All posts tagged: apps

We tried using video ads for Indie App user acquisition. Are TikTok ads a scam?

July 1, 2023
by Marc
Business / Making of Captionista
Composite of three iPhones 14 Pro showing screenshots of the app Captionista and its Freestyle feature

Back in late August 2022 we launched version 1.0 of our social video subtitling app Captionista into a crowded segment dominated by huge players including CapCut which is owned by the company behind TikTok. This makes App Store Search ads way too expensive for the keywords we need. As we were just this week posting videos as part of the marketing, we tried paid video ads to see if that might move the needle. We’ve experimented […]

The Making of Soundproof, part 3: Unlocking features with In-App Purchases

October 20, 2014
by Marc
Development / iOS / User Experience

During the process of making Soundproof, we had to consider what the business model would be. I wrote [some early thoughts about pricing](http://transition.io/is-unlock-everything-a-mistake/) and talked about some [issues with implementing upgrade pricing with In-App Purchases](http://transition.io/my-first-public-ios-app-is-now-available/) previously. Here, we’ll take a brief look at the experience of implementing In-App Purchases and the user experience.

The Making of Soundproof, part 1: iPhone 6 made our huge play button look tiny

October 13, 2014
by Marc
Development / iOS / User Experience

Some background: the first release of our [music practice Soundproof](https://soundproofapp.com) was “Waiting for Review” in the last week of September when my iPhone 6 arrived. I ran the app on the iPhone 6 and of course got the stretched up iPhone 5 UI. It was OK, but a bit “Duplo” shall we say. Also our very subtle background gradient was being stretched. Nobody else would notice but… there is pride to consider.

Debugging tools for OpenGL in XCode

May 23, 2013
by Marc
Development / iOS

My first iOS app has some UI elements that use OpenGL. It’s been interesting learning to optimise this particular part of the app for 60fps (60 frames per second) rendering. You hear 60fps being talked about a lot with iOS UI development, and there is very good reason for this. If what you are doing animates in response to touches, 60fps updates are essential to avoid it feeling laggy. Apple spent a lot of time […]