Posts tagged with iphone
Aug 15th, 2011 by flingsoft
We are very pleased to announce that our newest app, Classic Westerns, is now available across multiple devices including the iPhone and iPad. Movie Vault users have been asking us for a while to come up with inexpensive pre-sorted versions and everyone loved our last genre specific version, House of Horrors, so we wanted to add to the collection. With this release, we expose a great selection of classic films featuring incredible western actors like John Wayne, Roy Rogers, Tim McCoy, Gene Autry and more!
You can install it now on:
- iPhone ($.99)
- iPad ($1.99)
- Android ($.99)
- Roku ($1.99)
- Windows Phone 7 ($.99) Coming Soon, in review now!!
We hope you enjoy and can’t wait for our upcoming releases!
Filed under:
itunes, android, roku, iphone, ipad,
Mar 18th, 2011 by flingsoft
As we wait for the imminent release of Movie Vault 1.2 on the iPhone and 1.3 on the iPad (which both add AirPlay!!), I thought I would offer up some information on the devices and testing we do for the various applications. We are also avidly working on Android, OS X, and Windows Phone builds which should be showing their faces very soon!
Most development teams do not have access to a wide array of devices, so they are forced to depend on the simulators that are included with the SDKs or great third party services like DeviceAnywhere. While most of these are really good ways of testing (and we use them in addition to the devices), we do notice that you can miss a lot of if you rely of them solely. So we have a nice stable of devices thanks to our partners and we are growing it rapidly. Here’s a shot of some of them:
We test on the following for iOS:
- iPhone 4
- iPhone 3GS
- iPhone 3G
- iPhone Classic
- iPad
- iPad 2 (coming soon, still in line!)
For Android, we test on:
- Motorola Droid 2
- Motorola Cliq
- Motorola Backflip
- Adding more soon!
For Windows Phone 7 we test on:
- Samsung Focus
- HTC coming soon!
For IP TV boxes, we test on:
Some issues:
To start, it is very difficult to test memory leaks and memory related crashes through only the simulator. Whatever the reason is, the simulators seem to not exhibit similar leak behaviors. I can run an app for hours in the simulator and then put it on the device and kill it in 10 seconds.
Next, UI interaction… you know the jumpiness/smoothness factor. Because the simulator takes into account system processing power things always feel crisp. Not so on the device and especially when you go between versions (iPhone 3G to 3Gs to 4 for example). DeviceAnywhere also has issues here because it is network based so sometimes it can feel jumpier than it might actually be. Two heavy extremes.
Video and this is obviously where we want to shine. We would never use a hosted service to test this and the simulator in most cases can’t even run video well. We can test our streams outside of the app for general functionality, but we always like to try them on device to make sure it looks the best it can given our original source.
General usability is the best use of these tools and where they accelerate development. If you want to see how things look and how interaction functions, then they can drastically speed things up.
I won’t delve into the actual QA process, but we are very engineering oriented so we go through QA cycles, bug review, fixes, re-test, etc, etc. I can always talk to our process here in detail as well if anyone is really truly interested. I hope everyone enjoyed this and we always welcome comments and questions. Always happy to help and share our experiences.
Filed under:
development, iphone, ipad, boxee, roku, qa,
May 1st, 2010 by flingsoft
After our initial work on some functional apps, we decided to have a little fun. Part of it was due to my young (2 years at the time) son and his obsession with the iPhone and little silly apps. So the next two apps were more about making something silly with some great design behind it. They were also based on the fortune cookie concept which is something simple for people to understand and something very “shareable”.
Fortune Monkey Lives!
Who doesn’t love a good monkey? We really set out to build something like Zoltar made famous by the movie Big, but with a little twist. To give it a little spin, he became a monkey and a gypsy and so much more… You can share your fortunes with friends or just play with it yourself, there are hundreds and hundreds of fortunes to choose from
And then the Buddha Speaks!
We then decided to branch out and do another version that was still fun but with a different spin. Buddha always has awesome teachings and was a natural fit. So we came up with a cartoon version based on the fat laughing Budda or “Budai”. Same functionality, but new content and different target.
Neither of these apps were about making money as there are a ton of these types of apps, but really more about having some fun with design and getting users something fun to play with. Both really successful from that perspective and the uptick in sales was not a bad thing.
Filed under:
iphone, buddhaspeaks, fortunemonkey,
Apr 12th, 2010 by flingsoft
In the beginning, the idea was simple… find a hole in the iPhone application landscape and fill it with something people needed. This hasn’t changed much obviously, but the amount of gaps in those first six months were so much greater than they are now. So we decided to tackle something that was relatively simple and something we felt was much needed. It was a way to get us into the store quickly, push us into iPhone development, and really just dip our toe in the water. From all of this, FotoFling was born. It was originally actually called MySnapFoo, so really happy that we changed that along the way.
FotoFling Development
FotoFling started off as something very very simple; “build MMS functionality into the iPhone platform”. Digging a little deeper, we soon discovered that our goals were much greater than what was allowed by the iPhone OS and the SDK. For example:
- No access to the SMS sub-system to send messages.
- Limited access to the user’s phonebook to negotiate between mobile/non-mobile numbers.
And so our first approach was very rudimentary. We decided to use a server side solution to handle the photo sending and make use of the e-mail to text messaging gateways of carriers to send the SMS notifications. This was for several reasons:
- Again, no access to the SMS sub-system to send messages.
- Cost of using API for SMS sending was fairly obscene depending on volume. Meaning, it just wouldn’t scale financially.
- No way to send an SMS other than using a major third party platform.
We pushed forward and soon our prototype was up and running. Our initial foray into iPhone design was complete with a clever catchy retro design and the functionality was pretty solid. We were ready to launch, it was June of 2008.
Apple’s Sign-Up and Review Process
Behind the scenes, we had been in the “sign-up” queue with a million other developers for months and after many back and forth exchanges with Apple developer support, we finally got our approval e-mail. It was clearly the most amount of time I have ever spent in order to give someone $99. So new developer account in hand, final binaries compiled, META information for the store ready and SUBMIT FOR APPROVAL. Woohoo!
And we waited…. for two months. Finally at the end of September 2008 (1 day after my birthday, Happy Birthday!) our little app showed up on the iTunes App Store. Priced at $1.99, we quickly moved to the top of the Photography category and ended up in the top 100 of the store overall.
We were feeling pretty good, but then things changed in the store.
Apple Policies Cost Us
Apple got lazy on policing apps that were submitted and soon we had a number of competitors. Competition is typically good, but most of the apps were from the same company and they actually were the SAME APP. Sure some were green and others red and had different names, but the interface was identical. This absolutely killed us in the long run and before two months was up there were over 20 apps that did the same thing, many of which were duplicates. They fixed this, but it took over 6 months to get there.
There is no way to tell how much launching earlier would have helped from the lack of competition, but this is all speculation. Also, the lack of real app monitoring post our release always would have cost us substantially. We are over it now, but it was brutal for all developers… not just us.
Customer Feedback
Now our app wasn’t perfect by any means, but some of the negative reactions from customers was almost insane and proves how well Apple does “hiding” the iPhone’s inadequacies. The biggest negative we heard was “this is not real MMS!”. The tricky thing here is that there was no way to do “real MMS” on the iPhone at this time. The whole point of what we were all doing was to give iPhone users an alternative way to accomplish this. So, while we were doing our best to put out a functional app that user’s would want to use, we got slammed in reviews (that you can’t respond to) about features that you literally couldn’t make the phone do. It was painful for us and we had no way in the iTunes store to tell our users…
FotoFling’s Status Now
The original FotoFling was AT&T only and that soon gave birth to FotoFling Worldwide. We dropped pricing, played with naming and UI elements, etc. We still get downloaded across the world which is strange given that we only support certain markets, but the prospect of “Free MMS” really appeals to some people.
To date, we have sent over one million messages and we are very proud of that fact.
We are not actively doing new development on this as the market is over-saturated and of course the fact that Apple has built MMS into the iPhone OS itself. We thank everyone who has purchased and will continue to support the infrastructure that runs this. We are actively working on new apps for ourselves and clients, but we will never forget how it all started!
Filed under:
iphone, fotofling,
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