Taco Loco is an app that finds mobile taco vendors near you. Taco Loco locates taquerías without a permanent address such as trucks, carts, and stands – they often have the most authentic flavors. Simply fire up the app on your iPhone or iPod touch, and you’ll immediately see nearby taco trucks on the map.
Marco Arment, the lead developer of Tumblr and creator of Instapaper, wrote a great article on how the App Store is really two different stores. He doesn’t say it, but it’s really Wal-Mart and L.L. Bean in the same store. One is focused on low prices and volume while the other is focused on quality.
Marco uses Ramp Champ as an excellent case study in how to approach these two stores. Shortly after this article was published, Gedeon Maheux and the team at Iconfactory updated Ramp Champ’s description and images in the App Store. I’m not a fan of the way they choose to update the images. The compositions they choose look good within iTunes.
Ramp Champ's App Store presence
But, they reduce the level of detail potential buyers are able to see. The Iconfactory put a lot of effort into their art and now with the revised images which are collages of different screenshots, they’re short-selling that work. It gets even worse than that when viewing the new images on the iPhone.
Screenshot collages are often painful to view on the device
The Iconfactory should go back to using full screenshots to display their artwork. But, taking the advice that Marco laid out in his article, they must pay more attention to the order their screens appear in. Clown Town is easily the most reminiscent of Skee-ball and carnival games of this sort and should get top billing rather than the ramp select screen as in the past.
Clown Town should be Ramp Champ's primary screenshot
The first two ramps in Ramp Champ are definitely the most visually appealing and evocative of the carnival aesthetic – and I bet Iconfactory planned this. So, it’s definitely Breakwater Bay that should come second. To the shoppers in the App Store, seeing a second ramp would reinforce the variety that Ramp Champ has over Skee-ball and other games.
Breakwater Bay is also bright and colorful – providing contrast to Clown Town
Now it is time to let the audience know about the hooks to the game. Why would they want to play it for more than a day or two? Because they get to redeem their tickets for cool loot!
Loot worked for World of Warcraft
OK, so they can cash in their tickets for loot. But, what if they’re looking for some more meaningful rewards? Show them the trophies they can get for different achievements on the various ramps.
Maybe they should get this shot from someone that's better at the game
What if they really want a game that they can come back to weeks or months later? The deeper the potential customer goes through the screenshots before making a decision probably correlates well with how deep they want to be able to go within the game. So, the final screenshot is when Ramp Champ should prove it is in it to win it.
Extend your play as you need to – for less than a game of real Skee-ball
My 19 month old daughter loves playing with our iPhones. Too much. So, when I am not using my iPod touch for developmental purposes, it’s hers. This got me thinking about some apps that would be good for her. Apps that could function as learning tools for her rather than just playing another round of Super Monkey Ball. My second app is the first app along this line of thinking.
It’s called Fun Calc and right now it is a calculator with very colorful buttons that entice her to touch them. When she does they respond with a cheerful chime corresponding to the button she tapped. On the iPhone, tapping the clear button will make the phone vibrate. As a side note, I hope Apple adds vibration to the third generation iPod touch – it’s really needed now that the iPod touch has become a game platform in its own right. I’ve got some ideas for improvements to future versions of Fun Calc which, of course, will all be free upgrades.
My thought is that the iPod touch is about $200 which is only twice as much as some of the nicer children’s notebook computers like the Vtech Touch Tablet PC. It’s got a much nicer screen and has a speaker that is probably just as good if not better. She can also watch WALL-E on trips to her grandparents’ house with the iPod unlike any of the children’s computers. And, most importantly, it has an interface that is very intuitive for young children because it is so direct. As evidence of this, I recorded a video of my daughter playing with Fun Calc on the iPod.
I’ve been working on a few iPhone apps lately, and I just had my first one approved for sale on the iTunes Store. Curiously, this isn’t the first application I started working on. But, it is a concept that kept coming to mind as I was working on my other app and learning iPhone development. I took Daniel Jalkut’s advice and started working on this smaller app as my first one for the App Store. There is more to come!
Please check it out and let me know what you think.
Here is the description of Shuffle Dialer as it reads on the iTunes Store:
Do you ever find yourself losing touch with friends or family? Why don’t you do something about it? With Shuffle Dialer you can reach out and touch somebody… at random! It’s a great way to reconnect with people that you care about.
Shuffle Dialer calls the contacts already on your iPhone and will even allow you to limit shuffling to a particular group of contacts. You can also tell Shuffle Dialer how many seconds to countdown before dialing.
On the iPod touch, Shuffle Dialer makes a great toy application for young children. My one and a half year old daughter loves pretending to call people with it. She hears the ring tones as it dials and a friendly “Hello?” on the other end of the line. iPhone users can enter this mode by turning the dialing switch off in the settings.
On the Mac, I love using Apple’s unit converter Dashboard widget. I have wanted something like that for my iPhone, but I haven’t seen anything that looked as easy to use… until now.
Unit conversion on the Mac is easy with this Dashboard widget
Tapbots has released their new application Convertbot [app store link] – and it is great. You can tell they really focused on the user experience before they ever started up Xcode. You’ll use the (now almost instinctive in humans) iPod touch wheel motion to select the conversion units for whatever you’re converting. Then, you tap on the read-out to bring up a number pad for entering what you need to convert. That’s about it.
Selecting categories is as easy as selecting a song on an iPod classic (click the image for a slideshow)
Tapbots has a great demo on their Convertbot page. I encourage you to actually watch their demo movie rather than just the animated iPhone on their site. The animation seemed confusing to me at first, but their demo explains everything and really shows how easy to use Convertbot is.
The only fault I can find with this app is that it seems like it should start up faster than it does. It may be waiting to update currency exchange rates before displaying the interface. Don’t get me wrong, though, it doesn’t take as long as some games do – I can’t count to “Three-Mississippi” before it is ready.
