Inedible Blog

James and I interviewed on UNTETHER.tv

eddie — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 17:32:56 +0000

James and I had a great chance to chat with Rob Woodbridge from UNTETHER.tv a week ago, and the interview is now online. Check it out for a bit of our backstory and thoughts on the mobile app ecosystem.

UNTETHER.tv: Behind the business of mobile

App Store Analysis Part 1: App Developers

eddie — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 05:25:57 +0000

Having made my claim that ratings are a good indicator of downloads I’m going to look at the top app developers. As of a week or so ago 39,175 developers have at least 1 application on the store. I’ve compiled the Top 100 app developers and included them in a plot below. Check out Inedible Software at #68. There are two things I find interesting about this data:

1) The top app developers are gigantic. Gameloft has just about 2.3% of all ratings, which means they probably have near 2.3% of all downloads. Digital Chocolate is almost as large, with about 2% of all ratings. We ourselves have 0.23%, which from Apple’s stated total number of app downloads is just about spot on.

2) The top 100 app developers have 40% of all ratings! Looking down a bit further, the top 170 control 50%, which means that the bottom 39,105 developers have as many downloads as the top 170. Tough market.

App Store Analysis Part 0: Ratings vs. Downloads

eddie — Fri, 28 May 2010 04:46:44 +0000

I’ve been working hard the past couple of weeks to scrape a whole bunch of data from the iTunes App Store. Before I ask what I think are some interesting questions, however, I’d like to state why I think the number of ratings for an app is a very good indicator of number of downloads. Three reasons:

1) You can’t rate an app if you haven’t downloaded it. Some percentage of those who download an app are going to rate it, and so it stands to reason that the more downloads an app has, the more ratings its going to have.

2) We’ve found for our own applications that the number of ratings goes up quite linearly with the number of downloads. The rate isn’t the same from app to app, but its the same to about an order of 2.

3) I made a nifty plot of the number of ratings for the top 3000 entertainment apps in the order of popularity. The ordering by popularity is given by Apple and I have no idea how its calculated, but it definitely weights number of downloads very very heavily but also takes into considerations things like price and the current Top 100 standing.

The reason why this claim is important is that Apple is exceedingly stingy with download numbers. It’s even a pain for us to find our own! To analyze the market, however, all we need are relative download numbers. And if ratings are a good indicator of downloads, then relative rating numbers should make us good to go.

One Hit Wonders Released

eddie — Wed, 05 May 2010 19:23:44 +0000

Inedible Software is pleased to announce the launch of their sixth iPhone application, One Hit Wonders. One Hit Wonders is designed to help users locate one-off, likely forgotten about songs in their iPod library. To do this it only shows songs with a unique artist and album – in other words, a user’s own personal one hit wonders.

Many people nowadays have huge music collections with tons of albums and playlists. They’ve also added random individual songs given to them by friends or downloaded as singles. Such tracks can easily be lost, and so One Hit Wonders was created to help users reclaim these gems. They took the time to add them to their library, so they should have a way of finding them again.

One Hit Wonders is currently available for free on the iTunes App Store and is compatible with all iPhone and iPod touch models.

Check out One Hit Wonders on the iTunes App Store!

[download press release here]

Spent the weekend at iPadDevCamp

eddie — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 00:06:39 +0000

I just spent most all of this weekend at iPadDevCamp. The event is the fourth of its kind, though the first three were called iPhoneDevCamp. They’re put on by a few developers and all-around-good-guys Raven Zachary, Dom Sagolla, Chris Messina, Chris Allen, Blake Burris and William Hurley.

The event had a few keynotes from some pretty heavy hitters (like Bob Borchers, former Apple bigwig now Opus Capital bigwig), a bunch of barcamp style training sessions (including one from Saurik of Cydia, king of iPhone jailbreak land), and a hackathon. A couple really sweet projects came out of the hackathon. I also got a good chance to hang out with our friends from Burstly, which always makes an event more fun.

I’m not sure when the next one is, but I’ll definitely be going. It’s an exhausting weekend, but a fun one.

Shotgun Duel in Development!

eddie — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 00:10:19 +0000

I’d like to officially announce the start of development of Shotgun Duel, the sequel to our popular applications Shotgun Free / Pro. One of the major enhancements is the addition of multiplayer dueling (hence the name), which we’ve been working on quite diligently. James and I had our first duel yesterday, and I won. More info to come.

Updates for Air Guitar, Shotgun Free and Shotgun Pro

eddie — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 00:04:59 +0000

In the last few days we released updates for Air Guitar, Shotgun Free and Shotgun Pro. We managed to fix what seems to be all of the major outstanding crashes, most of which were on iPhone OS 2.2.1. We (James in particular) get quite upset when our apps crash, and while we think we generally write stable code there are always a few things that fall through the cracks. I think and hope we just swept all of that up.

Inedible Software pinch hits for CivicTweets

eddie — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 23:59:17 +0000

About a month ago Inedible Software stepped in to help a good friend of ours, Jeff Carlson from CivicSpeak, complete his company’s first application CivicTweets. Jeff’s company has a neighboring cube to ours in the Plug and Play Tech Center in Sunnyvale CA. The app was just about done, but we helped with some Map Kit integration, some data saving and persistence, and some bug fixing. Check out that app on the app store here:

Civic Tweets on the iPhone

Three high-profile Song Sift reviews

eddie — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 19:10:18 +0000

Since Song Sift was released it received three high-profile reviews.

The first was Mac News World

The second was Gizmodo in their Top 10 Apps of the Week

The third was Mac World

We’re super pumped about all three reviews, as they come from some of the bigger and more important blogs / review sites. Whoo!

Speeding up Tables with Section Headers

eddie — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 09:22:28 +0000

I’ve been working recently on a table with section headers that had really slow scrolling speeds (around 30 FPS). After a lot of digging, I found the problem in a strange place, so I thought I would share in hopes that someone else can save some time.

The gist of the problem is that when you override tableView:viewForHeaderInSection: it ends up being called constantly when you scroll. This in turn calls tableView:titleForHeaderInSection, and if that’s slow, you’re going to see serious lag.

What can unexpectedly make that call slow, however, is the standard:
[[[UILocalizedIndexedCollation currentCollation] sectionTitles] objectAtIndex:section];

What dramatically speeds it up, however, is declaring your own NSArray *sectionHeaders and setting it in your init as so:
sectionTitles = [[[UILocalizedIndexedCollation currentCollation] sectionTitles] copy];

I found that referencing this instead of the indexed collation dramatically sped up my scrolling speed, and now I’m whisking along at an acceptable speed (60 FPS).