Tag ‘itunes’

iPad ready for the big launch with exclusive apps, 30,000 free books, adult content

Mauro Dalu

Analyst Katy Huberty with Morgan Stanley said suppliers for the iPad have currently forecast 2.5 million iPads to be shipped from March to May 2010: Apple would ship between 8 million and 10 million by the end of 2010. This number is much higher than the expectation of 5 million that was forecasted so far. The upward revisions to iPad build rates “point to strong initial pre-orders.”

While video demonstrations of the iPad software including Safari browser, iBooks, Keynote, Pages and Numbers have been posted on Apple’s Web site, with videos that show many uses of the iPad, including its ability to be docked and utilized as a digital picture frame, how are Apple and the developers community preparing to the iPad launch?

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iTunes Sales Reports Analytics: a closer look to appFigures

Mauro Dalu

appFigures is a reporting platform for iPhone developers that automatically downloads and visualizes iTunes Connect sales data with App Store reviews and ranks for all of their apps.

We have been using appFigures for a while now and are pretty happy with it. Before we started using appFigures, we had no reliable and fast way to see how our sales were going and no real way to keep track of the effectiveness of our marketing activities.

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Apple removes “do-nothing” apps from the store

Mauro Dalu


Another change in policy for Apple regarding the App Store. Some developers said the company began removing applications Apple felt provided “minimum user functionality,” such as one that simply quacked like a duck.

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Where is the text-to-speech “speak” command in Mac OS X Snow Leopard?

Mauro Dalu

Add-to-itunes-as-spoken-textI was used to have a “speak” command somewhere in the services menu to be accessible whenever you had a text selected. In Snow Leopard, that has disappeared but a new Automator command is provided instead.

The command will convert any text to an iTunes track containing the speech synthesis reading the text. A new “Text-to-Speech” album is added to iTunes containing the tracks.

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iPhone synch: manually manage music, videos and ringtones

Mauro Dalu

ringtones-synch-iphoneRingtones in the iPhone are treated like Music and Videos. So if you want to manually manage the music and the movies you keep on your iPhone, while keeping synchronized all your ringtones… you can’t.

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iPhone Apps scanned for private API use during App Store approval process

Mauro Dalu

iphone-app-storeApple recently began using computers to automatically scan for the use of private application programming interfaces. The new “static analysis tools” aim to catch those who might have snuck by the approval process before, with software that bends or breaks the rules established by Apple.

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Toneaphone iPhone ringtones App highlights: 3D interface, Core Data, Server Component

Mauro Dalu

toneaphone-ringtones-iphone-app-blogToneaphone is one of the greatest and most unique mobile media companies you’ll find out there. They are the first company in the App Store to compose original songs as ringtones, feature corresponding Album Artwork, and have created a vast collection of over 100 original ringtones to choose from, of all genres.

The iPhone native app Surgeworks designed and developed had about 200 downloads in the first week, and was positively received by bloggers and reviewers on YouTube. It also got about a dozen five star reviews on the App Store and got ranked 30th in Italy for the Entertainment category in the same time frame.

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iTunes Connect Sales Reports Analytics and Stats Tools for iPhone Apps

Mauro Dalu

iPhone-Sales-Stats-AppFiguresWay back when the iPhone OS 2.0 was announced and the SDK released, we worked on our very first iPhone App: Divine Office. It is a niche app that allows Christians to listen and pray an audio version of the Liturgy of the Hours.

What we really missed at the time was the ability to quickly post-process and analyze Apple’s cryptic reports to understand how the sales were going. Apple is not providing simple data you need, like… totals. In any given moment, to find out how many units you are actually selling, you need to go through a custom spreadsheet or a database in order to get some real data out of it, and even that way, there’s a lot of complexity to be taken care of: multiple currencies, free updates, refunds, etc.

We envisioned a web app named “App Tracker” that would basically be Google Analytics for iPhone Apps Sales, but we never managed to have spare resources to assign to the project and finally the community caught up with an impressive line up of products to serve the purpose. Here is a quick list.

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