Comments on: Tea Time! Available on The App Store Now!

By: squidbot

squidbot — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 19:10:35 +0000

Thanks for the response! I just discovered your blog a few days ago(actually via a Google search for a comparison of unit testing frameworks, so thanks for an excellent writeup on that topic, it was just what I needed) and was interested to see what you’re doing with iPhone development since I’ve just started to foray in to it. Anyway, you’ve got the not very distinctive honor of being added to my RSS feeds Keep up the good work! Your posts have actually been pretty inspiring to me, since we’re somewhat similar (I’m a game developer looking to branch out on my own a bit.)

By: Noel

Noel — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 23:51:34 +0000

@squidbot: Unless you’re planning to reach a wide audience, or have tons of marketing and visibility, I doubt it would be worth your while financially. I’ll post the specifics once I have more data, but Tea Time! is an example of what an app with a small audience (tea drinkers) without any marketing can do. So far it has sold 23 units the first day and 35 the second. I suspect that 3/4 of those are friends and readers of this blog

@Clint: Funny, I hadn’t thought about it as an agile practice, but you’re right. It’s a very short iteration/spike that I can learn from so I can make better decisions in the bigger project.

By: Independent Game Creation - How do you work towards success? « I, Game Maker

Sun, 11 Jan 2009 22:29:28 +0000

[...] seem to take this to heart: Noel Llopis’ gamesfromwithin has created Tea Time! in order to learn how to release a product on the iStore and my friend Owen has released the first video of his up coming iPhone/iTouch game Dapple. Good to [...]

By: mos

mos — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 19:47:12 +0000

Noel, do you use Xcode or makefiles (or something else)? I’m finding the move to OS X to be problematic; I really liked how easy it was for me to set up UnitTest++ projects in Visual Studio. I’m still wrapping my head around the Xcode way of doing things.

Now back to tracking down my problem with llvm-gcc not recognizing the standard header paths…

By: Clinton Keith

Clinton Keith — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 19:12:29 +0000

>It was an experiment to see how quick I could put a simple app together
>and getting the experience of going through the whole cycle with the App Store

That was just a brilliant move! Very agile of you

By: squidbot

squidbot — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 22:20:32 +0000

If you’re willing to share, I’d be very interested how it sells. I’ve been toying with some ideas about iPhone apps and would like to gague how well one can sell without advertising. Really I just want to know if it would be worth my time spending more than a few days on an application to sell if for 99 cents.

By: Ulm

Ulm — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 22:03:05 +0000

Congratulations, Noel! Just bought the app! Now, I have to learn something about tea…

By: Noel

Noel — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 16:11:39 +0000

@Muhammad, Thanks! You’re right, it only took 2.5 days and most of that was tweaking the graphics, setting up the Apple submission process and getting the web site ready Full story coming up. I know about the pirate sites, but there isn’t much I can do. I doubt my target audience is going to go to the trouble of getting a pirated version.

@Bluebird, Yes, but glass is prettier It’s actually a pretty thick mug and it keeps the tea hot for quite a while. I do brew it in a closed teapot, so that helps.

@Tommy. You’re right about being careful when changing steeping times. As long as you don’t get past the limit, you do get different strengths though. For tea connoseurs, I figured they can change the strength setting based on the type of tea or how fine/coarse it is if they want.

By: Tommy

Tommy — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 14:49:15 +0000

That looks like a nice app. And I’ll probably pick it up.

However (WARNING: pretentious tea snob alert!) it looks like it adjusts the timing based on the strength the user wants. Never! You adjust the strength of your tea by adjusting the amount of tea used, not by extending the time! Longer steeping time leads to bitter tea!

Sorry, just had to get that out of my system. Nice looking app. A good dedicated tea timer was needed.

And I agree with Bluebird that real tea doesn’t belong in glass teacups. (Unless you’re in Russia or Morrocco.) But their use in the app more clearly shows the type of tea, so I think it’s appropriate here.

By: Bluebird

Bluebird — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 08:44:46 +0000

I don’t like cup of tea made of transparent glass. For me, the real cup of tea has a strong thick non transparent glass structure, so that it keeps the warmth longer. But apart from that, it looks nice

By: Muhammad Ishaq

Muhammad Ishaq — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 06:29:09 +0000

The app looks pretty cool considering it might have been written in a time-frame not more than a week (am I right? ), the artwork looks elegant, sorry, can’t appreciate the application itself since I have not purchased it yet.

And on that note, I hope you are already aware of pirate sites like appulo.us, are you going to make some effort to make sure your big app (the one that you have been working on for last few months) doesn’t end up there?

looking forward to your big app!

–
MI