(via tuaw) tap tap tap, developers of a number of popular iPhone apps, recently posted an entry on their in-house blog about how they made their most recent launch, Camera+, succeed in the App Store. According to the company, the classy photography app launched very successfully, making over $250,000 in the first month of sales.
If you haven’t played with an iPad yet I highly recommend it. It’s surprising how much more fun it is to use than a laptop or regular mobile device. Even the iPhone feels quite boring by comparison. To give you some ideas Apple has created a site profiling some of the better 3rd party iPhone apps, with videos, recommended viewing.
Thanks to all the users who wrote in about the Doris crashes after updating to iOS4, a new binary was uploaded to Apple last night and should be with you shortly! Thanks for your patience.
There was an issue with the new Yahoo login feature on our Read Later app, this is now fixed since our latest update went live in the App Store last night.
Yahoo had changed the HTML on their login page which we scrape to allow for easy logins from our app. The fix, which consisted in changing one line of HTML, took over a week to be accepted by Apple!
Apologies for the inconvenience.
On May 4th we released a major update for our My High Street app. At last you can view your favourites brands and retailers within the app, no need to quit out into the Maps app.
Also we added the ability to search by brand or retailer. Rather than having to scroll through the hundreds of High Street brands stored within the app, simply pull down the categories list and type in your search, just a few letters are needed to bring up the relevant results.
Here’s a full list of the new features and improvements in version 1.3:
On April 8th 2010 we released a major update for our Read Later iPhone app. Users will happy to hear you can now login to the app either with your Yahoo ID, or a Delicious ID.
As some users may be aware, in the last few months Delicious has changed its account creation policy and now you may only create new accounts using a Yahoo ID. Existing Delicious accounts are still functional, and those users may optionally migrate their account to be Yahoo ID based.
Some other exciting features that made it into this release:
I got a chance yesterday to put together a brief list of some of the iPhone apps we’ve developed recently, check it out:
http://seagullsystems.com/services/iphone-development/our-customer-apps/
You can also get more information about our in-house apps and how to get a quote here:
http://seagullsystems.com/services/iphone-development/
If you’re a customer here’s some information on locating your UDID, which you’ll need if you want to install an Ad Hoc build we provide you.
Check out the Feb 2010 issue of T3, in their 60 Best iPhone Apps feature you’ll find our My High Street app as one of the 4 finalists in the shopping section. Thanks guys!
We’d like to thank all our customers and partners for a great year and we wish you all the best in health and happiness for 2010. Thanks for your continued interest and support and stay tuned in 2010 for some great new products we’ll be announcing.
Season’s Greetings!
Here is a vital piece of information that doesn’t seem to be on the web anywhere. Have you ever modified campaign/banner settings and had to wait ages before the effects were visible? Twenty minutes even 
Twenty minutes is the default cache timeout, a setting you can easily change while setting up your campaigns.
During testing to you can set the cache timeout value to some low value like 1 second so that effectively the cache doesn’t get used. That’s at Global Settings > Banner Delivery Settings > Time Between Banner Cache Updates (seconds).
Just a quick note to our OpenX customers, we can confirm that the companion positioning issues have been resolved in OpenX 2.8.1, so please upgrade to fix the problem, or let us know and we’ll be happy to do the upgrade for you.
As some of our techie users will have guessed, we’ve had an API (Application Programming Interface) for Doris working for some time now, that’s the reason you can use a range of clients (iPhone, Dashboard widget, Opera widget) to access and update your account data.
But starting today we’ve made the API publicly available, see for yourself by checking out the Doris API documentation.
What does this mean for all users? It means you now have total control over your data and can use it exactly how you like. With the help of a developer you can write custom programs to use Doris data in new and exciting ways.
What does this mean for developers? It means you can now create Doris-based applications and/or integrate Doris with your existing development workflow.
We’re excited to see what ideas our users come up with and judging by the amount of requests over at Uservoice, I’m anticipating a healthy response.
If you have any questions, ideas or bug reports please drop us a line at the usual place.
The folks over at Betavine/Vodafone interviewed me several weeks ago thanks to our second place results in the Betavine widget contest.
We had of course hoped to win the contest with our Doris widget but were very pleased with second place results, there were a lot of great competitors.
Read the Betavine interview here.
Read later finally went live in the AppStore last Saturday. Took a bit longer than expected, but that’s Apple for you
Read Later is targeted at heavy Delicious.com users who want to keep track of their favourite web finds and don’t always have time to read everything they bookmark.
Simply add the bookmark of your choice on Delicious to signify that an article must be read later, eg, to_read, and let Read Later load up all your articles for easy reading on the iPhone, offline if needed.
All web content is cleaned up for easy reading, ie banners and ads are stripped, as are images.
UPDATE: it’s already #21 in the Japanese AppStore!
Betavine Widget Competition
We almost won, but second place is not too bad so we’re really happy with the Betavine results!
Two months ago we entered the Betavine competition which asked mobile developers to build widgets for devices based on the S60 platform using the Opera widget runtime.
You can check out the Doris mobile widget on the Doris Integration page.
When we launched Doris back in Oct 2008, of course we were nowhere to be found in Google. After a few months we were comfortably in the top 10 results for “doris”.
So to overtake Doris Day and claim the #1 spot is quite a proud moment – thanks to all our users for helping make Doris a success!
We’ve had the Seagull Systems site totally redone. In the new version you’ll find details of our iPhone development work, our new products: Doris, My High Street and Read Later, and some new services we’ll be offering.
In the weeks to come we’ll be adding more details about the new service offerings about additional products set to launch.
We also had the logo redone, hope you like it as much as we do!
Our latest iPhone app, Read later, was submitted to the AppStore last week and will go live any day now.
The app is targeted at heavy Delicious.com users who want to keep track of their favourite web finds and don’t always have time to read everything they bookmark.
Simply add the bookmark of your choice on Delicious to signify that an article must be read later, eg, to_read, and let Read Later load up all your articles for easy reading on the iPhone, offline if needed.
All web content is cleaned up for easy reading, ie banners and ads are stripped, as are images.
After some preparation, the public beta for Doris was finally announced yesterday! We’ve had some great feedback so far, and are scrambling to keep up with feature requests already coming in. Some interesting enhancements on the near horizon:
We also will be putting together a top requested features page, and implement new stuff according to demand.
Keep the feedback coming in and let us know if you experience any probs with your account. Thanks for checking us out!
I didn’t get a chance yet to blog about our last TechCrunching, but Kindo, the startup I co-founded in March 2007, today announced its sale to MyHeritage, the biggest player in the family tree space.
Kindo is a PHP social net app built on our Seagull framework and other open source software. At peak popularity our users were building 38k profiles/day and we acquired more than 1m profiles in our first 10 weeks.
Hats off to the Kindo team on this great achievement.
