Year: 2009

You’re now down to the last few days were you can submit your iPhone application inspired sugared creations to Antair Games’ Great Indie Bake-Off 2008:

“The rules are simple, bake something inspired by a game or app, and post a picture somewhere.”

If you’re looking for ideas of how not do do it, check out the Cake Wrecks blog.

The big news around Yummy HQ is that we’re currently beta testing the next major release. A few users have been trying it out since late last week week and most of the feedback has been positive. Of course there have been a few bugs that I’ve had to fix, but that’s the whole point of a beta test.

Over the next few weeks I’ll be discussing the new features here (so please add this website to your RSS feed or consider subscribing by email using the widget to the right of the screen) but first let’s consider how big a change is coming to iTunes and your iPhone.

The simplest measure is the number of lines of code, and by this metric Yummy 2.0 is nearly twice the size of version 1.0.3. And that’s only half the story as I have spent a lot of time replacing some verbose, automatically generated code with shorter, hand-optimised versions.

When you write an iPhone application there are two parts. The first part is traditional computer code (written in a language called Objective C). Unless you’re a programmer, none of this will make much sense to you. That’s represented in the blue blocks in the above graph. You can also do a certain amount of work by dragging and dropping bits of your user interface, much as you would with a program like Visio. That “code” is in the green.

I didn’t include the numbers, as they’re not terribly important, but the relative sizes are obvious.

Maybe a better measure is the volume of changes. This graph represents the number of lines changed between a version and it’s predecessor.

As you can see, the move to 1.0.1 and 1.0.2 was pretty significant and the fixes in 1.0.3 were much smaller. You can’t however, miss the size of the change moving to version 2.0.

Stay tuned over the next few weeks to learn what those changes look like and how they make Yummy even more useful, convenient and powerful.

In the olden days, way back in September and before, a minor update to an application would put you back in the “new application” category of the App Store which would typically result in a short-term boost in sales. Apple fixed this a while back but one thing that hasn’t changed is the rate at which users take the update.

I got an email from Apple saying that version 1.0.3 of Yummy was available for sale just shy of midnight (GMT) on Tuesday 6th January. By Thursdays sales report I saw that nearly 50% of users had already downloaded it. I’m not sure exactly when the update hit iTunes nor the cut-off time for the report, but it was at most forty-eight hours and maybe as little as twenty-four.

I’ve not seen any platform where optional upgrades are accepted so quickly.

It’s tempting to say that it’s because on the iPhone it’s both easy and free, but how hard is it to take updates for the Macintosh, Windows Update or most Linux distributions? Automatic updates are typically enabled by default but many users actively refuse them, perhaps because they don’t know what they are or what benefit they would derive from them. Of maybe it’s the perceived quality? Most people have never had an update mess up their computer, but everyone knows someone who has had problems. An iPhone application is pretty low risk. At worst you’ve broken a single program.

The explanation I like most is that I have many enthusiastic users who are dying to get the next, exciting update as soon as possible. They read this blog, follow me on Twitter and sit in iTunes pressing the “Check for updates” button trying to get their latest hit.

If you know the truth, please try not to spoil my delusion.