Welcome to Dear Dr. Laptynx, a new series we’re launching that answer some of the most common questions we get from TapLynx builders. You can always feel free to ask the Doctor questions by emailing feedback@taplynx.com. Please make sure to include “Dr. Laptynx” somewhere in your subject line.

Dear Dr. Laptynx-

Recently, I’ve been feeling like my app has been behaving oddly, it seems like the views are empty, but if I’m patient, I can tell they’re just taking a long time loading. What’s wrong? Can you help?

Slow in Sonoma

——-

Dear Slow,

Yes, of course Dr. Laptynx can help. Lie back on the couch and tell me when you first started having these feelings. Was it when you added too many feeds at once, or when you used large images? These are the two main causes of these symptoms.In both cases, the problem is generally that the poor little device is getting overwhelmed with data on the network. Trying to load from many feeds all at once, or having large images in the app can quickly use up all the available network bandwidth, and slows all loading to a crawl.

The solution is to use fewer feeds (maybe you should have two apps instead of just one?) and make sure your images are sized appropriately for mobile.What is that appropriate size? Well, even the nicest iPhone 4 screen only shows 640 x 960 pixels at one time, so remember that, and also realize that its one thing to send one 100K image over a 3G wireless network, but 10 of them suddenly approaches a megabyte and soon you’re going to be completely filling your connection.Someday, hopefully medicine will have a cure, networks and processors will be faster, and software will be improved.

Until then, take two apps and call me in the morning.

I’ll bill your insurance.

Dr. Laptynx

What inspired the idea behind inSW1?

London and the SW1 area are steeped in history and culture. Businesses have collaborated as the London Victoria Partnership to protect, enhance and promote the area. 2012 is the year of The London Olympics and Queens Diamond Jubilee where London will see a huge increase in visitors and media attention. The inSW1.com aspires to provide information & support to help improve the area and assist growth through a wide range of business and visitor support services. London starts here!

What’s your favorite place in the Victoria neighborhood?

I’m from a small village in Ireland which is worlds apart from the hustle & bustle of one of the world’s busiest cities. I do get to travel to London frequently though. Victoria is at the heart of London’s numerous tourist attractions. You can see major London musicals including Wicked and Billy Elliot at theatres in Victoria. London Victoria Station, the Victoria tube line and the area of Victoria in London were all named after Queen Victoria, the longest-reigning British monarch.

There’s also The Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace, Changing the Guard, Westminster Abbey but my most recent favourite has to be a visit to the Churchill War Rooms where the books and charts have remained exactly where they were left at the end of World War II in 1945. My granny also witnessed the bombing raids on Belfast from the house where i grew up which became known locally as The Belfast Blitz.

Why did you choose to build your app on TapLynx?

The decision was easy really: I reviewed a number of products and online services over a couple of weeks. The way in which TapLynx consumes RSS feeds really complemented our website content management system incontrolCMS. As our customers updated their website the app was also pulling down this new information in real-time. We could also connect all their social media outlets through the app incorporating latest news, audio, video and image galleries. We built the app in a few days and submission through the appStore was painless.

The app is native and can be extended through plugins which I’ve also incorporated. For example, A feedback tab where the user can email a pic from their phone to the team @inSW1, an audio player for streaming radio & mp3, a web view which enables us to call web pages directly within the app & the list goes on ….

I’m really looking forward to the latest release which includes iAd support and we’re working on an iPad app right now using the TapLynx framework for iPad. With TapLynx, so much can be achieved in a very short space of time.

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.

Greetings TapLynx Community,

I wanted to take a moment of your time to give you a quick heads-up on some big changes going on with TapLynx.

First, we’ve dropped the regular price in half for TapLynx: now its only US $299 and iPad, still in beta, is $499. We think this will help bring TapLynx to an even larger community.

Second, to help make it possible to lower the price, we’re adding paid support packages for two areas that customers often want to have someone else do anyway: assembling the app and submitting the app to the store.

We think this makes TapLynx an even better value considering the wealth of features it provides, the one-time-purchase licensing model and the ease with which you can make apps.

We’re continuing to work on the 1.5 release and hope to have an update soon, and we’re also going to be rolling out some new interesting things in 2012 that we think will make TapLynx even better for current and new users.

On behalf of everyone here, we appreciate your support of this fantastic platform, and we look forward to making you even more successful with TapLynx apps!

Thank you!
Joe

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

Customization

TapLynx enables you to quickly and easily customize your app. We recommend you do this out the door to be sure your branding is carrying through your mobile presence. Head to the ‘Tutorials’ page under Support on the TapLynx site to watch our ‘Customization’ videos that will guide you through personalizing your app.  Basics we recommend include streaming your social media feeds, incorporating your brand colors and images throughout and syncing up your font with your other online copy.

Push Notifications

Here in our office, we’re big fans of push notifications. We believe they are the key to keeping your app living on a static iPhone or iPad screen, not only reminding users you’re there, but also engaging them with fresh content streaming through your app. TapLynx powers content-specific pushing (i.e. a push when a new blog post goes up or a new video is added to a stream) and broadcast pushing.

We recommend you utilize broadcast pushing periodically, when you have pressing news. On an ongoing basis, we’ve found stream-specific push notifications are key to making users feel like they are shaping their experience with their app.

We advise keeping these best practices with push notifications in mind:

• Give your users a lot of control over how they engage with pushes.
• Don’t over send your pushes: find the balance between engaging and over-engaging.
• Build a strategy. Be clear about how you’re using pushes.
• Include push settings in the app so users can decide what streams they will receive.

Set up your push notifications here.

Happy building!

Last week, we hosted our first TapLynx Tuesday in the office here in Boulder, Colorado. It was the perfect way to celebrate our last summer day here before a winter storm’s arrival the next morning. To kick off the first of what we hope will be many TapLynx Tuesdays, we invited a variety of businesses from around our building in to build an app over lunch. Attendees included an active industry PR business, a political campaign, a renewable energy company and a business strategy firm. The session went great and illuminated for us on the team questions you as users may have about TapLynx. Stay tuned for more info on the next event!

Main feeds:

URLs for each feed that you would like to use in the app (make sure to pass them through feedvalidator.org first to ensure that they are valid RSS feeds)

Title that you would like to use for each tab in the app, and each sub-feed or folder (if applicable)

Category icons (you can design your own, or can download them from a service like glyphish.com)

Main graphics:
App icon image (the icon that shows on the device dashboard):

• 57×57 pixels for older iPhones (72 dpi)
• 114×114 pixels for retina display (72 dpi)
• Keep in mind that you’ll also need a 512×512 pixel version for the Apple store when you upload your app

Splashscreen image (full-screen image that shows while the app loads):

• 320×480 pixels for older iPhones (72 dpi)
• 640×960 pixels for iPhones with retina display (72 dpi)
• (for iPhone apps, only portrait mode is needed)
• 768×1024 pixels for iPad portrait mode (72 dpi)
• 1024×786 pixels for iPad landscape mode (72 dpi)

Pick your app color scheme:

• You can customize the colors in your app, and you may want to pick out colors in advance, using their Hex color codes. You can use one of these tools to find the hex color codes for the colors that you wish to  use: http://html-color-codes.com/ or http://www.colorschemer.com/online.html

Social media:

Twitter (both iPhone and iPad): You will need to authorize your app in advance with Twitter. Follow the steps outlined here: http://taplynxwiki.pushio.com/wiki/Twitter_OAuth_Change_Implementation

Facebook (iPad only, coming soon on iPhone!): You will need to register your app in advance with facebook. Follow the steps outlined here: http://taplynxwiki.pushio.com/wiki/Sharing_to_Facebook_and_Twitter

Happy building!
The TapLynx Team

Are you interested in tracking what’s going on in your app? With a quick and easy setup, you can integrate Flurry Analytics into your app. Flurry will enable you to follow everything from total users of your apps to page views. To include Flurry analytics in your TapLynx application follow the directions below.

Happy Tracking!

Installing Flurry:

1. Go to http://flurry.com/ and sign up for a free analytics account. Once signed up, create a new app in Flurry’s system.

2. Download the Flurry analytics SDK.

3. Copy libFlurry.a (from the FlurryLib folder) inside the SDK to your Libraries folder in your TapLynx project folder.

4. Drag libFlurry.a into your Xcode project: put it right next to the libTapLynx libraries in the Frameworks section.

5. In NGConfig.plist, add a key Analytics_UseFlurry. It’s type should be boolean, and the checkbox should be checked.

6. Also in NGConfig.plist, add a key Flurry_AppID. It’s type should be string. Copy the API Key from the ProjectApiKey.txt file that was included in the Flurry SDK. The part to copy is just the gibberishy-looking part (like “BCGDJ1FKJFF” only longer).