Let me ask you something. How many applications do you have installed on your desktop that you actually use on a regular basis?

Let’s see. I’m on a Windows 7 notebook, so I have Microsoft Office, Pidgin (for all of my instant messaging), Adobe Photoshop, Skype, PSpad, FileZilla and iTunes (only because I have an iPhone).

If Google Docs worked better, I would eliminate Microsoft Office from my desktop and from my life. So, I have seven apps installed that I’ve actually used in the last three months. For most people, this list is probably even smaller.

I would use fewer desktop apps if I could. Desktop apps are problematic for a number of reasons. First, they save data to my local machine, which I can eventually lose (hard drive crashes, misplacement, etc).

Second, this makes me dependent on a physical device, which I don’t like at all. I prefer to have all of my information freely available wherever I may be.

Third, over the years desktop apps have suffered from what is commonly referred to as “feature creep”. For example, Microsoft Word now contains hundreds of features that people just don’t use, making it a more complex product overall.

According to Jensen Harris, Group Program Manager of the Microsoft Office User Experience Team published a list of the most used features in Microsoft Word.

1. Paste (11%)
2. Save (5.5%)
3. Copy
4. Undo
5. Bold

According to the study, these five commands account for 32% of all of the command usage in Microsoft Word 2003.

The explosion in iPhone applications can’t be ignored (150,000 plus at the time of this writing). If you use an iPhone, there’s a good chance you have quite a few iPhone apps installed that you use on a regular basis.

Why? Because the majority of iPhone apps are designed to do one thing, and do that one thing very well. For example, the iPhone texting application, it gives you the ability to send and receive text messages in a very simple and straightforward way. The iPhone Facebook app gives you the ability to quickly view the status of your friends and update your status. You can even snap photos and instantly upload them.

There are iPhone apps for setting alarms, getting the current weather, listening to Pandora, Slacker. Apps for monitoring eBay, booking a hotel room, checking airline ticket prices. I find myself using the iPhone apps more than I use my PC and a web browser. Why? It’s the simplicity of these applications. They typically don’t suffer from “feature creep”.

Is my viewpoint is slanted, because I work on a Windows PC instead of a Mac? I’m not sure. Most likely not. I will bet that “feature creep” eventually finds its way into popular iPhone applications as well. As a software architect or designer, it’s a natural process to want to continue to add more features to your product. Competitors are adding more features and as a software designer, you must “keep up”. I’ve done it and I see startups doing it now with their iPhone efforts.

This process devalues applications. We need to strive to simplify applications and stop adding more features for the sake of adding features, attempting to please a few to the detriment of the many.

Instead, if you’re a software developer, architect, creator, etc., follow in the footsteps of the most recent simplified engineering successes. Successes such as Twitter, Foursquare, Yelp and the like.

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. ~Leonardo DaVinci

About Todd
Todd Fearn is the owner of an internet marketing company and also CEO of a wall street technology consulting firm. Todd has created a number of unique software and internet startups. Todd’s blog is at http://www.toddfearn.com

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Todd_Fearn
http://EzineArticles.com/?iPhone-Apps,-Simplicity-is-the-Key&id=4136666

This past week I made some tweaks to this website. You may notice some new visual effects and more organized content. Nothing major but I did want to highlight some of the directions that I have been taking on this website. Here is the low-down

H.264 Video

Many people have mentioned that it is ironic that I some of my screen casts are in Flash. They are right, streaming video is a vexing problem and Flash works great for everything (but not of course the iPhone). I have started experimenting with new ways to stream video that you can use from the iPad, iPhone as well as your Mac.

For an example, check out the new Hello World Tutorial that I create last week. This is a work in progress but I know to have a process in place soon and eventually get all my video up to this new spec. My feeling is that with the iPad now we can do some serious content distribution using iPhone OS.

At some point in the future I will be discussing the technical details behind this new procedure I am following.

Live Events/Tutorials Tab Added

Some of you may know that I have started doing live events like iPhone Boot Camp recently. Now I am putting dates where I will be doing these training in this tab for people who are interested. I will also be adding conferences or any other events where Mobile App Mastery will have a presence.

Tutorials are something I have wanted to add to the site for a while. They have always been here but never featured in a prominent way.

Most of the other changes simply are adding some visual flair: I updated the CSS and change the header a bit as you can see.  What do you think?

Oh Yeah, Here Are the iPhone Programming Tutorials:

Main Tutorial Page

iPhone SDK Tutorial

Hello World iPhone App With UIActionSheet Tutorial

Objective-C Tutorial

Pre Gizmodo drama around the new iPhone, Apple unveiled the key features of the new operating system that will be running our iPhones in the summer. Developers like myself have had a chance to play with some of these. Lets do a recap of the major features announced in the April 8th event.

Multitasking: Wow!

For everyone who is saying that they are waiting for multi-tasking to buy an iPad or iPhone now you have no excuse. They will be implementing a limited version of multi-tasking that is meant to strike a nice balance between switching apps and maintaining long battery life. Music apps like Pandora will be able to continue playing music in the background while you switch to other apps (finally!).

Notifications are included in this category as well. So, now it will be much easier to implement push-like notifications without using third-party (or your own) servers. I wonder how this will affect companies like Urban Airship who already provide workarounds for developers?

Folders: Wow!

Not sure though if is “Wow” or “Thank God”… This is a neat little feature that will let you group your apps together into little folders. For app addicts this will make scrolling through endless pages of apps much less of a chore.

Mail: Wow!

Mail is getting some neat new features like conversation threading – sorely needed on the iPhone. Even though I tend to use the gmail web app exclusively I think this feature is a nice touch. But, here is what I give this category a Wow…

It looks like we will be able to send special attachments through the mail app that will open up apps up when users touch the attachment. If these attachments can contain bits of data it could be a convenient way to provide offline backup and syncing to users who don’t want to rely exclusively on iTunes. This could also be an alternative to using a web service to provide sharing and other social networky features.

iBooks on the iPhone: Meh

This may simply be sour grapes for me – I am a big Kindle fan. Love Amazon as well. iBooks seems like a “me too” offering. It does have a nice UI as expected but so far I will be avoiding this one. Also, iBooks doesn’t really have much implications for developers.

Enterprise Features: Meh

This update simply is addressing the real world concerns of the corporate IT guy. Don’t get me wrong, the more support these guys get the better but I don’t see it impacting us as developers all that much.

Game Center: Wow!

Initially I was skeptical but after seeing the demo and comparing it in my mind to Steam on the PC I think this could have legs. Game Center will be a central place for iPhone OS game enthusiasts to network and invite friends to play.

I feel bad for the social gaming networks that are already out there – Apple just tanked their business. But, they cannot yet provide the same level of interaction and access that Apple appears to be able to provide.

iAd: Wow!

Basically, Apple will be providing developers with the ability to embed ads in their apps. The 60% revenue share is about what you would expect when using other ad providers and as a developer it is nice to have the native API to use. Another big feature here is that users will not be taken out of your app when they view an ad.

Overview Opinion Of iPhone OS 4.0: Wow!

I’m pretty excited about this new update and also a bit amazed at the speed at which iPhone OS is evolving. With the announcement of Game Center and iAd it appears that is tightening its grip on the iPhone OS ecosystem. My only fear is that as a content provider myself that one day they will put the screws to me when it comes to my own iPhone apps.

What Is Your Verdict: Wow! ^ Meh?

Do you have a favorite feature, see a worrisome trend or would you rather jump over to Android? Let me know in the comments below plz!

Today I thought I would have a little bit of fun by answering the question, “How much more money could I have made by giving away my app for free?” Now of course, I don’t mean that I am running a charity. What I am getting at this that instead of just selling my app for quick change (with an Apple tax) it occurs to me that I could have taken the longer view and used my iPhone app as an up sell to a Mac desktop app for much more money and without an Apple tax. Apps like Things and 1Password are examples of how this is being done right now.

The Experiment Setup

For this thought experiment what I started with are real world revenue numbers from my Wine Pad application. For the next step I took what I know about the download rates of free vs paid apps to estimate how many downloads I could have expected in Wine Pad had been free all year (I get this number from tests I did with an add supported version of Wine Pad). The next thing I did was make an assumption about what a conversion rate for an app like this could be based on my experience with products I sell on websites.

NOTE: The word “conversion rate” refers to the number of people who buy your product divided by the number of people who view a value proposition that you present to them. I have found that websites typically have a conversion rate of about 3% meaning that for every 100 people who visit a sale page 3 of them will buy your product.

From these assumptions I arrive at what I think is a good model of what revenue I could have expected if I tried to up sell Wine Pad users to a Mac desktop app. First, let’s go over what happened in the real world last year with Wine Pad…

Wine Pad Case Study

Time Frame: 12 months
Units sold: 3586
Price Point: $2.99
Total Revenue: $10,722.14
Profit After Apple’s Cut: $7505.49

As you can see above, Wine Pad netted me over $7500 over the year. Not bad, but you would need 8 or 9 apps like this to keep your kid in sneakers all year. The Apple tax of 30% really stings here especially on top of the 48% in taxes you can expect to pay as a business owner on these profits.

Let’s try to imagine a completely different play next.

What About The Up Sell Play?

Let me take a second to describe what I mean about the up sell play. The idea is that you would need two products here: a complete desktop application and the iPhone application. Customers expect to pay more for desktop software and Apple has no control over desktop applications and cannot take any tax on these. Of course, having a desktop app doubles your workload but you can actually leverage most of the iPhone code here since the Mac and iPhone share much common ground.

The idea is to give away the iPhone app and engage your users with a quality experience. A certain percentage of users will want the additional feature set that and convenience that would come with a desktop experience. Since the perceived value of desktop software is so much greater you can charge more money for your desktop application (typically between $30 to $100).

From my testing I know that people seem to download 20 times as many apps when they are free. Using this as my guide I came up with these alternative stats for Wine Pad downloads last year.

Time Frame: 12 months
Units downloaded: 71,720
Price Point: FREE
Total Revenue: $0
Profit After Apple’s Cut: $0

Enter The Mac Desktop App Up Sell

Of course, now we are making no profit (of course neither is Apple). But, let’s add the up sell proposition to our business model.

Typical Website Conversion Rate: 3%
Sales Projected: 2,152
Price Point: $29.99
Total Revenue: $64,538.48

What I am saying here is that I hope to convert 3% of users who download the free version on the iPhone into buyers of my Mac software. If I priced my desktop app at a reasonable $29.99 then I would net $64,538.48! Wow!

Profit After Apple’s Cut: $64,538.48

Of course Apple cannot take a cut here so I am saving around $20,000. However, selling software like this usually entails credit card processing fees of something like 2% so I refine the numbers a bit:

Profit After Credit Card Fees: $63,247.71

That is a huge difference isn’t it? Specially, this model would have brought in $55,742.22 more than simply selling my app outright on the App Store.

Take Away Message

This may look like I am just blowing smoke up your [REDACTED], but I actually feel pretty confident in these numbers. They are based on a years of app sales and my experience selling eBooks. Obviously, producing another product will take some time but even if I outsourced a desktop version of Wine Pad I think I could gotten it down for between $15,000-$20,000.

Really the take away message for people who want to be iPhone app publishers is that it will pay if you get a bit creative in your revenue models. The model I am showing here is being used now. I would also encourage you to take advantage of the power of FREE especially on the App Store. Check out the book Free for a discussion of the power of giving away products. But, alway have a backend business plan in place.

Smoke & Mirrors, Self-Indulgence or Flat Out Insightful?

What do you think about this plan? Do you have any sizzling or silly ideas to make money on iPhone apps? Am I just full of it? Let me know in the comments below.

PS: please hit the retweet button if you like this article. I’m curious about what the rest of the Twitter-verse thinks of this idea…

In this week’s show I share my thoughts on Apple’s iPad announcement last week.

Show Notes

iPood

You may have wondered why I missed the last podcast… Well, the reason is that I was meeting my new daughter: Keira Ruby! Just want to welcome her as the newest member of the mobile app family (iPood: there is an app for that!).

What I’ve Been Up To (Other Than Changing Diapers)

This week I’ve been creating content for the Mobile App Mastery Silver Program. Specifically, I am working on the NO-BS Cocoa-Touch module. This one is fun because it introduces what is unique about the iPhone SDK: Model-View-Controller (MVC), Target-Action, Delegation and Interface Builder.

[Click Here To Read More]

The short answer to this is $99. This is how much it technically cost to get a license from Apple that will let you put your iPhone apps on your phone. Lately, I’ve been thinking about what the overall cost of learning iPhone programming was for me. Maybe this is just because this is the time of year where I need to talk to my accountant about taxes and what my learning budget is for next year (you do list the money you spent in your education and re-training as a tax deduction right?).

[Read More]

Happy Holidays!  Thank you for a wonderful year!

BREAKING NEWS!!! Video sneak peak of a new iphone app development e-course coming in January released JUST NOW! Check it out here at the main mobile app mastery website!

This has been a great year for How to Make iPhone Apps – the blog was launched last January and has gone through 4 major revisions as I learned more about what our audience wants (and needs) and we managed to launch an ebook.  In addition to my regular iPhone app business this has kept me extremely busy to say the least.

Since this blog has been out for the past year I thought it might be fun to find out what the most popular posts have been so if you are coming here looking for iPhone development help (while I am disposed drinking eggnog) you should not be disappointed…!

So, without further ado, here are the top five blog posts from 2009!

How To Add A Nice Background Image To Your Grouped Table View

Are you tired of your table views having the standard, boring, gray and white striped background? Adding a nice image or pattern to your table views is one way of putting a little extra gloss to your UI.

[Click to read more]

How to Make Your iPhone App Send Email with Attachments

Would you like your users to be able to send email with attachments from your app?

In iPhone OS 3.0 you can easily send pictures and voice recordings from your app in an email. In fact, now your emails can be easily formated using HTML and once the user has finished the email control returns back to your app. Pretty nifty!

[Click to read more]

Examples of Objective-C Loops

Using loops to repeat actions in programming is a common task. Objective-C does this chore in more or less the same way as other programming languages. However, if you are still unfamiliar with the Objective-C syntax you may feel a little disoriented.

So, to help out I wrote out some examples of for, for-each, do and while loops for you:

[Click to read more]

How to Sort An Array in Objective-C

Arrays are structures used to hold a list of objects. Sometimes though you may want to sort the order that the elements appear.

[Click to read more]

For and ForEach Loops in Objective-C

Loops are the gears of programming: they make your code take action.

The two loops I use most often is the for loop (to do a predefined number of steps) and what is usually called a foreach loop (to move though a list of objects)

[Click to read more]

Happy New Year!

Today is a special holiday in North America – Thanksgiving! In the spirit of Thanksgiving I wanted to give a huge “THANK YOU” to you for taking the time to read my blog.

Writing a blog is a bit of a risk and it is deeply humbling when I see that my readership has grown over the past year. Hopefully, you have gotten a little bit of help and even inspiration to enjoy coding.

So – thank you for your attention and reading this blog. Now, don’t let me keep you from your turkey. Enjoy the holiday!

Many of you may have seen that I have been using the “Mobile App Mastery” name often these names although I have not really talked about what Mobile App Mastery was going to be….

Well, today I fleshed out this new brand a bit more by launching a new podcast as part of the Mobile App Mastery brand. Keep your eyes on this website or on http://mobileappmastery.com over the next few weeks: I have many new surprises in store!

The first episode of the new podcast is about the Entrepreneurial Seizure – that moment where you realize that you can leave your 9-5 job and become your own boss.

Now you can subscribe to the podcast in iTunes! Click here to subscribe to Mobile App Mastery.

Some of you may have noticed that a lot has been going on at this blog and the mailing list. Clearly, something is afoot and while I am not ready to tell you exactly what is going on I did want to let you in on a little tidbit or two.

Mobile App Mastery

If you correspond with me via email you will notice that I am now using the address matt [at] mobileappmastery.com. This partly reflects my decision to put all my mobile development tech blogs under the umbrella brand “Mobile App Mastery”. There are a few reasons for this.

Quick Note: I am conducting a survey to see how I can make this blog a better
experience for you.

Please help me out by filling out this survey:
Click Here to take survey

The obvious reason is that I personally am interested in all mobile technology, not just iPhone OS. Right now iPhone OS is the most significant platform and the one I would encourage most people to start with because it has the audience and the business model works for many people. However, at some point in the future other mobile OSs will become more significant (looking at you Android!).

Stay tuned here at this blog and the others that I will be pointing out below for more details on Mobile App Mastery. I have some big things planned for it that will interest iPhone app developers in particular.

Mobile App Mastery Facebook Page

I have created a facebook page for this blog and all my others under the Mobile App Mastery name. This is in part due to my non-iPhone friends complaining about all the iPhone related content I post. For now, I have moved this to the Facebook page that you can see by clicking here!

Sign up for the Facebook page to add that content to your timeline. If you have friended me on facebook for iPhone stuff then I would recommend switching over to the new page otherwise you will simply be bombarded with pictures of my cats and new baby that we have on the way…

New YouTube Channel

Since I have found my previous YouTube channel named MrScopeCreep to simply be too creepy for me I have changed to (again) the Mobile App Mastery YouTube channel. Please do me a favor and subscribe if you want to have a video feed for iPhone related content.

Recap

So, clearly I have a new brand name but I am planning on doing some big things with it in the very near future that I believe you will find compelling. Be sure to not miss out by subscribing to our mailing list or one of the other feeds available on this blog!