Strip Designer was chosen as staff favorite again. This time in the US iPad app store. It jump from a spot in the 30s to 10 in Photography, and it even managed to squeeze itself into spot 152 on the iPad top paid apps chart at the same time. This little (40000+ lines) app is doing quite well at the moment.

Update: I noticed it got a little higher later, and according to Top App Charts (http://topappcharts.com/) it got to spot 119 of Top Paid yesterday, although it dropped today. I also noticed that 3D Brain was at spot 151 of the top free one month ago. That app has been downloaded more than 400,000 times.

Lifecards 1.5 got released yesterday. It took exactly 7 days for Apple to approve the update. Most of the time the updates are approved within a couple of days. I guess the review team is busy.

Besides all the features that came along with Strip Designer (stickers, cutouts, iPad support, auto font-sizing, etc.), there are three major new features: Undo/Redo, "multipage" cards, and hand-writing.

Undo/Redo was horrible to implement. Lifecards was never designed with that in mind, so it was put on top of the existing code base. The implementation isn't pretty; Each user content object consists of two types of data; settings and current state. Settings data reflect the settings the user has applied to the object and the current state contains cached data, like the current texture id for photos/stickers and the balloon path for balloons (things that can be rebuild). The setting data is pushed onto the undo-stack at specific points in the code. Undoing an action means that you have to restore the settings of the specific object and rebuild all cached data. It sounds straight-forward, but since the objects were not built with the cache/setting division in mind, it looks a bit messy in places. For future projects I'll think about undo/redo from day one. It would have been easier if that part of the code was also more clearly divided between model and view, but when you build iPhone apps you don't want to overcomplicate things from the beginning.

I actually planned undo/redo for the last two releases of SD, but decided to disable it about 2 days before both releases. In both cases because I didn't felt like I had the time to test it properly and finish the last remaining bits. I didn't cut it because it wasn't stable. I cut it because I wasn't sure it was stable. When you start to see your planned deadline slip 5-7 days it is time to cut features.

Multipage was added to better support backs of postcards and the inner side of a greeting card. When I started multipage (after the last release of SD) I was very ambitious. I wanted to have the ability to create photo books. Each page can have its own independent template. However, I realized that having multiple pages visible at once presents a lot of issues when you can drag e.g. balloons from one page to another. While most of the code for multipage documents is there, I decided to simplify everything for this release to avoid introducing too many bugs. So the current code is limited to having all pages visible at the same time. People are begging for SD to become multipage, so I may have to get everything working properly soon. I am still divided between building on top of the current code-base or starting over.

Handwriting was also added to enable you to draw a signature. It is a funny little feature. The drawings are stored in vector format -- Basically a set of paths, with pen width and color data. That way they don't take up too much space and they render nicely in PDFs. Unfortunately, erasing parts of vector paths is somewhat tricky. I implemented a small algorithm that removes anything that intersects with a line of some width (the eraser). Basically, given a path and a convex polygon (made from the line and its width), I can remove those parts of the path that intersects the polygon. There are still a few glitches in the algorithm, but I decided it was stable enough to release.

I think the keywords of this release were "priority" and "good-enough". Some planned features didn't make it into the release, and some are just barely implemented "well enough". The whole update took about 21 days and the deadline slipped about 5 days -- That is a lot of underestimation considering I didn't finish everything I planned for, but at least it got out.

There has been several reviews of Strip Designer lately. I haven't really paid much attention to them, and I only stumble over them when I do an occasional blogsearch on Google... Anyway, today I found a video review (although it starts about 2 minutes in): here.

I am really amazed with how professional many of these reviews are. Everything is cleanly cut and the voice-over fast and well timed with the video. Seems like the reviewers spend a significant amount of time on these.

Also, great review! She really makes "Strip Designer" sound good (I've never been completely happy with the name)!

I don't really know why (yet), but Strip Designer managed to squeeze into Italy's top 100. Currently at number 16. I haven't checked the numbers for a while so I actually only stumbled on this by accident. Number of downloads yesterday was 202. Perhaps the fact that the app is on sale for $1 might have helped. I think that 16 is actually the highest position I've seen Strip Designer on any of the major top 100 lists so far. The app also got great ratings in Italy; "Bravi", "Ottimo", "Davvero Carino". Great!

So, Strip Designer managed to squeeze into a couple of more top 100s around the world. Yesterday it was on top 100 in Portugal and at the time of writing it is number 100 in Australia. I don't know what the sales numbers are, but Portugal went so quickly that I don't think they are particular impressive. Australia should be around 50-100/day. I have increased the price now after the Sunday+Monday sale, so I expect the rank to drop quickly now.

I noticed that Apple selected about 30 apps for a "Creative Kit" promotion on the app store. Strip Designer was among them and this explains the most recent surge. I was looking for 4-5 days for a cause of the surge, before I stumbled over the Creative Kit on the app store. It is kind of funny that I don't get any notice from Apple, but only see a surge in sales numbers, and later notice that the apps are featured by accident.

Meahwhile... it is time to submit the iPad version of Strip Designer with the GM build of iPhone OS 3.2. I was struggling to get everything ready for the first review this Saturday. I had to cut a lot of things from the release. For instance, I decided to drop undo/redo because I didn't have time to test it thoroughly. I literally only removed the undo and redo buttons.

Hopefully, this version will make it onto the app store for iPad launch. Let's see. I'll reenable some of the dropped functionality in the first update after the iPad has launched.

Update: Strip Designer is currently no. 58 in Australia. Yesterday's sales: 35, but there must be some more today. In Japan we needed more than 200 sales to get on the top 100, so it seems like Australia is a significantly smaller market. In fact, we sold more in Germany while only being no. 8 in Photography.

Update2: Ah, I see. SD is now featured under New and Noteworthy in Australia. It isn't really new so perhaps "and" really means "or". This is great!