I have a small one-on-one coaching program for app entrepreneurs. I rarely publicize this program because I only have few slots available and most of the time the program is full, and has a waiting list.
In celebration of the new year, I’m making this program available to a few more applicants. This is the time to plan for your app business success in 2014, and I want to help you reach your goals.
Click here for more information on the coaching program and how to apply.
One of the better known apps we at Pervasent have developed is the Zinio magazine reader app. For a while it’s been in the top 5 of the Top Grossing iPad Apps on the App Store. Duking it out with Apple’s Pages app, Angry Birds and Smurfs’ Village for the top spots.
Recently the Zinio app was awarded the “Best Global App” by the Internet Marketing Association at an award ceremony in Las Vegas. The event was opened by the Mayor of Las Vegas and streamed live to 11k people (out of IMA’s 350k members). So sounds like a pretty big deal. I’m not sure what the selection criteria was, or who the competitors were. But it doesn’t get much better than being the best global app. Nice!
On Wednesday June 29, 2011 my colleague David Foote will be conducting a webinar for iOS developers. If you want to learn how to create an automated build process for iOS projects, this webinar is for you.
You can sign up here.
Here’s the full text of the announcement:
Are you currently building applications for Apple’s wildly popular iOS platform, or planning to do so in the future? If so, it is important to understand the unique lifecycle management challenges you will face in iOS app development for mobile devices and the solutions available to overcome those challenges. Aldon and Pervasent invite you to attend a webinar on how to create an automated build process and application distribution system that will accelerate the development and testing of your iOS applications.
Managing the build/test process during application development is one of the great challenges of developing iOS apps. Builds are typically created by hand. Mobile provisioning profiles containing the device IDs of all testing hardware must be created and distributed to testers and executive stakeholders. Each new build must be installed on each testing device by attaching it to a PC running iTunes. These manual processes are time-consuming and error-prone.
During this webinar, you will learn how to create an automated build system that will enable anyone in your organization to dramatically simplify the build and deployment process within the iOS application lifecycle.
I am fortunate to be in a position to be selective about the clients I work with and the projects I work on. The project has to have some difficult technical challenge to satisfy the inner geek. But equally important is that the resulting app should do something good, something that helps people, and maybe make the world a little bit better.
An app that I recently completed fits these criteria perfectly. The app is called NutriSleuth and in a nutshell it allows people with allergies or other medical conditions to check out food items in the grocery store to see if they are going to make them, or anyone who they shop for, sick.
The app scans the bar code of a food item and uses the UPC to lookup the product in a database stored on the device. The database contains over 200,000 food items and over 2.5 million nutrition records. The database uses Core Data and its total size is over 500 MB on the device. Herein lies several technical challenges, and I’ll be writing a few blog posts about this.
Once the nutritional records for the product have been retrieved, a rules engine goes through the data to determine if the fits or clashes with the nutritional profiles the user has configured in the app. (This rules engine is part of the proprietary, secret sauce of this app, so unfortunately I cannot write about this in more detail.)
The result of the analysis is a simple green, yellow, red light that indicates if you can safely eat this food item, if you should exercise caution or put it back on the shelf immediately. Some people go into anaphylactic shock when they are exposed to certain food ingredients like peanuts, tree nuts, eggs, etc. This severity level can also be configured in the app and then the nutrition and ingredient analysis goes into hyper-vigilant mode.
The app does not just handle food allergies. Say that you have a friend who’s coming over for dinner and she has Crohn’s disease or a high cholesterol condition, or only eats vegetarian or only Kosher food. What can you safely serve for dinner? Setup a separate profile for you friend and scan away.
The app received a lot of press even before it was launched. I think the reason is that you instantly recognize that this app would be very helpful (potentially a lifesaver, literally) for so many people that have food allergies or other common medical conditions.
I’m proud to have been part of this project. And being able to do something really good like this, is one reason why I love being an iPhone developer.
You can check out NutriSleuth in the App Store now.
So, I was exiting the Castro Street MUNI station, taking the escalator up to street level. I had my book bag over my shoulder behind my back and my iPad in my hand. I decided to hop up the last few steps and tripped hard on the last step. As I careened towards the ground (I knew I was going down) I put my left hand out and realized it contained my iPad. Rather than let if fly or shatter it as I put my hand down, I launched forward and planted an exaggerated right shoulder roll, cradling my iPad like a football. It never touched the ground. I stood up on my knees, embarrassed, laughing and letting others around me know I was okay …. but it was really about my iPad.
You don’t have to be this passionate about your iDevices to work here at Pervasent. But it helps. 🙂
My company, Pervasent, develops complex, enterprise class iPhone/iPad software. If that’s what you do, then please keep reading.
Please take a moment and look at our portfolio on our web site. If you have developed similar applications, then we definitely want to talk to you.
At Pervasent we really enjoy our work, and are looking for people who think developing iPhone/iPad applications is fun. We can’t wait to get to work (well, most of the time). We have the pleasure of working with other passionate developers, both on our own projects, and for our top-tier clients. We have been developing applications for the platform since the day it became available for third parties, so other than working for Apple, you can’t work with a more experienced team of developers than you can at Pervasent.
We have two immediate openings for an onsite project in San Francisco to work on a top 10 iPad app. For other projects, we are open to candidates in other locations. Please note that we only hire individuals, not companies. If you work for a consulting or contracting company and you want to offer *your* services, that’s fine, but then we want to see *your* qualifications, not your company’s aggregated portfolio.
These are contract to hire, or long-term contracting positions. And of course you will get paid for your work; no internships or revenue share BS.
All the developers in our company have 10-15 years of large scale, enterprise software development experience. If you have a similar background that’s a definite plus, but not a requirement. But design patterns, object modeling and data modeling must be ingrained in your thinking. Be prepared to answer questions more complex than “explain the benefits of an MVC architecture.”
You should have completed at least a couple of iPhone apps, either as an individual or as a part of a team. Please point us to your best apps in the App Store and describe your development role in each of them.
Beauty and quality comes from within, so at some point we will need to do a code review of something that you have written (this can occur in person on your equipment; we don’t expect you to send us your crown jewels). If that scares you, then this would be a good point to stop reading.
Finally, and most importantly, please tell us why you’re passionate about developing iPhone/iPad apps.
Thank you for your time and attention. We look forward to hearing from you.
Today the Zinio app rocketed up to the #1 slot in the News category for free apps. It is ranked ahead of NYTimes, Yahoo!, NPR and USA Today. Pretty cool.
The app allows you to read magazines on your iPhone. The magazine pages are rendered just like they appear in the dead tree version of the magazine, or you can select a text mode where you lose the overall layout of the page, but the text fills the screen and is much easier to read.
If you live outside the United States then physical magazine subscriptions from the U.S. are typically very expensive due to the postage. (You used to be able to select surface mail, which was much cheaper. But then it took three months for the magazine to arrive. I always wondered what kind of surface vessel took 3 months to cross the Atlantic to Europe. I guess those ships have been retired because surface mail is no longer an option.) With a digital subscription from Zino you get the bits immediately and for a much more reasonable price. And you can read the magazines on your iPhone, another mobile device, or on your computer.
It’s a really nice app. Check it out.
I was part of the team that developed the People Celebrity News Tracker which launched last week. It has since then hit #13 on the top list of all paid apps. Apple’s promotion of the app on the App Store home page was a nice endorsement, and no doubt helped the sales.
If you search for “celebrity” in the App Store the #1 search result is the People app. And #3 is another app that I worked on: Funniest Celebrity Quotes, Jokes & Bloopers.
After cornering the market on celebrity apps I need a break to spend some time in the real world again. 🙂
I’m honored and humbled to have created the App Store Pick of the Week. Please check out The Green Book, a real book bestseller published on the iPhone using the TRIBE reader.
Apple has created a new Green Room section in the app store in time for Earth Day. And The Green Book is also featured here.
Congratulations Genus!
Apptism just reported that they are now tracking 20,000 apps on the App Store. I thought I’d take inventory of the number of apps that I’ve written for clients that are available on the App Store now. The total tally comes to 164. Granted 132 of those are books powered by the Iceberg book reader. (They are not not public domain books, but current best sellers from big name publishers.)
That gives me about a 0.8% share of the number of apps, which is the same as when the App Store launched. So I’m keeping pace with the growth of the App Store!
After this self-congratulatory post, back to our regular scheduled program…