When I wrote my ten-part series on making your own app marketing videos, one of the first things I recommended was avoiding live footage. Take shots from the iOS Simulator, place them on top of still frames of iPhones and iPads, and animate them in Final Cut. Super easy to get professional looking results. Live footage is very difficult to get right on a budget. Without professional lighting rigs and a good bit of expertise about how to shoot properly, the results could be devastatingly amateurish. But there are some…

One thing that has bugged me since I got my first 4-inch iPhone is the “thumb gymnastics” involved whenever I need to reach a control that’s near the top of the screen. You know what I mean. Holding the phone one-handed, touching controls with my thumb, I can reach the top left and right corners of the screen for those navigation bar controls, but it’s not exactly comfortable. I can’t fix this issue for every app on my phone of course, but for my own apps at…

I surprised myself last week by working up yet another new version of x2y. I thought it would be a few months before I had a chance to finish up the optimizations and polishing I wanted to do for 1.5. But another project required me to do some research into animation in UIKit, and thus I couldn’t resist bringing some of that fun into x2y as well. A short while ago, Foster from Mysterious Trousers wrote a nice piece about the “visceral” elements of some apps. The little…

While following the conversation about Status Board yesterday, I saw a tweet that made my jaw drop. @viticci It just doesn’t seem right morally, even if they say it’s built for “professionals”. — Jack Amick (@jackamick) April 10, 2013 I don’t mean to single this guy out, or anything. But do I really need to explain why this is downright ludicrous? There is only one circumstance under which a price can be “immoral.” That is if the good being sold is both 1) Absolutely necessary for survival and…

Today I’m launching my first iOS app, x2y. While I’ve collaborated on many apps with my partners at Bombing Brain Interactive, this is the first app developed entirely by yours truly and published under my own name. x2y solves an old and common problem. You have an image or other media file, and you need to display it at a different size than the original. But when resizing the image, you need to be careful to keep the aspect ratio consistent, so that your media doesn’t get…