Can I sell my app on the App Store once I’ve built it on TapLynx?
Once you purchase a TapLynx license, you own your app. This means if you want to sell your app on the Store, you’re free to.

How do I get the money when I charge for my app?
This is all managed through your Apple Developer account once you’ve published your app in the Store.

How many apps can I publish per license?
Each license works for one app only.

Do I need an Apple Developer account?
Yes, you need a Developer account to publish your app to the App Store. If you want to distribute your apps for internal company purposes only, you’ll need the Apple Enterprise Developer account.

Will TapLynx help me publish the app?
We are happy to walk you through the steps via our customized Support package. See the Support tab at the top of the page for more information.

Can I make multiple apps?
You definitely can. You will just need a license key for each app. If you’re developing a bulk of apps, we offer discounts. Get in touch with us at sales@taplynx.com to learn more.

Can I build an Android app too?
Right now TapLynx is only designed for iPhone and iPad apps, though creating an Android version is one of our top priorities.

Do you offer a non-profit discount?
We think the $299 price of TapLynx is an incredibly low price for an app for both non-profits and for-profits. We only offer discounts for those customers buying in bulk or who develop a large number of apps for clients.

Can TapLynx help me build my apps?
We do build semi-custom apps via our parent company Push IO. Email us at sales@push.io for more information.

If you haven’t released your TapLynx app yet, this may be the time to do it. Whether you’re in development mode or your app is live, it’s not too late to integrate push notifications, powered by Push IO. Push notifications are a powerful way to engage your users this holiday season and are a good add on to any kind of app. Integrating pushes will help you stand out among the handful of other holiday apps fresh on your users’ mobile devices.

Here are a few tips from the team at Push IO to maximize the mobile shopper frenzy:

• Mobile users plan to use their apps to comparison shop this season. If you’re a news publisher, we recommend featuring any content related to gift tips in your publication content. As soon as you publish these, push notify your users.
• Mobile alerts drive about 1 out of 3 users in stores. It has been found almost 30% of these users will then make a purchase inspired by their pushes. If you are a store, we recommend maximizing on these sales leads with your pushes.
• Send out push notifications about deals, specials, holiday hours and any other relevant content. They’ll be looking for updates throughout the holiday season.

Happy building this holiday season!

Still in building mode? No worries. You can purchase your license while still developing so you can catch this one day offer. Once you’ve downloaded XCode4, to get started, check out this video that will walk you through building your app step-by-step. Both this video and this one will then help you customize your app. If you need more support, head on over to our Google Group and our Wiki, both maintained by TapLynx experts and our staff here in Colorado.

Happy holidays and happy building!
The Team at TapLynx

I’ve been writing software as a hobby or professionally since about 1979. I’ve always gravitated toward writing software though I’ve had a lot of different jobs in IT and other fields. I enjoy the creative process and I enjoy making the software solve problems for people. I’ve really been taken by the iPhone and mobile devices. The CPU constraints and memory constraints force you to be efficient in your code and make it so that you can’t write giant programs that take years to develop and need 100 page manuals.

What landed you in the TapLynx developer world?

Brent S. (and I think Jenny) were on the MDN podcast talking about the framework. I got really interested in it from there. The hook for me was when Brent started talking about being able to modify the UI without resubmitting an app to the store. At the time I was dealing with a minor bug in an iPhone app that was in production. However, the approval process for the bug fix version seemed to be taking forever. By coincidence, my employer at that time wanted an app that seemed to fit with the TapLynx model and I was able to knock together a prototype in an afternoon using TapLynx. We polished the app a little after that and submitted it to the app store a short while later. I was sold on the framework and have been using it and building things around it ever since.

What do you like about the TapLynx platform?

I like the speed at which I can prototype ideas for clients the most. I also like that I can add functionality to particular screens without having to worry about all of those background things like the network or disk storage. The best thing is that the configuration can be modified by non-programmers so I can work with a client who knows their content and they can actually help build the application. Creating a good TapLynx app can be done for about $1500. Creating a good non-TapLynx app seems to start at $3000 and go up quickly.

What is your favorite project you’ve worked on?

I think the Manager Tools app has been my favorite TapLynx project because they have extended the framework in ways I hadn’t considered before. I’ve learned the most working with the CampusLynk application. They are doing interesting work with password protection and consuming lots of different types of data. As far as my favorite project overall, my Massage Therapist Notebook application is my favorite just because I’ve had the idea for years and have finally realized it and massage therapists are actually buying it and telling me it’s valuable. This project and a few other app ideas I have are what convinced me to quit my day job and write software for a living. So far I haven’t starved and my wife hasn’t left so it’s been a success.

Is there anything you’re scheming up for a new TapLynx project? We know you have some secrets, but one you can tell us about?

I’m doing some more work with my Citizen Reporter plugin. Right now it lets someone using a TapLynx app take a picture and email it. I want to extend it so that a user can post their messages directly to a news feed that can be consumed by TapLynx. I think that will add to the social networking capabilities of any app that uses it. It’s going to require setting up a web service or else writing clear instructions for people so they can modify their blog or website to process the photos. I am also working on a web interface that lets someone configure their TapLynx applications with a browser. TapLynx has the capability to download a configuration file on a regular basis and update itself. However creating that file can be difficult for some people. I think with a web interface it would be easer.

Today we released some big news: Push IO has acquired the TapLynx platform. Read all the details here. We think we’ve found a great home for TapLynx. We’ve worked with Push IO for years and trust the team knows the product inside and out.

This month, Push IO is re-releasing TapLynx with new features, including in-app purchasing and iAd capability. Later this summer they will take TapLynx for iPad out of beta, releasing a revamped 1.0 version.

Thanks to all of our committed TapLynx users for a great few years. We’re excited to watch the product grow with Push IO and have no doubt the addition of TapLynx to their industrial strength platform will be of benefit to TapLynx users.

I attended sessions by Michael Simmons (no official relationship to Brent) and Mike Lee, among others, and was able to take away a lot of useful information pertaining to marketing, branding, and building a community around your product. Also, I didn’t know this but a good portion of the highest grossing apps are free: they utilize in-app purchasing for the big bucks.

In addition to the knowledge and inspiration gathered therein, there was the usual conference shenanigans:
Yeee-haw Brent!
Got-dang Mike!

Brent has put his presentation slides up on his website. He spoke about epic code-reuse and the last slide of his presentation has words to live by.

We’re looking forward to 360MacDev right here in Denver, Colorado! It will take place at The Crowne Plaza Downtown on December 10th and 11th (more info here: http://www.360macdev.com/). You can get a discount to it by going here.

Follow @360iDev or @360MacDev

Several responses offer up concrete examples, such as the Barack Obama app costing an estimated $50,000 – $150,000 and a shopping cart app that cost about $100,000 (“and thats [sic] insanely cheap!”).

Even our friend Craig Hockenberry of Twitterrific fame weighs in to point out that many factors, such as design, management, and testing can all drive up the cost of your iPhone app. So where can you cut back? How can you produce a quality iPhone app at a reasonable price?

(I think you can guess where this is going.)

As you know the focus of TapLynx is to help you create content based apps, in addition to which you may integrate your own custom plugins as you see fit. Using TapLynx as the foundation of your app is a smart idea not just because of the development costs it cuts down on, but also the time it saves you: time better spent designing and polishing your app to perfection.

From this earlier blog post, the cost of the TapLynx SDK plus development time amounted to a mere 10% of what the app would have cost had it been built from the ground up.

Now comes TapLynx for the iPad, which will be released early next month. It includes gorgeous new layouts and a huge amount of customization options (seriously, you will be blown away). At $1198 the new framework will let you take your iPad app ideas and make them real: for a fraction of the time and effort.

TapLynx iPhone Development Tool Premiers with the Launch of GlamMedia Mobile Application Ad Network

Tokyo – 10/04/2010– Glam Media Japan announced today it will use the TapLynx iPhone application development tool to create a mobile application advertising network with its publishers. Glam and its publishers will together develop the applications using TapLynx and then share the advertising revenues.

TapLynx, a product of NewsGator Technologies, lets designers and developers create truly unique iPhone media applications with customized content and their own distinctive look and feel simply by filling out a configuration file. The framework is optimized for presenting the latest content (through standard RSS feeds), including text, images and video, all viewed inline within the application. The framework also supports multiple ad formats and servers to monetize content. Users of the app can easily share the content with their Facebook, e-mail and Twitter followers. All apps work equally well on the iPod Touch, and Taplynx will soon release a version for the iPad.

Taplynx has also been selected by Digital Advertising Consortium as the application development tool for its Smarti smart phone advertising network. NewsGator has also formed an alliance with Quark® Publishing System in Japan that allows users to instantly publish newsfeed content to Apple applications using Taplynx.

TapLynx features include:

• Monetization – The framework supports ads, sponsorships and/or download fees.
• Customization – Developers can change content or look and feel without resubmitting their apps to the iTunes App Store.
• Flexibility – Developers can use existing content presentation templates or extend the framework to use their own.
• Analytics – TapLynx measures application usage, both online and off.

“As advertisers look to follow their audience’s migration to mobile devices, working with TapLynx will provide Glam and our Network publishers a cost effective way to build the critical mass of inventory that our advertisers are looking for. This is a win-win situation for all,” said Yukihiro Yamamura, CEO of Glam Japan.

“Mobile application growth is explosive. With Taplynx every publisher is now able to quickly and cost effectively follow their users wherever they go. In the same way a company has a web site; it can now have one or multiple iPhone apps,” said Taplynx Japan Representative, Andy Meyers, of AJ Advisers.

According to Apple’s release at its June 2010 annual worldwide developers conference, the App Store has generated developers more than $1 billion in revenues. Apple as shipped 85 million of its iPhone and iPod Touch models and the number of applications in the iTunes App Store has now reached 225,000.

To download TapLynx, please visit http://www.taplynxjapan.com

About TapLynx

TapLynx, a division of NewsGator Technologies, is a leading downloadable framework for affordable, productive development of custom iPhone and iPad Apps. NewsGator Technologies helps enterprises and media companies leverage social computing solutions to deliver real business value. The company’s enterprise social networking and widget services are in use by hundreds of the world’s most recognized brands, including Biogen Idec, CBS, CNN, Discovery, National Geographic, Procter & Gamble, and USA Today. NewsGator Social Sites and Tomoye give enterprises better ways to collaborate, share content, expand employee knowledge, and improve productivity. NewsGator’s Widget Services and iPhone applications enable media and brand companies to better engage their audiences and extend the value of their brands through viral syndication of content. NewsGator also offers award-winning RSS aggregators such as NetNewsWire and FeedDemon. For more information, visit www.newsgator.com.

About AJ Advisers

AJ Advisers is a business development consulting firm that assists companies to generate new opportunities in their target markets. It concentrates in Internet technologies, content management and media representation. Clients such as the Nihon Keizai Shinbun, CNN Japan, and Shogakukan, have turned to AJ to better access the latest Internet marketing tools. Based in New York and Tokyo AJ brings the latest global technologies to the Japanese market.

Contact Information

Andy Meyers
AJ Advisers Japan Branch
03-6226-3515
ajmeyers@ajadvisers.com

Melissa Risteff
NewsGator
303-552-2035
mristeff(at)newsgator(dot)com
www.newsgator.com