Saturday, February 24, 2018

How to get featured in the App Store


Getting your App featured is a big deal. Your App is easier to discover and has an endorsement from Apple. Here’s a few ideas that have worked for developers.

* No non-native App or Apps that are not exclusive to Apple are ever featured by Apple. This is one or many reasons to start with Apple first, get featured and move on to Android. 

1. Native is key. Hybrid Apps are very unlikely to be featured.

2. Bug free. There are no perfect Apps. Still you should bug test and fix as much as you can before submitting.

3. Design your App with an intelligent UI. An elegant design with minimal ease of use is critical. Build your App like Apple builds their products.

4. Your App needs to be universal for all iPads and iPhones.

5. Update your App often.

6. Pitch your App to Apple here: https://developer.apple.com//contact/app-store/promote/

7.  Follow Apple on twitter @AppStore

8. You need a creative App Icon.

9.  Create those 30 sec preview videos.

10 Your snapshots should be embedded in an Apple product like an iPhone. Apple likes that.

11. Create a video commercial and spread the word on YouTube and social media.

12. Have a great landing page, with useful snapshot, 30 second previews, well written description, good title and subtitle and effective keywords.



Monday, February 19, 2018

Augmented Reality Apps



In 1968, Professor Ivan Sutherland of Harvard University invented the first head-mounted augmented reality (AR) display.

Today augmented reality is a reality with many great Apps coming onboard. Even printed products can benefit from an augmented viewing feature to bring the printed stories and prints to life. 

The Verge has a good article on some interesting Augmented Reality Apps

ThinkMobiles has another

Even Forbes has an article if you can get through the ads.


Friday, February 16, 2018

Secret Magnifier

Having trouble reading those small labels? Can’t find that stupid magnifier the kids were playing with? No problem if you have an iPhone or iPad.

Head to Settings > General > Accessibility >  Magnifier and enable

Now simply tap on the Home Button three times and the Camera App pops up in magnifier mode.

But the iPhone X has no home button, so just swipe down from the upper right corner for accessibility and select Camera. Then pinch to zoom.




Sunday, February 11, 2018

BlockChain for Smartphone Voting

Blockchain will disrupt the smartphone industry and change the rules of politics forever. 


“What the internet did for communications, blockchain will do for trusted transactions.” 
Ginni Rometty

Our votes should be Transactions. With a distributed database of transactions there is no central database subject to hacking or insider bribery. When you vote today, do you have a traceable receipt? Do you know what happens to your vote? Do you know if it was even counted? Do you know if it was altered? There is a technology to provide for all of the above. 

So what is this strange technology? Blockchain is the foundation upon which Bitcoins was created. There is no centralized server to hack. It's unhackable for several reason: It's decentralized because it's Peer to Peer. BlockChain uses private/public key encryption on every node and verifies all nodes for each transaction.

Blockchain could change the way we vote. The vast majority of Americans – 95% own smart phones.  What if we could all vote securely for anything with our smart phones? Now that would be a game changer. That would be true people power. With 95% voting and no corruption, the rules of politics in America would change forever. 

Casting votes as blockchain transactions, the system tracks and tallies all the votes. Every voter can agree on the final count because they count the votes themselves.  There's an audit trail, and there is verification that no votes were changed or removed. Illegitimate votes are impossible. The system is un-hackable. There is no central server to hack. 

We only have to win once and the people control voting again and no politician can set the clock back to the good old days when only 50% vote and perhaps their votes counted.

Links to this subject 


https://followmyvote.com/online-voting-technology/blockchain-technology/







Wednesday, February 7, 2018

Apple says one OS for iPhone, iPad, Mac Apps

In an unconfirmed report from Bloomberg, Apple plans unifying MacOS and IOS into one operating system. That would be a big deal. How can we verify this? Seems like I've heard this before. 

Brief:
  • Apple is planning major iOS and macOS updates.
  • A single app for all Apple machines, Mac, iPad and iPhone would be great news for App developers.
  • Apple will eventually merge the Mac and iOS App Stores. No point in having both. FYI, the Mac version of the App Store has not changed since 2014. It's basically a ghost town. This would wake up that ghost town. 

Easy is Hard

Even Snapchat is struggling with how to make their App easier to use. It's the old developer's adage that Easy is Hard.

Here's an article about Snapchat and why they are struggling with Easy

Snapchat CEO wants Snapchat easier to use

Their new user increase was falling. So what do you think. Is their new UI disruptive? The idea was to separate social from media. They are having a tough time competing with Facebook’s Snapchat clone, Instagram Stories. 






Tuesday, February 6, 2018

Best Photography Tip ever


The best photography tip you will ever read anywhere is that timing is everything. That’s it.









Monday, February 5, 2018

Mobile Glidecam

You should consider a GLIDECAM. This video kind of speaks for itself.