Simple Software for a Complex World

It's really exciting to submit an app to the store. Of course, it's much more exciting when it actually gets approved. I submitted Faceover, my new app for iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch, to the App Store a couple days ago and can't wait until I can actually tell people it's ready to download!

Faceover is a really fun app for editing photos of faces. By copying, pasting, resizing, rotating, flipping and swapping portions of photos, you can make some amazing (and amazingly funny) pictures. I got t...
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I did it! I finished my Master's degree! I spent the last four years of my life taking one class at a time while working full time. I enjoyed the distance program in Software Engineering at Southern Methodist University (I even managed to pull off a 4.0). Of course, the best part about finishing the degree is the fact that I now have some free time again. And a little free time can go a long way with software development.

In what little extra time I managed to wring from between the day job, s...
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Over the summer I spent a few good weeks on my app for finding online classified ads and ended up with a mostly usable app. However, there are a few reasons why I have decided not to go further with the idea--for now at least.

The news site whose RSS feed I was planning to use is just not useful enough as is. I'm guessing this may be by design to keep people from hijacking their traffic. Specifically, the RSS feed is limited in four ways: it only shows the last two days of posted ads, it does ...
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I have decided which of the ideas from my constantly gowing list will be my next smartphone app. It's an app for finding online classified ads in Utah. I may expand it to other areas later but for now I'll focus on local ads so I can get something released soon. I'll call it AdFinder for now at least.

I tried out iWebKit with PhoneGap and liked how it looked. I almost decided to use it for my next iPhone app. However, I decided not to for two reasons:

1. I'm a little concerned about reports on the...

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I submitted a minor update for Lexify to the App Store last Thursday. It was approved today, six days later. Of course, those six days include a holiday weekend too so I would hope that app updates usually get approved faster than that.

I've been playing with PhoneGap and tried the iUI library because I want an iPhone-like user interface. I decided not to use iUI. There is no documentation and very little sample code. It is only at version 0.2 though so I understand. My next task is to try out...
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My download totals from iTunes are in for my app's first week.
Lexify Lite: 453 downloads
Lexify: 22 downloads

Of Lexify's 22 downloads, here's the country breakdown:
17 USA
1 Great Britain
1 Australia
1 New Zealand
1 Mexico
1 Sweden

Nothing spectacular, but at least it's selling. Also, things have definitely slowed down after the first two or three days. I've started to rework the Lite version a little to include more words and ads but remove the save and view tabs. The Lite version seems to be the be...
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So I lowered the price for Lexify yesterday morning after I saw that only about 1-2% of the total Lexify downloads from the App Store were paid versions. It looks like this was a good choice. After the price change there were 87 free downloads and 7 paid ones, or about 8% of the total. This is in the 5-10% range that I would have hoped for. Since 7 purchases at $2.10 (after Apple's cut) = $14.70 and the previous day's 3 purchases at $3.50 (also after Apple's cut) = $10.50, the lower price is ...
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There were 200 downloads of Lexify Lite from 32 different countries yesterday but only three downloads of the full version. About half of the downloads were from the US. I had no idea that iPhones were so popular internationally! However, this means only 1.5% of the Lite users are buying Lexify. I think my initial price of $4.99 was too much to ask for people that are used to spending $1 on their apps. I decided to change the price to $2.99 and change the primary category from Education to P...
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Lexify (Lite version) got its first iTunes review from someone I don't know. fatkid311 says "Interesting app my friend. What can I look forward to next?" and gave it 5 stars. Thanks fatkid311!

So what is next? I have a list of possible ideas for apps. There are two in particular that I'm looking into right now:

My favorite idea at the moment is an app for making phone calls and reading text to the person being called. I think it'd be especially fun to use for prank phone calls. I'd really like ...
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