BIT-101 Blog

Here are all my apps.

Falling Balls was free from the start and has made me a small fortune in ad revenue.

All the other paid apps have made me, all told, maybe $300 over the last year. When I consider that amount of money vs. the exposure of having thousands more people possibly using the app because they don’t have to pay 99 cents for it, I’ll go with the higher exposure. Furthermore, with Bug Out! I installed Pinch Media analytics. It was discouraging to see that close to half (48.9%) have the users had pirated versions. Therefore, I’ve removed all “lite” versions and made all my apps free. I have not added advertising where there was none originally. You get the original full version for free. Use it, enjoy it, tell others about it.

Going forward, I do not plan to create any more paid apps. I do plan to do more ad-based apps and experiment with in-app purchases. I think it’s also fair to make it so that any in-app purchase also automatically disables all future ads.

All this is not a written-in-stone promise. Who knows what may change in the future? But that’s the way I see things now.

After only 11 days in approval, RoboDancer has hit the app store. I guess it pays to write blog posts about long waiting times.

Check it out here

I’m pretty bad about email. No, I’m really bad. This weekend I decided to sort out my inbox and found unanswered email going back to last October. Ugh.

A lot of these emails are questions from people who read this blog or have read my books. Questions and some thanks or praise. So yeah, I feel bad for not answering so many for so long. But here’s the deal: there’s no way I can answer all of them, and answering a 6-month old email is kind of bizarre anyway. So I just went ahead and deleted most of the really old ones. Sorry if yours was in there. I’m going to go through and try to answer all of them from this November through at least September, maybe August. Probably not much before that.

So if you did send me an email with thanks or praise, at least know that I read it and acknowledge it. Thank you / you are welcome. If you had a question, and you still haven’t found the answer to it, or needed help and still need it, send it again, and I’ll do my best to try my hardest to promise to attempt to think about answering it.

This is really nothing but a fun app that I had a fun time making. It hearkens back to a small Flash piece I saw on the web close to ten years ago (which you can see here).

Basically, you have a robot on your screen. Fire up some music and start clicking and dragging to change the way the robot dances. Or shake the device to come up with a random dance. There are 10 interchangeable heads, tops, bottoms, and sets of hands, meaning 10,000 possible different robots, plus a few different backgrounds.

Read it here:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/video-games/6461245/The-20-best-internet-Flash-games-from-Doom-to-Stick-Cricket.html

Coming in at 11:

11. Gravity Pods

A simple concept – use a gun to fire a pellet into a target. But the pellet’s path is deflected by little gravity pods. Use them to guide the pellet around barriers and into the target.
We got stuck on Level 9, but we had other games to review. We’re sure you can do better.

Play the game itself here

And when you are done with that, play Gravity Pods 2 here!

The first app I submitted to the app store back in January was approved in something like 3 days.

As the year went on, that figure went up to around a week, 10-12 days, two weeks, over two weeks.

I have people telling me now that they are experiencing waits of up to 20 days. So my guess is that by the end of the year, we’ll be topping 3 weeks.

Now, I assume that it doesn’t take 3 weeks of testing to see if an app is approvable. In other words, some QA dude doesn’t sit down with it and work on it every day for weeks. Or it doesn’t go through a line of something like 20 people, who each have one day to do their thing with it. And I doubt they do some kind of stress test where they install and run it on a phone and leave it running for a few weeks to see what happens.

My guess is that it takes maybe half an hour to approve or disapprove an app. Maybe more, maybe less. Even if you are ridiculously gracious and say it takes them half a day per app, what accounts for the 3 weeks wait? It’s obvious – there’s a backlog.

So when you submit your app for approval, it goes into a queue. That queue is so damn big that it takes all the Apple approval techs working full time up to three weeks to even getting around to looking at your app.

Backlogs are funny things. Generally, if you have a backlog, it grows. Why? Theoretically, backlogs can either grow, remain the same, or diminish. But if is diminishing, it’s because you are handling things faster than they are coming in and catching up on the backlog. If it is staying the same, it’s because you are handling things at the same rate they are coming in (but not catching up). But the very fact that you have a backlog in the first place indicates that things are coming in faster than you are handling them. So unless you’ve drastically changed how fast you work, or the amount of things coming in drastically reduces, it’s going to continue to grow.

The app approval backlog has steadily grown all this year. That indicates that it’s only going to get worse and worse, because the fact that it is growing shows they are falling behind more and more. Furthermore, the number of overall apps being submitted is increasing. And even worse, every app in the store means potentially several updates, which go through the same approval line. So I predict it’s going to get exponentially worse.

The only solution is to drastically change the way the approval process works. I don’t know how it works, so I can’t particularly say how to improve it. But I hope Apple is doing SOMETHING. At the rate it’s going it’s going to mean multiple month wait times for app approval by some time next year, which is no way to run a business.

As I’m considering picking up a Nook next month, I’ve been thinking about the possibility of transferring my Kindle books over to it. This has led me to do a bit of research into ebook formats.

First of all, we have the Kindle format, .azw, which is actually just a slightly modified version of the Mobipocket .mobi format with some changes to the DRM and the way the serial number is stored.

And how about the Nook? It supports eReader .pdb and EPUB .epub formats (as well as PDF, but that’s a bit different).

So, how to turn an .azw into an .epub or .pdb ? Well, first you need to turn the .azw into a .mobi. This can be done with the free tool called MobiDeDRM. I have no idea how legal this tool is, so I’m not going to directly link to it or tell you how to use it. But there’s this site called Google that should help you find out all you need to know about it. But I will say that it’s a Python based, command line tool. No fancy UI or anything, but all in all, not too difficult to use. The result is a non-DRM .mobi version of your book.

I’ve actually been using MobileDeDRM for a while, for a couple of reasons:

1. The whole thing where Amazon went and deleted books from users’ Kindles made me want to have a non-Kindle backup.

2. Occasionally I like to use the text-to-speech feature, and this is disabled on many books. By converting it to a .mobi you can get the text-to-speech back, but this sometimes requires some other steps, which I’ll cover below.

Note, I’m not advocating removing DRM for any kind of illegal purposes, such as sharing, torrenting, reselling, or otherwise ripping off the publisher/author/Amazon. But I do believe you have a right to personally use your own purchased content in the way you want, including listening to it, viewing it on another device, and protecting it from being deleted.

Anyway, now you have a non-DRM, .mobi version of your Kindle book. There are two free tools you can use at this point to convert it to something Nook-ready.

1. Calibre. This is a hard core ebook conversion tool. It reads a number of different formats, and though it only ouputs to three (.mobi, .lrf, .epub), it gives you all kinds of options on how to convert, including editing of metadata, look and feel, page layout, chapter detection, and bulk conversion. Generally, the defaults work pretty well. Calibre also deals with images in ebooks pretty well and has some other neat features I haven’t even tried, such as converting RSS feeds to ebooks, and direct device integration.

2. Stanza. This is actually a desktop ebook reader application, but once you load up your ebook into it, you can export it into something like 16 different formats, including .epub and .pdb. The one thing Stanza doesn’t do so well is images. And by “doesn’t do so well” I mean it ignores them. At least in the version I’m using. Not sure if they’ve improved that or plan to. But mainly it’s good for straight text.

So, using either of these tools to convert the .mobi to either .epub or .pdb, you should be able to view these books on a Nook. I did convert a Kindle book down to a .pdb via Stanza and tested it on the Barnes and Noble desktop ebook reader, and that worked fine, which is promising.

As far as enabling text-to-speech, in the few I tested, I converted the Kindle book to .mobi with MobiDeDRM and put that back on the Kindle. While it worked fine, the text-to-speech was still disabled. I think what I did was open up the .mobi in Stanza and re-exported it as another .mobi and put that back on the Kindle, and voila, text-to-speech re-enabled. Unfortunately, this kind of threw off the formatting of the book a bit. The text seemed a lot more squished together. Might want to try that with Calibre, which gives you more control over stuff like that.

At any rate, I think it’s cool to know about all these different formats and how to convert them. Even if you don’t plan to get a Nook or Kindle, you might have another device you want to read books on, with the eReader software, for example. That also takes .pdb files, so the techniques here should work the same way.

More info on various ebook formats here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_e-book_formats

Well… buy my book.

Today only (Thursday, October 29, 2009). AdvancED ActionScript 3.0 Animation, only $10 (ebook version).

http://www.friendsofed.com/dotw/index.html

It was just about a half a year ago I bought my Amazon Kindle 2. Six months later and I still love it. It’s a one trick pony, but hey, who doesn’t love ponies? Seriously, it’s just great at what it does. My Kindle’s index is about nine pages long, full of books I’ve read, books I plan to read, books that are partially read samples that I might take a look at some time, and articles saved through my own KClipper application. I know there are a lot more features it could have, but when you are reading a book, all those wished-for-but-nonexistent-features just seem to disappear.

So last week I caught wind of the hottest new competitor to hit the market. Or at least to be announced on the market, the Barnes and Noble Nook:

After laughing a bit about the name, I started watching the videos and checking out the specs. It looks pretty good on paper (or in the web browser to be accurate). If it’s close to as good as it seems to be, I’ll probably pick one up.

Features that have me interested:

• Additional storage through a micro SD slot. Not sure why this is cool, since I’m nowhere near the 2GB storage on my Kindle. But good to have the option. Also, you can use it to transfer files to the device.
• Removable battery. Batteries don’t last forever. Nice to be able to replace it without sending the whole unit in. Then again, the way technology moves, battery life probably outlasts how long you own any one device before upgrading to the next big thing. I mean, six months and I’m already considering giving up my Kindle.
• Wifi as well as 3G. I assume that means you can transfer stuff to the device over wifi. Good if you don’t always carry that sync cable with you everywhere. Also cool you live in an area with really bad 3G coverage.
• Another one of the hooks of having wifi is that if you are physically IN a Barnes and Noble store, you can get access to exclusive content only available on the free B&N wifi. Not sure what that is, but apparently there are also in-store discounts you can take advantage of, and coolest of all is that eventually you will be able to read entire books in-store without buying them. Fantastic if you live near a Barnes and Noble. It becomes a library. [edit - though on second thought, you can just do that with regular books in a bookstore as well. And I've never done it. I still think it's cool though.]
• Personalized screensavers. Not that I don’t respect the selection of famous authors Amazon has supplied us with, but I sometimes get a bit self conscious when I pull my Kindle out on the train and look like some kind of Emily Dickinson and Oscar Wilde fanboy. I know there’s a hack to use your own photos on the Kindle, but from what I understand, all those hacks have to be removed in order to install firmware updates. Too much trouble.
• Native PDF support. Say no more.
• And of course that nifty little color touch screen display on the bottom. Gimmicky perhaps, but seriously, anything has to be better than the e-ink/joybutton navigation on the Kindle. Well, who knows. Maybe they screwed it up royally and made something worse, but you have to hope.

Things that I don’t care about so much:

• The whole lending thing. This also pretty gimmicky. I suppose if I had a bunch of friends with Nooks, and we had similar tastes in books, it could be fantastic. But I’m guessing I probably won’t use that feature very often.
• They are making a huge deal about the line of covers available for it, but Kate Spade and Jack Spade. Yeah, covers are nice, but they are pushing them way too hard. Wrong focus.

Things that concern me:

• Performance. Both of the e-ink display and the color touch screen. The e-ink page refresh in the main video (”Hi I’m Katy and this is my Nook”) appears to be noticeably slower than the Kindle. And the scrolling and animation on the color screen looks pretty choppy. Hard to tell though, because all you are seeing is a compressed on-line video of a pre-release device. So I’m trying to withhold judgement there. However, I’ve read a number of blogs and reports from people who were at the event(s) where the Nook was shown, and all said that the B&N people would let no one touch the thing or experience it hands-on. Speculation is naturally that it just wasn’t ready for prime time – either buggy or slow.
• Um… I guess that’s about it.

So I would say that there’s a good chance that I’ll be a Nook owner come the beginning of December. I’m not preordering though. Still concerned about how the thing actually works in real life. Luckily, Barnes and Noble is a real brick and mortar store and will have displays where you can see and touch and interact with a real Nook in-store once they are released. I’ll hold out til I get my hands on one and read the reports of the early adopters.

Today is my birthday. I am 101101. How cool is that?