The Coffee Cellar Christmas update is out now. Featuring…
- Features 3 new festive icons
- Shake your phone for a random coffee
- Tap the name tag in your cupboard to view concise coffee details without leaving the cupboard
- Fixed the appearance of the name tags in the cupboard. No more names running off the end of the plaque!
I’m extremely happy right now. I just walked into my local newsagent to peruse the magazines and, totally by chance, stumbled across a written review for Coffee Cellar. Totally unexpected and awesome in equal measure. The magazine in question is Tap! – a UK iPhone & iPad print magazine. Here it is…
Pivotal moment in my App development career :)
My App Development series is nearly wrapped up. I want to spend the next two posts sharing some data with you and dissecting the project. For this post, we’ll focus on the results of my marketing efforts and I’ll share my sales data with you – warts and all!.
Launch day
Coffee Cellar has been available on the App store for 3 weeks now. This means I don’t have a huge amount of data to share, but still enough to give you a taste of the results I’m seeing.
My original plan was to go live with Coffee Cellar on Wednesday 17th August. As I approached that date, and with some promised coverage on launch day, I felt it was too risky to leave the launch until the morning. What I instead ended up doing was to soft launch Coffee Cellar on the Tuesday evening (16th August). keep reading…
This is my final App Development post prior to launch. All of my work over the past 6 months is finally coming to fruition and I’ll soon get to see my App in the wild. It truly is the most exciting time in the App development life cycle.
Before I begin this post I should point out that marketing is the area that I’m weakest in. I get a huge kick out of developing Apps and games solo because it gives me a taste of all aspects of product creation. Code, Artwork, Sounds, and to some extent game design are all scientific disciplines that I can approach in a methodical way and learn (through practice). For some reason marketing alludes me. It’s a mine field and there doesn’t appear to be much in the way of science behind it. It appears on the surface to be some kind of dark art. Nevertheless, its a crucial aspect of creating your own Apps and as such, deserves attention.
After nearly 6 months of effort which has seen us produce a solid plan, create a design doc, produce wireframes and workflow, create initial artwork and a moodboard, develop the App, and complete a full beta testing process; Coffee Cellar is finally ready for submission to the App store!
But the story, and my guide, is not quite over. My App still won’t see the light of day for another 2-4 weeks. My next focus is on marketing. In my next post I’ll discuss what my marketing efforts entail. After that we really will be “done” (for now) and will get to see how successful the App is in the App store – this will culminate in a numbers post, a postmortem, and a project wrap-up.
For now though, lets bask in the satisfaction of completing a project. This post will focus on the final artwork. keep reading…
I’m currently in the process of testing my Coffee App and wanted to share the testing process with you. This is the first time I’ve done any significant public testing for one of my Apps. In the past I’ve just tested with a couple of close friends/family. With my Coffee App, I wanted to be sure that I could get a good mix of people who didn’t feel obliged to say nice things.
In this post I’m going to take you through the full process of Beta testing your App.
This post puts us back on track in my 8-step (9 if you count going to the pub) guide to App development success (or total failure – or more likely a shade in between). You can catch up on the previous posts in the series here.
1) App Development – Doing it properly
2) App Development – The Design Document
3) App Development – The Wireframes
4) App Development – The Artwork
5) App Development – The Code (Split into 3 development diary posts – Diary #1, Diary #2, Diary #3)
6) App Development – The Testing (You’re here)
7) App Development – The Final Art
8) App Development – The Marketing
9) Go to the Winchester and have a nice cold pint
True to my word, it’s time for another progress report.
Much of my time, during the last few weeks, has been spent iterating the art. I’m now at the point where some of the artwork within the App is pretty much finally and I don’t expect it to change before launch (barring any issues during the Beta). There’s still a fair bit to do though, mainly related to the UITableView which looks out of place with its default look and therefore needs a drastic overhaul. keep reading…
Whilst I’m brainstorming ideas for my next game, I’ve decided to take a slight diversion into the world of application development. My reasons for doing this are two-fold. Firstly, I’d like to expand my knowledge of core iPhone development (i.e. the interface builder and core API’s). Secondly, I’d like to see how the iPhone application market differs from the game market.
I’m still finishing off the first Astro Noughts update so I haven’t been able to commit much time to it yet. However, I have made some in-roads into a basic idea and some very early interface mockups – and thats what I’ll share now. keep reading…