The App Reviews Formula

What if I told you there was an easy formula for pitching your app to bloggers and reviewers?

And if that formula would give you a running start far beyond most apps?

Why it Matters

You want your app to sell – to get downloads. You might have the best idea, but if people don’t hear about it, the app will flop and soon be forgotten. One of the most effective ways to reach your target audiences is through blog reviews. It is your chance to get wide exposure to a lot of people at once.

Think about it.

You possibly have hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of potential customers reading blogs every single day.

Bloggers have direct influence over the buying habits of their readers. They’ve done the hard work of building their audience. They know what readers want.

All you need to do is write an effective pitch that catches their interest and interests them into review your app.

With this formula, it’s not that hard.

Continue reading “The App Reviews Formula”

iOS Smart App Banner plugin for WordPress

iOS Smart App Banner plugin for WordPress

I just released version 1.0 of my iOS Smart App Banner plugin for WordPress. This plugin lets you put a smart app banner at the top of your post or page when an iOS device visits in mobile Safari. It’s a great tool for app promotion that makes it very easy for people to find & buy your app in the App Store.

 

[UPDATE] The plugin has been updated for Apple’s new referral links.

An Overview on Providing OAuth for Your Mobile App

I was recently playing around with an idea – a proof of concept – for an mobile app API. If you’ve never done this before, keep reading.

The high-level requirements:

  • A mobile app that you have control over
  • An API you’re working on
  • Users must be authenticated

As I am the app and API owner, I thought it best and easiest to use a two-legged OAuth implementation – username & password plus some secret keys (3-legged vs 2-legged explanation). This is what your users will expect when logging into your app & service. Before you can start, find an appropriate library for your web framework. There are plenty out there, so pick your poison. I’m familiar and develop relatively quickly with CakePHP, so I went with seddonmeida cakephp-oauth-server. I’ll spare you from too much code.

First, you’ll have to set up an OAuth client in the database. This is for your app and nobody else. Follow your library’s instructions; you’ll find out you can’t read values from the database because they should be hashed. Once you have it installed and are sure it’s working, you can start the setup. In the CakePHP plugin,

function some_open_oauth_action(){
    $client = $this->OAuth->Client->add('myapp://register'); //the URL isn't really important in this case
    print_r($client);
}

Save your client_id and client_secret in a safe place. You’ll need it in your app. Now, the fun part. You can test this in your browser, but it will work the same way in your app.

First, Grant the Token

In OAuth terms, we’re doing a password type grant with the client_id and client_secret.

https://domain.ext/oauth/token?grant_type=password&client_id={SOME20CHARACTERLONGID}&client_secret={some40characterlongsecretkey}&username={username}&password={password}

You’ll get JSON in return with a few important keys, namely access_token and refresh_token. They will serve as your ID badge for future requests. Keep them around. NB: access_token is used most, but refresh_token has a special place.

Request Something

Making a request for protected resources is easy. Assuming your back-end is set up properly, you should be able to run something like this with no problem:

https://domain.ext/oauth/userinfo?access_token={whateverAccessTokenYouWereGiven}

I know the above URL is at /oauth/, but that doesn’t mean your entire API has to be handled with your OAuth controller. In practice, you should include your OAuth library as a component of each appropriate controller wherever you’re accessing the API, or at least secured content.

Refreshing Your Token

A lot of services using OAuth aren’t going to expire your token. Seddonmeida’s implementation uses an expiration, but in practice doesn’t actually enforce it; that’s up to you. In the case you do have an expiring token, it’s best to refresh your user’s keys from time to time so they aren’t “logged out.” To get a fresh new token, access our OAuth token action and request a refresh_token grant type using the client_id, client_secret, and the refresh_token you received when first authenticating.

http://domain.ext/oauth/token?grant_type=refresh_token&refresh_token={youGotThisAtAuth}&client_id={some20charid}&client_secret={a40charstring}

A Note About HTTPS

Make these requests over HTTPS if you have any option at all. Otherwise, HTTP is sending your username and password over in cleartext, which we all know isn’t a great idea.

Focus Follow Mouse and other *nix wonders

Back in the days at the UCSD Center for fMRI, I had the opportunity to get my hands dirty with a few types of *nix systems that most people have never heard of, much less use. My boss was also pretty keen on very specific configurations that he insisted his employees put on their computers for those infrequent times he’d be on our workstations. For the record, they were:

  • Always use Emacs
  • Make sure that key to the left of the “A” key was your control key, map it to control if it wasn’t already
  • Make sure focus follows mouse set to enabled.
These are no big deal on various *nix systems, but to most Mac people, completely novel ideas

Caps Lock to Ctrl

Briefly, that control key thing. I hated it at first. Then I started using Emacs quite a bit and it made sense. It much better on your poor little pinky finger to press down without having to contort your hand. Old Solaris systems actually made that the hardware control key. Any other keyboard has to be remapped via software so “caps lock” wasn’t really caps lock. I highly recommend it, but people are soooo confused when they’re using my machine and the caps lock doesn’t work. Or control doesn’t work and makes all their text in capitals.

Focus Follows Mouse

I don’t know why I forget to do this one. The idea is that window focus (the act of becoming active) can be controlled by simply moving your mouse over the window rather than having to physically click on it and bring the window to the foreground. FFM is particularly handy because the window isn’t brought to the foreground, but is still takes input from the keyboard. I use this most often when working with the terminal – where often I only care most about the last several lines of output, and not all the clutter of text and OS UI above it. It leaves the main window that might be referencing right where it is.

On your Mac, open Terminal, and do this:

defaults write com.apple.terminal FocusFollowsMouse -string YES

Quit terminal. Re-open, and open a second terminal window (not tab). Hover your mouse over one of them and start typing. Now, hover your mouse over the other one and type. See what happens? If everything worked properly, the typing occurs in the window your mouse is hovered over. The only caveat is that it acts a little funny if the terminal is in the background to another app, but it still works. I found that sometimes you have to hover out & over another app then back to the other term window. Not a huge deal, I guess. Try it out. If you don’t like it, change the above command from … YES to … NO

It’s a time saver and convenience – especially useful on constrained displays. You might just fall in love. Now if only the whole OS would let me do that.

 

Underwhelming Android Experience

Ryan Heise summed it up nicely in Four Months With Android. I used an HTC incredible for 11 months. There are some great things about Android, but the negatives far outweigh the benefits for me. Android was just underwhelming. The UI and UX isn’t as nicely polished as iOS. Android apps, on average, just aren’t as well polished. Android reminds me of Windows of years past. Sure, it more or less works, but it’s just not that great of an experience.

Will Hybrid Mobile Apps Prevail Over Native?

I’ve been wrestling with this question for some time, and I thought this post may help sort out my thoughts and opinions while giving you some important insight. Are hybrid mobile apps going to become the developer’s choice anytime soon? The debate can be pretty heated as companies choose one technology over the other.

Hybrid, the Unlikely Union

Let’s get the definitions straight before we begin. A hybrid app is one of those mobile apps that uses a native web view to display HTML, CSS, and JS “web” apps. They’re only sort-of “web apps” because they are run locally, though they often pull data from online sources via AJAX requests. So, you have this HTML/CSS/JS app running inside of a natively-compiled stand-alone web browser of sorts on your phone. One such example is PhoneGap. Because the logic bits of the app are written using web technologies, you can often develop once and deploy on multiple platforms, so long as you’re using supported markup. You’re killing multiple birds with one stone.

Hybrid is the Bee’s Knees

As I mentioned above, hybrid technologies are great for developing cross-platform apps. Seriously – since iOS, Android, and even some Blackberry devices are both running Webkit most, if not all, your html, css, js is going to work remarkably similarly on both platforms. It’s pretty enticing. From your and your client’s perspective it’s a pretty easy sell. For one round of development you have the potential to hit many more users. It’s pretty cost-effective. Pretty soon you’re singing the praises of your decision and you’ve decided that from now on hybrid apps are the bee’s knees.
Continue reading “Will Hybrid Mobile Apps Prevail Over Native?”

GeoLocation Near You

We at Pivotal Action were recently given a task for a client – develop a tool for a mobile API where admin can upload a list of retailers so that their mobile app users could find locations near them. It’s basically a “Find near me” utility.

This type of project is broken down into 3 parts: Upload & store geolocation data, find addresses near a given point, and display those locations either textually or on a map display. This quick tutorial will cover the first two parts.

Part 1, Getting Located

The goal of this part is to obtain and store latitude/longitude pairs for given addresses. I’m going to assume you can already get a list of addresses, whether for a spreadsheet/csv file, or other source. With a parsed address, you can obtain the lat/lng pairs from the Google Maps API. Just be forewarned that Google limits you to 2,500 requests per 24h period. That could be a problem for some applications, so you may need another provider like SimpleGeo.com

<?php
// Google maps API. rate limit to 2,500 reqs/24h
$url 		= 'http://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/geocode/json';
$address	= urlencode($row['address']);
$city		= urlencode($row['city']);
$state		= urlencode($row['state']);
$zip 		=  $row['zip'];

$requestUrl = $url."?address=".($address.",".$city.",".$state.",".$zip). "&sensor=false";
// echo $requestUrl;

$crl = curl_init();
curl_setopt($crl, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
curl_setopt($crl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1); 

// Set up the CURL request
curl_setopt($crl, CURLOPT_URL, $requestUrl); 

// Here we get the google result in JSON
$googJson = curl_exec($crl);

curl_close($crl);

$googArr = json_decode($googJson);
$status = $googArr->status;
$loc = $googArr->results[0]->geometry->location;
if( strtolower($status) == "ok" ){
	$tableData[count($tableData) - 1]['lat'] = $loc->lat;
	$tableData[count($tableData) - 1]['lng'] = $loc->lng;
} else {
	$tableData[count($tableData) - 1]['lat'] = 0.0;
	$tableData[count($tableData) - 1]['lng'] = 0.0;
}

//go on to save $tableData to your DB

?>

There are a couple key parts in there. First, you need to URL encode the address details. Second, the curl stuff is pretty standard – you can find similar versions all over the net. Third, the response data comes back as a JSON string, so you need to decode it into a PHP array to make it useful. My default value for lat/lng pairs is 0.0/0.0. There may be cases where Google doesn’t understand the address information or perhaps you’ve gone over your rate limit, so you have to accept more or less a throw-away response. The important thing is that you have your address coordinates saved (dare I say, cached) in your DB. You need this.

Part 2, Finding Yourself

Now how are you supposed to find these stores that are near you, at this moment, without having to use a lame web form or other manual means? You’re going to use the Haversine, aka Great Circle  Formula. Don’t click that link unless you really want to be confused. Here’s the gist – the globe is a big sphere, and we know from high school and/or college trigonometry classes that you can figure out lengths and distances on geometric objects. Some guy long ago (whose name was not Haversine) sat down and figured this out for us. What we get as a result of running these maths is the distance between to points on earth, using lat/long pairs. The caveat is these are as the crow flies, not driving directions. What I’m going to show you below is some SQL you can use to find the N closest points within a given distance. This will work on MySQL, and I’m assuming other SQL-compliant DBs. YMMV.

// scale:  MILES - use 3959 ;  KM - use 6371 (mean radius of the earth)
$scale = 3959;
$sql = "SELECT name, address, city, state, zip,  ( "
. (int) $scale ." * acos( cos( radians(".(float) $loc['lat']
. ") ) * cos( radians( lat ) ) * cos( radians( lng ) - radians("
. (float) $loc['lng'].") ) + sin( radians(". (float) $loc['lat']
. ") ) * sin( radians( lat ) ) ) ) AS distance FROM "
. $tablename ." HAVING distance < ". (int) $distance 
. " ORDER BY distance LIMIT 0 , ". (int) $limit . ";";

(Thank Pavel Chuchuva on Stack Overflow for the SQL [answer here]). You only need a couple parameters to get this chugging along and giving you a list of distances, closest to farthest from the point you are feeding it. Along with your address information, you’re also provided a distance in miles (using 3959 for measurement in Km).

Now you can use these results to display distances to your users. Let Google be your guide for implementing Part 3.

Quiet NSLog() in Release Builds

On the heels of the previous post, here’s a little snippit I picked up from Marek Bell to quiet NSLog() output in release builds.

Add this to your {MyApp}-prefix.pch file

#ifndef __OPTIMIZE__
#    define NSLog(…) NSLog(__VA_ARGS__)
#else
#    define NSLog(…) {}
#endif

The reasoning behind using __OPTIMIZE__ is that it’s set only on release builds of your app, not in debug versions. It’s very simple and allows you to use NSLog() instead of having to come up with your own version.

Quiet the Console – PhoneGap / iOS

I have a confession – I’m a console logging junkie. I just like to see what’s going on. While that may be great for development, at some point you’ll have to quiet the logging down for production. Really – doing enough logging will slow everything down each time you’ve inserted a console.log() into your code.

Silencing the output to XCode’s debugging console wasn’t immediately obvious. Overriding console.log() in JS by setting it to an empty function worked in the browser for development, but as soon as I loaded the app onto the actual simulator, we were back to square one. Enter the PhoneGap DebugConsole prototype. Override it.

Insert this anywhere after your phonegap.js file loads. It’ll keep things quiet as long as DEBUG = true…

if(DEBUG == true){
    DebugConsole.prototype.log = function(message, maxDepth) { }
    DebugConsole.prototype.warn = function(message, maxDepth) { }
    window.console = new DebugConsole();
}

There you have it

PhoneGap + XCode4

There’s been a bit of confusion surrounding changes to XCode4 and PhoneGap. Right now the big ones are 1) Where did my PhoneGap user templates go!? and 2) How do I submit my PhoneGap-based app to Apple? Let me help you.

1) You want to create a new PG project, but you’re not seeing the XCode templates when you go through the new project menus. Check out Shazron’s blog @ Nitobi for a command-line script to get you a new project up and running. It’s not as sexy as the XCode template, but it will do.

2) You can’t compile your app for submission to Apple? That was a little more tricky to track down. See this thread on the Apple Dev Forums for a bit of an abstract view of what’s going on. I’ll save you the details. Follow these steps to XCode bliss.

  1. Select the PhoneGapLib.xcodeproj entry in your files list:
  2. Make sure the “All” tab is selected:
  3. Look for the “Deployment” section and scroll down until you see the “Skip Install” parameter. Set Skip Install to YES:
  4. EDIT: Make sure to verify your target device…
    Make sure you have the “iOS Device” option selected in the schemes drop-down:
  5. Go over to the “Product > Archive” menu. XCode will do its compile magic. Open the Organizer to see the app and the listed archives when the compile is complete. At this point, make sure you are ready to upload the app to iTunes Connect. Bonus: we get to skip the Application Loader app from now on!
  6. Select the archive and click the “Submit” button. XCode will ask for your credentials. Log in and select the appropriate app and distribution profile from the list. Submit. If all goes to plan, you’ll get a message of approval. Finished.

That was easy. Now you can navigate the XCode4 waters with PhoneGap.

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