 |
This section lists all blog posts, regardless of topic.
Riding a Wave of Success
December 22, 2011
It has been a few weeks now since I released iTunes Sync, and amazingly sales continue to be very strong, even though the app has long since moved on from the "Newest" section. Having CrackBerry cover the app was another shot in the arm which returned sales close to first-release levels.
Since then, sales had settled in at about $150/day (of which I get 70 percent), which for a guy who previous had at best $10/day apps, is incredible.
This week has brought yet another surprise: Yesterday sales shot up to $320, and today, even though it's still early in the day, the numbers are looking similarly great. What is causing this big surge? I have yet to find out. One possibility is that it's my release this week of a phone version of the app. Unfortunately, RIM's spreadsheet downloads are down, and so I am unable to check whether these sales are PlayBook or phone sales. I have been receiving a steady supply of email from people using the PlayBook, but haven't received any mail from phone users, so I'd be surprised if these were phone sales. Also, I was very disappointed that when I released the phone version, it didn't show up in the "Newest" section of phones. There seems to be some underlying App World issues at play whereby PlayBook is treated as "just another device", which it is not.
Something fun that happened a couple of days ago was that a friend from church sent me a message on Facebook that she had just bought a PlayBook and had bought iTunes Sync, then realizing that she knew the author. I love making connections like that!
|
 |
Exciting Times at Wolfram AlphaDecember 6, 2011
I've been working at Wolfram Alpha for two years and three months now, and I'm finally working on the project that I always dreamed of working on: Next generation core parser design. Being moved onto this project has breathed new life into me, and I've been busy filling up my notebook with ideas. Doing this kind of R&D is extremely exciting, and so far, I feel like I've been more successful at it than I could have imagined. With any luck, my efforts along with the contributions of others will lead to a serious IQ boost for Alpha. iTunes Sync SupportDecember 1, 2011
Since danielbigham.ca is my support URL for my mobile apps, I should have posted any/all support help instructions here several days ago, but I'm just getting to that now. If you are having trouble connecting  | There is an ugly bug in that if you exit the iTunes Sync PC app by right clicking on it and selecting "Exit", and then you open the app again, the PlayBook won't be able to connect. This is because the .NET program calls a native library that listens for an incoming TCP connection, and there is no way for the .NET program to tell the native library to stop listening, so the program doesn't exit properly. Therefore, if you can't connect, log off of your Windows session and log back in again -- that will kill iTunes Sync and it will start again automatically when you log back in. (So make sure you don't try and start it a second time after logging back in) Or, alternatively, ensure iTunes Sync is running, and kill it forcefully using the Windows Task Manager, then start it again. |
| Ensure that your Windows Firewall has an exception to allow iTunes Sync to talk on your local network. When you started iTunes Sync for the first time, it likely caused a Windows dialog box to be displayed asking if you want to "Unblock" the program and allow it to talk on either the local and/or remote networks. Hopefully you clicked "Unblock". If not, these Windows Firewall exceptions may be missing. |
If not all of your songs are getting sync'd | The primary cause for this is that if your iTunes music is DRM (digital rights managements) protected, then it can't be used by mobile devices other than Apple products. To check this, right click on one of your non-sync'ing songs and select "Show In Windows Explorer". If the file extension ends with ".m4p", then it's DRM protected. Fortunately, Apple allows you to pay an additional 40 cents to free your music forever. The relevant URL for that is: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1711 |
| Another common cause of this is if you are trying to sync music that wasn't purchased and which doesn't have proper meta information. What I mean by this is that each purchased iTunes song is tagged with information about the name of the song, who the artist is, and what the name of the album is. The iTunes Sync program uses this information to put the songs in proper Album/Artist folders, and to name the song files appropriately. If your songs are missing this information, such as if they are .mp3 files that were created by some means that did not add this information, then the iTunes Sync program currently doesn't touch them. You can verify whether a song is missing this information by going to your music folder, then iTunes, and looking in the "iTunes Music Library.xml" file, and searching for the song name. There should be XML tags giving the song name, artist, and album. If not, you have discovered why iTunes Sync isn't sync'ing the file. I would like to think about this some more and update the program so that it can do something sensible with these files rather than ignoring them. |
If your virus checker is preventing installation | Be rest assured that the PC program doesn't have a virus. I uploaded the EXE to a website that runs it through virtually every virus manufacturer, and none of them flagged it as being a problem. You could try disabling your virus checker during installation of the PC program. |
If the download link on the web page doesn't seem to be workingDoes the program run on Mac? | Not yet, but I hope to do that. The description of the application refers to the program as being for Windows PC. I will edit the description to hopefully make this clearer. If you would like a refund, developers unfortunately don't have any means to do that, but if you contact App World Support, they may be able to help. |
older >>
|
|
|
|
|
|
