lazy to describe in detail what was done. The simple line "fixes" is the worst you can imagine. "
The organizers wanted to get someone from the creators of Flipboard . Raphael, a Swiss working in the Valley, eagerly responded to their call. His first application was the iA Writer editor . He worked closely with the company from Japan and was very close to moving to the land of the rising sun, only all these plans were destroyed by the well-known tsunami.
Raphael was easy to climb and after some time landed at San Francisco airport, where he soon began working at the company in Palo Alto. He sent the first version of Flipboard to the App Store while sitting in a coffee shop and using them is not the fastest Wi-Fi.
During the Renaissance, many beautiful works of art and inventions appeared, but all the most-important things happened in Florence. Raphael compares Silicon Valley with IT Florence of our time.
Basic promises - look for a team of like-minded people (Team Up) and bring projects to the end (Shipping).
The scene was occupied by another Canadian - Matt Ricks, the creator of Trainyard . His story is very interesting. In most of the time, Matt was developing on Flash. The idea of ​​Trainyard came to his mind during a regular train ride. In a short time, Matt sketched a prototype in Flash, he was able to make sure that the game mechanic is realizable and interesting enough. Instead of the planned 3 months, the development took 7 months, all this in my spare time, in the evenings and on weekends. The original Trainyard game was not important. TouchArcade did not want to make a review, which greatly upset Matt. He began work on Trainyard Express , a free version designed to boost sales of Trainyard. The birth of a son did not contribute to further development. The boss at the main job gave Matt a month off from time to help his wife and child. As it turned out, babies just do that they sleep all day long (that's where I'm willing to argue with Matt, I think he was just lucky). Thus, Matt got almost a month to complete the development.
Trainyard Express was more successful. The take-off was not instantaneous, but Matt had all this time and confidence that he created a great game, he knew that the product was good and he needed more advertising. At some point, he swung at Angry Birds, it all started with a post on Reddit , Matt wrote “Trainyard has every chance of getting around Angry Birds!” And described his entire difficult development process. And the community responded, the story went online, and finally toucharcade.com made a review. Trainyard bypassed Angry Birds as a result, but it turned out to be only the second in the top, just at the same time Cut the Rope came out, it took the first lines. Matt notes the importance of the story surrounding your application. The result of sales - about 800,000 downloads of the paid version and 4,300,000 free.
Just a week ago, the Android version was released. The Canadian studio Noodlecake was engaged in development , not even entirely in development, they claim that they created the technology for porting iOS apps to Android. It can not be, I thought, but it is worth at least read about them. Matt could not answer how many Android sales were for this week, at the end of the day he was kindly informed from the audience that there were about 1000 purchases in the first week.
Matt also believes that it is never too late to try to take their place in the App Store, yes, there are hundreds of thousands of applications, but there are only thousands of really good applications.
The last speaker was Justin Williams, creator of Elements Editor for iPad. Justin titled his speech “Why I Sold” (Why I Sold Out). For a long time, he worked from his home in Indiana. Before iOS, he was a consultant, also in IT. At some point he left the main job with enough money for the next 2-3 months.
After the success of Elements, he chose a different path from that followed by most of the speakers. The need to manage his own company did not deceive him, he was not pleased to pay taxes 4 times a year, and not just one. Justin listed many other reasons, the conclusion alone is simply not his. After several years of voluntary loneliness, he wanted more and wanted more change. Learning from others is very important, he believes. Justin moved to the Valley and got a job working for a company that creates Hipstamatic , which he doesn’t regret. In addition to iOS development, Justin has published several books.
At this the main program was completed, after a short break it was the turn of questions and answers (Q & A). All the speakers settled on the stage, the presenter and the audience asked questions. Some answers deserve attention.
Someone wondered what the speakers thought about Apple TV, about the possibility of creating a gaming console from Apple. Few people have a clear idea on this.
An inconvenient question was asked to Raphael "Why is the Flipboard for Android available only on Samsung devices?"
Raphael chose not to answer this question. Indirectly, the answer was given by Dave. When asked, “How about Android?” He replied, “We don’t rush to port anything on our own. We are waiting for companies like Samsung, Motorola, etc., to contact us and pay us to port applications to their devices. ”
They asked, “How close to your heart do you perceive negative reviews?”
It turned out that many perceive it very closely. Lee Armstrong is strictly forbidden to respond to users, apparently for good reason. The speakers noted that in the case of the App Store it is very difficult to get more details from the user. The App Atore interface does not allow any feedback. Sometimes a person can respond to his negative feedback. Buyers are very appreciated, very often, those who wrote a long review and received a response from the developers become the most loyal customers. In the case of Android, developers sometimes have almost a complete user dossier on their hands. It is not difficult to “go out” to a disgruntled customer and continue communication.
“When you decide that everything is already there, the project is not worth the effort expended on it and need to switch to something else?”
The most common answer is “When I realize that I will no longer use my application myself. As long as I am personally interested, I will continue. ”
“What are your thoughts on cross-platform, in particular Android, is it worth the effort and trying to enter this market?”
Adam Kirk was very critical "We are not disturbed by people who have no taste."
Others were less categorical. For example, if you create corporate applications, you will most likely have to write for several platforms.
The creators of the games have noted that profits have so far not so hot. Igor Pusenyak told a funny story about the letters paid by the BlackBerry. According to him, he often receives letters written on the same template, sometimes in the text there are lines insert developer name here . In the letters, users tearfully ask him to port the Doodle Jump to the BlackBerry Playbook.
“I am working on an application in my free time. From time to time, I suggest new features and ideas. Should I try to implement all possible features or try to enter the market as soon as possible? ”
One of the answers was “Enter the market early.” Often the future fate of the project, whether it will be in demand, is often unclear. Then it makes sense to get into the App Store early, to observe the reaction of users, get feedback and move on. In rare cases, you can be sure of the demand for the product and postpone the release, working on new features. By myself I know, if you work alone, appearing in the App Store is a good motivation for further work, otherwise you begin to doubt “will I ever finish?”
“What do you think about the trial period for apps on the App Store?”
For some categories, this would be a definite plus, for example, for productive applications, costing $ 10. For games, according to the developers, this would be a nightmare. They referred to the example of Android, people are pumping a casual game, killing a few hours of travel time and demanding a refund within 24 hours.
There was such an opinion - Apple will not move until it faces the problem itself. For example, if they want to get the same Microsoft Office on iOS, they will have to think about the idea of ​​a trial period, since this is a standard approach for Microsoft, besides the price of the product is very high and it makes sense to try the application before you buy.
One possible way out is to use the subscription mechanism, which is already supported by iOS.
At some point a man approached the microphone, a sort of ordinary man, middle-aged. He prefaced his question with a short story about himself. It turned out he manages the office of iOS development, over the past 6 months they have written 150 applications! At this moment, I, and many in the audience, had a slight break in the pattern. Being impressed, I didn’t catch the exact number of employees in his office, seemingly 20, which is certainly impressive, although there may be 40, at such moments you begin to doubt whether you heard correctly. A comrade said, “Of course, this is such a Shotgun approach to itself, some applications are not so good, some are very good.” As for me, this is not a “shotgun” approach, this is a nuclear bomb approach.
After the conference, when people drank beer, this man approached to get acquainted with everyone, as soon as he learned your name, his next question was “how many applications?”, Everyone else asked “where are you from?”, But not him. If you called a number less than 20, he immediately lost interest in you. I think if I said “20-30 in the last half year”, he would have called me to work in my factory.
After the official part, everyone went to drink beer and chat. I would not say that the communication turned out to be somehow ecumenical, but it was free and unconstrained, it was possible, if desired, to sit on anyone’s ears. After an hour and a half, I headed back to the airport, and the conference was over for me.
Overall, the impressions are positive. It is very interesting to hear all these stories first hand. Make sure that all ages of iOS are obedient and get other positive messages. Many things that seemed obvious, made me take a different look at certain aspects of the development and take steps in a new direction.
So the main conclusion is more such conferences.
You can write about errors in the text directly in comments, I do not see anything wrong with that.
Recently happened to visit the One More Thing Conference 2012 . I thought for a while whether to write about it or not. In the end I decided to tell what this event was and what informative I learned there. If you are interested in the theme of development for iOS and stories linked to it, then welcome to cat.
I found out about this conference quite by accident, I came across a link somewhere on the Internet. The venue (Melbourne, Australia) turned out to be only an hour in the summer. I almost instantly decided that I would go, it would be a sin to consider myself an iOS developer and promote such an event. Looking at the list of speakers, I was convinced that it was worth it.
')
Format
The conference is still young, held only the second time. Last time, as I was told, mostly local iOS developers and designers were performing, this time heavy artillery was used (the list will be lower).
On the first day, the so-called. mini-conferences. The speaker stands in front of a small group of people, about 30 people, sharing experiences and answering questions. At the mini-conference tickets were sold separately and cost more than the main event. I decided not to take it for the first time, so I can’t tell anything more about the first day.
On the second day, about 300 people gathered in the large hall, the speakers spoke one by one, with a break for lunch. Finally, the Q & A section. It is important to note that this is not a technical conference, no one talks about iOS frameworks, does not show code examples, or something like that. Whenever possible, people with humor tell their success story (there were no others) and share their experience first-hand. I will try to highlight the main points of each speaker’s speech, to highlight interesting points.
Igor Pusenyak
Croatian by origin, the creator (for a couple with his brother) the well-known game Doodle Jump . Like many other speakers, he began developing for iOS almost since the opening of the App Store. For him and his brother, it was an opportunity to work together, something they both wanted for a long time. Igor took up design, his brother - programming, having no experience with Objective-C.
Of course, success did not come immediately, before Doodle Jump were such applications as Eat Bunny Eat and AniMatch . Using the example of AniMatch, they noted for themselves the charm of frequent updates. Parents bought the game to their children and every week they waited for a new animal to appear. Such is the concept of "digital snack" (Digital Snak), a way to fuel interest in the game for some time after the first release. Now it seems obvious, then it was the first applications with this approach.
Over time, games from major publishers and companies began to appear in the App Store, Igor and his brother realized that it would be difficult to compete with them and decided to look for their own unique direction. I didn’t catch it when and how they got the idea to create Doodle Jump and didn’t remember how much time it took to develop. On the first day after the release, 21 copies of the game were sold. It is hard to believe, looking at the subsequent success of the application. Igor decided to tackle the promotion more closely and began sending letters to forums and other resources devoted to iOS (then iPhone OS) games. He recommends starting small; Do not tag right into monsters like TouchArcade . Doodle Jump lit up on small forums and the chain of reviews began to appear here and there. Then they added new themes (Christmas, space, jungle, etc.). One of the effective ways to promote Igor is cross-promotion. Doodle Jump contained references to games such as Pocket God and others. And, of course, there is little that compares with Apple's Featured.
Winter Wong
The next was a developer from the sky. His story was about the Tapatalk app. In short, this application allows you to read and post to all your favorite forums, blogs, tapes and magazines, totaling more than 1000. Winter and his team went through 10 circles of hell, or rather, through 10 failures in publishing the first version of the application. Not only did the first refusal come only after 2 months of waiting, the subsequent ones were not much faster. In total, the first version has been searching its way to the App Store for more than 7 months. Vinter was often visited by thoughts like “is it worth it?”. You must admit that it is hard to imagine such a thing now, on average, it takes one week to consider, two - already a serious delay. The reasons for the refusal were for every taste and color, starting with the fact that the application icon contains an image of the iPhone, and ending with the fact that in the application you can see nude (of course, access to 1000+ forums!).
Tapatalk is one of the few paid social apps that sells very well and takes places in the tops. Android version is also popular, but brings a much lower income. Nevertheless, Winter believes that the Android market is ripe enough to expect serious profits from it.
Among his mistakes, Winter mentions the creation of a version of the application for Nokia and BlackBerry. If you ask the user to evaluate the application, make sure that the launch counter is reset to zero after departures. In case a serious bug crept into the application, Winter has provided the ability to turn off such reminders remotely. He showed a screenshot of his gmail account, where as many as 28,000+ unread reports accumulated under the label of the iPhone Crash Reports.
Considerable headache delivers piracy. Hacked versions appear like mushrooms after rain, however there is no effective means of struggle. Such a resource as DMCAGuardian.com , for example, does not help much.
Winter also recommended crowdin.net , crowd-sourcing for translations, completely free. Only my site never opened.
Lee Armstrong
A withdrawn comrade from the UK with the sonorous name Lee Armstrong told his story. One fine morning (or evening), his wife read an article in the newspaper entitled “App Store - a gold mine for developers,” looked up from the text and asked: “Lee, can you do it?”. Well, he, in fact, could, again, without having any programming experience. Dozens of ships, ferries, barges and other vessels passed daily around the embankment of his city. He decided to create an application to track the ships and their routes almost in real time. So Ship Finder , and later Plane Finder , Plane Finder AR and the company Pinkfroot appeared .
One of the features of Plane Finder AR is the use of augmented reality to track aircraft. It is enough to point the camera at the sky above your head and the application will find all flights flying in this place. One morning, Lee woke up with the stigma of a terrorist. An article in the Daily Mail exposed him and his application as the main threat to air travel and a means of targeting terrorist missiles. In fact, application sales have increased significantly. Conclusion - there is no such thing as a bad press (there's no such thing as a bad press).
Of the highlights, Lee notes good relationships with journalists and reviewers. He began to build this relationship long before the first version of Ship Finder saw the light. In his opinion, journalists like to feel involved. From technical points, Lee noted the convenience of tools like the HockeyApp and Beanstalk .
Not without a stone in the garden Android. Approximately this schedule was in Lee presentation.
“Look,” he says, “here it is, Christmas, has arrived in the App Store. And in the Android Market, what is it? No Christmas ... And at the bottom, see? I can help and highlight the laser pointer, in — oh, there, this is not the axis of time, no, this is the Windows Phone sales schedule. ”
When a volcano erupted in Iceland and almost all flights to Europe were stopped, Lee rightly feared that few people would need the application. He was pleasantly surprised when he learned that people use Plane Finder simply as a replacement for Google Maps.
Lee comments positively on events like Apple WWDC. For him personally, it was a chance to talk to the MapKit developers and get answers to all their questions, and he had a lot of them. Lee also noted the advantages of frequent updates and featured promotions from Apple.
Adam Kirk
The next scene was taken by the serious American Adam from a company with a frivolous name Mysterious Trousers . Adam is one of the creators of Calvetica , an application that makes it easy to work with the calendar and events. According to his calculations, the creation of a simple event in a standard calendar requires from 14 to 25 tapas. Calvetica reduces this task to two screens and two or three tapas. Unlike previous speakers, Adam did not walk around the stage, stared at his laptop and shot phrases in the audience more like quotes from famous people. Be that as it may, this did not prevent him from conveying his thought. Adam noted the importance of design. Calvetica was sold in the amount of 25 copies per day, the number increased to several hundred after improving the appearance.
He also mentioned an interesting question related to major updates. If you have completely redesigned the appearance and added numerous new features to the list, should this update be made free, available as embedded purchases, and the application itself be made free, or spread as a separate version? This raises many questions. Those who have already bought the application before will feel cheated and will not want to pay a second time. Adam has chosen the path with a paid upgrade, but, looking back, he admits that the release of a separate application would be the best option. His general message is to make high-quality applications and smile less.
Finally, Adam spoke about the resource tinkerlearn.com with which he is directly connected.
Kepa Auwae
The last speaker before the break was a speaker with a colorful appearance and with a special opinion - Kepa Awaye, one of the creators of Rocketcat Games . The studio is known for games like Hook Champ , only I, frankly, did not play it. Before developing Kep, he worked as a nurse, his other partner delivered pizza, but this did not prevent them from finding themselves in the role of iOS developers. His message was: “Look at us, we do not know how to do this and that, we are poorly versed in such and such things, however this does not prevent us from earning a living through the App Store. If we were able to achieve something, then nothing prevents you from doing it. ”Gradually, Kep and his colleagues began to work at the main job for only half a day, and after a while they completely switched to development. He told about the first games of their studio: “And now let's talk about our first games ... We decided to never again talk about our first games.” That is, like many, the first pancakes are lumpy.
In some of his statements, Kep directly contradicted the other speakers. “Don't bother with updates at all,” he says. Released the game, proceed to the next.
He considers his games to be niche, so he keeps a fixed price of $ 2.99 on them and never deviates from this policy. For niche games, there is absolutely no difference in the price of $ 1.99 and $ 2.99, more precisely, it does not affect the number of purchases in any way, but of course $ 2.99 brings more money into your pocket. The point of view on niche markets is this: you have a sales ceiling right from the start, there is no point in selling at $ 0.99, it is unlikely to make your product less niche.
Engage in promotion on such resources as toucharcade.com. After a couple of successful releases, it will be easier to get an overview of your new games. Never make a new release on Christmas, at this time all the big sellers are doing discounts and your game is hopelessly lost. Cross-references are definitely a good and useful approach.
Shaun Inman
Sean spoke first after the break. A distinctive feature of his presentation was a magnificent pixel art. Sean shared a link to all art on his twitter.
Sean was involved in various web projects before trying himself in iOS development. His Last Rocket application has never been in the tops and has not had a resounding success. The development took about 140 days, instead of the planned 30. Sean recommended that you participate in game marathons, the very ones where in 48 hours you need to come up with an idea and create a working version.
Dave Howell
The next speaker was Dave Howell from Avatron Software , known for such a product as Air Display .
Dave noted that he is the only “aged” speaker. Throughout his career, Dave has been developing in one way or another connected with Apple. At first it was development for earlier versions of Mac OS, after he worked directly at Apple and the next step was to create his own company. Dave made a couple of critical remarks about Apple, starting with the company's internal kitchen and ending with the application review process. The early version of Air Display was not accepted in the App Store, because the icon depicted a rectangle resembling an iPad. Oddly enough, after they turned this rectangle 90 degrees, the similarity with the iPad suddenly disappeared. The sad fate befell their other Air Dictate application for cunning keyboard manipulations (the application superimposed its interface over the keyboard, moved it somewhere else, and when the user pressed a button in the application, he actually pressed the Siri icon on the keyboard hidden behind the external layer). Nevertheless, this is a completely permitted approach, at the moment there are many other applications that work on the same principle, so Dave just once again sighed and said "there is no point in fighting, they cannot be defeated." One of his tips is to register a trademark in the name of your applications.
Julian Lepinski
Canadian Julian Lepinsky, one of the authors of Pano , an application for creating panoramic photos, stepped onto the stage. Their story began with an amateur rock band rehearsing in a garage. Once they were driving in a car and the idea of ​​Pano was born during the discussion. Drummer Mike slept soundly in the backseat, so there were only 3 people in the company, not 4. The first version of Pano was developed in Hakintosh. When the guys got their first check from the App Store, they went and bought an Apple laptop for further development.
Julian gives one useful tip: “The best way to motivate your designer is to say that you do everything yourself. When I just write, “You know, don’t worry, I’m now riveting the interface myself,” after an hour, the psd file neatly divided into layers comes to me in the mail.
At some point, Julian returned to Ph. D., the rest of the team began building careers in other directions. Julian believes that this was a mistake, at the moment he left his studies and returned to the development on a permanent basis, like his colleagues.
A few more tips: “Talk about your application anytime, anywhere. Updates are important. Do not be lazy to describe in detail what was done. The simple line "fixes" is the worst you can imagine. "
Raphael Schaad
The organizers wanted to get someone from the creators of Flipboard . Raphael, a Swiss working in the Valley, eagerly responded to their call. His first application was the iA Writer editor . He worked closely with the company from Japan and was very close to moving to the land of the rising sun, only all these plans were destroyed by the well-known tsunami.
Raphael was easy to climb and after some time landed at San Francisco airport, where he soon began working at the company in Palo Alto. He sent the first version of Flipboard to the App Store while sitting in a coffee shop and using them is not the fastest Wi-Fi.
During the Renaissance, many beautiful works of art and inventions appeared, but all the most-important things happened in Florence. Raphael compares Silicon Valley with IT Florence of our time.
Basic promises - look for a team of like-minded people (Team Up) and bring projects to the end (Shipping).
Matt Rix
The scene was occupied by another Canadian - Matt Ricks, the creator of Trainyard . His story is very interesting. In most of the time, Matt was developing on Flash. The idea of ​​Trainyard came to his mind during a regular train ride. In a short time, Matt sketched a prototype in Flash, he was able to make sure that the game mechanic is realizable and interesting enough. Instead of the planned 3 months, the development took 7 months, all this in my spare time, in the evenings and on weekends. The original Trainyard game was not important. TouchArcade did not want to make a review, which greatly upset Matt. He began work on Trainyard Express , a free version designed to boost sales of Trainyard. The birth of a son did not contribute to further development. The boss at the main job gave Matt a month off from time to help his wife and child. As it turned out, babies just do that they sleep all day long (that's where I'm willing to argue with Matt, I think he was just lucky). Thus, Matt got almost a month to complete the development.
Trainyard Express was more successful. The take-off was not instantaneous, but Matt had all this time and confidence that he created a great game, he knew that the product was good and he needed more advertising. At some point, he swung at Angry Birds, it all started with a post on Reddit , Matt wrote “Trainyard has every chance of getting around Angry Birds!” And described his entire difficult development process. And the community responded, the story went online, and finally toucharcade.com made a review. Trainyard bypassed Angry Birds as a result, but it turned out to be only the second in the top, just at the same time Cut the Rope came out, it took the first lines. Matt notes the importance of the story surrounding your application. The result of sales - about 800,000 downloads of the paid version and 4,300,000 free.
Just a week ago, the Android version was released. The Canadian studio Noodlecake was engaged in development , not even entirely in development, they claim that they created the technology for porting iOS apps to Android. It can not be, I thought, but it is worth at least read about them. Matt could not answer how many Android sales were for this week, at the end of the day he was kindly informed from the audience that there were about 1000 purchases in the first week.
Matt also believes that it is never too late to try to take their place in the App Store, yes, there are hundreds of thousands of applications, but there are only thousands of really good applications.
Justin Williams
The last speaker was Justin Williams, creator of Elements Editor for iPad. Justin titled his speech “Why I Sold” (Why I Sold Out). For a long time, he worked from his home in Indiana. Before iOS, he was a consultant, also in IT. At some point he left the main job with enough money for the next 2-3 months.
After the success of Elements, he chose a different path from that followed by most of the speakers. The need to manage his own company did not deceive him, he was not pleased to pay taxes 4 times a year, and not just one. Justin listed many other reasons, the conclusion alone is simply not his. After several years of voluntary loneliness, he wanted more and wanted more change. Learning from others is very important, he believes. Justin moved to the Valley and got a job working for a company that creates Hipstamatic , which he doesn’t regret. In addition to iOS development, Justin has published several books.
Q & A
At this the main program was completed, after a short break it was the turn of questions and answers (Q & A). All the speakers settled on the stage, the presenter and the audience asked questions. Some answers deserve attention.
Someone wondered what the speakers thought about Apple TV, about the possibility of creating a gaming console from Apple. Few people have a clear idea on this.
An inconvenient question was asked to Raphael "Why is the Flipboard for Android available only on Samsung devices?"
Raphael chose not to answer this question. Indirectly, the answer was given by Dave. When asked, “How about Android?” He replied, “We don’t rush to port anything on our own. We are waiting for companies like Samsung, Motorola, etc., to contact us and pay us to port applications to their devices. ”
They asked, “How close to your heart do you perceive negative reviews?”
It turned out that many perceive it very closely. Lee Armstrong is strictly forbidden to respond to users, apparently for good reason. The speakers noted that in the case of the App Store it is very difficult to get more details from the user. The App Atore interface does not allow any feedback. Sometimes a person can respond to his negative feedback. Buyers are very appreciated, very often, those who wrote a long review and received a response from the developers become the most loyal customers. In the case of Android, developers sometimes have almost a complete user dossier on their hands. It is not difficult to “go out” to a disgruntled customer and continue communication.
“When you decide that everything is already there, the project is not worth the effort expended on it and need to switch to something else?”
The most common answer is “When I realize that I will no longer use my application myself. As long as I am personally interested, I will continue. ”
“What are your thoughts on cross-platform, in particular Android, is it worth the effort and trying to enter this market?”
Adam Kirk was very critical "We are not disturbed by people who have no taste."
Others were less categorical. For example, if you create corporate applications, you will most likely have to write for several platforms.
The creators of the games have noted that profits have so far not so hot. Igor Pusenyak told a funny story about the letters paid by the BlackBerry. According to him, he often receives letters written on the same template, sometimes in the text there are lines insert developer name here . In the letters, users tearfully ask him to port the Doodle Jump to the BlackBerry Playbook.
“I am working on an application in my free time. From time to time, I suggest new features and ideas. Should I try to implement all possible features or try to enter the market as soon as possible? ”
One of the answers was “Enter the market early.” Often the future fate of the project, whether it will be in demand, is often unclear. Then it makes sense to get into the App Store early, to observe the reaction of users, get feedback and move on. In rare cases, you can be sure of the demand for the product and postpone the release, working on new features. By myself I know, if you work alone, appearing in the App Store is a good motivation for further work, otherwise you begin to doubt “will I ever finish?”
“What do you think about the trial period for apps on the App Store?”
For some categories, this would be a definite plus, for example, for productive applications, costing $ 10. For games, according to the developers, this would be a nightmare. They referred to the example of Android, people are pumping a casual game, killing a few hours of travel time and demanding a refund within 24 hours.
There was such an opinion - Apple will not move until it faces the problem itself. For example, if they want to get the same Microsoft Office on iOS, they will have to think about the idea of ​​a trial period, since this is a standard approach for Microsoft, besides the price of the product is very high and it makes sense to try the application before you buy.
One possible way out is to use the subscription mechanism, which is already supported by iOS.
At some point a man approached the microphone, a sort of ordinary man, middle-aged. He prefaced his question with a short story about himself. It turned out he manages the office of iOS development, over the past 6 months they have written 150 applications! At this moment, I, and many in the audience, had a slight break in the pattern. Being impressed, I didn’t catch the exact number of employees in his office, seemingly 20, which is certainly impressive, although there may be 40, at such moments you begin to doubt whether you heard correctly. A comrade said, “Of course, this is such a Shotgun approach to itself, some applications are not so good, some are very good.” As for me, this is not a “shotgun” approach, this is a nuclear bomb approach.
After the conference, when people drank beer, this man approached to get acquainted with everyone, as soon as he learned your name, his next question was “how many applications?”, Everyone else asked “where are you from?”, But not him. If you called a number less than 20, he immediately lost interest in you. I think if I said “20-30 in the last half year”, he would have called me to work in my factory.
Afterparty
After the official part, everyone went to drink beer and chat. I would not say that the communication turned out to be somehow ecumenical, but it was free and unconstrained, it was possible, if desired, to sit on anyone’s ears. After an hour and a half, I headed back to the airport, and the conference was over for me.
Overall, the impressions are positive. It is very interesting to hear all these stories first hand. Make sure that all ages of iOS are obedient and get other positive messages. Many things that seemed obvious, made me take a different look at certain aspects of the development and take steps in a new direction.
So the main conclusion is more such conferences.
PS
You can write about errors in the text directly in comments, I do not see anything wrong with that.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/144743/
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