In an effort to better show off the bevy of features included in the TapLynx framework, we’ve revamped our features page. More images, less text. It’s also where we’ll highlight what’s new in current releases. Head on over to the TapLynx site to check it out: http://taplynx.com/features
Archive for the ‘General’ Category
Revamped features page on TapLynx website
Wednesday, September 22nd, 2010
Add push notifications to your app to drive up user engagement
Wednesday, September 15th, 2010
Greetings! Lindsay guest blogging here from Push IO – providers of mobile engagement solutions, specializing in push notifications and alerts. We partnered with NewsGator a few months ago to provide all the notifications to TapLynx-based apps, and we’d like to thank our friends at NewsGator for giving us an opportunity to talk about this useful feature. This partnership has been great so far, increasing engagement of participating TapLynx apps and pleasing customers who now have a means to customize their favorite apps at no additional cost. Also, we’re pleased to announce that Discovery News, the first TapLynx app to implement notifications, recently exceeded the one million mark for delivered alerts! Well done, Discovery News, well done!
When the average iPhone user has 50 to 100 applications on their phone, it can be difficult to ensure that your application remains active among users. Push notifications are an effective tool for overcoming this challenge. Among the 60 or 70 apps on my phone, I use about six on a regular basis. Two of these get such regular attention because of the alerts that remind me they’re there. Along with drawing in users even when they’re outside the app environment, notifications provide a means to increase the personalization of any TapLynx-based app.
Today, I’d like to tell you about the two key reasons why notifications are useful: engagement and personalization.
Engagement
Implementing notifications for your application helps to keep users returning regularly. With such a dense number of applications available, it’s understandable that people have difficulty keeping up with all the options. Providing occasional alerts serves as a reminder of the new content being published via your app and keeps users up to date.
Personalization
When a user enables the notifications feature of an app, they’re prompted to select specific sub-topics about which they’d like to receive alerts. This allows them to be notified only about the content that they choose, immediately making the app more personally relevant. While this option for customization is clearly beneficial for the user who no longer has to sift through extraneous information, it’s also an asset for the creator of the app. By presenting users with a tool to align your application more directly with their interests, you automatically increase the relevance of your app for your users – without having to write any code!
One more key feature of the notifications service is built-in engagement tracking that keeps you tuned in to the activity on your app. Once notifications have been enabled on your application, you’ll receive daily emails with your engagement statistics.
So we think it’s clear that push notifications drive up engagement and result in a more relevant and more effective app, but have I mentioned that it’s incredibly easy to set this feature up on any TapLynx app?
Sign up here for an account with us at Push IO: https://taplynx.pushio.com/users/new – and then follow the basic instructions.
Additionally, the first 25,000 notifications are FREE for any TapLynx customer, with no obligation to continue the service, after which point you can choose from a range of packages to accommodate your needs.
We’d also like to thank our technical support team member, Josh Clauss, who’s helped many TapLynx customers to get this service up and running in their apps. Josh makes the setup easy, and he’s always happy to assist new customers with the process.
TapLynx has a complete wiki page with all the details at: http://developer.newsgator.com/wiki/index.php?title=Push_Notifications
Thanks – we look forward to helping your app succeed!
Nieman Journalism Lab saved money using TapLynx, is your app next?
Tuesday, September 7th, 2010
This article from OS X Daily discusses iPhone app development costs, and what to expect when hiring an iOS developer. A poll cited from TechCrunch points out that for a relatively small app the average development cost was $6,453. When you consider that the TapLynx framework costs $599, and additionally removes a great amount of developer work on your part, your potential iPhone app is a steal.
As was mentioned in this article posted a week ago from Nieman Journalism Lab, developing an app doesn’t have to be insurmountable because of high developer costs. Using TapLynx, Joshua Benton was able to produce a solid journalism app for only $624 (1/10th of the afformentioned cost!). Not only does the framework cut down on many hours of developer time, it is customizable to a level that if you did want to invest money in custom features, you can do so by building it into the framework instead of starting from scratch.
Based on high demand for iOS developers leading to high development costs, is building an iPhone app worth it? OS X Daily says it is, if you can avoid shelling out thousands of dollars for development time. This is why Nieman Journalism Lab so effectively used TapLynx: it provides a means to produce quality iPhone apps at a fraction of the cost.
OS X Daily: iPhone Development Costs http://bit.ly/dnTmJC
Nieman Journalism Lab: An iPhone app developer’s diary http://bit.ly/9qobhP
TapLynx 1.4.1 is out!
Monday, August 9th, 2010
Download it here
Release notes:
-Significant performance enhancements
-Works with new Twitter authentication system. Refer to “Upgrading Twitter” included with the download, or read the documentation here.
-Programmer folks: the custom TapLynx app delegate now gets called with applicationDidReceiveMemoryWarning:, applicationWillTerminate:, applicationDidEnterBackground:, applicationDidBecomeActive:, and applicationWillResignActive:. The single parameter is a UIApplication object. These are all optional. (It was already calling applicationDidFinishLaunching:.)
Bug fixes:
-Multi-tasking support on iOS 4
-High-res thumbnail generation
-Prevent navbar image from displaying over top of buttons in the navbar
-Playing videos in iOS 4
-Display thumbnail shadows on the bottom
-Atom parser now handles inline xhtml
-Date parsing with particular date formats
The Big App Show: Getting even bigger and more appy-er
Thursday, July 8th, 2010
The Big App Show is really taking off, and we couldn’t be more titillated. The app, built from the TapLynx framework, is as simple as it is effective: Adam Curry walks you through a featured app, describing to you what it’s about and how it works. It’s an excellent way to get a feel for an app before downloading it. Also, the new version of the app features push notifications, a recent addition to the TapLynx framework.
It was recently highlighted on USA Today: http://bit.ly/9JGsRC
And now MediaPost has picked it up: http://bit.ly/dzr2l3
Download the app here: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/big-app-show/id368656200?mt=8
Submit your app to the Big App Show: adam@curry.com
Will it blend? TapLynx + Quark !
Monday, June 28th, 2010
Oh yes. We’ve partnered with Quark: a leading provider of publishing software. Together with TapLynx, Quark users can now easily publish their newsfeed content into custom TapLynx-built iPhone/iPod apps.
The press release is here: http://bit.ly/clUAei
And more info about the Quark Publishing System: http://dynamicpublishing.quark.com/en/qps/
We’re really excited about this announcement- we’ve been working on this integration for a few months now and Quark has been a fantastic partner in the process. We’re looking forward to helping define the future of digital publishing!
Adam Curry’s Big App Show!
Tuesday, May 18th, 2010
Put quite simply, it is a free app about apps.
Download The Big App Show: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/big-app-show/id368656200?mt=8
It’s marvelously simple and informative: Adam Curry, “The Podfather”, walks you through the fundamentals of each featured app, and from there you can go directly to the app store to download it. It was built off of the TapLynx framework and it rocks: I love seeing what people come up with.
Want to see your app featured? You can submit a request to adam@curry.com
Follow Adam on Twitter: http://twitter.com/adamcurry
Big App Show site: http://bigappshow.com/
Brent Simmons Named to MachTech 25!
Friday, April 30th, 2010
Brent Simmons, the brainchild behind TapLynx and NetNewsWire, has been named to the MachTech 25. This is includes “the most influential Rock Stars, MVPs, Prophets, and Pundits in the Apple Technical Community.” While we didn’t need anyone to tell us how visionary Brent has been in the space, it’s a huge achievement for him to be on this prestigious list.
About Brent they say he is “a tireless promoter of the Mac platform, but is perhaps best known as the author of NetNewsWire, the wildly popular RSS news aggregator for Mac OS X, and the founder of Ranchero Software, which was acquired by NewsGator Technologies.”
They add, he is also the brains behind TapLynx, which lets you create iPhone and iPad applications with your content.”
Congrats, Brent 
You can see the whole list here.
View Our iPhone App Webinar with Stratfor
Wednesday, April 21st, 2010
Walker Fenton, GM of NewsGator’s Media and Data Services, the umbrella under which TapLynx resides, talks with Matt Solmon, a project manager at Stratfor, for this month’s webinar. They talk about Stratfor, the iPhone app they built with TapLynx, in-app purchasing, and more! If you’re currently using TapLynx to create apps, or interested in using TapLynx, I’m sure you’ll find this webinar quite useful.
TapLynx Webinar with Stratfor from TapLynx on Vimeo.
360iDev: Action! Suspense! Sumo take-downs!
Friday, April 16th, 2010
This week Brent Simmons and I were in San Jose, California for the 360iDev conference. Big thank you to John, Tom, and Nicole for organizing a great event and just being awesome in general. It was all very productive (partying), with a lot of networking (drinking beers with fellow Mac nerds), team building (playing Rock Band) and fostering of friendly competition (throwing each other to the ground in oversized sumo-suits). Overall it was a solid conference and we’re looking forward to seeing everyone at Voices that Matter next week!
Brent gave a great speech about behind the scenes stuff that drives content based apps. Here are the slides: http://ranchero.com/downloads/BrentSimmons-ContentApps-360iDev.key.zip
We got interviewed by TUAW: http://www.tuaw.com/2010/04/13/360idev-brent-simmons-on-netnewswire-for-ipad-and-iphone-os-4-0/
A couple of my favorite quotes from the whole event:
”Yeah, we’re going to sex this bitch up.” – Brad Ellis on incorporating sexy design ideas into NetNewsWire
”I would rather have spent those 6 years on a beach in Hawaii… or just being flogged.” – Brent Simmons, on all the time he spent writing syncing code
”Me-arrrrr!” – Me and Joe Pezzillo, thinking that pirate kitties was somehow a funny idea (hint: beers were involved)
”A perk of being one of a handful of female attendees at a male-dominated tech conference: no waiting line at the restroom!” – @hubflanger Amen, sister!!
In the interest of complete self-deprecation, here are embarrassing videos from the event (Brent don’t kill me for posting your rendition of “Under the Bridge”):
Rock Band: Jenny sings Alive (hey I’m like a barotone, give me a break): http://vimeo.com/10877784
Rock Band: Brent sings Under the Bridge, Jenny on the drums: http://vimeo.com/10877548
Sumo fight for an iPad, Rana vs Jenny to the death: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zG57p49SlS4 The funny thing about our match was a lot of people were all, “ZOMG two chicks are fighting!!” Really? you can tell that we’re women once the suits are on?
And lastly, it should be noted that the guys from 360iDev will be posting session videos at some point, which we’ll retweet. Thanks everyone for a great time!
