Five Tips For Getting iPhone Reviews

Jim Bernard of MarketWatch.com writes down his tips for getting iPhone reviews in Mobile Orchard. While some of his tips should be self-evident (provide complete information, start with a great description) he adds an interesting idea for the YouTube multimedia age: make a great short video showing off your application. Jim quotes Barbara Holbrook, Editor in Chief, at AppCraver:

A video takes just seconds to watch and can be the difference in whether an app gets a longer look.

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Tips for a successful AppStore submission

Andrew Grant recently asked the Stack Overflow community for tips for a successful AppStore submission. Some useful tips included:

• "You basically get no notice before your App goes live, and the review process can take any where from a few hours to a few weeks. Make sure you have a website up and running and the ability to accept (and provide) feedback." - Stephen Darlington
• "Make sure you Small Embedded icon 57x57 matches the Large 512x512 icon. If it is "too" different in their opinion they will reject the app." - Jamey McElveen
• "Follow the UI guidelines, if you're using any Apple widgets. For example, reusing Apple's icon sets in contexts that change their meaning (such as reusing the camera icon, which is for bringing up the Pictures album, for, say, screenshots) can be grounds for rejection." - Rothko
  

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One month as an iPhone OS developer

Marco Tabini is a part time iPhone developer. He recently blogged about his initial experience selling his app through the App Store. His lessons include:

1. Understand your market
2. Focus, focus, focus
3. Spread your risk
4. Release early, update often
5. Never, ever give out a paid app for free
6. Never, ever sell your app for $0.99
7. Hope for the best, prepare for the worst
8. The App Store is a marketing medium
9. Don't get mad at Apple

Details in "One month as an iPhone OS developer".

App Store Marketing

David Frampton of Majic Jungle Software wrote earlier this month about App Store marketing, warning about the pitfalls of pricing your app too low:

But the biggest problem with setting an app price at the lowest possible value is that there is no room to move. Dropping the price may seem a good revenue increase initially, but sales will tail off. Then what can you do? Nothing. You’re selling two copies a day at 99c.

Objective-C and Cocoa best practices on Stack Overflow

User pixel on Stack Overflow recently asked "What are best practices that you use when writing Objective-C and Cocoa?" and garnered a lot of good answers.

My favorite: using class extenstions (anonymous categories) to keep private method declarations in the .m file.

Experiences Of A Newbie iPhone Developer

Noel Hartshorn of The i-Doodz Partnership has a post on TechCrunch talking about his experience developing iPhone apps. He talks a lot about the marketing challenges of the App Store:

The iTunes App Store is a weird, wonderful and ever-changing beast. If a developer launches an app and leaves it alone expecting it to earn money, it won’t.

He goes on to talk about application updates, lite versions and review sites.

14 Essential Xcode Tips, Tricks and Resources for iPhone Devs

Dan Grigsby has a great post on Mobile Orchard entitled "14 Essential Xcode Tips, Tricks and Resources for iPhone Devs". Learning all the keyboard shortcuts and other editing tricks really makes using an IDE like Xcode way more fun, but I never have the patience to slog through all the documentation, and I haven't been in a position to do a lot of pair programming using Xcode. (Pair programming with other IDE users is by far the best way to become a power user.)