Guest post: Miso Strobe Tuner: The Lessons We Learned When Marketing

The Miso Strobe Tuner is one of the first applications that we came out with at Miso Media.  It really is a great app if you are a musician.  The design of the our tuner is great, and it does exactly what it is supposed to do, which is tune an instrument.  When we looked at other companies that had apps directly competing against us, we thought we were the clear leader, which is why we were confused about our lack of sales.  We had a great product, at an insanely low price, and no one was buying it.  Well, we started doing some tests, and our sales and revenue started to climb.  We continue to split test and optimize to this day.  Here are some of the lessons that we have learned:

miso strobe tuner icon

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Making a cross-platform game in two weeks

In today’s post I would like to share with you my experience working on my first cross-platform game. Although it is intended to be available for Windows Phone, iOS and Android, currently I’m focused on the Windows Phone version.

The game is called Muster my Monsters (MmM). It is a two-player fighting monsters action game. It is a casual game, so game mechanics need to be simple and art appealing to most of people. Here you have a gameplay video.

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FacebookScorer – Post highscores to user’s Facebook Wall

Today’s post is an update for an old article about posting high scores to Facebook Wall. Some users have reported some issues about this class. There were some problems with the state control when authorization was needed.

Today I will like to post a new version of the class that solves these issues. The project is now called FacebookScorer and you can find it on GitHub.

Facebook icon_big

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Guest post: The Making of Pigeons Attack with Cell SDK

Pigeons Attack was born as a sample to show how the accelerometer API works. You move forward and backward –tilting your phone- your just washed car in order to avoid pigeons get it dirty. Once the semaphore becomes green, leave quickly the scene to check how many impacts you had. The less you have the better.

Within the following sections you will be guided through the development process, starting from a new Cell SDK project.

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In-App web browser control for iOS apps

In today’s post I would like to share with you a little piece of code. If you need to integrate in-app web browser control into your iPhone apps, this handy module will save you some time.

There are already some solutions to this problem out there but non of them offers the features I needed. First, the solution I present in this article uses a work-around for the well-known UIWebView bug that causes erratic behavior when combining “zooming operations” and “landscape orientation”. Moreover, the solution presented is highly customizable.

I have called it TSMiniWebBrowser. You can download the source code at the end of the article.

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Game Theory Applied: the puzzle of designing a puzzle game

Today’s post is going to be the fourth in the series “Game Theory Applied”. You have the previous ones here:

Today I would like to talk about the tricky concepts around puzzles and puzzle-based games like New Sokoban. Puzzles are often considered to not be games at all. This means that designing a video-game entirely based on puzzles implies some issues that need to be addressed to minimize the inherent problems that puzzles have and maximize their benefits. We will see it applied to New Sokoban, a puzzle-solving game.

Game Theory Applied: puzzle games

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A Twitter reusable class. iOS 5.0 ready with iOS 4.x retrocompatibility

Today I would like to share with you a little but useful class to post highscores  to Twitter on your games. This tutorial is the perfect companion for the Facebook one I wrote some weeks ago. It basically adds a new abstraction layer to the MGTwitterEngine from Matt Gemmel and the OAuth Twitter Engine from Ben Gottlieb providing the needed UI to send tweets to the user timeline.

The tutorial also shows how to figure out the iOS version and use the Apple’s Twitter API for iOS 5 if available.

You can download the entire project at the end of the article.

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Guest post: Creating Opuss

by Jeff Hodnett (@jeffhodnett)

Opuss is a new service that i’ve been working on with Adam Neilson(@adamneilson) and Chris Knight(@chrisknight2) for the past 2 or so months. It’s a new and exciting way to read, write and share all the best words in the World.

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The pressure of money

In today’s post I would like to share with you some thoughts about surviving as an indie iOS developer. I started my iOS journey in August 2009 with the development of paintingWalls. However, I went full-time indie one year later, on August 2010. So currently, I’m living from the incomings produced by the apps you can see in the Projects page of this blog.

money

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