Phil

[theephil-blog]

Free is good

A few days ago I took the decision to make iMinigolf free due to the lack of interest in the app itself. 

A day after me making it free, I checked iTunes connect just out of curiosity to see how many people had downloaded it because it was now free. I was surprised to see that almost 300 downloads were made within a day of being free. So it shows to have apps for free.

I am curious though, why do people download free apps? Well I did a quick twitter search, and it seems there is a few accounts that post a tweet when an app goes free. If only a small percentage of the followers to these accounts downloaded it, it would account for the downloads iMinigolf had.

It seems to have settled down the downloads now, and its slowly going to zero downloads per day. If you people who have got the app, thank you downloading it. But I'm afraid to say, I won't be updating it any further. 

[theephil-blog]

iMinigolf now FREE

For the past few months, can't remember the exact date, I have had an app on the iOS app store. It was released just to show what I had learnt in the first few months of learning Objective-C and I wasn't expecting big sales from it.

Since then, it has sold less than 20 copies. This could come down to two reasons.

- People don't want an app like this that they need to pay for. This is obvious, people get given a free scorecard when they go to play. So why should they pay for pretty much the same thing?

- I barely advertised it. If I wanted to make money from it and get people downloading it, I could of gone to minigolf course or even golf courses.

The app has been updated a few times since released and now has features that would make it of some use. But I still think it's the price issue that could be causing a problem with this.

Due to this, iMinigolf has now been made free (may take a while to propagate to all stores). I'm not expecting this to make a different to sales, in fact I imagine they'll stay the same. But being free gives people the option to download it without worrying about paying money for an app they wont use more than once. 

As a side note, app #2 that was in development has stopped due to time issues. The bases of the app is there, so I could easily pick it up when I have time. 

[theephil-blog]

Re-Designs are GOOD!

On Wednesday 19th October I decided to re-design my portfolio to make it feel more professional, rather than the fun feel of the older version. The older version felt to childish and didn't give of the right impression.

About the re-design. Well, to be honest there isn't much to say about it. Except I would like to mention I have used responsive web design technique on this website. Explanation? Ok then...

I'll give an example, if you access the BBC news website on your phone, it redirects you to the mobile version of the site which is nice as it loads very quickly. But let's say you want to share that article with a friend or family member, get the link and send it off. What you didn't notice was it had m.whatever at the start. So you're friend opens it up, but it's the mobile site. Not very user friendly on a desktop.

Responsive design takes away from this, loads the same page but depending on the screen size depends on how the content is displayed. If you grab the link, it will still load up the desktop version to your friend or a mobile version if they're on their phone.

Clever right?

One more thing about the site redesign, my old site required me to edit the HTML file and upload it again. My new site connects to a database and pulls it from that. I then only have to add a new field in the database and then website is up to date. 

Well if you click here you can view the re-design of my site. Bare in mind there is a lot of changes still to be made and some content missing. 

[theephil-blog]

My hero

A day after the news broke that Steve Jobs passed away, and it's still hard to come to terms with this news. It's the first time I have ever been upset and held back tears from the death of someone I never met.

I wish I did meet him, it was always a dream of mine just to be present in the same room as him. I am extremely gutted this will never happen. But I am happy for what he brought to the world. He didn't just bring Apple products, he moved technology forward and made customers' excited about products. Without Steve Jobs starting Apple, the computer wouldn't be as we see it today. He innovated whilst others' didnt.

Apart from Apple, Pixar was huge. The biggest animation company in the world, start by Steve Jobs, has created some of the best movies ever seen. But not many people know this side of his story.

The world has lost a true inspiration. But his family have lost someone closer. I feel for them, I feel for his biological parents, who never got to know him personally. Without that part to his life, I wouldn't be sitting here now blogging about his un-timely death.

Time will move on and so will the world, new people will take over. As Steve Jobs said 'Death clears out the old and makes way for the new'. But I will never forget him. I will never forget what he has done. He will always be an inspiration to me and my work.

Stay hungry, Stay foolish.

Background image taken from http://dribbble.com/shots/286394-Steve?list=popular&offset=23

[theephil-blog]

Apple announcement

Yesterday Apple announced the new iPhone 4S. Pretty much the same as the iPhone 4 except with new insides and a new camera. 

Its very nice, mainly because the iPhone 4 is nice. The iPhone 4 was a complete game changer when it was released, broke the mould of what the iPhone had looked like since it was released. Added a nice new antenna design, even though that is a bit bad sometimes. It added things that made the iPhone awesome.

iPhone 4S? Well as far as I can see, not much change. Yeah it has the new A5 chip and a better camera. And I'm not saying its a bad phone. It's just I don't expect it to sell as well as the previous iPhone. Why? The name.

Lets say you have an iPhone 4 and you see that a new iPhone announced, if it said iPhone 5 you are likely to think that it is a huge update and want it. If it still has the same name, you aren't as tempted. (Watch it sell like crazy now!)

As a side note, I love the new feature of it, Siri. Personal assistant on your phone. It looks awesome. And I'm sure, if Apple can pull it off, it will work amazingly well. But usage of this feature? As far as I can see, very limited. Just a feature to say you have and use once in a while. Accessibility wise, for partially blind people, lots of uses and I'm sure will be a big hit for them.

Problem with that, why make it iPhone 4S only? It could easily run on the iPhone 4 as I'm sure it wouldn't require that much memory to run. So expect iOS 5.1 or 5.2 to have this feature in it for iPhone 4 users'.

[theephil-blog]

iMinigolf

For the past month and a bit I have been designing and developing a new app for your iPhone or iPod touch. The app? iMinigolf. What does it do? Keep reading to find out.

First of all, I will say this is a very basic app and was created mainly to understand how the app store works and to put together what I have been learning the past couple of months.

The first thing to say about the app is that it is all one screen. All the bits of interface that you see are just placed onto the view and then removed when not need. (Except when the view flips)

Only 9 players? WHY?! Well I just figured that I've never seen more than 9 people playing minigolf at one time. To be honest, I dont think I have ever saw more thant 4 people playing so 9 is a generous number compared to 4. I would like the limit of players raised. Yes I can easily do this, if people wish me to, I'll just see what people want first.

You can just use the piece of paper that you get when you go to minigolf? Well yes you could do, but I have found that a lot of people end of fumbling around, trying to remember which pocket they put the pencil in and then attempt to write down the number which ends up being un-readable by the end of the game. iMinigolf on the other hand, tap the player you want and then the score they got. No searching for pencils and at the end of the game, it adds it all up for you and displays it in a scorecard, displaying all the scores and the final total.

Can I view my old scorecards? At the moment, no, but the next update, yes. I couldn't quite get the scorecard saving system to work, so I just left it out of v1.0 and left it for v1.1.

Feedback for me about the app? Tweet me it @iamphill or leave a review on the app store (I'd prefer a tweet so I can reply)

I hope you like the app.

PS. The app is currently waiting for review, I will tweet when it is available.

[theephil-blog]

My adventure's with CSS3

Even though I know a lot about CSS, I've never used CSS3 at all. Except for the odd border-radius and box-shadow.

So I thought I'd look into using some more advanced stuff that CSS3 offers. The main two I have looked at is the :before and :after selectors. These two selectors basically allow you to specify content that you want to be placed before or after a certain element, whether it be a div or a paragraph.

The first example I created was a banner, click here, this banner was created with one div element and one paragraph element. 

The idea is that the all the left hand side elements are created by using the :before and :after on the div box and then the right hand side elements are created by using them selectors on the paragraph element. Pretty simple stuff.

To get the triangles by the way was done by using borders, as web browsers render borders by using triangles for some reason.

As another example to these selectors I also created a chat bubbles by using the same method, except all the elements were created with just one div box. Click here to view

So thats it, my new adventure into the land of CSS3 selectors. 

[theephil-blog]

It's live!

After almost a month of development, several different designs, several different layouts, lots of headaches, lots of late nights, my portfolio website is live! I'm very happy with the outcome of the website and I hope you are to. Comments would be great, to send them to me, access my website with the link below and click get in touch. Fill out the form and then send. Click here for my website

[theephil-blog]

The end of the world

Before reading this, I want you all to understand I am not the biggest religious person in the world, I haven't read the bible all the way through and I barely go to church.

So according to this Harold Camping guy, today (May 21st) is the rapture. He also stated that approx. 200 million of Jesus' followers' would be taken up to Heaven. He finally stated that the world would ACTUALLY end 5 months later, which would take us to October 21st for everyone else remaining on earth.

Now when on May 21st is this meant to happen? Well according to this Harold guy, at 6pm in each of the time zones. When 6pm hits in each of these time zones, huge earthquakes would shake the countries signalling the start of the rapture. (on a side note, its not 6pm EST time, its 6pm in each time zone according to his theory)

6pm passed in England, no earthquake and as far as I can tell no rapture. I'm guessing this because my girlfriend and her family are still with us right now.

Why has it not happened? I'm gonna take a guess at the fact this Harold guy just wanted to publicise his group of so called christians. I say so called christians because how they actually call themselves true christians, when a true christian believes that only God himself knows the rapture date,

Also, surely if he believed the rapture was about to happen today he wouldn't of needed to of been raising money? If he was going to Heaven, he wouldn't need any money.

[theephil-blog]

Hello blog world

Its been far too long since I've updated tumblr and its not that I've been busy or anything. I've just been lazy. Putting off updating tumblr by saying 'i'll do it later' and then later never comes.

Well whats been going on:

Easter happened, and I still haven't even started to eat my easter eggs.

All university assignments have been finished and handed in.

Revision? Yeah that hasn't happened yet.

About the revision...

My exam, only the one, is in less than 10 days and I haven't even opened a book yet. Its not that I don't want to, because I do. I'm just far too lazy to sit there and read about a subject, that to be honest I find boring.

What have I been doing instead? Well I've been putting together a design for an iPhone app I'm working on. It's looking good and should hopefully move to the development stage after I finish my exam. When will it be out? Well how long is a piece a string? 

[theephil-blog]

Grand national isn't so Grand

Ok the title is a bit misleading, but bare with me on this one.

There are a few reasons I believe the grand national isn't grand at all.

Does anyone actually care about the horses? If the horse falls and breaks a leg, they shoot it. Why do they have to do that? Why cant they just keep it alive and sort it's leg out? Yes its probably cheaper for the trainer to just kill it, but its horrible and doesn't need to be done. When they are running, why do they have to whip them? If I was the horse and got whipped, I'd just stop running. And what will the horse get for all this? More than likely, nothing more than being told to do it again in a few weeks time at a different race.

Is there a need for the betting? Yes it's nice to win some money. But when people start putting £100's on a horse and then complain they have no money when they loose. Any need? Yes I have betted on a horse a few years ago. But I only put about £5 on it. And yeah I did loose, and wasn't gutted at all. 

The booze that causes problems. When I went to Ladies day for my 18th, at about midday, the majority of people there were drunk. And not just drunk, so drunk they couldn't walk. Ok after a whole day there yes, but midday I mean come on! This booze then causes problems, and more than likely quite a few people will get arrested for drunken problems.

Why does EVERYONE all of sudden know everything about horse racing? For the rest of the year, people don't care about the racing, they don't put bets on. But the grand national weekend, everyone knows everything about all the horses and knows who the best horse to pick will be.

Don't get me wrong, its a nice day out and I thoroughly enjoyed it when I went for my 18th. But the 4 things mentioned above make me think was it worth it? But saying that, I want to go next year, only because its my 21st and it would be a nice day out with the family and my lovely girlfriend.

[theephil-blog]

Someone's birthday

Well today is someone's birthday (Beths) and she got well and truly spoilt today! And not just by me!

She got s new netbook from her parents. It's tiny! But I still prefermy MacBook.

From me:-

Pandora bracelet with 2 charms.

My old iPad with the cover.

Me to you teddy bear.

Build-a-Bear teddy bear.

New blue bumper for her iPhone.

Also took her out for lunch to gourmet burger kitchen. It's nice in there but rather expensive for what it is.

[theephil-blog]

Another year gone

Another year has gone and I'm now a bit older. Time is flying by.

It's 366 days until my next birthday at which I'll be 21. OMG!

What did I get today:-

Camera bag.

New hoody.

Some strawberry sweets, best in the world!

A nice tshirt.

And money.

And there is still stuff to come from my lovely girlfriend.

Mothers' day tomorrow, and I havent got my Mum much, but she didnt want much. So I thought Amazon voucher for her Kindle which I got her for Christmas. Best present I have ever bought her, she is never off it. I think in the time since Christmas shes read like 7 books, a lot more than I've ever read in my lifetime but thats not the point.

AND THEN if this weekend couldn't get anymore crazy and jam packed, its Beths' (my girlfriend) birthday on Monday and well I have her some pretty cool presents which I cant write here yet. But I know she'll love them :-)