Techieवार्ता (TechieVarta) Blogs

I must say, day 2 for Stack ‘em Up looks a lot more promising than day 1. In all I sold 31 units for net revenue of $21.13. That is large improvement over yesterday. However, the revenue always goes down after initial up, and yesterday was a Saturday. I still think the numbers don’t look all that good. I have started posting announcements on forums. I don’t know if they help. At present all my announcements include a few Promo Codes for the forum members. I am more focused on getting word of mount buzz going rather than earning money from forum posts. I don’t know if forum posts ever earn any money anyway.

Also, I think at some point I will try increasing game price to $1.99 to see how that goes.

On AdMob front, they had 614 impressions and 6 clicks for the Stack ‘em up. There is no way to know conversion rate there though.

Will keep you guys updated.

Yesterday was the first full day of Stack ‘em Up on AppStore. The day was rather disappointing. I sold 12 copies with a net revenue of $8.37. The only review I have received so far is mine own. I have received several review comments in private from my friends who tried the game. So far private reviews are positive. Let us see if this can translate to real revenue.

Yesterday was also the day when Nukkad  multi lingual Twitter client) went ad supported. I am using AdMob for the ads. They allow me to run house ads. Nukkad is configured to serve 30% “Stack ‘em Up”. That means so far 624 “Stack ‘em Up” ads have been served. AdMob is reporting 11 clicks. Out of the 11, a couple of probably me clicking when experimenting.

In all I am disappointed overall. Maybe tomorrow will be better.

I have seen some comments that people are having difficulty finding refresh button and new message indicator. The refresh button may not be at the most obvious location but it exists. Select a message and the bottom panel shows up. Touching the refresh button will refresh tweets.

The new message indicator exists on the top right on the message.

“Twitter is exploding fast and is a true global community. That’s why Twitter World comes so handy. You can easily translate the following languages to English and finally understand what everyone’s talking about on Twitter”  - iPhoneAppsFinder.com

Twitter World has one spectacular function: it allows you to read Tweets written in foreign languages by automatically translating them. If you’ve been watching the news lately, you’ve probably heard of the events in Iran being highly integrated into the Twitter universe. Wouldn’t it be great to have been able to read the tweets of the Iranian protesters first hand? Too bad they were written in Farsi. That’s where Twitter World comes in. Also, if you just have lots of foreign friends, this app is perfect.  - iSmashPhone.com

Other reviews:

1. http://www.macotakara.jp/blog/index.php?ID=3668

Update: The updated with fix has now been accepted by Apple is now @ AppStore. Get it

My previous release of Twitter World application had a nasty bug which made it unusable for lots of “Twitter World” users and completely killed the reputation. I owe these users an explanation of what happened.

As you know, Twitter World uses Google API to translate Tweets. In version 1.0, the Twitter World translated one tweet at a time. This was slow and resulted in significantly slow initial load time. So I decided to use the newly available Google batch translation API. The batch feature of the API allows me to submit multiple translation requests at once. Google also has a limit of maximum 2000 encoded characters in the URL. A given batch could have at most 7 tweets. Any given tweet cannot be more than 140 characters long. So in theory this should always have been safe.

The part I missed was UTF8. In UTF8 (which is the most used character encoding), every character can be encoded in 1-4 byte.  Now if you take 140 characters/tweet and mutliply it with 4, you get up to 560 characters in the URL per tweet. That implies even 4 tweets can take up to 2000 URL character limit Google requires. This results in URL too long error from Google.

This along with some lousy error handling caused the crash which a lot of users saw with the version 2.0 of the Twitter World. The fix was uploaded to Apple yesterday. It is frustrating that I cannot push the fix out faster and am @ Apple’s mercy when it comes to pushing update to this critical issue. In the middle if somebody needs an update, I can provide them with ad-hoc release.

iSmashPhone.com

“Twitter World has one spectacular function: it allows you to read Tweets written in foreign languages by automatically translating them.”

http://www.ismashphone.com/2009/06/todays-notable-iphone-apps-friday-june-26th-edition.html

The tweeter has been a great force behind Iranian revolution. Google did a great job by quickly providing translation service for Farsi.

I am getting lots of tweets from people using my Application Twitter World - Breaking Borders to connect and read Farsi Tweets in English. I can easily include English to Farsi support as well but that will take more than 2 weeks to get through Apple’s bureaucracy In any case I am happy to support Iranian people.

I will like to announce availability of Twitter World: Breaking Borders for iPhone and tocuh. You can get it @ http://tinyurl.com/getTwitterWorld. I have seen explosion of Twitter Clients @ App store. However the TwitterWorld is different. It can translate tweets in to your language. No other Twitter application can do it. You can also use Twitter World to retweet in other language and reach larger user base.

It was late February when I eventually gave in to continuous persuasion of my friend and colleague Cole Harris and decided to start experimenting with iPhone applications. He had been on the AppStore for some time and has several successful applications and had given me some tips. Man what a month of March it turned out to be.

The first question was what to develop and my first answer was to develop an April Fool day application. Which I developed but never uploaded. This application provided me with significant insight in to iPhone capabilities.

I had rich embedded devlopment background (how rich :)). I knew C/C++/Java rather well but had never done any ObjC or GUI related development. One and half month later my first application has been uploaded for Apple’s review and I am nervously waiting to see what happens to it.

As soon as Apple approves the application, I will use this space to discuss design and tools used to create the application.

Arcade bowling’s description says: “Stuck in another meeting with the “Bobs”? Tired of filing out endless TPS Report Cover Sheets? blah blah Then look no further. I did not know that 3 year old kids had to file TPS report. At least not in my household. This game seems to be just appropriate for 3 yr old kids. (more…)

Bounce On which is in top 25 free apps category. It is graphics rich game which uses accelerometer smartly. The goal is the same old get the ball to its destination.
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Can you add 2+2 or 5+3? Wait till you try BrainTuner from http://gengarstudios.com/. It is an absolutely addictive application where you continuously challenge yourself in game of maths trying to beat your previous time and in rush to beat timing you make mistakes answering these simple questions.
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