Posted: 12 Aug 2013 08:01 AM PDT

So you’re a young, up and coming entrepreneur who has read about the likes of Chad Mureta, and now you want to get into the mobile app development industry but you are not sure how to get your feet wet. Well, there are a few things you should know about before joining the pleiade of app developers struggling to get into the top 5% of app stores.

For your convenience, here are the shortcuts to each section for faster access:

Native vs Cross-Platform Development
Choose Your First Platform Wisely
Designing For Success
Client Retention Secrets
Marketing (Magic) Tricks
Monetization is Tricky Business

Let’s get to it.

Recommended Reading: Ultimate Resources For Mobile Web Application Design

1. Native vs Cross-Platform Development

Competition in the app business today is so fierce, you have to develop no less than the possible best and most fluid app ever to stay in the game. Fact of the matter is every platform has its own unique set of required coding skills. You’ll want to develop your app in Objective C if you’re looking to develop for iOS, or Java and XML if you’re going for Android development.

Coding it right will allow for high performance and latest API support. If this is your first time, I would advise you to start small, test it out on a single platform, and then look to SaS sites for multi-platform app development

PhoneGap

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AppCelerator

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RhoMobile

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2. Choose Your First Platform Wisely

There are only 3 stores to sell your app: Google Play, App Store or Windows Store. Decide in whose hands you want to put the fate of your app by answering these questions.

1. Want to Get Rich?

The revenue generated at the Apple App Store to Google Play is at a ratio of 8 to 1. Apple does pay more for top developers who build their apps to be sold, not downloaded for free. The Windows 8 Store is still small in terms of its revenue, but it allows apps to run simultaneously on a PC, tablet and smartphone – more mediums, more downloads.

2. Paid or Free (with ads)?

The majority of Android apps from Google Play are free and reliant on monetizing through advertising. You may even make more money than you would from selling your app upfront. As for Windows, there aren’t many ad networks which support Windows 8′s funky ad formats. So you’ll probably want to sell your app for a fixed price.

3. Want to Play or Get Real Quick?

The Apple App Store does have notoriety as a hard nut to crack, especially for new developers – more reluctant to promote the new guy. If you want to generate a decent amount of downloads in a faster time frame, go for Android.

App Shopping

That said, Google Play is starting to grow at a much faster rate than its archenemy, and is starting to challenge Apple in the overall revenue category. As for Windows 8, developers are not flocking to it, probably due to some intrinsic problems but pioneer developers from every successful app market always reap great benefits. We’ll see if we can call the Windows 8 Store a ‘successful app market’ in the future.

3. designing For success

It isn’t hard to tackle the designs for an app, here are 6 things you should pay attention to when designing a mobile app:

Less is more – This principle should really be augmented, since you’re designing for small screens.

Pixel-perfect graphics – Don’t be lazy just because the screen is smaller and you think you can get away with mistakes.

Big buttons, big fonts, Icon Matter – In comparison to the specific screen size you’re developing for.

Of Flaws and Features – Stay away from the idea of “It’s not a flaw, it’s a feature”. Be professional about it.

Icons matter – It’s the first thing your customers see. Make the design fit the overall theme of the app.

Test your design – Test it on every known screen size (ldpi, mdpi, hdpi, xhdpi). It should appear the same all across the board. Design it yourself, get an experienced designer or use standard icons such as those offered by Glyphish then edit them as much as possible.

4. Client Retention Secrets

Next we open up the black book of Client Retention Secrets:

(Again) Be Professional – Users love to use simple, professional apps. Have the best possible app in your niche.

Balance monetization and annoying your paymasters – Don’t annoy your users with too many ads or in-app purchases when going for free apps with ads. Also changing your monetization scheme during an update will make you lose users.

Be transparent when using ads – Write about every monetization plan or in-app purchases you’re using in your app’s description page. Users will see from the permissions needed anyway.

Update often, but not without a reason – Constant improvements keep users. Also start working on an update when the number of users, or ratings, are dropping.

Support and Respond – Support as many devices and device screens. Respond to your users feedback via e-mail or comments. If your app requires users to log into an account, use Facebook Login. It’s simpler.

5. Marketing (Magic) Tricks

At the app store: Presentation is essential. Screenshots for your app make a huge difference. The first three screenshots should highlight your app’s best instances!

Product Description

Write a professional sales letter instead of a dry app description. Make it unique for each app if you have a big portfolio! Videos matter. Make a video for each app and promote it as much as possible. Have it in the app description.

Try to get featured on your store with services such as AppShout! when launching. Burst companies like AppBrain‘s are a great way to reach the top, if you have the money to invest. The CPI (Cost Per Install) model seems to work best but if you’re not for the CPI model, take a look at AirBop.

Intelligence gathering

Take a look at the apps which are at the top of your niche. Emulate their keywords and descriptions, but keep yours unique. Also, check out this tool: Searchman SEO. Integrate analytics in your app, it’s the only way in which you’ll know how to improve.

Brand Awareness

Social profiles on every major site. Update them often. Offline promotion doesn’t seem to work unless it’s geolocated. If you have the budget, have a hotspot promoting your app inside a high traffic location such as a mall. Contests and giveaways work in any form, both offline or online via websites, blogs or social media.

SEO Pays Off

Have as many backlinks to your app as possible, from as many quality sites as possible. Google Play’s app ranking system now takes into consideration how many Google Pluses your app has.

6. Monetization Is Tricky Business

You have only 3 options, but you can be creative with them:

Sell at a fixed price
Give it away for free and rent out ad space
Sell unique things from inside the app, aka in-app purchases

Mix It Up

You could have a PRO version (no ads, more features) and a FREE version, but with ads. You can use the free version as a catalyst to boost sales. Have it run ads for users to switch to your PRO version, and list clearly all the advantages of having the PRO version. If you are going for this, take a look at these monetization schemes:

Search Ads (e.g. StartApp)
Usual Ad Networks (e.g. LeadBolt)
CPM Networks (e.g AirPush)

On a side note, you can try to get into more complex and harder-to-get-into monetization plans such as virtual currency: GetJar Gold. It will be worth it.

Recommended Reading: 20 Advertising Networks to Monetize Your Mobile App

Word of Caution

Lastly, if you want to opt for the third method (in-app purchases), don’t launch PRO version also. Create a free app, and focus solely on in-app purchases to create revenue. Otherwise you’ll only confuse the user. Stay away from in app purchases + external ads. That will only annoy the user and get your app deleted.

How To Turn Criticism Into Inspiration

Posted: 12 Aug 2013 06:01 AM PDT

As creatives, criticism is part and parcel of our careers. Yet, because of our artistic sensitivity, we can often be the least prepared to deal with it. I once had a classmate in design school who would quite literally burst into tears whenever an instructor made a critical comment (justified or not) about her work.

Each semester I would find her reduced to a heap of tears and despair, threatening to drop out of school and leave all of her mean, awful teachers behind for good. Actually, come to think of it, she probably had some other issues that we weren’t aware of. But regardless, we’ve all been there at least one time or two.

Luckily, there are some ways you can deal with critics that will not only silence them, but also provide you with even more fuel for your creative fire.

Recommended Reading: How To Deal With Criticism In The Freelancing World

Turn The Heat Around

The best way to address someone who is giving you unsolicited and unhelpful criticism is to turn it back on them. Make it their job to prove themselves to you, rather than the other way around. It’s been my experience that 99% of critics disappear when confronted with any kind of rigorous intellectual challenge.

Why? Because their true aim isn’t to help you improve, it’s to tear you down or it’s to find an outlet for their own jealousies and insecurities. Either way, it’s not constructive to either you or them.

Preparing For Battle

When dealing with haters, it’s perfectly okay to be a snob. If you are confronted with a stupid comment attacking your work or your character in a nasty way, it doesn’t help anything to get angry and start a flame war.

Instead, try saying something like this: “it’s interesting that you should say that, because my research (cite some book or blog post you read here) seems to suggest that the opposite is actually true. Is there some study or paper you can point me to that would validate your claim?” Bam! Hater, gone! No one is going to attempt to seriously debate with you when you’re so obviously prepared for an academic beat down.

Get Inspired

The use of hatred as creative inspiration has a long and illustrious history in the arts. In fiction, no dramatic story arc is complete without the main character overcoming some sort of adversity, typically in the form of harsh, unfounded criticism of his or her abilities.

Read Also: How to Handle Cyber Hecklers

When you do your homework and challenge your critics in a polite, serious way, you can send most of them packing. But you can also generate more inspiration for your work.

Fuel New Ideas

You can use the criticism of your past work to generate ideas for new projects. For example, researching a response to a critic may lead you to read about or experience something you never would have before, which can open the door for all sorts of new experiments in your professional or personal projects. In this way, I suppose even haters can offer you constructive criticism. Who knew?

Feel The Love

Remember: for every mean or ill-informed critic, there are typically dozens, if not hundreds or thousands, of people who will love and support what you do wholeheartedly. I know it’s easier to focus on negativity – human nature and all that – but there’s really no reason to.

If you’re focused on providing the most value to your targeted, niche audience that you possibly can, you won’t even have time to listen to the detractors. Eventually, most of them will go away because they won’t have a leg to stand on.

Your Worst Critics Are Your Biggest Fans

As for the ones who stick around? Well, obviously there’s something they find compelling about you or your work, or they wouldn’t bother reaching out to you. When most people genuinely dislike something, they assess that they dislike it, and they move on. But something about what you do is keeping these critics engaged.

If you’re so inclined, you can try to figure out what it is, so that you can do more of it. Usually, your critic will give you clues about what they’re so obsessed with, as they’ll keep mentioning it or pointing out how ‘intolerable’ it is.

Grab Your Silver Lining

It’s hard to shield ourselves from criticism especially with an audience as big and as globally diverse as the Web. You can’t keep everyone happy but you can however make the best of your situation and aim to come up tops, with the majority.

A few years down the road, you may even look back at this week’s terrible incident, laugh and think, "is that all there is? I’m so glad I didn’t actually give up that time. I’m so glad I didn’t let them win just because I couldn’t take a punch."

How to Edit CSS Dotted Outline

Posted: 12 Aug 2013 03:01 AM PDT

By default, when an anchor tag element is in active or focus state, a dotted line appears around it, as shown in the image below.

This outline is used as a visual aid for users who are accessing the website only with the keyboard, technically with the Tab key. It shows the users what they are currently focusing in. However, in particular cases, this outline turns ugly, annoying, and obtrusive making some designers prefer to move this outline out of sight with the following CSS rules.

 a:hover, a:active, a:focus { outline: 0; }

Keep the outline

It is suggested that we should not remove the outline. Instead, we can try styling the outline presentation to make it fit and work well with our site design. By removing this outline, we will prevent accessibility for users without a mouse or for screen readers.

Styling the outline

This outline is specified with outline property in CSS. We can specify the outline styles, width, and colors. Given the example from the previous figure, we can style the outline, as follows.

 a:active, a:focus { outline: 2px solid #e9841d; }

This will result in:

Now doesn’t that look better then the default outline style?

Replacing the Outline

Alternatively, we may remove the outline and replace it with the other CSS properties. For example, we can replace the outline with the backgrond-color, like so.

 a:active, a:focus { outline: 0; backgrond-color: #e9841d; }

Now, when the menu is in focus state, the background menu is highlighted with a distinctive background color, instead of with an outline.

Other CSS properties that we may use for replacement are color, border, and text-decoration.

Final Thought

There are many people with disabilities and with limited access to the Web. So, making our website more accessible will indeed be very helpful for them, including providing interactive presentation for elements in focus state, instead of removing the outline. For more about this subject matter, you can head over to the following references.

W3C Accessibility – W3.org
Why is Accessibility Important to Faculty – Especially to Those Who Teach Online? – Wisconsin University
What is accessibility? – Adobe.com
Removing the Dotted Outline – CSS-Tricks

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