We are excited to announce our new app, WebToolbox has officially hit the App Store. WebToolbox is a collection of over 70+ bookmarklet tools that you can install in Safari on your iPhone/iPod Touch. These tools range from Find in Page functionality, over 30 search tools, format page, and much more. We are confident that there is a tool for everyone!
Check out the official page to watch a video on installing the tools in your mobile Safari browser.
For those of us who use Stick It on a constant basis, we have to admit, loading new notes wallpaper isn’t as immediate as we’d all like. Because of Apple’s restriction on the wallpaper portion of the iPhone OS, they do not allow apps to automatically change the wallpaper. So that leaves us to do it manually. Here’s a tip to make it as quick and convenient as possible:
Position your Settings app icon next to Stick It on your home screen.
With your Settings app sitting right next Stick It, all you have to do now is close Stick It and open Settings. No hunting for Settings, its right there.
We are just about finished with a minor Stick It update and would like to share what it will offer:
- Ability to control text justification
- New notes including a transparent note
- Minor bug fixes
- Improved stability
- Emoji enabler
Also in development is Stick It 3.0 which will be the biggest update yet. Here’s what we have planned:
- Ability to scale and rotate notes
- Ability to add photos as notes
- Redesigned interface
- Alternative grid view in note selector
Here’s the iTunes link to purchase Stick It 2.0:
http://bit.ly/wYWEN
Thanks to everyone who has purchased Stick It, we are excited to offer these new features that will hopefully enhance your Stick It experience. Keep the suggestions coming!
With all the elegance and robustness of the iPhone, there are those few features that seemingly slipped through the cracks and have left many of us scratching our heads, thinking “how could they have left that out?” Maybe these features just didn’t make the cut, or there was an ulterior motive for leaving them off, or maybe the strategy was for Apple to not build every single imaginable feature into the iPhone to fuel third-party development for the App Store. Whatever the reason, our mission as TapFactory is to fill in the gaps. That’s why our focus is utility apps.
Contact is no exception. Sure you can assign your most dialed contacts to the iPhone’s Favorites, but what better way to utilize the device’s home screen than adding speed dial icons amongst your apps. So TapFactory set out to do just that: build an app that allows you to generate speed dials to be placed directly on your home screen. Sounds simple enough, right? No so much.
A brief background on iPhone development: To open the iPhone as a development platform for third party developers, Apple set forth the iPhone software development kit (SDK). In a nutshell, the SDK provides a set of tools that allow a developer to program apps for the iPhone. The tools are set up in such a way that it is not a truly open platform; there are many limitations built into the SDK that restrict what parts of the operating system a developer is able to utilize within an app. This is Apple’s way of maintaining quality control and optimization of the iPhone OS and it’s user experience.
Let’s jump back to Contact. We left off with our ideal vision of how Contact would function: it would generate speed dial icons on the home screen that when tapped would directly perform the function you set: dial, sms, or email. But when applying this model to the SDK, things get a little tricky.
Here’s the kicker: there is no way to program an app to generate an additional native icon to the home screen. iPhone apps by definition (by SDK standards) are self-contained applications, that are only able to perform functions from within the app and only after initiated by the user. Therefore, there is no way to program an app that generates “child” apps on the home screen. That’s why there are a multitude of speed dial apps available in the App Store that generate and manage speed dials that reside within the app itself, requiring the user to first open the app to access the speed dials. But with this model, you might as well be using your built in iPhone Favorites feature.
Working within the strict guidelines of the SDK often requires some creative problem solving, which is a positive way of saying as developers we have to work with what we’ve got. Fortunately, the iPhone has a feature originally intended for Safari called Webclips. Webclips allow you to bookmark a site to be added as an icon on your home screen, just like we want to do with our speed dials. Here’s where the creative problem solving comes in: we thought, what if we were able to utilize Webclips to serve as speed dials? Bingo.
So with a little help from our friend Jordon Dobson over at Squad (http://www.madebysquad.com/), we engineered a way to utilize Contact to generate a Webclip that when launched would perform the same function as a speed dial. Not the ideal solution, but the only way within the SDK to bring home screen speed dial functionality to the iPhone.
Here is a breakdown of how our Webclip speed dial technology works:
- A page is loaded in Safari with your contact’s speed dial information. This is then immediately converted to a format in which the entire speed dial page is encoded into the url. Although the initial page is loaded in Safari, once your speed dial is created you’ll never see it launch Safari again (technically it does, but only a Webclip instance of the browser, which is invisible to the user).
- When you save a Webclip of the new url, it saves the entire page locally on your device, so you never have to access the internet again to perform your speed dial.
- Now that you’ve saved your speed dial to the home screen, when you tap that speed dial icon it opens the page locally and seamelessly and immediately dials the number, opens an sms, or opens an email.
- When dialing a number, the iPhone OS forces an alert to pop up to confirm the call. This is a new addition to the iPhone 3.0 software, and there is nothing we can do to prevent this.
Although it is not the ideal solution, Webclip speed dials perform extremely well and only add a few seconds (almost nothing if you’re using a 3GS) to the speed dial. Considering what we have to work with in the SDK, I’d call this a victory.
I wish I could communicate this to every Contact user. It’s not that we have developed a half-baked app, but just the opposite: we have done everything within our power to deliver the closest thing to a true, native speed dial. We truly strive to deliver apps that provide a seamless, holistic experience for the user.
With all of that said, we are thrilled to finally have Contact in the App Store, and hope that our users will contribute their suggestions to make Contact the best speed dial app available.
To read more about the Contact submission/rejection saga, read our previous blog, Contact finally hits the App Store.
After 9 months of numerous App Store rejections (at least 10), failed correspondence with Apple, and a number of emails from iPhone users inquiring as to “when the hell Contact is going to finally be released”, we had recently come to the difficult acceptance that the 3-4 months of Contact (originally named TapDial) development and subsequent PR efforts was all in vain. Finally at terms with our failure (or Apple’s failure bestowed on us), we woke Saturday morning with the proverbial “Your app is ready for sale” email in our mailboxes. My first thought, “Apple must be messing with us” was quickly squashed with astonishment that after so many abject rejections, Contact has risen from its grave.
Not an uncommon experience among iPhone developers, this is just another testament to Apple’s unpredictable, broken and often hypocritical review process. Hypocritical in the case of Contact because at the time of submission there were 2 other apps currently on sale in the App Store that employed the same web clip techniques for speed dial that was the precise reason for Apple’s rejection. Their repeated impersonal rejection letters always included the same ambiguous reasoning, which didn’t leave much for us to argue our case or make corrections to the app to fix what the Apple reviewer had taken issue with.
So we were left with only one recourse: to resubmit constantly until Contact was accepted. This is apparently a common and often times successful technique that numerous developers had suggested because it had worked for them while in the same position. The fact that this works is laughable and shows just how arbitrary the review process is. When you resubmit an app, especially if its under a different name (which is why we changed the app name from TapDial to Contact), the submission is fielded to a different app reviewer. And what is plainly obvious here is that each app is subject to the varying interpretations that app reviewer has of Apple’s SDK.
So here it is: Contact is available in the App Store. We hope you enjoy what we’ve offered. Look out for updates because we have some great additions planned (assuming they will make it through the maze of App Store acceptance), one of which is building in downloadable icon packs so that we can frequently offer new speed dial icons.
Contact – Speed dial, SMS and email for your iPhone
http://www.tapfactoryapps.com/Contact
We are officially announcing our new app TweetVid, the easiest way to record and upload your iPhone 3GS videos to Twitter. We’re in the beta testing phase of development and should be submitting the app in the next few days.
Here is a summary of TweetVid’s features:
• Record a video from within the app or select one from your Camera Roll.
• Resume a video upload if you get a call while the upload is in progress.
• Set TweetVid to open your favorite Twitter app once the upload is complete.
We are very excited to announce that Stick It version 2.0 has been accepted into the App Store. This means full saving of your notes, new note sizes, new backgrounds, and interface enhancements.
We’re working diligently to finish our next major update for Stick It, and are looking for feedback from real Stick It users to help pack as many enhancements into this update as possible. Got any ideas for features/additions you’d like to see? Please, send ‘em our way! We’re all ears.
Click here to email us your suggestions.
Firstly, thanks to everyone who has purchased Stick It and helped put it at #27 (and climbing) in Top Paid Utilities! We have some exciting updates nearing completion that are sure to make Stick It even more useful than ever. We’re rolling out these updates in two phases:
Phase 1: Saving (Submitted to Apple)
Users have spoken, and we have listened. Our next version of Stick It will be graced with the ability to save the last state of your notes when exiting the app. This will make it so that next time you open the app, your notes will be there in the same state you left them. This is an essential feature that will now make your note taking experience more fluid and efficient.
Phase 2: Save Manager (In development)
Once we have implemented the core saving feature for Phase 1, the next version will add a full-blown Save Manager which will allow you to save different collections of notes to access in the future. With this feature you can have, say, a collection of your school notes for things you need to memorize, notes for your shopping list, notes for your personal self-reminders, etc. And instead of re-typing notes as needed, all you would have to do is open the save manager and load the note collection you would like to edit and use. Below is an example of the Save Manager in its current state of development:
As always, we love to hear from our customers. Please contact us with your ideas on how to make our apps better! We are listening.
For the next 48 hours, we’ve cut the price of our custom reminder app, Stick It, to $.99! Be sure to snag it before Sunday evening at 11:59pm, when it returns to its normal $1.99 price.
