Continuing in my tradition of winning contests that I entered with very little expectation of actually winning, I got an email a week or two back about the University of Michigan 2010 Mobile Apps Competition that I entered in November. The competition is open to students, faculty and staff at the university. Since I’m working on a part time basis at the university, I figured I would enter a few of my apps. I chose Checkmate and ♥s Threadless, and made some awkward demo videos of each (warning, don’t play these simultaneously or your head might explode from too much Hung voice):
Winning a prize in this contest was a really nice way to start my year. It’s really encouraging me to continue doing mobile apps and exploring what’s possible.
Today my newest app was approved for the App Store (and should be propagating quickly)! ♥s Threadless is what I’ve been working on mostly for the past few weeks or so. Hurry up and download and review it, then come back here for more info about the app.
It’s no secret that I’ve been a huge fan of Threadless since I discovered it back in 2005 (see these blog posts for proof). I really love the fact that the community provides designs and decides which ones will be printed. The company is really only there to provide the machinery to make shirts and fulfill orders! I wanted to contribute to the community by making an unofficial Threadless app (and maybe get a little store credit to feed my t-shirt needs).
My main reasoning for writing a native Threadless app is that I found it pretty hard to browse shirts, even in a fully fledged web browser let alone an iPhone browser. The Threadless site is by no means bad, but it’s hard to see what designs look like when the images are small and on models. I prefer viewing the actual design. So I built an app that makes it easy to 1) browse and find cool shirts and 2) share them with your friends.
In order to do this, I needed to get a database of shirts on Threadless. It’s kind of unfortunate that Threadless doesn’t have an API. At all. Threadless does, however, has a few feeds of shirts: one for shirts that are in stock and another for the weekly additions. I parsed this list of shirts and saved them in an App Engine database along with some other metadata like image urls, category info, etc. I also figured out a way to get the list of all Threadless shirts, including the ones that aren’t currently in stock. What this means is that the ♥s Threadless app will help you find more shirts than even the official website can. You can filter by category, color and run fulltext searches on the entire shirt database.
As far as the front end work went, I had to build a custom table view cell to scroll through shirts and a nested scrollview to view shirt images. The shirt view looks a lot like the native photo browser app for the iPhone. I also added features for sharing, including saving the image to your photo album, posting the design on Twitter and Facebook and emailing the shirt design as an attachment. I figure that covers most bases as far as sharing goes.
So far I’ve only designed and built the iPhone version. I think an iPad version would be neat, too, but I want to gauge the interest in the iPhone/iPod app before putting more time into this. If you like the app, let me know and write up a review for it!
Finally, here’s a video demo of the app, just for fun:
I’ve been working on a new app (I’ll write more about it in a week or so), part of which required opening a user’s Twitter client with a pre-populated tweet or opening Twitter on a particular user’s profile for easy following. There are a lot of Twitter clients out there, so it’s hard to predict what a particular user will have installed on their device. They might not even have any Twitter client installed.
Many (but not all) Twitter clients have url schemes that allow you to open them with a particular message filled out, etc. There’s a few here, but it’s not a definitive list by any means. I gathered a bunch of the more popular ones and wrapped them in a helper class called ObjTweet.
Since I want to give back (and I wouldn’t mind the recognition), I’ve licensed this class under the GNU GPL license MIT License (thanks, Marcello for pointing out that the GPL license is pretty restrictive) and uploaded it to Github. Hopefully someone else finds it useful. My hope is also that people will help find some of the missing url schemes for other apps and build on ObjTweet. If you found this class and are using it, let me know! Hopefully it works as described.
Today I decided to have the Apple “Back to Mac” keynote stream while working on other stuff. I was literally setting up a print job in my composing stick when I heard Steve Jobs mention that iLife will have a letterpress printing option. I never imagined that Apple would move in on my turf when I decided to get an old style printing press!
It looks like you’ll be able to order prints from a number of templates, some of which can also include photos:
I think it’s neat that letterpress is becoming mainstream (again) enough that it warrants a feature in iLife. As far as my concerns about taking away business (which I haven’t quite decided to get into), I think it’s good that Apple’s pushing this kind of typing further into the mainstream. There’ll probably be a lot more people interested in letterpress, and not just for the personalized photo cards, etc.
On a technical note, I’m interested how Apple is going to farm out the print jobs. Do they have their own print shop with all the Heidelberg machines, or are they partnering with a shop? Depending on the volume of orders, I wonder what their turnaround time would be.
I’ve got some more thoughts on iAd after trying iAd out on one of my apps for about a month now.
As I noted in an earlier post, Apple responded to a really low fill rate on their iAd program by enabling developer ads. Developer ads are simple banner ads that entice a user to download an iPhone app. Here’s what the use case looks like via Business Insider:
To Apple’s credit, the workflow is actually pretty good. It doesn’t require users to leave the app to download another one.
Since developers can’t really afford the insane $2 cost per click that the big media customers pay, Apple is charging $.25 a click instead, and no cost per impression. Theoretically, this should mean that the fill rate would be very high (as long as developers are not maxing out on their daily spend limit or too aggressively filtering out apps). Yet I’ve noticed a pretty big fall in fill rate (from about 30% to 20%) in the last month.
I think the main issue is that Apple never really intended iAd to be used for performance advertising. Performance advertising is about getting that direct action (in this case, an app download). Apple’s been pushing iAd as a great Brand advertising solution (where the user is not expected to go out and buy Dove soap from their phone). That’s why the premium brands are willing to pay so much per click and impression. By comparison, AdMob ads on the iPhone seem to be more geared toward performance advertising.
By introducing developer ads, I think Apple has tried to appease publishers at the cost of the perceived premium value of iAds. Sure, the developer ads aren’t as flashy as the premium advertisers’, but $.25 versus $2 a click for the same piece of real estate is quite a difference. Add the perception that iAds for developers are not cost-effective and you could come to the conclusion that Apple is doing it wrong. It doesn’t help that the premium brand advertisers seem to be frustrated with the process of dealing with Apple as a gatekeeper.
So what can Apple do to fix this? They should go back to their specialization: doing one or a few things really well. They should focus on iAd as a brand advertising platform. They should work on getting as many large partners onto iAd as quickly as possible. This will alleviate the growing pains that publishers (including me) are feeling with fill rates. Right now it seems like Apple is reacting rather than acting; following rather than leading. They need to show that they’re serious about carving their own niche in the mobile advertising space.
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