The Appsperts

http://www.seangolliher.com/2011/uncategorized/how-i-reversed-engineered-klout-score-to-an-r2-094/

It's a widely accepted fact even in the iPhone dev community that today it's impossible to gain visibility in the App Store without marketing. Recently we finished developing a new app - Black Cal - that we are about to distribute. And so we started to look for great, up to date ways of promoting it. So what are the options out there? - http://prMac.com - this is probably the best priced option out there. The cheapest plan is about $20 whereas the video review + distribution is about $90. We had some level of success with it in our previous app, Calendar At A Glance. - ww.talonpr.com - we've heard mostly good things about it. It's basically supposed to be one highly-connected dude with high level of success. Prices should be below $200. The website looked totally outdated so we decided to move on for now. - www.ecoappsfree.com - this agency is good for eco/green apps. If your app can be qualified as such (criteria is on their website), be sure to check them out. They provide an auxiliary, organic channel of distribution which is different than most competitors. Unfortunately, our app does not qualify as such despite it's black interface which allegedly consumes less energy that an all-white default iphone cal app. So we moved on. - www.prweb.com - this is your home depot solution. Proven success stories, pricing starting from $80 and going all the way up to thousands of dollars, several review options. The website looks like it actually was updated in the last 3 years. Potential problem - they don't have a specialized solution targeted for the iPhone. And as all of us iPhone devs know, it's very different from regular web traffic. So what's the verdict? Besides making a really great app? Still no definite winner. We are happy to consider recommendations.

We are looking into new designs for our website and this is what we ran into. Some themes are pretty cool. http://wpmu.org/16-beautiful-and-free-responsive-wordpress-themes/

A common problem for many iOS developers is how to color a UIButton. In iOS 5 one can use UIApperance to color all instances of the UIButton class in the application. But sometimes all you want is to color one simple button pressrving its round-cornered shape. This article provides the best programmatic coloring solution we've encountered so far. Enjoy! http://www.cimgf.com/2010/01/28/fun-with-uibuttons-and-core-animation-layers/

http://blog.mugunthkumar.com/coding/iphone-tutorial-in-app-email/

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Unless Apple comes out with a programmatic way to implement it in the future iOS versions and Google works with Apple to allow it in its Maps app, I guess many programmers will be implementing that times and again.

This is an ongoing debate on what is the best business model today. With the lite & full model being left aside, the two strongest remaining candidates are the freemium (download for free, purchase upgrade inside app) and the paid (cash upfront) models. Analyzing the App Store Top Grossing, it seems that in the Games category, freemium is already the dominating model, where in all the other categories it's not a trend yet. The link shows other data.

Stay tuned!