One More Thing
My good friend Adam Sharp told me about an iOS developers conference a month back. The compelling and selling point for me was that all of the speakers are from abroad with a lot of experience in the field.
Igor Pušenjak | Doodle Jump
Listening to the story of Igor’s move towards iOS development was very inspiring. Igor gave lots of great advise for developing games, especially regarding updates and dealing with application exposure. Updating your application regularly to keep it fresh and adding themes really do sell! Christmas and easter for example are great opportunities. Implement the addictive factor ”just one more game” scenario.
In regards to expose annoy everyone possible, blogs, people, forums. Don’t just go for the big guns!
Winter Wong | Tapatalk
Winters story of developing and publishing to the app store was an insight into the frustrations of the application review process. The hints and tips he provided are fantastic for optimising your successes. Tags for your application could include partner apps that are similar ;-). Request reviews from power users only. Remotely disable reviews if app build has serious crashes.
Crowdin is a great for crowd sourcing free translations. | DMCAGuardian is great for Android piracy, boosts sales.
Lee Armstrong | Plane & Ship Finder
Lee was up beat about getting bad press as it lead to more interest in their applications. “no such thing as bad press”.
User content is trusted content as apposed from coming from a big company like user provided photos of planes and ships. Outsourcing is important part of evolving as you need to value your own time. Especially to handle those customers who say bad words about your baby (app).
Start with a book: Beginning iOS Development by Apress
Adam Kirk | Mysterious Trousers
Adam’s mentality of “leave it better than you found it” with just about everything in life really did hit home, motivating and inspiring speaker. Adam pushed the point that you should not sit on the fence and be indifferent but believe that their should be a difference.
Trade offs between the obvious and the fast need to be looked into as well as the trade offs between power and simplicity.
Use interface builder a lot, TestFlight is a great testing platform.
Kepa Auwae | Rocketcat Games
Kepa had an interesting story of coming from a nursing background to being successful enough to quit his job and work on what games full time.
Building a team of people who you trust was one of the most important factors to his success as one bad egg can ruin the whole thing.
Gaming cross promotion in his view is a great way to build a community and sales!
Shaun Inman | Last Rocket
Unfortunately I missed a little bit of the start of Shaun’s presentation but I soon picked the theme. Every slide appeared delicately designed by a pixel by pixel feel.
Talking through solving his problems of defining the big rocks, smashing them down into smaller rocks and finally smashing them into sand. The goal of “chilling in the sand” once you have solved all your problems and workflow flows. This analogy really is cool and I hope to apply it to my developments.
Dave Hawell | Avatron
Dave has a great focus by looking forward focusing on what you can change and by doing those changes, “dont get caught up by roadblocks”.
Influence the influencers is one of the tips he gave as well as being around motivated people.
Get your application featured by following in suite of how the other apps became featured. Research! 
Julian Lepinski | Pano
The story of the Pano panorama application from Julian was very interesting. He emphasised the idea is not the lesson, copy copiously and not in the bad way to learn how to create features.
Advise: When you are feeling down just remember there are a lot of apps out there, not a lot of great apps. Build a great app. Talk above the noise with passion, listen to your users and don’t stop!
Raphael Schaad | Flipboard
Raphael’s presentation was by far the funniest and most invigorating by sharing his perspective and story of creating applications.
Sharing his creation process of: Ideate with everyone. Execute with a team. Ship with booze.
Quotes: “high fived the universe” “software developers are shaping the way the world works, these are amazing times”.
Matt Rix | Trainyard
Matt was adement that you should determine your personal goals and write them somewhere you will see every day.
A nifty idea from Matt was to add an easter egg to your application, especially if its a productivity application which is hard to delight customers. Calvetica does this well with a few comments every now and then to congratulate on keeping your calendar under control.
Justin Williams | secondgear
Justin had an array of humorous slides. As a solo developer myself it hit home that building around a team in the long run is a lot more empowering in terms of skill sets and personal growth. Justin explained this with his 2 years of development as a solo developer and his recent decision to join a team.
All in all the conference was amazing and inspiring, I am looking forward to applying some of the principles learnt from the speakers. I hope the next lineup of speakers are as awesome because the range of people and quality of the slides was perfect at One More Thing 2012!
