Archive for 'Programming'

You know, for how important everyone agrees that direct user support is for keeping users happy and avoiding one-star reviews, it’s kinda surprising a) how many of us actually implement it on a level somewhere between “an email link that almost nobody finds” and “nothing”; and b) how little there is available in the way of mobile-focused infrastructure for that kind of thing. Only thing we find in our archives is this three year old post which, well, still pretty much covers things as of last week, really.

But in the span of four days we got two, count em’, two, emails from people who want to do something for you about this lamentable lack! In alphabetical order, they are

Helpshift — “The first and only customer support help desk for native apps”

• Engage users in-app with a native, familiar experience so they don’t stop using the app
• Cut down on support time with a searchable FAQ that answers common questions
• Privately resolve user issues to avoid negative app reviews and increase app ranking
• Integrate a seamless UX built for mobile that you and your users will love

Intriguing, yes? They’re in invitation-only preview mode right now, and there doesn’t seem to be any information available on what the eventual cost of the service is planned to be, but we certainly encourage you keen early adopters out there to sign up and let us know how things go!

And in the other corner of this week’s new contenders, we have

Neemware – “In-App Marketing, Messaging, Cross-Promotion & Feedback for Mobile”

As the tag suggests, this one is more a platform for managing user engagement — or, put less diplomatically, a way to push out all the kinds of things that the APNS terms of service don’t allow:

• Send rich in-app messages in real time
• Target messages to users based on app usage
• Send messages without app updates to store
• Cross promote apps
• Get in-app feedback
• In-App reply to user feedback

They’re also in try it for free mode right now, and the planned pricing seems pretty reasonable too; so we even-handedly encourage you keen early adopters to check this one out as well and let us know how that works out for you!

And as always, Dear Readers, if you have any feedback on other solutions for the user support/engagement space that have worked out well for you, please share the enjoyment!

Now this is certainly a Herculean endeavour: Messr. Steffen Itterheim of Learn Game Development with Cocos2d renown is launching a subscription-based full-blown fork of cocos2d!

In case you’d missed it so far, cocos2d has had its vision … refined … after the Zynga acqhire:

Vision

Currently cocos2d is: A fast, easy to use, free, and community supported 2D game engine.

And we want to do is go redefine it as: A fast, easy to use, free, multi platform,/ and community supported 2D game framework.

By multi platform, we mean iOS and Android in the mobile space and Web Browsers:

• Write once, run it on the supported platforms. The common language is JavaScript

By framework, we mean:

• An integrated framework for building 2D games:

Game engine: cocos2d

Physics Engine: Chipmunk

World Editor: CocosBuilder

Well, that’s a thing there, isn’t it? Always nice to have a new cross-platform game option joining the plethora already available, but if you’re reading this, chances are you’re of the attitude that you want to craft an awesome iOS game first and foremost and spend time thinking about those other, lesser, platforms sometime between “much later” and “never”, amirite? Well, you’re who KoboldTouch is aimed at then:

… It’s going to be a framework to program iOS & Mac games in, where best practices evolve naturally, where Cocoa programmers feel right at home, where beginners are not left in a void * EXC_BAD_ACCESS … and where Cocos2D is still at the heart of it.

KoboldTouch takes control over Cocos2D, to allows users to implement best practices naturally. Cocos2D provides the view, KoboldTouch provides the controllers, models and the framework to write your code in.

The Goals for KoboldTouch

Take the good parts of Cocos2D, improve Kobold2D and fix what’s been criticized, build KoboldTouch as a Cocoa-esque game framework around Cocos2D views, add Lua scripting and ensure tight integration with Apple’s OS features.

Little by little I want to transform Cocos2D from the rendering engine that it is and embed it into KoboldTouch, the game development framework…

And that’s where the money comes in. KoboldTouch is going to be a $200/year subscription product. How many out there think this sounds like a good enough idea to pay for it? Well, if you’re thinking it might, head to the KoboldTouch product page and check out the video and all the other links there!

So this is a monetization platform that you might want to check out seriously for your advertising needs:

MoPub — “Mobile Advertising Done Right”

For mobile publishers, MoPub is the only “one-stop shop” ad server designed to manage all your app monetization needs. MoPub’s three-pronged platform means that you can choose how you monetize through direct sold ads, ad networks, and our real-time bidding system, MoPub Marketplace. Designed for unmatched control over and transparency into how ads are performing on your app, MoPub’s platform makes sure that you’re maximizing your ad revenue potential — without sacrificing your user experience. And, since MoPub was founded by app developers, for app developers, our single, open-source SDK is easy to integrate and our platform scales to serve billions of ads every month…

Seems pretty much like the set of services you get with Burstly that we liked on first try a couple years back, right? Well, we’re a good bit wiser since then in the ways of ad mediation. Not to put too fine a point on it, all ad SDKs suck. If one appears to not suck, wait for the next system upgrade. And they conflict with your code, and you can’t get a patch for crashes in them even when you can prove where the problem is, yadayadayada. We worked for more than we care to remember of last year on a custom Mobclix-based mediation layer bringing in something like a dozen different kinds of custom video/rich media interstitial providers for an app that gave up on attempting to integrate Burstly because of a vast array of issues, but what it really came down to was that it wasn’t open source so we couldn’t do anything about the problems we found. Compare and contrast:

MoPub’s client code is hosted on GitHub in the mopub-client project. As app developers, we got frustrated with the fact that most ad networks required a separate SDK binary integration and constant updates to get the latest features. We came up with the “low footprint,” source level approach as a solution to that problem. Integrate a single set of source files into your app, directly through subversion or git, and then you will never have issues with updates…

A compelling consideration, that. Especially as one thing we learned doing that custom mediation layer mentioned above is that all the big money in advertising these days comes from the small upstarts doing rich media and geolocated ads and so forth, so if you’re serious about making money off your advertising you’re going to be messing around with custom SDKs with low fill rates and having them fall back to the chump change you get from the bigger networks. And that process will be much MUCH easier with an open source mediation layer.

However, it’s the money that most of you will quite sensibly make your final call on, no doubt; any of you Dear Readers have actual deployment experience with MoPub and can tell us how it compares to Burstly or Mobclix or whatever else you tried?

So you got a client that’s demanding to support Passbook in the next release, somehow, someway? Yep, us too, so let’s take a look at what resources are available out there, shall we?

As you’d expect, over at Caer Wenderlich there’s some nice introductory tutorials,

Beginning Passbook in iOS 6: Part 1/2 and Part 2/2

which are much abbreviated excerpts of a couple chapters of iOS 6 By Tutorials — which if you haven’t bought yet you should immediately, covering as it does pretty much everything significant new in iOS 6.

But back to Passbook in particular, here’s another good introduction set with sample code (h/t ManiacDev):

iOS 6 Tutorial: Integrating Passbook into Your Applications

iOS 6 Tutorial: Supporting Passbook within Your Enterprise Systems

Another nice one that goes into great detail on how to handle the provisioning portal is found at, of all places, the Xamarin online docs:

Introduction to PassKit

If you don’t feel like creating passes yourself, there’s a wide variety of services springing up to help you out with that:

PassSource – “Your source for free iOS 6 Passbook passes”

PassTools – “The easiest way to build and manage passes for Apple® Passbook®.”

PassKit – “Create, Distribute and Manage Apple® Passbook® Content Across All Major Mobile Platforms”

Passdock – “So cool to create Passbook passes with Passdock!”

PassPages – Hmmm, no allegedly catchy tagline here.

Or there’s some helper implementations showing up on github:

mattt / passbook_rails_example – “This project is an example implementation of this web service specification in Rails, and will serve the basis for a more comprehensive Rails generator in the near future.”

renstrom / passbook_flask_example – “An Example Implementation of a Passbook Webservice on Flask, based on matt’s passbook_rails_example”

tschoffelen / PHP-Pass – “A PHP class for creating a Pass for Passbook in iOS 6.”

SimonWaldherr / passkit.php – “a php function to create passes for Apple Passbook”

skyzyx / passbook – “PHP component and CLI app for creating Apple PassBook files for iOS 6.”

bitzeche / jpasskit – “jPasskit is an Java™ implementation of the Apple™ PassKit Web Service.”

Any other resources you’ve found particularly helpful setting up Passbook integration with your projects, Dear Readers?

UPDATES:

PassSlot “is a free service for developers that aims to make Passbook integration easy – Really easy.”

Getting your business on Apple’s Passbook, DIY style

iOS Passbook Tutorial

This is a slick little helper for if you’re writing software designed to run presentations, or if you want to record some screen tutorials:

developmentseed / fingertips

Fingertips: Presentation mode for your iOS app

Fingertips is a small library (currently, one class) that gives you automatic presentation mode in your iOS app. Note that currently, this is only designed for the iPad 2 and iPhone 4S (or later), which feature hardware video mirroring support. This library does not do the mirroring for you!

Just drop in our replacement UIWindow subclass and your app will automatically determine when an external screen is available. It will show every touch on-screen with a nice partially-transparent graphic that automatically fades out when the touch ends.

Here’s a demo video…

Handy if you need it!

h/t: @romainbriche!