Mobile Orchard Podcast

Oceanhouse Media has an enviable track record: For almost the entire lifetime of the App Store they’ve consistently had a handful of apps in the top-100. Their apps beat the averages for both volume and unit price; in fact, they won’t build an app unless they can sell five to ten thousand units at $4 to $7 each. Just before the holidays they landed the license to create apps under the “Dr. Suess” brand; their Grinch themed Christmas offerings were a hit and were widely covered by CNN, CNET and others. In this interview, I speak with Michel Kripalani, Oceanhouse’s founder and President, about the plan behind their success.

Chomp is a “social app discovery” iPhone app. It’s a bit like Yelp for the App Store. In this interview with its creators Ben Keighran and Cathy Edwards we talk about the app, the momentum its building, the recommendation algorithm that makes it tick and how app developers can use it to build buzz for their own apps.

The Best App Ever podcast episode. Features interviews with: Jeff Scott, creator of the Best App Ever contest and founder of 148 Apps; Garret Murray, creator of the aptly named “Ego” app; and Yuanzhen Li and Michael parker on their TrueHDR photography app.

In this episode, I speak with Peter Farago, Flurry’s VP/Marketing and Greg Yardley, former CEO of Pinch Media now VP/Products at Flurry. We discuss their merger, their App Circle app recommendation engine, their new relationship with comScore and what’s really important about the Google Nexus One.

Henry Balanon is part of the writing team for Giga Om’s “The Apple Blog” and co-founder of the iPhone app development shop Bickbot. This podcast features Henry’s speech on iPhone marketing and the panel discussion he organized for his segment at the 360iDev conference.

Henry’s speech if filled with goodies, including glimpses into how sought after media properties like The Apple Blog decide what to cover and this tactical gem: a timeline/calendar to follow for folks trying to concentrate their PR to coincide with an app’s launch.

The panel discussion features: Rana June, former VP/Marketing for Medialets and author of O’Reilly’s forthcoming “Marketing iPhone Apps” book; Natalia Luckyanova, co-founder of the multiple-hit game studio Imangi; David Whatley, creator of the top selling geoDefense games; PR firm TriplePoint’s Chris Heintz; Matt Drance, formerly of Apple, now founder Bookhouse Apps; and me, Dan Grigsby.

This interview is with Corey Johnson, creator of iPhone Wax.  iPhone Wax is an open-source project that lets developers build native CocoaTouch based applications using Lua.  Lua’s an expressive scripting language with dynamic language features familiar to Ruby and Python developers.  The interview includes content on iPhone Wax’s genesis, the Lua language, embedding and bridging Lua and the Objective-C runtime, performance, debugging, App Store policy and interpreted code, and what’s next for the project.

The second and final podcasts recorded at the 360iDev conference. Features interviews with Chris Heintz of Triple Point on PR, Mike Clark of the Pragmatic Studios on iPhone/Ruby On Rails integrations and REST, Jessica Kahn of Tappulous on code reuse, Jake Behrens on performance gains from coding interfaces by hand, and Peter Bakhirev on Game Kit and CFNetwork.

The first of two podcasts recorded at the 360iDev conference. Features interviews with well known Apple evangelist and WWDC planner turned indie iPhone developer Matt Drace, twenty minutes of advanced debugging with Kendall Gelner, and a talk on category/price performance and piracy with Pinch Media’s Greg Yardley.

This episode of the podcast is a little different than usual: there’s no guest. Instead, it’s the audio from a speech I gave last week at the 360iDev conference titled “Warm, Clothed and Fed: Developer Run iPhone Businesses.” The speech takes apart the iPhone market and looks for opportunities for developers to earn a sustainable comfortable living without turning into something they’re not — e.g., sales people. I gave the speech to an overflow crowd and, I’m pleased to say, it was well received. So I’m sharing it here.

Marcus Zarra is a well known Mac and iPhone developer and blogger at Cocoa Is My Girlfriend. He’s the author of several books, including “Core Animation: Simplified Animation Techniques for Mac and iPhone Development” due out in early 2010. In this interview, we talk about Core Animation on the iPhone. Topics include its programming model, view translations, Core Animation internals, implicit and explicit animations, hints that Core Image might be coming to the iPhone and user interactions with Core Animation.