

How I sold 172 copies of my HTML iPad app in the first 8 days - jayro
http://swarmsg.com/blog/?p=4

======
xenophanes
> in fact Swarm SG is much deeper than Backgammon or Chess and I believe that
> it could even take years to master

uhhh, if it's "much deeper than chess" then it _definitely_ takes _decades_ to
master.

One shouldn't claim to be deeper than chess without knowing the first thing
about how much it's possible to study chess.

~~~
eru
Lots of games can be analysed quite deeply, if you care enough about it. And I
agree that the analysis for chess has been done to quite deep levels.

Even humble Poker has provoked some sharp minds.

~~~
DennisP
It's even provoked at least one advance in game theory. Some mathematicians at
(iirc) the University of Alberta tried to use game theory to analyze poker,
and found it was intractable. That led them to invent a systematic way to
approximate complex games. (They built some good poker bots out of it, too,
and sold one version as a training tool.)

~~~
eru
Go has also provoked some interesting developments in Combinatorial Game
Theory. Conway got started with "On Numbers and Games"
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Numbers_and_Games>) basically got started by
analysing end-game situation in Go.

Note: Combinatorial Game Theory has almost no overlap with Game Theory.
Interestingly Combinatorial Game Theory has some analogies in topology. You
can for example give meaning to the temperature of a game.

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st3fan
"If you are thinking of building an iPhone/iPad app I would set aside one-two
weeks just to navigate the certification process, and setting up all the legal
stuff that you need to have set-up just to be able to sell games (rather than
give them away for free)."

Uhhh seriously?!

I know the certificate/provisioning profile stuff was broken and hard to get
right in the beginning. Like 2 years ago. But now you spend 3 minutes in a
Wizard and you have setup your certificates and profiles.

~~~
cmelbye
This popped out at me as well. Especially with recent versions of Xcode, the
process is incredibly simple. Run the wizard, download the files it gives you,
and then open them. Boom, you're ready to run the app on your device and
submit it to the store.

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mkramlich
I bet a big factor in his iPad sales is the "gold rush" effect of being one of
the first batch of iPad-only/iPad-optimized games. That's not to take away
from whatever good qualities it might have. But I'm sure it is a factor.

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beambot
Pardon my ignorance, but I'm genuinely interested...

Is ~20+ sales per day considered good / high for a just-released iPad
application?

~~~
Zev
~$100/day is ~$100/day. Its nothing special, but if you have a couple apps
that sell like that, you can make a decent living.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
The life cycle is weeks; you probably need several apps in the store at
various stages of lifecycle, and several more in development simultaneously to
"make a living"

~~~
dminor
Hmm that sounds suspiciously like a full time job.

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blueski
Curious to understand whether Appcelerator is the best choice currently for
building native apps based on HTML5 and JS.

I'd like to build an app for iPad and Android tablets so HTML5 seems the way
to go. I've looked at Appcelerator and also Sencha - the latter seems to be
geared more towards mobile sites rather than apps (though these can be wrapped
into apps using something like Phone Gap).

It'd be a nice bonus to have a separate mobile site but native apps are my
first priority.

Appreciate any thoughts.

~~~
blueski
OK so I've looked into this more. From what I understand the difference is:

\- Appcelerator transforms HTML and JS (built around its own client library)
into native apps with native components.

\- Sencha builds HTML5 sites using CSS3 to mimic native components and
behaviors. These sites can potentially be wrapped with Appcelerator (using a
Web View), Phone Gap or similar to be submitted to the Apple App Store/Android
Market.

Looks like the advantage of Appcelerator is the speed and UI consistency of
using true native components - and perhaps a greater chance of Apple including
it in the App Store since the output (I think) is entirely Objective C.
Advantage of Sencha is getting a HTML5 mobile site "for free" (if your main
aim is to build apps) and in some cases more flexibility since the
Appcelerator libraries don't exposure all the native functionality.

In my case I want to build something around Maps. The Appcelerator Maps
component is just too limited to fit my needs right now so I'll be going down
the Sencha route.

Hope this is helpful to someone. Let me know if I've missed/misunderstood
something along the way.

~~~
dugmartin
Almost. Appcelerator Mobile is a cross compiler with a component framework. It
takes Javascript and compiles it into Objective-C and links it against their
framework. You can build completely native apps in it.

It's a little confusing in Justin's case as he is using it to host a UIWebView
which is running his game. You can do the same thing in Objective-C with a few
lines of code and some magic mousedrags in Interface Builder. However, I
believe he is also using Appcelerator's sqllite bindings to save game state
from the UIWebView. You can also do this in Objective-C by making your own
bridge from the UIWebView using intercepted custom URLs (which always feels
like a dirty hack - not as clean as Flash's DOM injection using
ExternalInterface).

Btw, Justin is part of a two person podcast I listen to regularly. I'd
recommend subscribing:

<http://techzinglive.com/>

------
credo
_> >"Day 5 4 Sales Day 6 27 Sales (5 reviews – 10 ratings) Day 7 59 Sales
(Front page of iPad Games in New & Notworthy) Day 8 68 Sales_

 _> >For me these stats and reviews are amazing. More than I could have hoped
for."_

59 and 68 sound like very low sales/day numbers for an app that is featured on
the front page of "New and Noteworthy"

The numbers may indicate that the market for this app is fairly small or that
some changes (in feature or price or ....) are needed to make the app more
attractive to users.

~~~
hardwareguy
The game costs $9.99 so I wouldn't epect it to sell in the thousands. If he'd
have had it at $0.99 or $2.99 when it hit the front page he'd be talking about
"how I made 10k sales in a week".

~~~
credo
No, the post explicitly said that the app was priced at $4.99

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wallflower
Good testimonial. I don't have an iPad to try it out. It seems like he created
a quality product: a novel game. Yes, he created it using Titanium from
Appcelerator, and he had to deal with some nasty, niggling Javascript
performance/implementation issues. Key to his success was the 'First Follower'
(positive reviews).

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stcredzero
I'm most interested in his, _"way of trapping “mistake” touches and NOT acting
on them."_

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nirmal
Great article but when I read the article title I thought the game was sold
outside of the app store. Is there a centralized online store for selling web
apps that live on the home screen and act like native apps?

~~~
pmjordan
In case it wasn't clear, his game isn't just a web app that lives on the home
screen as a bookmark. It uses the Titanium Appcelerator, which is a thin
native wrapper around a Webkit view. The app logic is written in JavaScript,
rendering is done using HTML/CSS and/or SVG or so. FWIW, this actually obeys
the arbitrary App Store rules: C, Objective-C, C++ and JavaScript (if run in
Apple's supplied runtime) are allowed.

~~~
nirmal
Oh, I realized that after I read the article. I just misinterpreted the title.

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sitmaster
How many of you would be interested in having an API to build try and build an
AI for the game? I know I would!

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mattmaroon
"Swarm SG is much deeper than Backgammon or Chess "

I'll call.

