The AppStore or Developer Center only provide the latest version to you, so what now?

A little bit hidden in the not so visible download section you can still find old versions:

https://developer.apple.com/downloads/index.action

About a year ago I decided to go with v8js to use javascript code within php because it was so much easier to handle.

Today I benchmarked a problem related to the v8 engine and just out of curiosity I ran the same test with Spidermonkey.

A simple A/B Test:

• A = define a JS Function and call it it in a loop
• B = define a JS Function once and call it in a loop

The results for V8 were:

It was not really surprising that the one-time-definition was faster.
I tried exact the same with Spidermonkey:

Huge difference compared to V8!

Here’s the test code:

V8 Test:

 0; $i-- ) {
$js->executeString($jsFunc, 'Test.Context');
$js->executeString("myTestFunc();", 'Test.Context');
}
echo "#1: " . (mstime() - $start)." ({$runs} with re-definition)";
unset($js);
$start = mstime();
$js = new V8Js('Test');
$js->executeString($jsFunc, 'Test.Context');
for ( $i = $runs; $i > 0; $i-- ) {
$js->executeString("myTestFunc();", 'Test.Context');
}
echo "#2: " . (mstime() - $start)." ({$runs} without re-definition)";
unset($js);
echo "
";
}
function mstime() {
list($usec, $sec) = explode(" ", microtime());
return ((float)$usec + (float)$sec);
}

Spidermonkey Test:

 0; $i-- ) {
$js->evaluateScript($jsFunc, 'Test.Context');
$js->evaluateScript("myTestFunc();", 'Test.Context');
}
echo "#1: " . (mstime() - $start)." ({$runs} with re-definition)";
unset($js);
$start = mstime();
$js = new JSContext('Test');
$js->evaluateScript($jsFunc, 'Test.Context');
for ( $i = $runs; $i > 0; $i-- ) {
$js->evaluateScript("myTestFunc();", 'Test.Context');
}
echo "#2: " . (mstime() - $start)." ({$runs} without re-definition)";
unset($js);
echo "
";
}
function mstime() {
list($usec, $sec) = explode(" ", microtime());
return ((float)$usec + (float)$sec);
}

WS only captures the visible part of the web page, the rest is blank.

Please fix this or I’ll have to write a scathingly negative review and give you zero stars.

(Running iOS 5 developer preview.)

Yours, [..]

Remember: iOS 5 is just a Developer preview right now (a few days old) and scheduled to be made public in the next months.

Time Machine is a great way to backup all files and restore to any point in time, by default it creates a new backup every hour.

Normally this won’t hurt the performance but if you have many small files on your disk or huge portions of your data change very often, it will slow down the whole system.

You can change the intervals to reduce the slowdowns. To backup only every 6 hours, open your terminal and:

sudo defaults write /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.backupd-auto StartInterval -int 21600

The interval is in seconds.

To setup more sophisticated schedules you can also try a free tool called TimeMachineEditor (http://timesoftware.free.fr/timemachineeditor/).

If you start at a new Mac without data migration, you can simply copy the folder with all archived App versions to your new users library.

You can find it here:

/Users//Library/Application Support/Developer/Shared/Archived Applications

Or, if you develop at different Macs, symlink that folder to your Dropbox to have them accessible everywhere :-)

It contains only a few but very cool new features:

The new features are:

• Support for Multiple Accounts – often asked for, here it comes!
• Advanced Segments – take a better look at your reports by switching and comparing subsets of data
• Open Reports in other Apps like iBooks – any App that supports PDF Files can receive reports for later usage
• Print your Reports! – Support for AirPrint is now built in

Improved was the following:

• The general speed of the website listing updates and report downloads was improved
• Goals have now names instead of numbers

Also one bugfix is included:

• Some users with special characters in their password had trouble logging in

In addition to the Update of the Free Version including its Premium Upgrade, there was also a full blown premium Version submitted to the store. That version is exactly the same but meant for everyone who has disabled In-App-Purchases and can’t get the premium upgrade.

2010/12/05 – Today the update hit the store, watch out for update notices in iTunes or the App Store to get it on your iPad!

It’s simple, just take a look at the browser identification:

 
Am I iPad?

Example:

Am I iPad?

It basically searches in the browser information for any occurence of “iPad” and returns true if found.

Here’s an example of Safari’s identification on the iPad:

Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; U; CPU OS 3_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.5 Mobile/7B367 Safari/6531.22.7

A blog entry Introducing ‘htty’, the HTTP TTY that is about a very cool console tool to “browse” the web. It allows you to connect to any webserver and take a look at what is really happening with your web connections.

It is perfect to analyze the response of your own websites or learn more about others.

I often have problems analyzing several forwards in tracking links because everyone uses his own tracking and AdServer, resulting for me to use telnet to do all the http requests by myself. This is the tool I was missing all the time :-)

Just follow the white rabbit err link ( http://blog.nilsjonsson.com/post/1076166313/introducing-htty-the-http-tty ) to learn more about this new “must have” for web developers ;-)

favo$ gem install htty
[..]

This caused the 1.5 Update to be submitted today instead of the end of the month, having to remove some of the new features that were originally planned for this release.

But it still contains some great new features! There is a new Metrics-Selection which allows you to choose which data to use in the graphs. For example: You can analyze your AdWords with bounce rates.

What is very exciting, is the possibility to even compare metrics in a graph! For example: Find out how the average time a user spends on your page combines with your revenue!

Here is the list of all the changes:

New Features:

• Metric Selection: switch metrics for your graphs
• Metric Comparison: Compare two metrics in a single graph (i.e. Average Time on Page vs. $ Index)
• Search option for many Traffic Sources
• Options to select all 5 Goals of all 4 Goal Sets (named Goals will follow soon, they were originally planned for this release)
• New Option: Graph by Hour, Day, Week or Month
• Optional: Access for up to 5 custom reports added. This functionality is enabled by default.
• Map Overlay Reports for: US States, Americas, Asia, Europe and Oceania

Improved:

• Support for up to 10.000 websites per account added (previously 100 websites per account)
• Quick time selection for this and last week is based on the current day instead of the last completed week
• Quick time selection also sets the compare time, based on the selected timeframes
• The upgrade process received its own status message
• Small GUI improvements

Bugfix:

• A bug in the auto-Login procedure which prevents reports from being displayed
• website names got cut off at some special characters, not displaying the complete configured name
• If the last selected timeframe was “Today”, it is also saved and set again on the next start.
• Broken Login with Google Analytics

2010/07/17 – Today the update hit the store, watch out for update notices in iTunes or the App Store to get it on your iPad!

The first post can be found here: App Sales, What’s Hot – What’s Not – #1: Category Featured

#3 – “Free for one Day” Promotions

There is so little you can do to market your App in the App Store / in iTunes itself. Outside the App Store you have some more options but less users.

There are Blogs, News and Promotion-Sites you can ask to blog/write/promote your App. I haven’t done the first two, but the last one I tried with FreeAppADay.com which I stumbled on by researching sales numbers by ranking positions.

I had two of these “Free for one Day” events, one by accident without being promoted and one with an active promotion. This helps identify the influence of such a promotion site and what you can do all by yourself.

Sales before

The baseline to compare everything too are the sales numbers before anything happened:

These are the normal up & downs for a timeframe of 4 weeks.

Set yourself Free

There was a promotion scheduled May 31st, which the App was set to free but freeappaday did not really promote the App. Neither Newsletter, Twitter nor Frontpage News had anything mentioned about the App, but it was free on that day! Here is what happened, the same graph +4 days:

6.600 more Downloads:

• 1.000 on the evening of the first day (~6 hours)
• 5.000 on the promotion day
• 600 on the morning of the following day (~6 hours)

The App moved in the Free-App-Charts to the top of its category within that day.

Sales the following day

Having the App on 6.600 extra iPhones and iPads should help its sales. Average sales increased by +10% after these days.

No need for a graph here, you can imagine +10% :-)

Free for one Day, with Promotion

The App was prepared exactly the same way about 6 weeks later and was sent to:

• 13.000+ Twitter Followers
• 20.000+ Newsletter Subscribers
• Put on the Front Page of freeappaday.com
• …and was announced to be the first Opening App for the new iPad Category

The results were nearly the same:

• 700 Downloads on the evening of the first day (~10 hours)
• 4.000 Downloads on the promotion day
• 600 Downloads on the morning of the following day (~10 hours)

= 5.300 Downloads, thats about 1.300 less compared to the free day 6 weeks earlier.

The App moved again in the Free-App-Charts to the top of its category within that day.

Why was the promotion less successful?

I have a Google Alert on the App’s name which made me aware of some websites that monitor price changes of Apps. These seem to have a very large user base that can be accessed very easily, if your App costs several dollars and drops down to zero.

My guess is, that the first try in May got all these users that were looking on these monitoring websites. The second try got all the users of freeappday.com and the ones looking on these “monitoring sites”. Someone can only guess how the users are divided between the two sources, my guess is 50/50.

Sales the following day

Having the App on 5.300 (this makes a total of 11.900) extra iPhones and iPads should help its sales again. Average sales increased again by +10% after these days.

But: There was a big difference on the second day, the App went back to $3.99. In contrast to the first try, there were more people actually buying the App on that day, the revenue increased +70%. This could mean that there are more people willing to buy an App on freeappaday.com than on the “monitoring sites”.

One month later

The sales decreased slowly in the following weeks and stabilized on nearly the same niveau before both Free-Days. The effect wasn’t permanent but this is basically because the App was not one you will show your friends or talk about it very often. If an App is more viral that could be a jump-start to get it on track :-)

Conclusion

What I didn’t say, is that freeappaday.com wants $1.200 for their promotion ($600 for “new” developers) and requires you to promote their website in your App description on the day your App is free.

So the conclusion I come to, is that you might not need such promotion portals. You can get the same number if users very easily for free if you just set your pricing to free and wait for these “monitoring sites” to catch it on the iTunes RSS feeds. Depending on your pricing on the previous days, you should get the same results as being on such a “free for one day” promotion portal.