Review: Sparrow Mail Client
Sparrow is a elegantly designed app that shows great potential to replace the built-in Mail app in Mac OS X.
loving the Apple (in a Beta'ish way)
Sparrow is a elegantly designed app that shows great potential to replace the built-in Mail app in Mac OS X.
Let’s put things into perspective. If you sat down and counted from 1 to 1 billion, you would take about 95 years to complete. And if you were to find a fishbowl big enough to fit 1 billion goldfishes, you would need a stadium to fit them all. Now double that.
Apple announced last Monday that the app store has surpassed 2 billion downloads from 50 million iPhone and iPod Touch users worldwide. That’s an average of 40 apps per device and according to Steve Jobs, half a billion was downloaded in this quarter alone. The calculators here in iHeartApple don’t have enough room to display enough zeros, so while we buy new ones, AppleInsider has kindly done all the maths for us. In the last 80 days alone, 6.3 million apps were downloaded per day, up from 4.1 million per day in the first 365 days of the app store launch.
That’s a staggering amount considering Singapore’s population barely tipped 4.99 million, as of June 2009.
What does this all mean for us? Well, I think a mobile device is only as useful as what it can do for you. With 85,000 apps to choose from, your iPhone and iPod Touch will give you far better mileage than other mobile devices currently in the market, all packed in a sleek and intuitive user interface Apple is famous for.
This 2 billion downloads is only the beginning. With numbers like this, Apple’s app store is by far the best solution for developers who are looking for a robust distribution infrastructure and this only means we will soon see more and more apps come through as software makers choose this app store over others.
So if you already own an iPhone or iPod Touch, I think we’re on the right boat with this one. If not, you can pick up a new iPod Touch from Apple SG Store and an iPhone from SingTel.
Bringing copying to a new low level.
Brought to our attention by a reader, we bring you Classics: Jane Austen by Diego Dominguez Ferrera of Ubiklabs. The application is a collection of ebooks by Jane Austen bundled together in a $2.99 package. Look familiar? It should, as the visual styling is very similar to Classics as seen in these two screenshots …
Read more at The Infinity Loop
The Mac Daddies at Ecamm Network has a good tip for iPhone app developers with regards to their earnings: If you have not done so, go fill in a 12 page Japanese tax exemption form as the Japanese tax authorities will withhold 20% of your earnings unless the forms are received.
They discovered about this after constantly finding around 20% of their earnings missing from sales of their app in the Japanese App Store. When they wrote to Apple, this was what they received:
“There is a 20% withholding tax in Japan until the Japanese tax authorities have accepted your tax exemption forms. This can take 90 days or longer. … They were required at the contract setup time in iTunes Connect. If you haven’t completed these and sent them in, you must or you should not have been paid.”
So for Singaporean iPhone developers out there, do spend some time during this Chinese New Year break and fill up all these tax forms to get all your income. (via Daring Fireball)
Catching up on news the past week – pricing for battery replacement on the 17-inch MacBook Pro, new Google Quick Search application and 3rd party browser appearing in the App Store.
Apple recently tweaked the UI of the iTunes App Store after facing much criticism over how apps are listed on the iTunes top pages. Most of the changes are on individual category pages where there’re two new columns showing the Top Paid and Top Free apps (see below).
However, there seems to be a bug in the display when you choose to sort by Most Popular as it doesn’t tally with either Top Paid or Top Free apps. Wouldn’t that goes hand in hand? As seen in the next screen grab below, the apps are almost similar when you select sort by Name
Still it shows that people in Cupertino still has ears listening out to the fans and developers and will react accordingly…at least some of the times.
(via AppleInsider)
New apps to try for your iPhone and iPod Touch – vLingo, Amazon Mobile and Twitter clients plus local company BAK2u security app for your iPhone stripped features to get Apple’s green light.
For those who wants to have those games from Pangea Software that were featured in this iPod Touch ad, do make haste to the App Store to grab these games at US$0.99 each.
Bugdom 2, Nanosaur 2, Cro-Mag Rally, Enigmo, Billy Frontier and also try out their new game Antimatter.
Grab these before the offer ends. For other Black Friday offers, or any other offers, check out App Shopper site.
Want to populate your iPod Touch or iPhone with Apps but find that some are not available in the Singapore Store or can’t wait to download Music, Movies or TV Shows from iTunes? Fret not, there is a way!
Andy Finnell’s post about pricing of iPhone apps available now in the iTunes Store brings up quite a few issues not just about pricing, but also on known shortcomings of the iTunes Store that Apple should look into.
The problem that you’re likely to have, like most developers, is setting a price that you can live on. The temptation will be to price your app too low, such that developing the application isn’t sustainable. You might have the best of intentions, but in the end you’ll cause the premature death of your business before it even gets a chance. So why might you be tempted to price your iPhone application so low?
To be honest, as consumers, we will definitely prefer to see the continuity of the current pricing situations, aka more $0.99 apps. But as pointed out in Andy’s article, we’ll end up with many apps that stayed at version 1.0 with not much improvements or with developers dropping out of the market with the unsustainable pricing situation now.
Also with regards to the iTunes Store, with only two ways to sort through the apps in their respective categories, it will be difficult for developers to help push their apps to the top of the pile unless they price it attractively (either $0.99 or FREE) or they get the boost from advertising and marketing, which most of them won’t.
So which do you prefer? Should developers price their apps based on their value or keep as it is now and risk going into oblivion?
Local iPhone App developer Just2Me recently launched the SG Toto app into the iTunes App Store for all you punters hoping to strike it rich.