How Much Does It Cost To Develop An iPhone App?→

How Much Does It Cost To Develop An iPhone App?

We started the iPad development from scratch, but a lot of our underlying code (mostly models) was re-used. The development was done by two experienced iOS developers.

With such a short schedule, we worked some pretty long hours. Let’s be conservative and say it’s 10 hours per day for 6 days a week. That 60 hours for 9 weeks gives us 540 hours. With two developers, that’s pretty close to 1,100 hours. Our rate for clients is $150 per hour giving $165,000 just for new code. Remember also that we were reusing a bunch existing code: I’m going to lowball the value of that code at $35,000 giving a total development cost of $200,000.

Craig Hockenberry is one of the Twitterrific developers. The whole reply is a must-read.

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Tasks Touch: The Simplenote of GTD Apps

Maybe you don’t need OmniFocus, and you don’t need Things. You don’t care about whatever David Allen has to say and seriously - the Emergent Task Planner? You just want to enter tasks and have them always available, right? I got you. You’re that kind of user who don’t care about features and UX innovations as long as what needs to be accomplished during the day is driven by a simple software that doesn’t get in the way and doesn’t require you to read a manual.

You’re anything like me, but I think I’ve got the app that might just change your productivity worfklow on the iPhone: meet Tasks Touch, the Simplenote of productivity apps. Read more

US iPhone Data for International Visitors: A Guide→

US iPhone Data for International Visitors: A Guide

I’ve just returned from a two-week holiday on the West Coast of the US, and during my trip was asked a number of times how I was using mobile data whilst away. As I gather a number of people are interested, here’s what I was doing during the trip. This method will likely work for most carriers around the world (you just have to get the right SIM card and set up your unlocked iPhone’s data settings correctly): but I’ve tried and tested it on AT&T with a GoPhone account.

Great tips.

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Intel CEO: “Apple Did A Wonderful Job With The iPad, But We’ll Win”

Rumor has it the iPad is the fastest selling gadget in history. As Kanye would say: the best selling gizmo of all time. What’s curious is that PC manufacturers used to ditch the tablet category and make fun of Apple and its iPad back in January, but after a few months of blockbuster sales they had to revise their position and rush to get some tablets out in the market. As it stands right now, the Samsung Galaxy Tab is coming out in a few weeks (though hundreds of review units are somehow circulating amongst tech blogs) and lots of other models have been announced but they’re still nowhere to be seen. Read more

Assorted Mac OS X 10.7 Hopes & Predictions

So Apple is holding a media event on October 20th and, judging by the invitation Engadget and BGR got, it’s going to be an event focused on MacBooks (October / November is the usual timeframe for new MacBook models to drop) and a new version of OS X, namely “10.7. Lion”. I mean, there’s a lion in there. It has to be a lion.

Tagline debates aside, I’ve been thinking about this a lot: Snow Leopard is state of the art desktop computing, how could Apple reinvent the wheel and introduce us to an even better, revolutionary (and yeah, maybe there’ll be a magical in there too) kind of desktop and portable computing?  Apple constantly iterates, yet sometimes they put a giant milestone in their timeline and they build the next 5 years around it. Look at Leopard: it set the foundation for the huge success of 10.5, and the evolution of 10.6. I think 10.7 will be another milestone, a new OS Apple will use as a foundation for years to come. 10.7 will set the bar really high once again, and it’ll mark the long-overdue definitive integration of the iOS ecosystem with OS X.

I’ve collected some hopes, predictions and expectations for October 20th event that have been floating around in my mind for quite a while now. See you on Wednesday, on the other side of modern computing. Read more

Apple Holding Media Event on October 20th - 10.7 Lion Coming?

Apple is holding a Mac-focused media event on October 20th, Engadget just got the invitation.

The event is dubbed “Back to Mac” and…is that a lion we see in there? Mac OS X 10.7 Lion, perhaps? Or maybe this is just a teaser, and we’ll simply see new MacBook models, which usually drop in the October / November timeframe? Next Wednesday can’t come soon enough. For all your predictions and expectations, we’re awaiting in the comments below.

We’ll be discussing the event live on MacStories. Stay tuned.

Take Five: New App From The Iconfactory For When You Forget To Un-Pause Your Music

I love waking up to new apps from people I respect and admire. The Iconfactory guys are among these people: how couldn’t the makers of Twitterrific not be in the list? They’re great developers and experienced designers that don’t fail to surprise on each new app release.

Take Five is a new app for iPhone from The Iconafctory aimed at letting you remember about the music you paused and never turned back on. Admittedly, this is quite a common problem: not all iPhone apps support automatic resume after a phone call interruption (Spotify, for example) and so many times we simply forget to press the play button again. Take Five automatically fades your music back in after 5 minutes. Why didn’t we think of this before? Read more