Having been beaten to a Twitter app by @jonmarkgo, I decided to focus my energy on creating an app to share your images & videos from Glass to Facebook and… version 0.1 is finally ready to go.

Facebook App for Google Glass

I’d love to hear any feedback about it and will be releasing the source code for this and / or a scaffolding version of this for building a Glass app on Sinatra.

Google are still figuring out exactly what a Glass Service store may look like, how that may interact with Google Play etc.. but in the meanwhile, we need a place to go to find out about new Glass Apps and make sure that we’re not all building the same thing!

So, a few of us from the Explorer Community have created AppsForGlass.

AppsForGlass is simple – it’s a categorized directory of Apps created for Glass by members of the explorer community.

I hope it helps some of you!

They got a great range of input – you can read the article over on Nerd Wallet.

There are challenges. Lots of them, including a general belief that Apple is against dynamically changing the UI on the iPhone, thus preventing tests. Nowhere in the developer guidelines does it say ‘Apps that change the colour of a button to test performance and report in this performance will be rejected’. The guidelines are there to protect against bad software, experiences and malicious actors, split testing is designed to make better software and better experiences.

What would a mobile A/B test look like?

This was where I started from and the vague requirements that I came up with are as follows:

• The iPhone App can contact a server to get a set of test cases with possible values
• Each control that is a ‘test case’ should check this set of tests to see if there is a value in there for it
  • If so, set the value (text, image URL, color etc..) to the value of the test. Fix the value for that client so that one user doesn’t see multiple test cases.
  • If not, fall back to some local default
• When a positive interaction is completed, this is uploaded to the server with ‘test case’, ‘value’, ‘outcome (+/-)’
• Same for a negative interaction (e.g. Cancel button, or App backgrounding)
• These results are available on the server and used to inform the next set of tests

What about things that aren’t controls?

There are plenty of things to test that aren’t controls, e.g.:

• Conditions for asking to rate – (rate button being positive and ‘never’ being negative)
• Message text on an upgrade reminder
• Determinate vs. indeterminate progress loaders for content (bounce on loading, rate)
• etc…

For these cases, we want the ability to generically create a ‘test case’ and use it’s value, then post back outcomes within the Application logic.

The iOS A/B Split Test Library

I made this library over the weekend, so it has many shortcomings, but it allows you to perform A/B tests on some extended controls and generic tests using values downloaded from the PHP Server companion project.

• A/B Test UIButton text values using ABTestButton (configure using User Defined Attributes in Interface Builder)
• A/B Test UIButton images using ABImageTestButton (again all in Interface builder)

These will both automatically post positive outcomes when the user taps on them.

• A/B Test any generic values using ABTestCase

ABTestCase

ABTestCase allows you to create a test case with a token (as configured in the PHP Server) and get a test case value then use it however you see fit, then post the outcomes whenever you like.

To get a test value, create a new test case:

ABTestCase *testCase = [[ABTestCase alloc] initWithTestCase:@"YOUR_TEST_CASE_TOKEN"
    andControlValue:@"Your Default Text Value"];
NSString *testCaseText = [testCase value];

Then, when you want to send an outcome, use ABTestCaseOutcome

ABTestCaseOutcome *outcome = [[ABTestCaseOutcome alloc] initWithTestCase:@"YOUR_TEST_CASE_TOKEN"
   andOutcomeResponse:ABPositiveResponse];
[outcome send];

The code is available for GitHub under the MIT License – I hope that it’s a useful start to your A/B testing efforts in mobile – I’d love to hear any comments. Also, any enhancements are more than welcome!!

Dear long tail of Apps,

Fuck you …

… begins Apple’s announcement of the new and redesigned App Store in iOS 6.

We felt that too many of you were getting downloads, making livings and generally participating in the ecosystem and so we’ve devised a way to counter this.

I am of-course referring to the modifications to the iOS App Store released today which replace the over-used and old-hat visual mechanism of a list to represent, well, lists of results and instead present them as full-screen cards, side-by-side. Apple has trained us over the past few years, that this is a paged view. There are pages, I’ll buy it.

I’m not however, convinced of the soundness of the concept of replacing a list of results with a paged view of result cards for one simple reason – it compounds the biggest problem in the App Store – discovery.

Exponential increased, exponentially

It’s already true that downloads drop off exponentially as you go down the search results but now Apple presents the results not so much as results but as the answer by presenting a full screen single App. They did this, without improvement of their search ranking mechanism at all. So now that same search engine that developers have complained about by the thousands and nobody (literally – outside Apple) has even a notional clue how it works is determining the answer to your search query and controlling in a pretty direct way the revenue of the developers behind these Apps. While the quality and logic behind these results isn’t really what we’re here to talk about (but it is very bad), the fact that it’s bad does compound the problem further.

Let’s compare the modifications to the iOS 6 App Store to the behaviour of Wall Street over the years leading up to the financial crisis. The App Store is after all, a market of it’s own. Specifically, I’d like to employ some rhetoric conceived by the Occupy movement – that of the 99%. This update serves to increase the visibility of the already-top-listed Apps which have been receiving the most downloads to this point and drive more traffic towards them, at the expense of the long-tail of (some very high quality) Apps which sit behind them – previously on the first page, now potentially 4 full (buggy) swipes away.

The App Store in iOS 6 benefits the 1% at the expense of the 99%

It’s actually likely worse than 1% v. 99%. I would suppose that less than 1% of Apps are top-result for common search terms other than their name (where they will also punish smaller Apps by displaying a full-screen ‘did you mean card’!??!) – meaning that this really does serve to benefit the very top Apps by funnelling users straight to downloading them before exploring competitors or smaller Apps. Occupy Infinity Loop.. anyone?

Tomorrow, we’ll get the first full day’s worth of metrics from iOS developers not lucky enough to be the top result for popular related search queries and my guess is there will be a lot of unhappy indie developers. Apple must be aware that decreasing the visibility of all but the top Apps will have a massive compounding effect on where the revenue goes – it seems they have chosen.

Big Apps need big $$

Apple would prefer to have a small number of high-profit Applications on the store, rather than the hundreds of thousands of small Apps that have gotten them to where they are today. It makes sense in some ways; the store is maturing and there are some really high quality, highly-valuable Apps (and companies behind them) that need lots of revenue from iOS to continue growing and innovating. iOS is not growing nearly as fast as Android and so in order to maintain the growth of these leaders of development on the platform, a greater share of the revenue has to go to them.

Whether you agree or not with the new Store, or my theories, one thing is for sure – Apple have made a choice, taken a side, and it wasn’t with us – the small developers.

We have just put together what I think is a great list of tips on how to write a Press Release over at AppLaunch and I wanted to share it with everyone here…

Definitely worth a look if you’re launching an App: How to write an App Press Release

Have a great weekend!

iPhone Developers:

The question is simple..

Would you use a service that handles all receipt validation, verification and processing & provides a simple client-side Framework for integration?

If you have 30 seconds, please let me know in this survey…

http://www.popsurvey.com/s/40sofw

I am proud to have been selected to act as both a judge for the AppIdol ‘get your App made’ competition and a mentor to the winning ideator.

Every day I speak with people from all walks of life who have ideas for Apps – many of which are extremely viable but they lack the knowledge and ability to have them developed. AppIdol offers a very real opportunity for these people to have their App developed by Top-Tier agency Locassa.

The Winner will get:

• Their App created by App Development Agency Locassa
• $1,000 to go towards marketing
• Coverage on iPhoneLife and the iPhoneAppCafe
• Feedback and Mentoring from the judges (including myself)

We’re also going to throw an AppLaunch Shuttle Publicity Campaign in to the mix to help get the App kick-started once it’s out in the market!

So if you have an App idea, then head over to the AppIdol page and get it submitted!!

When looking for a better alternative to sending 100′s of emails to App review sites in an attempt to get them to review the new version of Corkbin, I drew a blank. There were PR Firms that would charge frankly-silly amounts of money to send the emails for me and do their ‘black magic’, but, not having frankly-silly-amounts-of-money to spend, that wasn’t an option.

I literally just wanted to get my description, press release and images in front of as many reviewers as possible and I didn’t have the list, or the time to send them all individually (mass-mails just go to junk).

So, I decided to make it. AppLaunch is an affordable way to give your app launch a big press push by getting your App in front of hundreds of potential reviewers!

Check it out and I’d love to hear your thoughts… AppLaunch

I love the new sidebar – it genuinely looks awesome.

Looks like they’re still completely missing the point, though!

Check it out: http://plus.google.com