And now for the best time of the year – new app live on the App Store :]
My friend and partner, Nikolay Petkov, has drawn few hundred wallpapers for both the 3.5 inch and 4 inch iPhone screens. And so when I finally got some free time on my hands (after the big push to get “ iOS6 by Tutorials” out) I thought I might quickly put together an application to distribute his wallpapers.
When I had a look at the App Store to check out what’s there on the market for Wallpaper apps I noticed few things:
- there is an incredible multitude of wallpaper apps; many of them created by the same developer – very similar applications with different app icons
- most of the apps fetch images from the Internet – usually from Flickr, or other image stream services
- most app developers don’t have high attention to details, for example if you start any of them with no Internet connection, almost nobody cares to provide any coherent experience to the user
Here are just few examples of what I am talking about, get out of data coverage for a minute and that’s what you will see:
If you put your time into creating an iPhone app, why not also make it good?
Free Wallpaper a Day
Together with Nikolay we sat down and put together a simple application, to provide interesting and engaging experience, and also super high quality iPhone wallpapers.
Apple however discarded the engaging and interesting parts, so in the end you the user will just get a collection of wallpapers for free. Sometimes I really have to laugh when Apple discards something for being non-standard; looks like “think different” is a thing of the past. (But that’s a whole other story, no need to go in details here)
Everything that could make it past Apple’s reviewers is still pretty good, so you can enjoy some great wallpapers. Our app is now live on the App Store and you are invited to give it a try – it’s FREE!
You can also browse our wallpaper collection using your computer’s web browser, to have full blown sharing on the web, in Facebook and Twitter, we also needed a simple web site, so – have a look at it as well:
Libraries I used on the way
Beauitiful alert boxes extending MBProgressHUD
Now… for the Wallpapers application I used some already proven class and I also have put together couple of interesting classes, which I’ll share with you in Part 2 of this post; let me see what these will be:
- I used my ALAssetsLibrary category to save images to a custom camera roll album
- I used my MTPopupWindow class to show credits and terms of use
- I’ve extended Matej Bukovinski’s MBProgressHUD class, so that I can quickly show beautiful alert boxes
- I used my Google Analytics tracker class for easy in-app analytics
- I used the incredibly handy AutoCoding category on NSObject, which allows me to easily persist any object into a file
Links to all these come in Part 2 of this post, with examples.
Tools I used on the way
The Iconify app by Mugunth Kumar
Few notable tools I used while putting the “Free Wallpaper a Day” application:
- I finally found the one app that suits me best to downscale my graphics for the iPhone 3GS (C’mon Apple you cause enough trouble, just drop the requirement to support non-retina displays!!!
- ResizeMe is still the best app out there for batch image processing
- Iconify by Mugunth Kumar – so simple that I just can’t look for another app to do the job
- the Color converter on my web site – always my favourite tool
- I used hockeyapp instead of testfligh app for over the air distribution
- MajicRank for live rankings, although there are few UI glitches at present + a big warning on the author’s web site, not to use the application
- Evernote for all things planning, resource gathering, drafting, etc.
- Dash for documentation
All things in detail come in Part 3!
See you in the next post! Cheers
The post was originally published on the following URL: http://www.touch-code-magazine.com/free-wallpaper-a-day-is-live-on-the-appstore-part-13/ ·
Source : touch-code-magazine[dot]com
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