Recently, I was working as a contractor on an iPhone application and I learned a couple of things that while common sense in other parts of my business I wasn’t really using in my iPhone app sales. It’s quite possible to make good money selling iPhone apps but it has to be a strategic plan (like Apple’s domination of the upscale consumer computer and smartphone market).

The trick is but you have to find a market which is either stagnant or not being serviced, but has customers with money. I’m not talking about billionaires with Zonda’s, but people who are willing to spend a realistic amount of money for a quality product. My apps will now be selling for a minimum of $5.99 because a hundred copies at 99 cents is $70 dollars.

I’m always reminded of the guys who came up with the Method line of soap / soap dispensers. They weren’t soap hobbyists or soap heirs, they were two guys who walked into the super market looking for a product line with a weakness. It was a calculated mission of search and destroy. The priced higher while selling less and are very successful.

I’ll put this plainly: you won’t make it up in volume. Most apps won’t sell a million copies (probably just a thousand or so before the store turns over) so you need to price accordingly. You will sell less, but you’ll make more and you’ll have more valuable customers.

Once you have those valuable customers you need to engage them in conversation. Its not enough to just slap an email on the app store page and hope for 5 star reviews. You need to beg and plead for 5 stars. Contact them and ask for 5 star reviews. Ask them how you can make the app better for them and how great they are for purchasing it. The app store review process is total crap and unless you are PvZ you’re not a 5 star app, so work for it the old fashioned way.

Hey!  I’m back!

How do you check voicemail from a land line? – AT&T Wireless Community.

I always forget.  Hit star while the message is playing,  7 deletes, 9 saves.

But not on the device. Man, that was like 2 hours wasted today trying to figure out why the array was looping fine on the simulator but not on the device.

int i = 0 was the culprit.

MKMapView and Zoom Levels: A Visual Guide.

Its rare that some one posts something so awesome.

So some of our apps may be experiencing problems.

In mathematics, a power of two is any of the integer powers of the number two;[1] in other words, two multiplied by itself a certain number of times.[2] By definition, the number one is a power (the zeroth power) of two.

via Power of two – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Snow Leopard: QuickTime X | Mac OS X | Playlist | Macworld.

Been trying to find out where my QT7 Pro went so I could convert some background loop music for a iPhone game.  Its now stored in the Utilities folder and Quicktime Player X isn’t the same thing.

Warning for you: apple’s (amazingly awesome) time machine doesn’t back up Virtual Machines or the files stored on them. I learned this the hard way when my MBP’s hard drive and I installed a new replacement (500 gigs!). Booting up VMWare I found my window’s vista virtual machine was gone. Like…permanently. Including my Quickbooks files, my scanned documents, and a bunch of tax documents from 2008.

From my understanding, since virtual machines are stored as a single, very large file the developers turn if off. Be nice if there was a warning or something.

So, make sure you save any backups or files to your macbook instead off the VM file system. I got very, very lucky and found a quickbooks backup from september 2009. I lost a few months, but I’ll take it.

Well my 2007-2008 macbook pro hard drive completely crashed. After a trip to the mac store I ended up replacing it myself. I took pictures every step of the way so I could do an article on it eventually.