DragonStyle

There’s an App For That

You probably have seen the ads highlighting the App Store- ‘There’s an App for That.’ I’ve seen a ton of them, and one of the greatest things about them is that they aren’t lying. There really is an app for that.

There are now more than 17,000 applications available in the App Store. 17,706 to be precise. Each day, iPhone users can choose among 15 new games, 7 new utilities, 9 new entertainment applications, or 3 new productivity applications. 73 new applications appear in the App Store every day.

Want to track your finances? Mint.com. Need to lose some weight? Lose It! Like to shop for deals? WootWatch. Bored? Slotz. Like to work out? Runkeeper. Need to have dinner delivered? GrubHub. There are apps for just about everything.

Total # of Apps in the App Store

 

# of Apps submitted each day

 

Categories

Looking at the applications in the store, it is clear that the iPhone is an entertainment device. Games and Entertainment application make up more than a third of the applications in the store and typically dominate the top 100 applications in the store. In fact, Games and Entertainment make up nearly 50% of the most popular applications in the store. 

Distribution of Applications by Category

 

Category trend – % of application in each category each month

 

Growth of the top 5 categories

 

Pricing

While the low price approach of the App Store has continued, I think that the new headline should be ‘99 cents is the new free.’ The downward price trend continues, but most interestingly, but the percentage of applications that are free continues to decline. In fact, soon only 1 in 5 applications in the App Store will be free.

Average price of an application by month

 

Distribution of Applications by Price

 

Paid vs. Free App by Month

 

# of Applications by price over time

 

Summary

New SmartPhones (G1, Storm, Pre, etc…) are showing up pretty regularly now. They’re still working on catching the iPhone as far as its integration and slick user experience. The fact that the App Store is continuing to grow at such a torrid pace is bad news for these competitors. Because each new application is a potential reason for a customer to choose the iPhone and each new customer is a reason for a developer to build an application for the iPhone. This virtuous circle is creating tremendous advantage for the iPhone- it’ll make it incredibly difficult to catch Apple, once again.

 

If you’re interested in doing some analysis yourself, here is my latest raw data (csv).

Can Anyone Explain This?

I’ve been using Outbrain on my blog for a few weeks and I’ve been generally very happy with it. It is well integrated, visually attractive, and provides a real value in the ability to see reader’s ratings of my posts. It also usually does a pretty good job at making recommendations, but as I was replying to a comment on a post about the iPhone, I noticed the following recommendations.

 

WTF? Real Muscle Online? I’m not sure I get how that is likely to apply...

Brown Zune, Windows Live Writer, and My MacBook Pro

I’m more than a month into my conversion to a Mac, and so far I’ve adjusted nicely. The largest issue for me was the fact that I didn’t know any shortcut keys, so I was using the mouse a lot more than I’m used to. I’m overcoming that, though I desparately miss ctrl+tab to switch between windows of the current application.

There are two applications that I haven’t been able to give up in my transition, however.

Application #1 is Zune. Yeah, I said it. I’m not being a MS fanboy- Zune is a truly great application (the interface is far superior to iTunes, really not even comparable), but it also has subscription music, which is a huge money saver for me (I waste a lot less money buying music that I end up getting sick of or not liking at all). So enjoy the rich irony of Zune running on my MacBook Pro, and my horrible brown Zune docked to the awesomely great looking laptop.

 

The second application is, of course, Windows Live Writer. I actually spent the first week or so on the Mac without installing Writer, and it was just too painful. Trying to use the web interface was a complete non starter, and there was simply no comparison between other editors out there (ok, now I’m being biased). A quick VMWare and Windows XP install later and I’m running Writer on my Mac, using Unity to create a first class experience.  

 

The transition was really smoothed by the addition of VMware- anytime I need to I can simply open up Windows and do what I need to do (I ended up installing Visual Studio there so I can whip up quick utility apps in C#, for example). to any windows users getting ready to make the jump, I can definitely give you two pieces of advice from my experience:

1. The Mac experience is sweet. The OS is nice, the hardware and software are beautiful, and everything does really just work. I’d recommend it.
2. Invest in VMWare Fusion. For the small additional cost of of a VMware license, you can keep your Windows apps around, and have a fall back plan in case you need to do something that just requires Windows.

Transition, Part 1

So I’m going through a bit of a transition in my life (more about this later). As a part of this transition, the focus of this blog is going to change. It remains my personal weblog, but rather than mostly playing around with features of Windows Live Writer, I’ll be doing a bit more writing about my current technical interests. Top of the list is the iPhone (I know, I should get in line).

Stay tuned for more on the rest of the transition!

Google Reader Shared Items

When I first started blogging on Typepad, I actually mostly reposted stuff from the internet that caught my eye. Lately, of course, this blog has served mostly as a test best for new things that we’re doing in Windows Live Writer. But I haven’t forgotten that it is useful to have a lightweight way to track interesting stuff.

Enter Google Reader. I’m now marking stuff shared, and you can head over to my shared items page if you’re interested in knowing about what I find interesting…

 

Technorati Tags: Google Reader

IPhone

Are you jealous yet? Last weekend I headed out to pick up an iPhone, and it really was a good investment. I was rolling with a Razr prior to the iPhone, and I definitely didn’t feel the need to pickup a ‘Smart Phone,’ but I was right to invest in the iPhone.

There are 2 categories of impact that the iPhone has:

The Internet in your pocket

This is impactful in exactly the same way it was impactful to have the internet running to your house. Anytime anywhere access to email, maps, Google, and all that.

Obsolete the laptop

I mostly used my laptop for checking email, surfing the web, and playing a simple game or two. Of course in a pinch I could also develop on it, write documents, and more. While I won’t be dealing with a spreadsheet, a word doc, or Visual Studio on my iPhone anytime soon, it is awesome for email and the web. My laptop has come out of its bag once in the last week. Once.

Technorati Tags: iPhone

Writing Plug-ins Article in CoDe Magazine

Scott Lovegrove put together a good article describing how to writer a plug-in for Windows Live Writer. Make sure you check it out!

ContentSource plugins are very basic plugins and will only insert text into the blog entry. You can edit SmartContentSource plugins’ content again at a later time.

From CoDe Magazine.

 

Technorati Tags: Windows Live Writer,Plug-ins

 

[edit: fixed link to code Magazine- thanks Jose!]

Page Support in Windows Live Writer

A feature in Writer that not everyone knows about (yet :) ) is it's support for publishing pages. This support is (to my knowledge) currently limited to Wordpress and Typepad. Writer does use the Wordpress API for publishing pages, so any other providers out there that would like to add support just need to implement the page portion of the API and then use the Writer Provider API to notify Writer that pages are supported.

If you are using Wordpress or Typepad today, you are in luck- here is a quick tour of pages in Windows Live Writer.

Firefox 3.0 Beta 2

I've been playing with Firefox 3.0 Beta 2 at home. The feature list that I saw circulating on the yet was actually kind of a yawner, IMO, but I have to say there are a couple things that I absolutely love about it.

1) It is really, really fast. Pages render extremely quickly and the application itself starts extremely fast. This feature alone makes me stop using old versions of Firefox.

2) When you start typing a URL, you are greeted not by a lame combo box style drop down of your URL history, but with this excellent piece of UI:

Once again, it is a little tiny thing, but it is really a huge improvement over the old style combo box. It is much easier to pick out the URL that you are looking for, and as a result, what used to be a useless distraction becomes a useful shortcut.

3) It is currently called 'Minefield', but it is really pretty darn high quality. I have had very few problems using it as my everyday browser. It downloads an update seemingly every day, which is also great, since I am beta testing.

 

Technorati Tags: Firefox 3.0

Google Charting API

How cool is this?

The Google Chart API lets you dynamically generate charts. To see the Chart API in action, open up a browser window and copy the following URL into it:

http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=lc&chs=200x125&chd=s:helloWorld

Press the Enter or Return key and - presto! - you should see the following image:

 

Very cool. In fact, just from reading the documentation, twiddling the URL, and using an IMG tag, here is a readymade graph for this post.

 

It's joke, in case you don't get it. [Originally from here]