We’re getting notes from developers that TapLynx iPhone apps are getting approved by Apple in 24 hours… sounds like the iTunes Connect hiatus over Christmas did some good…
Archive for December, 2009
The Apple Tablet would be the perfect device for TapLynx Apps
Wednesday, December 30th, 2009
As you probably already know, rumors around Apple introducing a tablet have been ramping up over the holidays. This article in particular gives us some confidence in those rumors: http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-to-demo-tablet-in-january-asks-developers-to-get-apps-ready-2009-12
If this is true, the device will run the iPhone OS and therefore can run your TapLynx apps. It’s likely we’ll have to make a few changes to the framework based on the dimensions of it, but Apple is always good about helping developers prepare for new devices.
Think about it: with TapLynx you create rich content based apps. News feeds, tweets, picture galleries, video, all of these are perfect forms of media for a larger device. We’re really looking forward to hearing more about the Apple tablet this coming new year.
See you in 2010!
TapLynx Gallery – Let’s show off your iPhone Apps!
Tuesday, December 22nd, 2009
We launched a gallery today to show off some of the apps made using TapLynx – TechStars, Discovery News, ScreenDaily – just to name a few. If you’ve got a TapLynx app that you’d like to have featured, send us a note at feedback@taplynx.com.
http://taplynx.com/studies/
http://taplynx.com/studies/gallery.php
Happy Holidays from the TapLynx team!!
TapLynx 1.1.2 released
Friday, December 18th, 2009
TapLynx 1.1.2 includes a few changes:
- A couple crashing bugs were fixed. One could happen with iPhone apps that use sub-folders; the other could happen if a news item is updated at the same time it’s being drawn in a list view.
- Several more performance enhancements were added, though they’re likely to be noticed only with apps with lots of feeds.
- Feeds are now downloaded from left to right, which makes sense as the leftmost-tab is usually the most important.
As always, TapLynx is free to download and try out.
Free O’Reilly iPhone Development Training Course!
Wednesday, December 16th, 2009
TapLynx makes it incredibly easy for you to build content-rich iPhone apps without having to know Cocoa, and now our friends at O’Rielly are making it even easier for you by offering a free online course: “Learn How to Build iPhone Apps with HTML, CSS, and Javascript.”
This course, which consists of five online sessions of 90-120 minutes between January 5 and February 2, will help teach you how to:
- Build working web apps from the iPhone, using HTML and CSS web standards
- Learn what a mobile web app is and how it differs from a native iPhone app
- Create gestures and animation using JavaScrip and the iUI and jQTouch libraries
- Integrate your web app with several iPhone features
- Build simple native iPhone apps using the TapLynx library — without programming!
- Learn how to build your newfound iPhone web app development skill
What’s sure to be of most interest to TapLynx users, the 4th session — which is at 11am PT on February 2, 2010 — is all about TapLynx! Instructor Elisabeth Robson will teach you how to create both a video-playing app and an RSS-based app using components from the TapLynx library.
Best thing? All this goodness is totally free. Sign up here today!
TapLynx 1.1: faster, less expensive
Friday, December 11th, 2009
We’ve been so pleased at the response to TapLynx — lots of people are using it to build iPhone apps. Today we’re happy to announce a new version and a new price.
First, the price: a TapLynx license is now $599, down from $3,499. We made this change in part because we’d had lots of people asking about pricing for non-profits and indie developers and in part because our recent developer survey taught us more about how contractors charge for building iPhone apps.
But the main thing was that we just want even more people to be able to use it. We think TapLynx is cool.
It remains free, as always, to download the SDK and try it out. You can run apps in the simulator and on an iPhone or iPod Touch — you don’t have to pay until you want to upload to the App Store.
About this new release
TapLynx 1.1 is all about performance. It’s faster and more efficient. The parts of the app that do the most work — downloading, parsing, storing news in the database, making thumbnails, caching images — have been rewritten and optimized.
It’s a smarter TapLynx under the hood.
Though there are plenty of other feature requests, lots of things we want to add, performance is something everybody could use, so we did that first.
We also made a small change to the watermark to make it easier to demo apps to potential clients: the watermark now appears a maximum of four times per app run. (The watermark appears only for non-licensed apps, apps running in demo mode.) We made this change to make it easier for TapLynx users to succeed.
That’s the scoop. You can download it for free and check it out. If you have any questions or feedback, let us know. And don’t forget you can follow TapLynx on Twitter.
Three Best Ways to Build an iPhone App
Thursday, December 10th, 2009
There was an article in today’s Wall Street Journal titled, “Three Best Ways to Build an iPhone App.” While the three suggestions they have are definitely rather general in nature, and not specific, they’re still good suggestions worth keeping in mind.
Their first suggestion: make your app truly useful and not just a novelty item. ”To get on customers’ devices — and stay on them — your app needs to provide real value or solve a problem.” I definitely agree with that. In my humble opinion, TapLynx is perfect for creating content apps that are just that: useful 
The second suggestion: beware the potential pitfalls. They suggest that there is “such a thing as too much information, especially on a mobile device.” I mostly agree with that, but different users obviously have different thresholds for how much is too much — so I’m not sure it always applies. The converse that they list, “don’t create an app that you never update,” is definitely true though.
The last suggestion? A no brainer: “promotion, promotion, promotion.” They explain how easy it is to be lost in the noise, so it’s critical to promote your apps and make sure people are aware of them. You can just launch an iPhone app and expect that people are going to discover it without doing marketing around it. Unfortunately, it — with rare exception — just does not work that way.
You can read the full article here.
Results of Our iPhone Developer Survey
Wednesday, December 9th, 2009
Earlier this month we sent out a survey regarding iPhone app development to people who’d expressed interest in TapLynx. Nearly 250 people responded and we’d like to share the information with you. Note, partially in response to the results of the survey, we will be making some changes to the TapLynx pricing and you can look for those in the near future! Here are the results:
What types of iPhone apps are you making?
- Content (news, entertainment): 39.3%
- Utility: 36.2%
- Other: 14.4%
- Games: 10%
How many iPhone apps are you making for a fee?
- One every two to three months: 50.7%
- I’m not getting paid to make apps: 30.6%
- One per month: 9.2%
- Two to three per month: 7%
- One per week: 2.6%
How do you charge to create an iPhone app?
- Fixed bid based on specifications: 28.8%
- Not getting paid to make apps: 27.9%
- An hourly rate: 26.2%
- Other: 9.2%
- Standard apps with set pricing: 7.9%
How much are you charging — on average — per app you create?
- Less than $1000: 33.6%
- $5000 – $10,000: 19.7%
- $1000 – $5000: 19.2%
- More than $20,000: 14%
- $10,000 – $20,000: 13.5%
How many hours does it take you to build the typical app?
- 50-100: 32.3%
- 100-200: 29.3%
- 200+: 19.2%
- Less than 50: 19.2%
How much time (hours) do you spend building out capabilities like navigation, feed parsing, image display, integration with Twitter/Facebook, and ad insertion per app?
- Less than 50: 48.9%
- Quite a bit for the first apps we built but now we have reusable libraries for all those things: 24%
- 50-100: 21.8%
- 100-200: 3.5%
- 200+: 1.7%
We hope that you’ll find the answers to this survey as helpful and interesting as we did. Once again, stay tuned for upcoming pricing changes from TapLynx!
AdAge app launches – With the help of TapLynx!
Tuesday, December 8th, 2009
Advertising Age has launched an iPhone application that was built with the help of the TapLynx SDK. AdAge is an industry leader as far as marketing and media intelligence is concerned, and with their new app you can stay up-to-date on the latest headlines, strategies, and global and agency news.
Download it here (link goes to the iTunes store): http://htxt.it/x0yy
You can also read AdAge’s post on the launch: http://adage.com/article?article_id=140933
In other news, NetNewsWire Premium has been nominated for the Best App Ever, so go here to vote! http://bestappever.com/c/nwap/331598976/nom
TapLynx Around the World
Tuesday, December 1st, 2009
It should come as no surprise that the iPhone is not only dominating local mobile markets, but worldwide its popularity is gaining rapidly. South Korea and Europe have both taken up iPhones like crazy, and Black Friday saw strong sales in general for Apple. Here’s more information:
http://www.itbusinessedge.com/cm/community/kn/blog/iphone-popularity-soars-worldwide/?cs=37824
TapLynx will soon take advantage of these markets. On the horizon we’ll be enabling localization, and thanks to some of the members of our Google Group who have volunteered their services we’ll have native languages set up in no time!
