Rod On Life

I’ve been working on upgrading my apps to iOS5 and doing some Ruby programming as of lately, but I’ll be updating the site again soon.

Well, the app (ScreenTime) is in the app store and it’s doing fairly well. I had set some pretty low expectations, so I’ve been surprised to see downloads every day of the free app and a few sales already. I’ve been spending most of my time lately networking and learning the marketing game, trying a few things, and unfortunately, spending some more money.

I see the spending as paying for my own education. I hope I can make money on the app, but if I don’t, then many lessons learned. I’m doing a lot of the let work myself, though, building relationships with bloggers for my target audience, using developer groups and forums as platforms for learning what works or doesn’t for other people, and all the while trying to come up with new ideas for new apps.

Twitter has been my main source of referrals so far. The original press release did create a lot of hits to my web site, but that didn’t seem to influence the downloads much. It seems most downloads come from my followers on twitter, as far as I can tell.

I’ve also received some great feedback already from people using the app and have just released an update with some of their ideas. It’s been really fun, on top of everything.

I just ordered Learning iOS Game Programming by Michael Daley and have a project lined up with a graphic designer friend. It seems like a great idea for a kids’ game and a great way to get my feet wet into this side of iOS development.

Well, now that I have some more time, I’ll update the site a little more often with news from the app world, so stay tuned.

I’m in the final stages of development of my first iOS app and the work so far has been very challenging but fun.
It’s really a whole different deal working on something for yourself in comparison to working on a project for a company or a client.

The good so far:

It’s been a lot of fun learning a whole new language (I’ve been doing VB/C#) on a different platform. Aside from the graphics, I’m doing all the work myself, including the UI design.  My app is fairly simple since I’m not using many of the api’s in iOS, but I feel pretty comfortable with objective-c now and feel I can at least ask intelligent questions on a forum.

Working on your own stuff definitely gives you a lot of flexibility, which can be good if you’re disciplined enough to stick to a schedule and not let things slide.  I have to admit that initially I was tempted to let my other priorities get in the way, but I pushed through and got a lot of work done in a relatively short amount of time (approximately 3 months since I started).  Having the product almost done now has been very rewarding.

Having entered a whole new community of developers, I feel like a new developer again and my desire to learn received a new boost.  For the past few years I’ve felt like I “had” to keep  up with all the changes Microsoft has made to its development suite, but now I feel like I “want” to keep learning and improving my skills as a developer.

The bad so far:

First and foremost, the hours have been killer.  I can only get to work on my stuff after 9pm or 10pm on most nights, since I try to sacrifice as little time as possible away from the family.  That means going to bed between 2am and 4am some nights and waking up at 7am.  Staying healthy has taken a toll as well, lately, so I’m sure I’ll have to cut back soon (uh, right after I’m done with my first app, right?)

Working with Apple products has been specially challenging since it’s a relatively smaller community of people and resources.  I’m used to tons of materials and books and I feel it lacking somewhat for iOS (but not entirely).  I have been able to make good use of sites such as StackOverflow and iPhoneDevSDK, IRC, and many books (4 good ones so far), so there’s definitely enough to keep me going.

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I really hope to have all development completed before the end of the month and have things ready for testing on the first week of November.  It’s a little overwhelming to think how much work I still have to accomplish; finish coding, create my test group, work on the app’s website, twitter, and Facebook page, create screen cast and screen shots, and market, market, market the heck out of this thing.

I have no dreams of making it big, obviously, with this app, but I want to feel that I’ve done everything right and build a good base for future work, be it for myself or for others.