iAds For Developers Experiment Makes iAd CPM Rates Look As Stable As A House Of Cards
iAds and the iAds for develoeprs program has been a boon for developers showing iAds within their apps due to the extremely high CPM rates. The cost for non-developer ads has been said to be as high as $18 CPM while those of AdMob are considerably less than a dollar. The cost for developer ads is 0.25 cents per click.
It’s been suggested that these new ads perform quite well. Personally I’ve been extremely skeptical as even the much lower cost for AdMob ads does not make for easy profit. Fortunately, the developers at Cross Forward Consulting performed a test, and decided to share their results.
The overall results of Cross Forward Consulting advertising their app, Audiobooks Premium, a pretty successful app in it’s own right have shown absolutely dismal results.
The end results were $1251.75 spent on iAds providing 5,007 clicks and just 48 downloads.. The overall cost was $14.90 for each download. There were 2,052,929 impressions.
You can see the full writeup, and further details in the article here:
iAd for Developers
Sure, some might say a more expensive app could do better, but it’s hard to imagine how it could be worthwhile. Considering the extremely high CPM rates non-developers are paying for iAds it looks like the iAds CPM rates are about as stable as a house of cards unless somehow iAds performance were to dramatically improve. Especially given the much lower AdMob rates. Imagine if the test was done at the rate those big-wig advertisers are supposedly paying.. the cost would have been over $750 for a download.
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How To Stay Motivated And Actually Complete Your iOS App
Let’s face it.. it’s easy to get distracted.
Following through on your app ideas all the way to completion can be difficult, especially if someone isn’t looking over your shoulder.
I found this great article from Cliff Harris, developer of some excellent indie games providing some tips on how he keeps himself motivated when working on a project. While he’s not an iPhone or iPad developer the tips certainly apply.
Here’s 3 key ideas that I got out of it – that I personally feel would be helpful:
- Work on projects you actually like – not projects that are just meant to capitalize on something you have absolutely no interest in.
- Work on the cool stuff in the project early – special effects, graphics, stuff that actually can be inspiring to see and makes you think “this is going to be awesome” – Cliff picked up on this from Lionhead games.
- Keep a log of your work every day – I always try to get away from doing this myself, but when I do it really does help to stay motivated and efficient.
You can read all of Cliff’s ideas in his article:
How To Stay Motivated Whilst Programming A Game
This video below is from Cliff’s game “Gratuitous Space Battles” which he developed with a small team (looks too cool to be indie but it is – too bad it’s PC only.. great idea for an iPhone game). The game has incredibly cool graphics and I hope that you enjoy the eye candy.
Btw, if you’ve written an article feel free to submit it, or a link to it here and if I think the readers will like it I’ll feature it on the site in front of our 2,000+ daily visitors.
[Source: Cliff Harris]
Finishing With Interface Builder – Building Your iPhone Apps Interface Quickly 2/2
This is the second part of the tutorial on building your iPhone App’s interface in interface builder. In this video I quickly drag out all the elements, and connect the interface elements with the appropriate outlets, and actions, and build the class file automatically.
This is the 5th video/tutorial in this series, and I hope you enjoy it.
The first tutorial can be found here:
>>> Developing Your First Apple iPhone App <<<
The project containing the app at the end of this video can be found here:
Project file for tutorial
We will finally get into writing code in the next video!
Here it is:
Thanks for reading.
Porting OpenGL glVertex Code to Iphone OpenGL ES
Continuing where I left off yesterday I will describe some of the potential hangups when converting OpenGL code to OpenGL ES. The first thing I noticed when trying to convert some OpenGL code to the iPhone’s OpenGL ES was that on the iPhone there is no glVertex function. Instead of glVertex you will need to use a vertex array. I’ll give an example from Nehe Tutorial #2.
For example, in Nehe OpenGL tutorial #2 you see the lines:
glVertex3f( 0.0f, 1.0f, 0.0f);
glVertex3f(-1.0f,-1.0f, 0.0f);
glVertex3f( 1.0f,-1.0f, 0.0f);
glEnd();
What these lines do is create a triangle with the vertices specified through the glVertex3f function (3 dimensional locations).
In OpenGL ES the glBegin and glEnd, and glVertex functions do not exist, the above lines would be rewritten using a vertex array.
In my remake of the Nehe Tutorial #2 for iPhone this is done using the following lines:
0.0f, 1.0f, 0.0f,
-1.0f, -1.0f, 0.0f,
1.0f, -1.0f, 0.0f
};
glEnableClientState(GL_VERTEX_ARRAY);
glVertexPointer(3, GL_FLOAT, 0, triangleVertices);
glDrawArrays(GL_TRIANGLE_STRIP, 0, 3);
Here, an array is created, and then in order to draw the array we:
1. use glEnableClientState to enable use of a vertex array
2. use glVertexPointer to specify the size, datatype of the points stored in the array, and name of the array.
3. use glDrawArrays to draw the vertex array, in this case using the 3 points to draw a connected triangle.
Now you can see that this code provides the exact same result, just in OpenGL ES they’ve removed all redundancies so you need to use vertex arrays, and the glBegin, and glEnd semantics are removed. Next I’ll be exploring the differences using perspective functions in OpenGL ES.
Getting Started With QuickConnect Iphone
Lee Barney the founder of QuickConnect for Iphone recently informed me that his framework has been and is being used in apps currently available in Apple’s app store.
For those that don’t know, I mentioned QuickConnect a couple of times in the past week as a framework that allows you to write your apps in javascript, and publish them on multiple mobile platforms. It appears as though the frame work is quite far along on the Iphone, and it’s great to see that one of these frameworks really is being actively developed. The prospect of being able to develop apps for all the coming app stores without having to rework any code is definitely enticing.
For those looking to get started with QuickConnect for Iphone I suggest checking out the wiki which contains a couple of video demonstrations. The framework is available from here and contains many examples.
It’s definitely worth checking out, and I may even write an app I’ve been working on now in QuickConnect as I need native database access, but am finding it very tedious to connect with all the various web services using raw Objective-C code.
Any tips for those that have used it would be great. Have a great weekend.