iOS Development Blog

App Review: Erase It

First and foremost I have to apologize about the lack of posts. Diablo 3 has consumed my soul for the past three days. I still managed to escape Tristram long enough to write an app review submitted by one of my readers.

                  Erase It





Overall: 13 ☆ out of 20 ☆

iOS Design Decisions - Part 3

So you've released your first app, everything is going great and ready to start a new project and close this iOS chapter in your life...

Hold on just a second, come back down to earth and lets think about this. You just released a piece of software that users are now installing, using enjoying, getting frustrated with and everything else you can imagine. These people are going to be emailing you, contacting your support email address or website.



Customer relations is a huge part of being successful in the iOS market, competition is fierce and you need every edge you can get. I make it a point to reply to anyone to contacts me through my website http://www.pescribe.com within 4 hours of receiving the email. Just a simple:

"Hello I received your request and I'll be processing it soon."

You'll soon get good ratings and reviews from users, suggestions will be coming in for features, changes. Implement these! if the user is willing to make suggestions they like your app enough to use it on a daily basis. Make these changes!

This will also show future buyers that your software is not just a one and done. You can also reward feature requests or bug reports will promo codes for your app or a different app you might have. Chances are they have a friend who wouldn't mind a copy.

Morale of the story here is listen to the community and users buying your app. They're the ones who use it, give them the features they want and you'll succeed.


Cheers,

Corey

After 12 years... he finally returns.

App Review: Save Easter

iOS Design Decisions - Part 2

Formula's and calculations

With Mobile Register I'm performing a static list of calculations that only differs by what the user inputs and the choices they make.

Again I'm looking at the grocery store checkout process for the basis of my app.

First the app will total the list of items

Item1     $3
Item2     $3
Item3     $4

3 + 3 + 4

Total  = $10

Tax Rate


Now that we have a total from the items the customer wants to buy we need to do a few checks.

Is there sales tax where the item is being sold?

Yes = Total * SalesTaxRate = NewTotal
No = Total

This is a good spot to mention something that new indie developers overlook. For the basic calculation we're performing it would look something like:

(total) * (salesTaxRate) = (salesTaxAmount)
10  * .05 = .50

What if the user inputs .5 instead of .05 for the sales tax rate?
The formula is now wrong and the customer is now being taxed $ 4.5 as opposed to $.45

You need checks and balances to determine how the values are being inputted and either correct the data or pop up a message indicating how the data needs to be entered.

The idea here is check if the number is already in  the proper decimal form, if it is leave it alone, if it's a whole number divide it by 100.


Discounts


Is a discount being offered?
No = process the total amount due
Yes = calculate the discount with the process below


At some point the user will want to offer a coupon or sale wide discount. You could get fairly complex here and only apply it to certain items in the cart, we opted to just apply a discount to the total amount. It simplifies the interface and the user can just specify the amount when totaling up the customer items.

We offer two forms of discounts % or $ amount.

When the user selects discount it opens a separate view and lets them choose % or $ and then the amount.

We'll talk about the dollar one first because it's fairly straight forward, they enter the amount they want and it's just subtracted from the subtotal of the cart.

Cart Total = 10.50
Discount = .50
Total Amount Due = $10.00


When working with percentage discounts it's similar to the tax rate, you allow the user to input the amount.  You then have your checks and balances to see  how they entered the discount rate and adjust it accordingly so you can process your discount.

Cart Total = 10.50
Discount = .05 %
Total Amount Due = $10.00.


Qty


When the user is adding items to the cart they might sell more than 1 of each product so we need to calculate a qty against the sale price of the item. We do this before we start the total amount due calculation.

Summary


This really is a simple example, but I hope it shows the underlying message here. You can't assume the user knows how to use your app. You need to account for all situations and handle user input accordingly, this will ensure your apps success when the user doesn't have to think about how they input values into your app, "it just works".

Cheers,

Corey

iOS App Reviews

I'm going to start doing three iOS app reviews per week, if it starts to take off I'm thinking I'll expand it to five. So if you're a iOS developer looking to get a unbiased review by a developer send the following to:

mobileappconcepts@gmail.com

• iTunes link
• Description of the app
• Why you think I should review it
• Promo Code(s), if you send multiple I'll do a giveaway contest.

Cheers,

Corey

iOS Design Decisions - Part 1

Being an independent developer is difficult and rewarding at the same time. While developing software you really have to step back and look at all aspects with a top down approach, how the user will interact with the application, the flow of how the application works, how often it will be used, how repetitive the flow is. During these steps you will have to make some critical design decisions. When designing an app I break these down into categories and address them separately, let me show you.

When working on my most recent app Mobile Register 2.0 I had no idea how to design a point of sale system, I've never worked in retail and really was quite clueless to how this stuff worked.

First thing was I broke down my problems into categories:

• Cash register interface
• Formula's and calculations
• Data
• Customer relations

Cash register interface

Rule #1 Simple is better

If people can't figure out how your app works there will be very little adoption and frustration. With that being said, I wanted Mobile Register to look and act like a cash register. One of the biggest hurdles you'll have to deal with when doing iOS development is the screen size 480x320 pixels doesn't leave you much room.

When you go to the grocery store and are checking out all the item's you've purchased show up on the screen in a list. I took this as my Que and really the best way to list items on the iPhone is with a table view. At the same time though I couldn't just use a full screen table view, I needed a set of controls on the screen that would:

Controls that affect the current sale:

• Calculate Total
• Add Tax Rate
• Add Discount
• Add a product
• View existing products
• Email receipt

I also wanted a set of controls that would allow the user to change settings and generate reports.

• Settings Page
• Reports Page

This is what I ended up with, the buttons across the top represent the controls we've talked about but they're condense. When pushed a UIAlertview will show up asking which control the user is looking for. It's essentially works like a sub menu.

+ button controls:
Add Product
Existing Product
Add Category

Gear button controls
Settings Page
Reports Page


At the bottom I'm displaying some data to the user as well as including the rest of my controls.
When the user clicks on the discount button it opens a new view and allows them to select a cash discount or percent discount.

Importing frameworks, classes Xcode 4.3.1

First and foremost welcome to my blog, this is the first introductory post I'll be doing in a series of iOS tutorials.

In this tutorial I'll be touching on importing frameworks, classes, header files. This will be a short tutorial, the concepts here are pretty simple but can be frustrating if you're new to the iOS development world.

Let's get started!

Fire up xcode and create a new project:


I named my project "HelloWorld", use whatever naming convention you'd like.


If you open up your HelloWorldViewController.h you will see at the top it's importing:


When the import statement is incased in left and right arrow brackets "< >"
it indicates it's a system file or framework being imported.

If the import statement looks like this: