App Store Articles & Expert Advice

Instagram and Android, Together at Last!

April 3, 2012 By Jonathan Jeter Leave a Comment

Via an Androinica article, I just found out that Instagram is finally available for the Android OS. So now, finally, all of us Android users can find out what you iPhone users have been raving about for years. I guess because of the history of Instagram-like apps in the Google Play store, the actual Instagram app doesn’t show up in the first two app results when you do a search for Instagram. I gave up browsing through the 494 app results and went back to the original article, which conveniently had a link to download Instagram for Android from the Google Play store.

Having not used Instagram before, I found the installation and setup simple and following iPhone users I know who have Instagram accounts to be an easy process. Having used a couple of Instagram-like apps for Android, my favorites being Camera ZOOM FX and Pixlr-o-matic, I have a suspicion (based on what I’ve read so far) that the camera and filter features aren’t necessarily better than other camera apps, but the Instagram community is what makes the app so successful.

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Filed Under: Mobile

The Right Tool for the Job: Native or Mobile Web? at #SXSW2012

March 13, 2012 By Jonathan Jeter Leave a Comment

Tuesday, March 13, 2012 at the South by Southwest Interactive Conference in Austin, Texas #sxsw #righttool
Panel discussion by Buzz Andersen (Dir of Mobile – Tumblr), Jacob Bijani (Prod Engineer – Tumblr), Majd Taby (Software Engineer – Facebook), Matthew Delaney (WebKit Engineer), and Tom Dale (Sr Software Engineer – Ember.js)

Apps are much easier to monetize than websites, because you can charge up front.

The browser rendering engine does a lot of the heavy work that native developers have to contend with. The web browser is a highly evolved medium for content delivery and rich layout.

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Filed Under: Mobile

Google Play – Android’s New Playground

March 7, 2012 By Jonathan Jeter Leave a Comment

I’m sure you’ve already heard, but the Android Market has been rebranded as Google Play. Google Play is the reincarnation of the Android Market, which has been growing by leaps and bounds over the last few months, as first music and then books and movies have been added. My only hesitation when the Market became Google Play on my phone was having to agree to the privacy policy once again, which, of course, is the new comprehensive Google privacy policy covering all properties and all accounts. If you think about it, shouldn’t it be called the Google sharing policy instead of privacy policy, since you are basically giving Google permission to share your information across every relationship that you have with them?

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Filed Under: Android

Last Day of Android Market 10-Cent Apps

December 15, 2011 By Jonathan Jeter Leave a Comment

It has been a fun 10-day span of exploring and downloading Android Market apps. Some I had wanted to try and others I had never heard of before. One thing I learned during this week and a half was that I can actually try out apps any time, because the Android Market allows you to get a refund for apps within 15 minutes of ordering them. That’s really handy if you’re wanting to try an app and have the time to try it out.

In this post, I’ll list the apps that are available today and next week I’ll do a recap of the apps that were available during the 10 billion downloads sale and start reviewing the apps I’m using. Today’s apps are as follows:

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Filed Under: Mobile

Buy your 10 cent Android Apps Today in the Amazon App Store

December 9, 2011 By Jonathan Jeter Leave a Comment

Today is Day 4 of the 10 cent app celebration by the Android Market, celebration 10 billion downloads. The only problem is that the Android Market is experiencing a payment processing issue and if you try to by one of the apps, you get the following error: “An error occurred while processing your purchase. Please try again later.”

You can still buy most of the 10 cent apps today, if you use the Amazon App store. The following are the 10 cent apps available in the Amazon App store today:

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Shazam Encore by Shazam Entertainment Ltd.
Sentinel 3: Homeworld by Origin8 Technologies Ltd.
Baseball Superstars 2011 by GAMEVIL, Inc
Paper Camera by JFDP Labs LTD
Farm Frenzy by HeroCraft Ltd

$.10 apps that can only be found in the Android Market (or are only 10 cents in the Android Market) are:

Spirit HD by JAKYL
Jelly Defense by INFINITE DREAMS

Filed Under: Mobile

Android’s 10 Days of 10 Cent Downloads Continues

December 7, 2011 By Jonathan Jeter Leave a Comment

Image via Wikipedia

The Android Market continues its 10-day celebration of reaching 10 billion downloads by offering more premium apps for a mere 10 cents each. Today’s choices include the following:

Fruit Ninja by HALFBRICK STUDIOS
Berenstain Bears – Bedtime Battle by OCEANHOUSE MEDIA
AirSync by doubleTwist by DOUBLETWIST ™
Flick Golf! by FULL FAT PRODUCTIONS LTD
Star Chart by ESCAPIST GAMES LIMITED
Reckless Racing by POLARBIT
Christmas HD by DUALBOOT GAMES
NFL Rivals by NATURALMOTIONGAMES LTD
Beautiful Widgets by LEVELUP STUDIO
Read It Later Pro by READ IT LATER

If you have an Android phone or tablet, you should definitely take advantage of this special sale, as these prices are the lowest ever! One thing I found out, though, since I have an older phone with not much memory, is that if you uninstall an app within 15 minutes from the Android Market, the order automatically gets cancelled. So, if you are like me and have to pick and choose which apps you can run, just make sure your app is installed for at least fifteen minutes to take advantage of this great sale!

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Filed Under: Mobile

Bill Scott – Designing for Mice and Men

May 24, 2011 By Jonathan Jeter Leave a Comment

UIE Web App Master’s Tour – Seattle, Washington – May 23, 2011

Bill Scott from Netflix – Designing for Mice and Men

Bill Scott, Netflix – Designing for Mice and Men

Bill has been in the industry for a long time, at Sabre, Yahoo! and now Netflix.

Challenge is designing across devices: web, mobile, tablets & TV. Iteration changes based on devices. In Canada, they don’t even have a queue.

People like to make lists.

Chaos – 400 SKUs (devices) can run Netflix. Different manufacturers can create different NetFlix experiences. Using HTML5 for all platforms. Using Webkit (QT Webkit, Skia Webkit, iOS Webkit) Takes advantage of the same engineering team to create for most devices.

Server-driven dynamic UI

Webstyle release vs CE firmware updates

Support A/B Testing

Controlled Variances

Managing Across Platforms

Read the rest of Bill Scott – Designing for Mice and Men

portability layer (html5)
vary the experience across platforms
design for user posture, input capabilities, navigation styles and display capabilities

Filed Under: User Interface / User Experience Design

Josh Clark – Mobile Apps: Native or Web-Based?

May 23, 2011 By Jonathan Jeter Leave a Comment

UIE Web App Master’s Tour – Seattle, Washington – May 23, 2011

Josh Clark – Mobile Apps-Native or Web-Based?

Josh Clark, Author of TapWorthy

Mobile Apps

Mobile is growing quickly, with many platforms (many cultures)

App design needs to take mobile culture into accounts, how to develop for a iPhone user vs Android user, etc.

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Blackberry still has 40% of the global enterprise

Text-centric
low browser activity (blackberry browser has sucked until recently, when they adopted webkit)
how does your app fit into a text heavy culture

iPhone

active
high browser activity
spenders (big buyers – 70% of ebays mobile commerce is iPhone; eBay accounts for 25% of mobile commerce)
older, wealthier
according to OKCupid, iPhone users have more sex