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

App Store Shopping Cart

Every time you finish buying a new app from the App Store on your iDevice, iOS gets you back to the home screen. You have to visit App Store again in case you want another app to purchase.

If a feature like an App Store shopping cart is added to iOS 6, the user would be able to purchase several applications and download them at the same time.

While I whole-heartedly agree that the current mechanism of finding an App, buying it, returning to the homescreen and then having to re-enter the store is really quite poor, the answer to this is definitely not an App ‘Shopping Cart’ – at least I, as a developer on the store, hope not.

A large majority of purchases on the Store are impulse-purchases, that if given multiple steps (and multiple opportunities to question whether it’s a must-have or a want-to-have), users may abandon their shopping carts. I would predict a pretty solid 20-30% drop in sales the day that feature launched.

So, what to do instead? Just do what the Store does when you redeem a promo code… it silently downloads the App to the home screen while you remain in the App Store. Perfect.

There’s a fairly simple example available here

The Apple docs can be found here

Now, a competing free library has popped up, complete with it’s own splashy launch page – SecureUDID.

The differentiation, is that SecureUDID uses a domain and a salt (basically a private token) to ensure that UDIDs are persistant, but private between Apps. Assumedly, a global UDID ‘salt’ and domain could be shared to provide a standard default UDID e.g. using all 1s for both. This is both a feature (from the user’s Point of View, and some developers) and a weakness from other developers’ points of view, however for what SecureUDID are trying to achieve, ubiquity isn’t required for them to prove useful to the developers that do choose to use them.

You can get SecureUDID source at GitHub.

Get source at GitHub

Now, I am a man, and I grow (admittedly somewhat disappointing) facial hair which up until now, the semi-disposable Gillette razors with maybe 2 blade-changes a year, have done a perfectly decent job of removing. Time to turn over a new page in the book of my shaving life.

After fighting with their site for a couple days to be able to order – hey, these guys aren’t about TechOps, they’re about fu*king amazing razors – I ordered my $6/mo package that would turn me in to a smoother, generally more awesome man.

Today they arrived and here is the handle and first set of blades.

The handle is weighty and very substantial feeling and I will admit – for $6 there definitely is a feeling of a surprisingly high degree of luxury… I guess that’s what you get when every other month they send you $1 worth of blades for your $6.

So, enough rhetoric… Are these razors any good…?

Yes. They glided along very happily both with and without shave gel – I thought about taking a video but nobody really wants to see me in the shower!!

I love the Dollar Shave Club. I love the concept, the simplicity, the ease and the price. They solved a problem that I (sort of) had and gave me a warm fuzzy feeling – almost that ‘new shoes’ feeling, but for my face. In fact – id like to give them more money, I hope they branch out in to providing a shave gel as well and who knows what else!

Want to sign up..?

I finally have an up to date profile on the iPhone App Cafe authors page :)

This makes me happy: Chris Maddern

I especially enjoy that we got the iPhone Wine App link in there :) Oh Search eng1nes, how you must be optim1z3d. :)

There have been a number of new systems put forward, using the MAC address, randomness shared between apps etc.. some proprietary and some open source.

From what I’ve found, the best alternative at the moment is AppsFire’s open source OpenUDID. It provides a persistent, shared-between-applications ID for the device which can be used for tracking users through purchases, ad-clicks and upgrades. It does however support the concept of ‘opting out’ (if you implement an opt-out UI), so theoretically, another Application can allow them to Opt out and providing you choose to respect this you won’t get a UDID. You do however have the source though ;)

Usage:

NSString* openUDID = [OpenUDID value];
									

Open UDID on GitHub

Feel like donating $30+ to the coffers of a company that seems not to understand that questions that begin “wouldn’t it be great if” don’t translate well to storepolicy?

This is the question that the man at the Radio Shack was all but asking me while he was explaining their iPad sales policy.

“No iPad sales without accessories”

Read the full post over at the iPhone App Cafe: Radio Shack New iPad Story!

In this case, Facebook is in a position to defend itself; but if it becomes standard practice for the dying web giants to use their massive war chests of patents to sue startups, innovation on the web will become a lot harder and much, much more expensive.

For background:

Dear Yahoo

Employing the metaphor of the Cold War for the current patent stand-off both between large old tech companies within themselves and with the smaller, nimbler, innovating ones; you just fired the warhead which leads to the destruction of the entire world.

It has been understood for some time now, that patents are very much like nuclear misles; they act largely as deterrents and defensive weapons. They are to be used against other tech companies only as a last resort and when any chance of a detente has been exhausted. They are not a resource which a company looking for new revenue streams to replace it’s former actual use of the innovation covered by these patents, can or should utilise.

Please reconsider this path – don’t ruin it for everyone.

I know the 90s had some questionable fads and awful music, but it’s still better than the entire world being blown up.

Some random guy on the Internet