On the Gold Rush, March 27th and Waiting

You’ve probably heard that Apple is officially accepting submissions for iPad apps that will go into the iPad App Store; to be part of the “grand opening”, you’ll have to submit your app for review by March 27th. And unless specific conditions are met, I suggest you don’t do so.

It’s perfectly reasonable that developers want to jump on the wagon as soon as possible, submitting the app next week thus having it available when the iPad comes out and people will to spend money because they want new apps. Users will open the App Store knowing that they’re about to spend money because they need apps for their new toy, and we all know that a device is what apps make it. It’s a good thing that you (devs) are hurrying to have a stable version of your new app, and I understand that being among the first ones will be a terrific opportunity for you to get noticed, rise the charts and make money. But if you don’t pay attention now, that’s not gonna happen.

You don’t want to have an app that doesn’t work, just as you don’t want your inbox full of emails from users complaining about menus not working and crappy support for multitouch gestures. You won’t be able to test your new app on an actual iPad before the 27th, you’ll be submitting an application tested with a mouse and keyboard rather than hands and fingers. That’s insane. As much as the iPad simulator can work just fine, and as much as you think you’re good at Cocoa development, you’ll submit an incomplete software. Would you buy a car, knowing that its creators have never tested it on the road? I wouldn’t, honestly.

But spending bucks in the App Store is different from buying a new car. People will just fire up their credit cards and buy, buy, buy. So probably you’re playing this game, and you’re going to submit an incomplete and untested application because you know that people will buy it anyway. Now, let me ask you this: how long is that going to last, before people will start telling everyone that your app doesn’t work? Reviews will start appearing in the iTunes page and, eventually, you’ll be screwed. You’ll be the developer that thought he could make money just by selling crap on the first day. Are you sure you want to play this game?

I think that being a developer doesn’t only involve being good at Cocoa. You have a reputation, you’ve got an user base of customers that trust you, and you can’t betray them for an early gold rush. This is a different situation from the launch of the iPhone App Store: you had the chance to test your app on a real device back then, you knew how things were working, you knew how it would feel.

You have to remember that feeling an application is way more important than just having it available. And by submitting your incomplete application by March 27th, you’re putting the gold rush before the feel, and yourself.

WindowFlow, via Keyboard & Pane

We’ve done our fair share of window management applications here at MacStories. SizeUp, Mercury Mover, and Zooom/2 have all entered the market in hopes of improving how you interact with your Mac’s windows. And they’re all equally interesting, because they incorporate similar shortcuts while going about resizing and moving in completely different ways.

Today’s application, WindowFlow, adds a new element to the mix that could replace the infamous ⌘-Tab.

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Cloud App for Mac Gets a Release Date: It’s April 1st.

It may sound like a joke, but it’s not: with a blog post Linebreak has announced the official release date of the long-awaited Cloud app, the Mac app that should revolutionize the way you share stuff on the web which we previously covered here.

Cloud app has gone under some major changes and improvements during these past months, the web app has been rewritten and the Mac client should sport some new Cocoa goodness as well. Also, the developers say they’ll open an API next week, so if you’re a developer and you’d like to integrate Cloud’s feature into your own app, now you can.

You should look forward to April 1st. It’s gonna be a great day for Mac users.

Ember, Campfire Client for iPhone. Reviewed.

As you may have read in our huge Basecamp and Backpack article, we fell in love with these 37signals products, and I don’t see this love fading away anytime soon. Together with Backpack and Basecamp we decided to give a try to Campfire, the real time chat communication service for small and large teams, and we’re very satisfied. The web interface is simple and uncluttered, it’s fast and reliable and when combined with a Mac app like Propane, it’s a must have for any kind of team.

Guess what, I immediately went looking for a decent Campfire client for iPhone, and Ember seemed a pretty good choice. More than decent and pretty good actually, Ember by OverCommitted is the app you have to purchase if you’re a Campfire user.

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Eternity Time Log Winners Announced

Thanks everyone who entered the Eternity Time Log giveaway. Also, we’d like to thank the Komorian developers for the promo codes they gave to MacStories.

Here are the winners:

Tony

SebaSonido

Ellen

Rossella

Matthew

cjmegatron81

Arne

Mhaddy

AdamW

Philippe

You’ll receive the licenses in your inbox in a matter of a few hours. Stay tuned for other giveaways coming this week.

In the meantime, you can follow the official MacStories Twitter account as @macstoriesnet.

Keeping Track of Your Habits with Daily Deeds

The worst thing about having to deal with dozens of tasks and projects everyday is that I often forget about the other things I have to do, out of the MacStories context. Basic things like listening to music, walk the dog, getting through my inbox and reply to mails: daily habits I shouldn’t forget about, but I often do.

Daily Deeds is a new application for the iPhone which cleverly lets you annotate your habits, complete them everyday and forget about it.

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Optimizing a Jailbroken iPhone

If you have a jailbroken iPhone, it’s very likely that you installed a lot of apps, tweaks and extensions that are now slowing down your device. Perhaps you noticed that it’s not as fast as it used to be, applications like Mail take a little longer to start up, you have to respring every 30 minutes to see an increment in speed. You know why? Because the stuff you install from Cydia eats up memory, a lot of memory sometimes. Winterboard, for example, can take a lot of unoccupied RAM if you start enabling dozens of themes and graphical modifications; same applies for other apps like Action Menu, Pro Switcher - all these things constantly run in the background (they are based on MobileSubstrate) and they are the reason why your iPhone is slowing down.

Fortunately, there are some tricks and tips you can follow to optimize your iPhone, free up a lot of memory without the need of respringing / rebooting and get a fast and stable device once again. Here’s how.

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Apple Working on a New Social App for iPhone Called iGroups?

Patently Apple has discovered some documents on USPTO today referring to a new application for iPhone Apple’s developing called “iGroups”. The app should be based on the MobileMe infrastructure, allowing users to create groups and communicate with people attending “live events”. The whole document is rich and worth a read, here’s an excerpt:

“Apple is working on a new communications based social networking application that they’re simply calling “iGroups.” According to the documents published by USPTO today, Apple’s iGroup will be a new service that will work on your iPhone and likely work with MobileMe. The idea is to allow groups of friends or colleagues attending such events as a concert, a tradeshow, business meeting, wedding or rally to stay in communication with each other as a group to share information or reactions to live events as they’re occurring. The technology behind the new iGroup social networking applications works with a very sophisticated cryptographic key generation system to ensure security and privacy of your communications. Interestingly, the patent states that if one of the devices in your group happens to be without true positioning technology, it appears that Apple’s MobileMe service will provide some sort of “virtual GPS” capability to that user so that they could be aware of the locations of others in the group. Apple’s patent provides us with example scenarios of both a concert and WWDC event to clarify the service.”

Geo location, real time communication, MobileMe and a lot more in a single application that seems to start from the solid foundations of services like Gowalla and Foursquare. Interesting.