At the end of the school year this May, my friends Jimmy Luper, Jared Nilsson and I will be driving 3200 miles north from Fort Collins, CO to Anchorage, AK.
Best of all, we’ll be taking this trip in an original 1940 Chevrolet – dubbed the ‘Big Missus’.
The Big Missus will have a solar panel from Goal0 strapped to her roof. The panel will provide power for two iPhone 4s, an iPad 2, and occasionally a 13″ MacBook Pro. The iPhones will be constantly sending our location to the travel blog I’ve set up at 970to907.com.
Keep checking up on the website. We’ll be documenting the adventure thoroughly with pictures, videos, and blog posts. It’s going to be quite the trip!
Just as I was writing my last post about rankings, I opened iTunes to grab a link to the Navigation category under iPhone apps. On the main page for Navigation, I happened to see a screenshot for Fast!
Here it is! Fast is in the New and Noteworthy section in the Navigation category on the App Store. Hopefully this will keep us high in the ranks!
Fast has had a wonderful start in the App Store. In its first four days in the store, Fast had twice the downloads that PhotoRotate had received in the past month. I’m very excited to say the least!
With the initial success from Fast, I signed up for a paid account with AppFigures (well worth it!) and I’ve started following my apps’ rankings in the App Store.
Fast got off to a marvelous start, rising to 36th place in the Navigation category for paid iPhone apps in just the first few days. The ranking has dropped a bit from its place in the 30s, but Fast has maintained its place in the top 100, and at most times it is in the top 75.
Ranking is updated on an hourly basis, so I now find myself glued to AppFigures. Checking these analytics is both tremendously fun, and quite tormenting. But I love it.
Fast, my speedometer app for iPhone, has been approved and is now in the App Store!
Fast has a beautiful interface. There is both a digital readout and a classic speedometer gauge. Along with being a great speedometer, Fast will also keep track of your top speed. You can put your iPhone in your pocket while skiing, snowboarding, biking or anything – and check how fast you’ve gone once you are done.
I was skiing with my father and some friends today. We used the Top Speed feature to track ourselves. I was able to clock 44MPH. My dad’s friend hit 56MPH. (I’m just getting back on skis after snowboarding for 11 years).
Want a free download of Fast? Just let me know and I’ll get you a promotional code. All you have to do is leave a review once you’ve tried the app!
I’ve had great results with PhotoRotate so far. There have been over 8,000 downloads of the free version, and all of the reviews have been extremely positive!
Until just recently, the paid and free versions of PhotoRotate were not very different. The free version had ads, and the paid version did not. I wanted to add something that would give our paying users more of an experience, and simply show all of our users that we’re continuing to support the apps.
Now, the space in the free version that is occupied by ads, has become a functions toolbar in the paid version. Users can select between rotating, adjusting the brightness, and adjusting the contrast of their images. Triple the feature set!
Along with the added functions in the paid version, both the paid and free versions now have a Save menu. This menu lets users Email their edited image, Copy it to the Clipboard for sending in Text messages, or simply save it to their Photo Library.
This update has been a big project. Now, we’re settling back in to focus on The Helicopter.
We’ve made some serious progress on The Helicopter. Here are a pair of screenshots that show what we started at, and how far we’ve come.
This week is wild with work on finals and wrapping up school. It’s going well though!
Once the semester is finished, there’s a lot in the mix for break. Along with the usual snowboarding, hanging out with family/friends, and generally having a blast, it’s time to focus down on business and make things work better.
One problem to solve with Green iPhone is the trust and speed factor for BuyBack customers that live in other states. A lot of people from out-of-state want to sell their iPhones, but some have a hard time taking the leap of faith in sending their iPhones to us before they receive a payment. They’re worried about fraud, and once that gets in their minds, the whole process sounds too long and complex. They think “It’s going to be a big operation to ship them the phone, and what if they never send my payment?”
I want to create a solution that’s very simple. It will solve both problems by showing the customer the hard fact (that we’re running a legitimate business and we have our reputation at stake. It would make no sense to ruin our business in exchange for stealing a few iPhones) and by giving them more opportunity to interact with the company.
This could be in the form of a customer portal. Once a customer contacts me via email, they will immediately have the option to call me and have me explain our legitimacy. Following the email, they will get access to their own user page on our website. Once they arrange to send a phone in with me, their panel will allow them to print a shipping label for their phone. The panel would also have a box showing how much money they will get from this transaction. Once we receive their phone, their page on the site gets updated and they get an email letting them know that we’ve administered their check.
This is be a big update. But it needs to happen before we begin buying from non-local customers on a large scale.
We have a new app in the mix. This one is a game, and it’s called The Helicopter.
The Helicopter has a great story behind it and a bunch of neat features that I think will make it one of the best games in the App Store. I can’t say TOO much about gameplay yet, but we just got the official app website set up at TheHelicopterApp.com. You can also check our updates on Twitter at @helicopterapp.
As we progress in development the website will be host to game screenshots, explaining our progress, discussions about features, recruiting beta testers, and more. If you’re interested, make sure to follow the twitter feed or the RSS from the website.
I’m working very hard on The Helicopter, as are my teammates Ben and Connor. We’re dedicated to making a kickass game for the iPhone and iPod touch.
The website for Green iPhone officially launched today. Take a look, and feel free to send feedback through the Contact form on the website!
I’m really not good at keeping this blog updated with progress. It’s just not something in my daily routine. I think an update is due, though.
Recently I’ve started working on two big projects. The first is Green iPhone, an iPhone recycling company. It spurred out of my casual iPhone sales on Craigslist and it has developed into a working business model. Green iPhone has an iPhone Buy-Back program that buys used/broken iPhones from individuals and companies. On the flip side, we have a sales portal on the Green iPhone website where we sell professionally refurbished iPhones.
Green iPhone is just starting, and it has been a magnificent experience so far. Our full website will launch on November 1st 2010. You’ll be able to find it here. Here’s our logo:
The second project to mention is iPhone App development. My first applications, PhotoRotate and PhotoRotate Free were approved by Apple and put into the App Store this Monday. PhotoRotate is simple app, and the title should make it self explanatory. Unfortunately the iPhone’s operating system, iOS, does not have a photo rotating function built in. With all of the pictures that I take for eBay (I take them at interesting angles sometimes), I end up with incorrectly oriented images a LOT. I wanted a solution, and none of the rotating Apps in the store looked good enough for me.
PhotoRotate seemed like a great App to do some ice-breaking with. And it was! I got a great development team together, and we put together a really polished and intuitive photo rotator. I’m happy to say that the apps are in the store, and they are doing quite well. – My support page for PhotoRotate is actually on this site, here.
Now we’re moving on to much more complex Apps. There is a full-featured game in the works, and I think it’s going to be phenomenal. I will post an update when it’s complete.
That’s it for now!
