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Buffalo Wings is a Flappy Bird clone and 'a fun little family experiment'
After Dong Nguyen pulled Flappy Bird from the App Store, Tapity developer Jeremy Olson decided the time was right for him to learn how to produce a game and explore what makes Flappy Bird so popular. Instead of a solo project, Olson decided to make it a group effort and involve his family members in the development process. It was as Olson writes "an opportunity to take a break from our daily routine and do a fun experiment." After a few weeks of work, this experiment today launched in the iOS App Store as Buffalo Wings. Rather than duplicate Flappy Bird, Olson and Tapity UI Designer Christain Billings decided to replace the bird with an 8-bit buffalo character, which was whipped up by his ten-year-old brother in just ten minutes. The Buffalo Wings app shares the same gameplay as Flappy Bird, requiring you to tap on the screen to keep your buffalo from plummeting to the ground as you fly in between pipes. The mechanics are similar to Flappy Bird, with the jagged shape of the buffalo adding some challenge to the game. As work on the app progressed, Olson recruited his younger brother to help and taught him the basics of Objective C coding. His father provided the audio, while his sister researched the silly buffalo facts. Other family members were involved in the testing of the app, helping Olson tweak the physics so the game was hard, but not too hard. The challenge of the gameplay is where Olson nailed it. There's a nice balance in Buffalo Wings -- it's hard enough to be challenging, but not so hard that you throw your hands up in frustration (at least not all the time). As you make your way through the game, you are rewarded with silly buffalo facts that occasionally will make you laugh out loud. The graphics are polished for an 8-bit game, and the gameplay is every bit as addicting as Flappy Bird. Buffalo Wings is available for free in the iOS App Store. It is compatible with the iPhone and requires iOS 7.0 or later. There are in-game ads, but they are barely noticeable and don't interfere with gameplay.
In-app purchases may [not] be the way of the future
iOS app developer Jeremy Olson of Tapity has written an interesting article on how developers can survive selling apps and yep, paid apps are dead. (Tapity wrote Languages, Grades 3 and Hours, all available in the App Store.) Olson cites anecdotal evidence that people are not buying apps in the quantities today as they did even a year ago. App downloads are healthy, but the ability to survive as an independent developer is in flux. In-app purchases make up one revenue stream that has worked well for some, but there's still no guarantee of success. Olson cites a tweet from David Barnard of Contrast that lists "the four main factors that work together in a good IAP strategy: massive download numbers, high conversion rates, high prices and [recurring] revenue." Olson goes on to cite sales figures for Barnard's and his own apps. Olson continues that he doesn't think IAPs (in-app purchases) are the answer for his company. ...we might need to think bigger and more creatively about how our apps generate revenue. It means we might need to start thinking about business models that go beyond charging users for the app. He ponders the model of selling his apps to companies who might purchase them for corporate use, or include web and Mac integration. That, of course, means he needs a sales force and marketing, a whole 'nother can of worms in this writer's opinion. Olson thinks that if he thinks bigger, then he has a better chance of survival as an app developer. Maybe he's just falling into Apple's adage, Think Different...
A designer responds to iOS 7
As has been said many times by many people, including Tim Cook, iOS 7 is the biggest change to iOS since the original iPhone launched way back in 2007. With iOS 7, Apple has re-calibrated much of what we've grown accustomed to seeing in previous versions of iOS. iOS 7 introduces a vastly revamped UI and, of course, let's not forget about those curiously designed icons. Not wanting to haphazardly throw his hat into the firestorm of opinion that first surrounded the debut of iOS 7, Jeremy Olson of Tapity decided to use iOS 7 as his main OS for at least a week before jumping to any conclusions. With over a week gone by, Olson's take away is that iOS 7 rather nice, albeit with some areas that are in need of refinement and improvement. Despite my initial fears, I actually really enjoy using iOS 7 on a daily basis. I still have some complaints about several visual design choices but you have to remember, Apple has only been working on this for a matter of months. That's pretty insane. I mean, it takes us at least a year to put out a single app, let alone an entire operating system! So give them a break. I talked to a number of folks at Apple. They understand that this thing isn't finished yet and they want our feedback... It's only going to get better. Olson also talked to some folks who work with Apple, along with "leaders in the app community" to coalesce a few thoughts, one of which is that apps that embrace Apple's new design aesthetic "will have an edge over apps that don't." Indeed, this is a sentiment echoed by Marco Arment who wrote the following the day after iOS 7 was introduced: Apple has set fire to iOS. Everything's in flux. Those with the least to lose have the most to gain, because this fall, hundreds of millions of people will start demanding apps for a platform with thousands of old, stale players and not many new, nimble alternatives. If you want to enter a category that's crowded on iOS 6, and you're one of the few that exclusively targets iOS 7, your app can look better, work better, and be faster and cheaper to develop than most competing apps. Apple has indeed set fire to iOS, and in a post that's worth checking out in its entirety, Olson discusses many of the challenges and opportunities for app developers looking to get their hands dirty with iOS 7.
Languages offers offline translation for the iPhone
Today, Tapity -- maker of the iRadio and iTranslate apps for iOS -- is launching Languages, an all-new translation app that works regardless of an internet connection. Because it doesn't rely on an internet connection like some translation apps, Languages can provide instant results for your queries. The app offers English translations of Spanish, German, French, Italian, Dutch, Portugese and Swedish, as well as other options such as French to Italian and German to Spanish. You can download the app right now from the App Store for 99 cents.
iBook Lessons: Can an iBooks-only strategy work?
iBook Lessons is a continuing series about ebook writing and publishing. One question I keep encountering is this: "If iBooks Author is so great, can I make enough money selling only through Apple and only to iPad owners to stay in business?" The answer to that is that results will vary. Can you add enough value in an iBooks Author presentation to justify leaving out a large segment of the ebook market? Using proprietary formats, the iBooks Author app allows you to lay out your books and add custom elements in ways that go well beyond the EPUB standard. Your books look exactly as you intend them to; you can build interactive widgets that leverage the power of HTML and Javascript for new kinds of interaction. This extended standard means that iBooks Author excludes Amazon's Kindle and Barnes & Noble's Nook platforms, and it also cuts away anyone who might purchase and read your ebook on an iPhone or iPod touch. iBooks Author in its current state is Apple only and iPad only. [Note that you're free to repurpose your text, images and other content for those other platforms if you want to build Kindle/Nook-friendly editions. The iBooks Author licensing agreement says you can't sell the output from iBooks Author anywhere but the Apple iBookstore, but your content is yours and you can use other tools to build for other ebook platforms. –Ed.] That's not the entire picture, however. For some authors, specifically those creating highly-interactive titles, their choice hasn't really been about Amazon-or-iBooks, since standard EPUB represents a fairly static output technology. Their decision is more about choosing between an iBooks Author ebook versus a custom, standalone iPad app. I have encountered book creators who have gone in both directions. iOS development house Tapity chose to go iBooks. Founder Jeremy Olson told me, "To build an interactive digital book, our choice of platforms was really straightforward. Kindle doesn't yet allow the kind of rich interaction that we were looking to build so it was really between building an app versus building an iBook. When iBooks Author was announced in January, the choice was a no-brainer: It's pretty simple: cost to build, time to build, price you can charge, and less competition." Tapity's first entry to this field was Cleaning Mona Lisa. An interactive iBook, it introduced readers to painting techniques and the need for restoration. Host Lee Sandstead offers a series of enthusiastic lectures about the topic through embedded videos. Interactive widgets guide readers through virtual "cleaning" exercises, revealing the hidden colors and details hidden by the debris of time. "As a team of creatives, building Cleaning Mona Lisa with iBooks Author cost us next to nothing but our time," Olson said. "Just a few thousand dollars. I expect building an app with the same kind of user experience could have cost us close to a hundred thousand dollars to contract out the programming. This makes building iBooks far less risky than building apps." He pointed out how effective this choice was. "Programming a project generally consumes half or more of the development time. With iBooks Author, we design it and it's done (apart from just a few small HTML 5 widgets we had to program). This also cuts out the process of designing something in Photoshop and exporting it for use in an app." Going iBooks also helped sustain the book's bottom line for sales. "With apps, $2.99 is a premium price. With books, folks expect to pay more and so $2.99 was an extremely reasonable starting price for our book. With future books we think that we can even charge much more. With higher prices we don't have to worry about the volume so much." Monster Costume CEO Kyle Kinkade opted for a custom app instead. Having debuted in the ebook scene with the highly popular Bartleby's Book of Buttons, Monster Costume is known for producing high-quality, extremely interactive titles with a strong attention to detail. "We do books as applications," he explained, "Because, frankly, there's no platform that's mature enough yet to support the kind of interaction we create. If iBooks Author could produce the level of what we wanted it to do, we'd use it in a heartbeat. The problem is that it can't handle the demands we put on an interactive book." For Monster Costume, iBooks Author's Keynote-esque toolset -- intended for ease of use and book production by non-programmers -- doesn't deliver the level of interactivity or customizability needed. The company builds its own proprietary book development tools in-house. "We can handle logic way better than iBooks Author, and we can handle high-level scripting," Kinkade said. "We provide finely detailed interaction as well. We can adjust ourselves and our engines to a much higher level of graphical horsepower, too. In comparison, iBooks doesn't provide the horsepower or the finesse that we need for our projects." Monster Costume is currently working on The Adventures of Tyler Washburn. Kinkade told TUAW, "For Washburn, the title we're building now, we just couldn't have done it in iBooks. That degree of graphics and interaction simply does not exist in the tools that Apple has provided." Economically, building in-house tools has been an investment in the future. "The cost of development for our engine was extremely high," Kinkade explained. "Using that engine for future titles will be at a far lower cost now that we've created it. We are in talks with various content producers and publishing companies right now to license those tools, to let them do what we do." Choosing to go in or out of the iBookstore represents another point of difference between developers. For Olson, iBooks is a positive. "The iBookstore is a new marketplace and iBooks Author books are an even newer phenomenon. That means that Apple loves to promote great examples of innovation on the platform and it's easier to get on their radar. It also takes fewer sales to get high up in the charts," he said. "So did we make the right choice? Absolutely. No regrets. Our iBook peaked at the #12 book in the iBookstore and was the #1 app in Arts & Entertainment for over two weeks. Sales are definitely not on the same scale as the App Store but they don't have to be because we charge more than what we would for an app and sales are good. We think we can find ways to make these iBooks even more efficiently and you can definitely expect more iBooks from us in the future." Kinkade prefers the App Store. "We've found that the iBookstore gets way less traffic than the traditional App Store. So we get the advantage by positioning our books with the apps. The only negative is that it's harder to get featured as a book in the App Store -- although we did. It was just hard as hell."
