Eyestorm was one sale for one week. More than 6000 people downloaded it during that week and during the first 3 days it quickly reached spot 69 on the free iPhone action games list (US store). By the end of the week Eyestorm-on-sale was old news and the daily downloads were in the double digits. I raised the price to $1.99 and the daily purchases are now in the single digits just like before the sale. I am not really sure what was accomplished. The intention was to create more awareness of the app, but in reality it seems like the majority just grabbed it, played with it for a few minutes, and went on to the next free app. One thing that was interesting though was to see Eyestorm listed as the best free app of the day (here (www.theappsmachine.com)).

I am not really sure if we'll ever find a formula that works for Eyestorm, but at least 6000 people got it for free so far.

So here we are. It is March 4 and we still don't know when the iPad will be out (except by the end of March) and we don't know when we can submit apps for it. From a developer point of view all we have is the SDK in beta 3.

While a lot better than beta 1, beta 3 still has couple of rough edges here and there -- Like the "Upgrade target for iPad" menu option which is simply dimmed out for me, so I had to do it manually by changing the project settings to support both iPad and iPhone and create a new main xib file. For some reason my old main window xib files created a main window of iPhone size, so the app started in the upper left 320x480 pixels of the iPad simulator. Took me a good 30 minutes to figure out what was wrong. Anyway, beta 3 really feels a lot better.

The software is not the issue, it is the hardware.

The 1st and 2nd generation iPhone and iPod touch had only 128 MB of RAM while the third generation has 256 MB. Afaik all models have only 12 MB of shared video ram which is barely sufficient to have four 1024x1024x16 bit textures uploaded (8 MB ), additional textures and a few core animation layers. With full screen and modal uiviews significantly larger on the iPad, does it have more shared video RAM or does Apple expect us to manage with 12 MB?

Then there is the CPU question. The 1st and 2nd generation iPhone/iPod touches were not really fast enough to do >15 fps screen updates involving quartz painting -- Especially, when scaling and rotating images. The newest generation devices are faster, but only about 2x. I am guessing the iPad processor to be even faster, but will it be fast enough that I can do more screen rendering using quartz or do we still have to jump through hoops with Core Animation or OpenGL even for 2D graphics?

Then there is the UI. On the iPhone/iPod having the toolbars in the bottom of the screen makes sense, because they are close to the fingers. Apple places the toolbars in their iWork apps in the upper right corner of the screen. Is that really the right place for them? Sometimes following Apple is the right thing, but is it always? Hard to tell without the hardware, although a cardboard mockup helps.

While you are developing a lot of questions pop up, and not having the hardware is incredible frustrating when trying to plan, what *needs* to be done to port apps from iPhone to iPad. Will the OpenGL rendering be fast enough for what we do on the 768x1024 display? What sort of extra capability can we add given the CPU? How do we test that e.g. orientation changes are handled correctly? What is our deadline? Do we have 2 or 4 weeks?

I wonder how many developers will postpone porting until after the launch... I'll keep working blindfolded, but I bet that a lot of users will be disappointed with the first generation of universal iPad/iPhone applications.

Apple picked Strip Designer for the Staff Favorites section in the US store (probably in a few other stores as well) this week. That's is pretty cool. Both Lifecards and Christmas Lifecards were previously featured under "New and Noteworthy". Interestingly, all three apps share 100% code (excluding a few #ifdefs here and there) and quite a few graphics resources as well. Great!

... on the top free action games.

Eyestorm has had a tough time in the past, so after chatting about it with my brother in law, I decided to give it away for free for a while to see if it can gain some momentum that way. Yesterday more than 2500 downloaded it, which is way more than Eyestorm Lite. The current rating is around 3 stars on the US store, so it doesn't seem like it suffered heavily from going from paid to free.

I starting using Majic Rank for OSX to track the position of apps on the App Store in different countries. This morning, I noticed, that Strip Designer managed to rise to number 36 on the top paid list in Taiwan. The number of sales yesterday in TW: 20! What a world of difference from the US store. By the way: Strip Designer and Lifecards went on sale yesterday, and usually that would result in hundreds of additional downloads, but not this time. I guess, the "Sale"-effect is gone now.