The Power Of In-App Purchases→

The Power Of In-App Purchases

The common-sense approach to make money on the App Store used to be to do anything to get on the top charts. In-app purchases changed all of that. Good in-app purchases can make your app profitable without being anywhere on the charts, and are the best hope for the independent developer. Come to this session to learn why IAPs can be so effective and how to leverage them effectively: what makes a good IAP, how to increase your user involvement, how to present IAPs in an attractive way, what things attract users, and what things turn them away. We’ll go through lots of detailed real-world data from Flower Garden and other games with strong IAPs.

Recommended read for developers.

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Preview: Daisy Disk 2 for Mac

Daisy Disk is a very popular app for Mac that allows you to find files that are eating up space on your Mac’s drive. Many apps do that, and with a little bit of patience and with the help of Smart Folders you can achieve a similar functionality in the Finder itself, too. So what’s special about Daisy Disk? Read more

Ten Great Applescripts For iTunes 10→

Ten Great Applescripts For iTunes 10

But iTunes is one of Apple’s most flexible applications, offering a huge library of AppleScript commands and properties. AppleScript virtuoso Doug Adams has been running the Doug’s AppleScripts for iTunes Website for years, collecting scripts that he and others have written, and providing them for free. Here are some of the best AppleScripts that I’ve found on Doug’s site.

Great tips and great list. The Embed Artwork one is exactly what I was looking for. Make sure to visit Doug’s website for more AppleScripts.

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Shellfish Safari Extension Takes You On A Lonely Trip To The Internet

If you live on the Internet, if you ready dozens of blog posts every day but you hate the fact that the latest trend among publishers is to put tons of sharing buttons in their pages – then you’ll love this extension fo Safari called Shellfish.

Also available for Chrome and Opera users and released a few months ago, Shellfish strips away all the Twitter, Facebook and Digg buttons that suggest you share stuff with your friends. “Be Shellfish”, writes the developers on the extension’s site. Other services such as AddThis, AddToAny, Apture and Tweetmeme are blocked as well.

Shellfish is available here and works as advertised. If you think there’s no need to share anything, go install it.

AMD Fusion Coming To iMacs and Mac Pros?

Hardware Upgrade reports that AMD showed a couple of slides yesterday during the 2010 Financial Analyst Day which suggest that Apple might be included as a partner for future AMD Fusion releases. In the slides (which you can see below, or jump to the full presentation here) iMacs and Mac Pros are the Apple computers AMD’s slides are referring to.

As Hardware Upgrade also notes, rumors about deeper Apple / AMD collaborations have been floating around for months. Apple, of course, hasn’t confirmed any of them.

Apple Teams Up With Dentsu To Bring iAds to Japan

With a press release today Apple announced its exclusive partnership with Japanese brand agency Dentsu Group to bring iAds to Japan. The iAds following this partnership will be rolled out in Japan in early 2011 and Dentsu “will be responsible for the selling and creative execution”.

Dentsu subsidiary cci will provide creative production and media planning.

Check out the full press release below. Read more

Smule Wants To Make You A Musician Again With Their Magic Fiddle

There’s no doubt Smule knows how to release popular applications. If you look at their iOS portfolio, there’s not a single app that hasn’t sold thousands and thousands of copies in the App Store: I Am T-Pain, Magic Piano, Ocarina, Glee Karaoke and now, again on the iPad, the new Magic Fiddle.

Just like Magic Piano allowed you to play some sort of digital piano based on its own rules and system, Magic Fiddle recreates a violin on screen you can play with a few taps and swipes. The app is getting rave reviews on many blogs and publications, and while I haven’t tried the app myself (I’m not really a big fan of music apps in general) I have to admit it looks good from the screenshots and video posted by the developers.

The app contains a tutorial section to teach you how to bow, pluck, trill, vibrato and glissandi with your fingers; when you’re good enough to show off your skills, you can play with your friends and aim at the global leaderboards. Graphically speaking, Magic Fiddle looks interesting.

Magic Fiddle is available at $2.99 in the App Store. Check out the demo video below.

1.0 Is The Loneliest Number→

1.0 Is The Loneliest Number

I imagine prior to the launch of the iPod, or the iPhone, there were teams saying the same thing: the copy + paste guys are *so close* to being ready and we know Walt Mossberg is going to ding us for this so let’s just not ship to the manufacturers in China for just a few more weeks… The Apple teams were probably embarrassed.

But if you’re not embarrassed when you ship your first version you waited too long.

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