RxRick’s Blog

The iPhone has inexplicably cornered 30% of the smart phone market, quite a marketing feat for such a lousy OS. I spent a day watching some iPhone app development videos, and decided there is no way I’m getting stuck to that tar baby. The web version will just have to do for the iPhone sheeple. Blackberry is the smart phone market leader with 40%. I’ve recently had some folks tell me that the Blackberry browser does not render the web apps. So, why not, I’m a glutton for punishment. Since Blackberry is a 100% Java platform, I should be able to leverage my Android Java experience to develop a Blackberry app.

So, I download a couple of books, a video, and the Blackberry Eclipse plug in. It looks to be a pretty decent platform in the videos. Unfortunately I can’t get Eclipse to start a Blackberry project. Both the Blackberry Java plug in and the Blackberry Java SDK show up in Eclipse as being installed. However there is no Blackberry project option on the menu or in the New project options. I started a ticket on the Blackberry support forum. Another developer chimed in to say he is having the same problem. But the Blackberry people haven’t come up with a fix yet.

So much for Blackberry week one.

Android followup
About to break 300 on the download counter (299). Only 2 paid users though, lol.

I was able to track down a “force close on start” issue reported by a Canadian user. First I asked him to install aLogCat, a free Android application which reads the device log files. aLogCat also has filtering and email functionality. I asked him to filter for abpk and email me the results. Turns out he had an international phone number which started with a “+”. I had not anticipated that during my testing. So, Android crashed my app when it tried to convert the “+” into a digit. An easy fix, once I got the log files.

Web App issue
Had a user report the site crashing this week when he tried to reset his password. I was able to duplicate the error and tracked it down to a SMTP error. I haven’t looked at that code for months, having been deeply immersed in the Android project. I drew a complete blank trying to remember how SMTP worked on the web site. It felt like an Alzheimer’s moment, very frustrating, and a little scary. I started a ticket on Lunar pages, and slept on it. Lunar support was very helpful, and everything is working as it should once again. A relief, but I’m still worried about my aging brain.

Well, my app has been up for 6 days and it has been downloaded 117 times, with 82 active installs, a 70% retention rate. I think that’s pretty good. But so far there has been only one paying customer. Of the $25 I charge, google keeps $7.50, a 30% cut right off the top. No wonder those googledicks are bazillionaires. So, 6 months of work for $17.50, hmmm, not such a great return on investment. Obviously the app is useful if 70% keep it after downloading. I always thought Bayesian was the lure that brought in the paying customers, but apparently many people think they can live without it. My guess is the majority of the downloads are from pharmacy and medical students. I don’t want to charge for every download, I wouldn’t feel right charging a student. Maybe I’ll add a “please pay” nag screen with every screen change? It would be helpful if google would give you an idea of exactly who is downloading the software, where they are from, etc. But, they didn’t even give me the email address of the one person who paid for the app. So, I have no way of soliciting any user feedback.