Zhephree

I’ve always been a big fan of open source. It’s how I’ve learned how to do most of what I do. I’m also a fan of getting some income from my app sales. I’ve struggled to find a balance between the two.

While I know open sourcing doesn’t always negatively affect profits of an app, I’m not sure I want to risk it.

So, I’m not positive if apps like incredible! or Wooden Rows will ever be fully open source, but I will open source older apps. I will also continue to post Gists of code on GitHub for components and CSS and functions I think could be useful to others.

My first mobile app (foursquare) has always been open source and my Untappd webOS client growlr has been too. So, to add to that, I’ve opened the source for neato! today.

You can find all of my open source projects on GitHub (foursquare is under their account).

I will also make the commitment right now that neato! will always be open source, so when I port neato! to Enyo for cross-platform development, it’ll still be opened. It’ll still be for sale in the various app stores, but it’ll be open as well.

I like the idea of opening up Wooden Rows, but there are lots of server-side aspects of the app that I’m not sure I want to open up, especially since I don’t want my server to get hammered or compromised. I am willing to work with members of the Open Source community to discuss the feasibility of this. Not that it means I”ll definitely do it, but I’d like to hear some ideas before I decide not to.

Hey, everyone! Just wanted to give you guys a quick heads-up about my availability soon.

Since I have four apps out in the Catalog, I figured I should let my users know that I will most likely not be available to respond to tweets or e-mails over the next week and a half since I’m getting married next weekend.

I will absolutely respond to support requests via Twitter or email once I return from my break.

Here’s where you can get support:

foursquare: if there is a problem with the foursquare service (i.e., not connecting, wrong points, improper mayorship, etc) you can contact foursquare’s support (as you should always be doing in these cases) on Twitter at @4sqSupport or on their support site: http://support.foursquare.com/home. If you have problems with the foursquare app, you can use the in-app contact form to send me a message and I’ll get to it as soon as I start handling e-mail again.

growlr: As with foursquare, if you have problems with the Untappd service, you can contact Untappd via twitter: @untappd or their support site: http://help.untappd.com/ And if you have a problem with the app, shoot me a tweet at @zhephree and I’ll respond sometime after the 16th.

neato!: Shoot me a tweet at @zhephree or @neato_webos and I’ll respond sometime after the 16th.

incredible!: Shoot me a tweet @zhephree or @incrediblewebos and I’ll respond sometime after the 16th.

Just wanted everyone to know so you won’t freak out if I don’t respond in my usual timely manner.

Enjoy a Zhephree-less week!

After HP effectively killed webOS devices and made webOS’s future uncertain, they launched a “firesale” this weekend, pushing TouchPads out the door at $99. They’re sold out almost everywhere. This has lead to thousands of new webOS users itching to download apps. I figured it’d be cool to see what happened with my apps over the weekend.

foursquare
This is by far my most popular app and it continues to be so. In its heyday, about a year or so ago, it would average about 400 downloads per day. In the last 8-12 months, that number has steadily decreased to about 250 per day. Sunday saw 511 downloads, almost double my daily average. TouchPad users went from a handful, around a couple hundred, to over 1700 users checking-in on a TouchPad (including Friday, Saturday, and Sunday downloads). There are now 70% more TouchPad users than Veer users.

neato!
neato! has always had low, but very steady download numbers. Enough cover my monthly cellphone bill, with some spending cash after that. Sunday had a 70% uptick in sales from Saturday, which had a 10% increase from Friday, which also had a 10% increase from Thursday. neato! is a very niche app and it’s hard to explain it in text, so it doesn’t get the downloads it should. It’s also a phone-sized Mojo app, so it doesn’t get top billing like TouchPad-specific apps, making downloads less common on a TouchPad (it works perfectly though). There are now 4 times as many TouchPad users as Veer users, and by the end of the week, I suspect TouchPad users will overtake Pixi users, to put the TouchPad in the number two slot for neato!.

growlr
I don’t track individual downloads for growlr, but from total downloads, it looks like about an 8% increase in users, which is good for such a niche app.

This is all very encouraging to me, and has given me new energy to work on incredible! and get it out the door for the new users. The response from my beta testers has been overwhelmingly positive (with bug reports as well, naturally), so it feels good.

I encourage other webOS devs (even those that gave up) to look at their stats if they can and see how their apps are doing. It might be encouraging!

If you’re a user of my apps, no doubt you’re familiar with neato! and what it does. If you’re not, here’s the skinny:

• You’re browsing a website on your computer, maybe a news article, or a recipe, or some directions. You need to leave your house, or otherwise step away from your computer, but wish to continue reading that website.
• Click the “neato!” bookmarklet in your browser (or the Chrome extension) and blammo! the website instantly shows up on your phone.

There’s more to it than that, obviously. neato! does the same thing from your phone to your computer, or, from your phone to a friend’s phone. It also does the same for plain text, which is also handy.

The beauty of it all is that neato! runs as expected on your TouchPad! The dashboard icon hangs out up top with all your webOS 3.0 icons, but neato! does run in the mini emulator window, but it still works just fine!

One caveat! If you are restoring neato! to your TouchPad through the one time profile sync, you’ll probably have to regenerate your neato! codes in the Preferences so that the TouchPad has its own set of codes.

So that’s handy — send a recipe from your laptop to your TouchPad and then read along in your kitchen from the TouchPad. But here’s where it gets slick: since neato! can send data to other neato! users and since your phone and your TouchPad have their own codes and friend codes, they can send stuff back-and-forth!

What I did was set my name on my TouchPad to “Geoff’s TouchPad”, sent a friend request to my phone and now my phone has an option in the send-to dropdown called” Geoff’s TouchPad”. Now, I send content as I normally would and it appears on my TouchPad!

So, it may not be as elegant as Touch-to-Share, but now your legacy webOS device can send stuff to your TouchPad, and vice-versa!

The time is coming near, webOS fans. The TouchPad is set to launch this summer and all rumors point to June-something. This means one thing:

I have to get off my ass and start coding for the TouchPad.

I’ve filled you all in on my development roadmap and I wanted to give an update since I’m at a turning point right now.

MOJO
I’ll give you some updates on my apps built on the Mojo (current) framework.

growlr
Version 0.7 of growlr was submitted to Palm this weekend, adding the ability to view the beers your friends are drinking and the ability to toast and comment on them. I expect it in the Catalog this week. This will be one of, if no the last update to growlr for a while. Don’t worry — it’ll make its way to the TouchPad.

neato!
A new version of neato! — version 1.2 — is almost finished. I plan to submit this to Palm this week. It’ll add two new features: scheduling and card-only mode. Scheduling will allow you to have neato! launch and close at specific times so you don’t have to remember to open or close it. Useful if you only use neato! when you’re at work, so you could, say, have it launch at 8:30am and shut down at 4:45pm. Card-only mode will allow neato! to stay open and connected but without a dashboard icon. This will require a full card open, but won’t take up any screen real estate,  which is precious on the Pixi and Veer. I’ll also be adding support for Carbon, Spaz, and hopefully phnx Twitter apps. I am 90% certain this will be the final Mojo release of neato!. Oh, and a new browser extension will be launched with it, but I’m not saying which browser yet. neato! will probably make it to the TouchPad down the road, but it’s not a high priority.

foursquare
This is a tough one. It’s my biggest and most widely-used app. Version 2.6 just launched this week, adding the new leaderboard and some other stuff. I have one more maintenance release (read: bug fixes) I’m working on that’ll release soon, but that will be about all that happens now. Bug fixes, and minor tweaks or small feature additions. If enough people clamor for whatever awesome new stuff foursquare cooks up soon, I’ll add it in. Don’t worry — support won’t cease and I’ll pick up development on foursquare later this year to rebuild it in Enyo for future device support. I’ll always be your foursquare developer.

incredible!
The big one! This is a huge project, but it’s getting close to a beta launch. I’m hoping for a beta launch around early June (which is super soon). I want to have a full launch of the Mojo version shortly after. 

ENYO
I have some info about the Enyo/TouchPad versions of my apps.

I’ve prioritized all four of my apps for how they will come to the TouchPad. It’s sort of the reverse order they originally launched.

1. incredible!
   This will be my first TouchPad app. I want desperately to have it coincide with the TouchPad launch, but I don’t see it being spot on. However, I’m going to start working on it now, during the same time I’m developing the Mojo version. This way, it’ll be mostly done by the time the Mojo version launches and hopefully development will go speedier since some ideas and designs already happened. 
2. growlr
   While Untappd isn’t super-duper mainstream, I feel this will be a nice TouchPad app as people do drink beer at home, so the odds of checking-in to beers on a tablet are pretty good. Plus, it’s a 75% finished app on Mojo, so it’ll get completed on TouchPad.
3. foursquare
   I had trouble deciding between neato! and foursquare, but I think foursquare will be the biggest benefit. Plus, it’ll give me a chance to rewrite it, and it really needs it.
4. neato!
   With Touch-to-Share’s ability to move info from your phone to your tablet, device-to-device is handled natively. And, since Mojo won’t be killed off any time soon, neato! will still work on the TouchPad. In fact, I think its dashboard icon will be less intrusive on the TouchPad, so it’s not as high priority. It will be rewritten at some point, though.

So, what about time frames? I’d love to have incredible! out by July, but we’ll see how that goes. As for the other apps, the last chunk of the year is completely booked up for me between getting married and probably going back to school, so foursquare and neato! might not see rewrites until 2012. Unless Enyo is super fast to develop in. I dunno, haven’t started yet.

Remember, foursquare is open source, so if there’s a bug and you fix it, send me a pull request! It’d be a big help! It’s a free app, so it’s no big deal to me if you guys help out! Just send me a pull request and if I’m down with it, I’ll merge it with the master and submit it to Palm! It’s a good way to keep the app alive while I’m super swamped right now.

I was looking at all my various app stats and I thought I’d share them. Aside from my apps being open-source, I make my business open source (mostly).

neato!

Sales. neato! sales have been low, but steady. I expected a slight increase with the launch of the Veer the other day and I was mostly correct. I sold 4 times as many copies of the app on May 16 (the day after the Veer launch) as I did on May 15, but, given the low raw numbers, this isn’t significant so much as it sales coming out of a slump. A positive either way. The best sales day in the last 30 days was April 27th, for some reason.

Remedy. I’m planning an update to neato! very soon (bug fixes and a new feature). With it will come me pushing it more than I do. With the relatively small userbase on webOS, word of mouth isn’t enough and some sort of active push is needed. Maybe not for all apps, but definitely an app like neato! that has an ambiguous name and a feature set that seems pointless until you see it in action. I’m going to add a screencast video to the App Catalog listing and see if that helps.

Stats. We’re coming up on 3000 unique downloads of neato!. For an app like neato!, this isn’t bad, but obviously I’d like more. Interesting tidbit, neato! users are good about upgrading and having the most current version of the app. 88% of users are on v1.0. I assume some of the ones not on the newest version have stopped using it altogether. Fun fact: 3 people have downloaded the app with a Veer.

foursquare
Downloads. Downloads for foursquare have been insanely consistent, fluctuating very seldom. I’m averaging about 250 downloads per day, which isn’t Earth-shattering, but on a smaller platform like webOS, that’s pretty good. Contrasting neato!’s slight influx after the Veer launch, foursquare has actually dropped as of yesterday, for the first time in a month. Still has good numbers, but it’s probably a temporary decline. The largest download day in the last 30 days was May 7th, with400 downloads, which was when I launched the Explore feature in the app.

Remedy. There’s not a whole lot I can do here. This is more on foursquare themselves, and not so much as promoting my app as it is them promoting the service. If people know about foursquare and want to use it, if they have a webOS device, they’ll search for it. I doubt many people come across the webOS app and go “What’s foursquare?” and download it. I suspect people seek it out. However, I notice that people DO download the app when it shows up in the “What’s New” section of the App Catalog. I have another update coming in a couple of weeks that will boost numbers again.

Stats. We’re very close to hitting 100,000 unique downloads. This is pretty awesome, considering we were at 85,000 last month. That’s 15,000 downloads in about 30 days, which is really nice, and double the average downloads on a normal month. Contrasting neato!’s 3 Veer downloads, foursquare has 85 Veer users, which is pretty decent. (Not to mention the 18 TouchPad users, even though it’s not out yet…) As for having the most recent version of the app, foursquare users aren’t so good at this with only 10% of users having v2.5. This is specially interesting because neato! has no automatic pop-up telling users of a new version, whereas foursquare does have a dialog that annoys you to upgrade on every launch. Not sure what conclusions I can draw from this of whether the dialog is helping or hurting. Maybe only 5% of users would download the updates if I didn’t. Also of note, there are ~8 million foursquare users worldwide. With these download numbers, webOS accounts for about 1.25% of foursquare users. This is low, low, low, but it’s consistent. When the webOS app first launch in 2009, we accounted for just under 1% of users, so while it’s a small increase, it’s an increase nonetheless. However, these numbers aren’t totally significant since total foursquare users includes SMS, mobile web, official and unofficial iPhone, Android, and BlackBerry apps, Windows Phone 7, Symbian, and more. I think an interesting metric would be comparing webOS numbers to WP7 or Symbian, or possibly even mobile web. It’s already known that webOS isn’t as big as iOS or Android, so comparing them at this stage isn’t so important.

growlr

Downloads. I don’t have full stats on growlr yet since I haven’t added Metrix to it yet, so these will not be as interesting. We’ve had less than 1000 downloads for growlr, but for a sub-1.0 app that isn’t feature-complete and has been available for about 6 weeks, that’s not so bad. Not to mention, Untappd is a very niche network and for that to succeed on a small platform like webOS at all is interesting. Add to it that I never promote the app and it makes sense.

Remedy. First and foremost, I need to finish the app and get it to v1.0. But, like foursquare, growlr kind of is reliant on Untappd’s overall popularity. However, I do think there’s some room for promotion to garner new users (for this and foursquare). Once I finish up incredible! I’ll be able to push my existing apps a little harder.

So, there you have it. Nothing monumental, nothing amazing, but nothing totally discouraging either. Hopefully this summer, I can make a bigger push on my apps and the TouchPad and Pre 3 launches this summer will hopefully provide an organic increase in app downloads/purchases.

I’m totally swamped on web and app development. I’ve promised Firefox and Safari neato! extensions like the Chrome one that’s already out there, but haven’t delivered.

So! I’m outsourcing! 

If you are a Firefox or Safari extension developer and would like to make the official neato! extension, let me know! Hit me up on Twitter (@zhephree) or email (geoff@zhephree.com) if you’re interested! I’ll give you all the requirements, the graphics, and JavaScript library and junk you’ll need!

If you know an extension developer, let them know about this.

Making some progress with sending new stuff via neato!. As I’ve demonstrated already, you’ll be able to send a contact from your phone to another user’s phone. I’ve cleaned that view up a bit.

Since you cannot send text along with a contact, the textfield gets replaced with the contact you’ve selected. Note that just because it says “Computer” it will not send contacts to your computer. You’ll have to select a friend to send to.

But hey, what’s that new button next to the attach contact button? That’s the attach file button, which will allow you to send a single file to your computer or another phone!

This gets a little tricky. Sending files will need to take advantage of a server to send them back and forth. However, luckily free uploading site SendSpace has an API and allows anonymous file uploads! So, here’s how it’ll work:

You select a file on your phone:

When you hit send, the file will get uploaded to SendSpace and be given a URL to download it. If you’re sending to your computer, this URL will open in your browser in a new tab and give you the option to download it. 

However, this method isn’t the most ideal on your phone, so if you send a SendSpace URL to a phone, neato! will recognize it and handle the download for you, just as it does when sending a direct URL to a file right now.

It won’t be super instant, and it’s not much better than email, but given the limitations of webOS, it’s the best solution.

Techy discussion: my original plan was to Base64-encode the selected file and turn it into a data: URL, send that to your phone or whatever and avoid the upload process all together. BUT, webOS can’t download data URLs (it can view them, but not download). Also, the message length for sending via neato! is only a few kilobytes, so some PDFs or images wouldn’t be able to be sent. So, server middleman is the best solution right now.

The other update is the dashboard notification.

You now have three buttons in the notification: Open Main Card (like tapping the notification does now), Open Preferences (the new preferences-only scene), Send To (send to a phone or computer).

These will provide one less tap to get to the functions. Also, the “neato!” on the right isn’t just for decoration. It alerts you to the status of neato!. “Wait…” means it is currently disconnected from the server and is trying to establish a connection. When it says “neato!” it is connected to the server and data can be received.

I’ve also fixed the ability to send via neato! from other apps and browser patches. It actually sends the data AND if neato! wasn’t previously open, the stage automatically closes, so neato! won’t need to be continuously running just to send stuff from other apps or the web browser.

The updates are coming along and I’m making progress. I hope to have it ready for early next week.

neato! 1.0 will be bringing a lot to the table, including the ability to send stuff from your phone to a friend’s phone (provided they have neato! running on their phone). Because we’re working with two phones and not a phone and a computer, we have opened the door to sending some cool data types.

Like sending a contact to your friend.

So, here we go!

Here you see that your send scene is different. Below the “Send This” button, there’s an “Attach Contact” button. Tapping this will present you with the standard People Picker and you’ll be able to select the individual contact you’d like to send to your friend (I’m sending former Palm Dev Relations Guru Dion Almaer’s info to my webOS Emulator in this example).

Once you select a contact, you’ll see their name and their picture to confirm you’ve selected the proper contact. Note that attaching a contact will erase whatever text you might’ve had in the standard text field. To cut down on message size, you cannot send a message and a contact at the same time.

After tapping the “Send To” button, neato! will work its magic and your friend will get an alert (no matter what app they have active) asking them what they’d like to do with the newly received contact.

As you can see, you can ignore the message, or save the contact info to update an existing contact, or save it as a brand new contact.

Right now, I’ve got it sending the contact, but saving isn’t done yet. Shouldn’t take long. I haven’t put the effort in yet, but as of right now, it’s quite possible that contact sending will be limited to webOS 1.4.5 and below. Don’t worry — that doesn’t mean NO webOS 2.0 support. It’ll just come in a point-release soon after.

So, that’s where we are right now. Things are ramping up in my day-to-day world, so I might not get this out by the weekend like previously planned, but expect it either right before Christmas, or right after, if not this weekend.