iPhone App Sales Figures

Posted on May 14, 2011 by mrgordon

EpiCalc iPhone AppOur domain might mention that we’re a web development firm, but don’t forgot that we also love mobile dev for smartphone platforms like the iPhone and Android. Our first two apps, EpiCalc and SeriesSolver, have met with some success in the Apple iOS App Store. Both iPhone apps are currently at version 1.1 and we look forward to future releases where we can add more features and make them more beautiful! SeriesSolver recently switched to a nicer blue color scheme and we have more user interface enhancements planned.

EpiCalc, which computes the odds ratio and relative risk for epidemiology, was the seventeenth highest grossing app in Honduras at one point and it also peaked as the number one grossing app in the medical category for Honduras. EpiCalc also reached the top hundred grossing apps in South Korea, the Netherlands, Mexico, China, and France.

SeriesSolver, which solves arithmetic and geometric series, also had its best showing in Honduras. It reached the fourth highest grossing Education app in Honduras and the sixteenth highest grossing app overall. In the past week, it has reached the top five hundred grossing Education apps in Mexico and Canada as well. We look forward to watching future rankings!

Who is waiting for our first iPad application? We have a good one in mind!

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SeriesSolver Released!

Posted on March 16, 2011 by mrgordon

SeriesSolver was finally reviewed and approved for sale today in the App Store. The app asks you to enter a series of numbers, such as 1 3 5 7, and it figures out what kind of series (arithmetic, geometric, or neither) it is. It also tells you a formula for the series, and allows you to calculate the sum up to any term in the series.

You can see screenshots and a more detailed description here: Series Solver iPhone App

We’re very excited to see how SeriesSolver does!

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Series Solver iPhone App & UIWebView Tips

Posted on March 10, 2011 by mrgordon

UPDATE: Apple approved the app. Download Series Solver on the app store now!

We’re still waiting for Apple to approve our second iPhone app, Series Solver, but we’re already well on our way to finishing our third application. This time we’re building an educational game.

Series Solver allows you to enter the first few entries in a mathematical series and then it gives you the formula for the underlying arithmetic or geometric series. It will also tell you if the sequence does not represent a valid arithmetic or geometric sequence and it will compute partial sums.

I’ve been surprised at how difficult it is to use a subscript or superscript in an iOS app using Interface Builder. The main user interface classes like UILabel, UITextView, and UIButton allow Unicode symbols but not the full range of subscripts and superscripts that one might need to use. I was able to use Unicode superscripts for my UILabel objects by going to Edit -> Special Characters… and then selecting the digits I wanted.

Use UIWebView to make letters and other characters into a subscript or superscript. Then you can just use the and HTML tags to render your beautiful mathematics or other text.

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EpiCalc iPhone app

Posted on March 1, 2011 by mrgordon

Our web development firm’s first iPhone app, EpiCalc, is currently under review by Apple. We noticed that epidemiology calculators on the app store were seriously overpriced, so we designed an application that could help students and researchers for a fraction of the price. Who pays $5.99 to calculate the odds ratio or relative risk? The EpiCalc app will do both of these things for only $1.99 and we have more features coming soon.

We’ve built simple applications using XCode and Interface Builder in the past, but this time the pieces really made sense together. We were creating outlets and methods, experimenting with user interface widgets, and wiring it all together. As much as the Apple app store can feel like an unfriendly and corporate-controlled marketplace, the tools for creating applications that will run perfectly and look beautiful on iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch are very well done and appreciated. Codesigning in XCode was a nightmare, but at least it wasted hours (and not days!) of my time. The .xcodeproj XCode project file was storing the identifier numbers for earlier versions of our certificates and provisioning profile, so we had to manually edit the project file in the end to get XCode to codesign correctly.

UPDATE: EpiCalc has been approved. Download the EpiCalc iPhone app now!

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Learning iPhone App Programming

Posted on February 20, 2011 by The Team

We have a new project to work on. A friend of ours, a fellow MIT grad, came up with a great iPhone application and we’re going to help him build it. It’s a really cool video manipulation toy that we think/hope people will love to play with. We have never done an iPhone app before, but that’s part of the fun of this job: there are always new technologies to learn. Plus, the longer you have programmed, the easier it becomes to pick up new languages.

Interface Builder is a fantastic tool for creating the graphical user interfaces for iOS. It is so nice to not have to worry about cross-browser compatibility issues as one must always do when developing web applications for the general Internet.

We’re getting the hang of iPhone development and we look forward to releasing our first app into the App Store in the coming weeks.

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Progress on PINE

Posted on February 15, 2011 by The Team

We’re nearly done with our latest project, a basic website with a content management system for the PINE psychoanalytic society. There’s still some work filling in content that needs to be done, but within the week we’ll have a first draft to show our client.

This was our first project using Drupal 7, and it turned out very well. There are not as many modules available yet, but a lot of the administration controls are much nicer to use. It’s nice to see fields being used to configure user information instead of third-party modules like CCK.

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DecoBIKE

Posted on February 10, 2011 by The Team

A new bikesharing program in Miami Beach called DecoBIKE contacted us frantically a few days ago. They were set to launch in less than 48 hours and the person they had hired to build their website was suddenly saying he was “in over his head” and unable to complete the job!

We worked day-and-night with their designer remotely over Skype to implement their vision as fast as possible. It has been a very hectic few days but we managed to pull together a working site for them.

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