by admin on 13 October 2009
WiFiPhoto has been on sale for 40 days now. Some frustrations, many satisfactions. In the beginning I didn’t know what to expect. Just after its release I discovered I had made a terrible mistake. When you submit an application to Apple you decide the release date. I chose to leave the submission date, 22nd August. WiFiPhoto went on sale on 4th September. I didn’t know I could change my release date: my app was buried amidst tons of other apps and it didn’t get any benefit from being just released. A hard lesson that I’ve definitely learned. I sent a quick press release to Macity one of the most popular Mac and iPhone related websites in Italy (perhaps the MOST popular. take a look at Alexa). My sales readily took off. In a week I had sold over 2,000 apps only in Italy. Japanese friends also gave me satisfaction: some bloggers made a good review and it helped a lot. Indeed I was primarily interested in USA but at first things were very difficult (even because of a misleading customer’s review).
I decided to release a new update implementing various features I was requested. This time I chose to promote my app via a PR on prMac. And I didn’t forget to change my release date as soon as it became available on the AppStore. Eventually I got some attention from american users. I reached #26 in US AppStore in Photography category. In the meantime I had conquered some visibility even on other foreign AppStores. By now I’ve sold more than 5,000 apps all around the world. That’s not my first job (luckily) and I’m quite happy.
Anyway I received my greatest satisfactions from customers and they’re by far more pleasant than any financial result. Now I’m ready for version 1.2 but in the meantime I’m enjoying WiFiPhoto among “Staff Picks” on US AppStore ! Apple always rewards you.
by admin on 25 September 2009
by admin on 20 September 2009
As a developer I think it’s really weird the fact that I can’t answer to customers’ reviews. Especially if they claim something totally wrong. Two users from USA wrote in their reviews that WiFiPhoto scales down images before download. But it’s simply false. WiFiPhoto keeps photos at their original dimensions. So if you’re downloading a 1200×1600 pixel picture taken by your iPhone 3G’s camera, you’ll end up finding a 1200×1600 pixel picture on your computer. So, what’s happening ?
They simply ignore the fact that even the original photo they chose to download was not full resolution. There are different reasons. Perhaps they used some third-party camera app to take pictures with a zoom. Or perhaps, more probably, they transferred photo albums from iPhoto to their iPhones ignoring the fact the iPhoto shrinks and compresses images. So if you think to recover images from your iPhone after a crash of your hard drive, I have some bad news for you: you can’t. Or at least you won’t be able to recover your full resolution original pictures, simply because they’re NOT on your iPhone.
I’m sorry for this, but being unable to answer wrong customers’ complaints is frustrating.
by admin on 5 September 2009
At last my first iPhone application is available on the AppStore. It was thought as a solution to my worst problem with iPhone: how to download photos to computers without a usb cable. iPhoto is my first choice when I’m home on my Mac but I very often take shots for work and I can’t download them at the office. Sending in emails is complicated and sluggish. My solution ? WiFiPhoto. This app lets you pick multiple photos from the Camera Roll or from the Photo Library and lets you download them to any computer over a local network (there must be a WiFi connection for the iPhone anyway) one at a time or altogether compressed in a zipped file. It’s as easy as opening on your favourite browser the web address displayed by WiFiPhoto. Nothing more. More info at the product page.
by admin on 6 August 2009
At last I’ve managed to replace Joomla with Wordpress. And I’m not going back. Wordpress is simply easier, prettier and faster. Whatever you do, whatever you goal maybe it’s definitely The Choice. Each new release brings new options, more eye-candies and time saving features. Moving from Joomla 1.0 to 1.5 brought nothing really rewarding to mere users. It’s as if programmers wrote just for themselves (APIs change ? Who minds ? Everything looks the same to me). The more wonderful feature of Wordpress anyway is automatic update. I had stopped updating Joomla since each time I ran into some problems. Moving to 1.5 simply compelled me to copy and paste my posts since something didn’t go the right way with migrator tool. It’s not supposed to be this way. Even if it’s free open source software, it should be usable even by people who don’t spend their time digging into docs to find the magic formula. Wordpress is really another story. Nevertheless it provides all levels of customization necessary to turn your website into a complex CMS.
While searching for a suitable theme, I’ve come across Thesis. It’s not only a theme. It’s a framework. It adds a large number of options and yet it holds the flexibility to make it look the way you like. By means of hooks, you can customize behaviour and layout of your pages. See this post for further explanations. In a short time I was able to achieve this result. I’m very happy with Thesis and I’m working to adapt this website as soon as possible.
P.S. Autosave is really cool !
