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Mobile Orchard

iPhone Developer News, Interviews and Links

Interview with Glen Low, Creator of InstavizJanuary 5

This episode of the Mobile Orchard Podcast features Glen Low, the creator of Instaviz. Instaviz is a graphing and mind-mapping application with a novel, Newton-like shape drawing interface.

Glen won the 2004 Apple Design award for his porting Graphviz, the OSS graph layout software, to OS-X. Instaviz uses Graphviz — normally a techie’s tool — and some clever shape recognition to create an easy to use app with broad appeal.

In this interview, he talks about developing shape recognition using Bayesian classification (the same approach system commonly used for spam filters), endpoint/edge connection algorithms, developing for/with Graphviz on the iPhone, and trying to use the mailto-protocol handler to send email attachments.

For easy scanning of the interview, the following indexes shows what was covered and when:

• 0:30 - What is Instaviz
• 1:30 - Newton-like shape recognition with Naive Bayesian Classification
• 4:45 - Connecting objects: endpoint detection
• 7:00 - Sketch recognition algorithms
• 9:00 - Porting GraphViz to iPhone (via OS-X)
• 11:00 - Layout engines (DOT, Neato - spring-load/Mind-maps)
• 14:30 - No attachments via mailto protocol handlers

See Competing iPhone Apps Coming with One JuicerJanuary 2

One Juicer is an online application by Two Toasters LLC that enables you to keep an eye out for competing iPhone apps on the App Store. You specify some keywords, provide your e-mail, and you’ll be notified when apps matching those keywords come on to the store.

For example, if you have a “guitar” application, just use the keyword “guitar” and you’ll be notified when any guitar related apps are released. This might seem a little late in the whole process if you need to respond to the competition, but it’s the best you can currently do without constant Googling and monitoring of Twitter for competitors.

Route-Me: An open-source map library for iPhone developersDecember 28 2008

Route-Me is a new, open source map library for the iPhone, built using Objective C and using the fast CoreAnimation framework. It’s licensed under the new BSD license so you can use it for both commercial and non-commercial uses as long as you include the copyright notice and disclaimer in the documentation for your product (and in the source code if you distribute that).

Currently, OpenStreetMap, Microsoft Virtual Earth and CloudMade are the supported map sources. On the documentation front, there’s an “embedding guide” to get you up to speed with using Route-Me in your own applications.

Interview with Brent Simmons, Creator of NetNewsWireDecember 22 2008

In this latest episode of Mobile Orchard’s iPhone Developer podcast, we interview Brent Simmons, creator of NetNewsWire for the iPhone and Mac.

Brent talks about adapting a desktop app’s UI for iPhone, has advice for indies making a living selling iPhone apps, describes how he successfully split MarsEdit from NetNewsWire, gives some examples of cool iPhone apps, describes his “anti-packrat” compulsion, and chats about the complexity of syncing iPhone and desktop apps.

You can listen using the Flash player above, download the MP3, or subscribe to the iPhone Developer Podcast using the instructions at the bottom of this post.

For easy scanning of the interview, the following indexes shows what was covered and when:

• 0:25 - Adapting the desktop NetNewsWire UI for iPhone
• 1:45 - Determining what to cut out of the UI
• 2:50 - Dave Winer on UI: “bring your user along”
• 5:50 - “Whenver you have a preference it means you punted”
• 6:00 - Advice for indies: making a livin

How Rank Correlates to Sales: Top 50 means 1000 Sales per DayDecember 21 2008

Infomedia is the developer of iFart Mobile, an iPhone app that you can use to make farting noises. In just over a week of sales, iFart has done very well, going from #70 within the Entertainment section to becoming the 4th most popular app overall! Two days ago, Joel Comm (a popular Internet marketing expert in his own right) of Infomedia shared the sales figures for iFart along with the rankings. Then today he followed up with extra figures for today and yesterday.

Focusing solely on the ranking within the Entertainment category (see the blog posts above for more detailed info), the results are:

Date Rank in Entertainment Daily Sales Dec 12 70 75 Dec 13 16 296 Dec 14 8 841 Dec 15 5 1510 Dec 16 3 1797 Dec 17 3 2836 Dec 18 3 3086 Dec 19 2 3117 Dec 20 2 5497

Currently the border in rankings necessary to reach 1000 sales per day is between 76th and 39th overall in the App Store going off of Joel’s extended numbers so, roughly but considering the distribution, apps at #50 or above are probably selling 1000 units per day or more.

As an aside: As a 99 cent app and af