Hitherto, the only sanctioned method for a company to deploy apps amongst its employees was for the company to sign up for the Apple Developer Program. Simple enough to say but this was a real hassle in practice; the company itself had to apply and this proved challenging for some of our non-techie clients (who just wanted to have a few iPads with a custom app in their retail store). Moreover, the application process can take *forever* – one of our clients applied for the Program more than 2 months ago and the process is still not complete.

The other alternative of course it to put these apps on the app store, but in a lot of cases, companies don’t want their in-house apps accessible to all. Plus there is the ever-present problem of getting an app through app review (particularly when said app has been designed with a very narrow use case in mind).

For a time, we were seriously considering doing internal company apps on Android instead of iOS. Android app distribution is super-easy; We can just mail the app file to the client and they can install it on any Android device they liked.

However it looks like Apple has recognised the problem and is trying to resolve it. The new Custom B2B scheme lets developers create custom apps and make these available only to specific customers (apps are distributed via Apple’s infrastructure – customers are provided with a number of redemption-code based links from which the app can be downloaded). The apps still go through review but presumably/ hopefully they will be reviewed in a looser context than apps being reviewed for the app store.

Customers can access this Custom B2B scheme by just signing up for the Apple Volume Purchase Program. We’ll need to see how this sign up works in practice but on the face of it, it looks to be a lot easier than signing up for the Apple Developer Program.

The scheme is still being rolled out – currently, only US firms can sign up for the Volume Purchasing Program – but in general, this is a promising step. Fingers crossed, deploying in-house apps to companies will be a lot easier going forward.

Dress The Duchess (for Ink Robin) – a beautiful iPhone app for dressing up Duchess Kate, we built this for the lovely team at Ink Robin.

Tea Drop Tea Timer (for Tea Drop) – a funky iPhone app that showcases the products of luxury tea brand Tea Drop and provides tea drinkers with a guide to brewing the perfect cup

Otara Collection (for Colombo Jewellery Stores) – an elegant iPad app that showcases the Otara range of jewellery pieces at the Colombo Jewellery Stores. The app was designed and deployed for in-store use only (i.e. it is not available on the app store).

IBTC Grand Royal (for International Beverages Trading Corporation) – a slick iPad app designed to be used by the IBTC marketing team to engage consumers in bars with IBTC’s premium whiskey brand, Grand Royal Special Reserve. [Oh, and the entire app is in Burmese]

img class=”alignnone size-medium wp-image-50″ title=”GrandRoyal1″ src=”http://www.appwolf.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/GrandRoyal1-300×260.png” alt=”" width=”300″ height=”260″ /

JPGs are much much smaller than PNGs (in terms of filesize)

Given that most of the app’s size comes from its graphic files, we only recently discovered that we can radically cut down app size by converting our images from PNG to JPG. There’s no discernible loss of quality and you can cut an image file’s size by over 50%. The only trick is that JPGs don’t support transparency – for this, you have to use PNG

You can create an iTunes link to your app with just the app ID

http://itunes.apple.com/app/id418125178 works just as well as http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/cricket-booth/id418125178?mt=8

And iTunes Connect gives you the app’s ID the moment the app is created, so you can construct the app’s URL even before uploading the binary (which is useful if you want to include a link to the app within the app itself)

Which is our way is saying – sorry we haven’t blogged for months.

So what have we been doing? All sorts of things. Since we last posted, we have built an array of iOS apps;
AreaNow – a location based social network app for music lovers
A timer based game and a comedy photo app (which were outsourced to us by a London creative agency, and so can’t be named)
Cricket Booth - a cricket-based photo app to celebrate the Cricket World Cup
An in-house iPad app for Boutique Creative, a London-based events agency (the app synchronises video playback across a set of iPads)

… plus four more apps that we are just finishing and which we’ll talk about shortly.

So we’ve been busy and it looks like we’ll be getting busier. But going forward, we are going to make sure to blog. Keep an eye open.

We’ve come across a few more in our interweb travels so here’s a list of our current favourites;

Beautiful Pixels

TappGala

Pttrns

Mobile UI Patterns

iOS Inspires Me

Dribbble (of course)

Laudable Apps (previously Applaudable)

Well Placed Pixels (infrequently updated)

Appsolute.ly (infrequently updated)

TapFancy (infrequently updated)

We’ll update this list as we go along. Enjoy

In general, there is a large (and growing) market for mobile app outsourcing and from what I can tell, the players in this market are pretty much like that for any type of software development – you get the large (usually Indian) firms with hundreds of coders, you get the small/niche development houses and then you get an army of freelancers. Appwolf falls firmly into the middle category – a small app design house – and will stay there; I have no intention of turning this firm into a factory. Doing a couple of interesting projects a month would be more than enough for us.

So there we are – if you are looking for someone to build a killer iPhone, iPad or Android app then drop us a line on info@appwolf.com and we’ll talk.

The SMS Contact Sender is a super-simple app that lets you send a contact number to someone else via SMS. Non-iPhone users might be surprised that we’d need to build an app for something so basic but bizarrely, the iPhone only lets you share contacts via MMS or e-mail. So if you want to send a number to someone who doesn’t have MMS or e-mail access on their phone (which is still the vast majority of people), then you need to do some fairly tricky cut-and-paste work between the SMS and Contacts apps.

Or… you can download our SMS Contact Sender and share a contact with just a few taps.

The app is available for $0.99 from iTunes – do note that it is only available for iPhones running OS 4

Our latest iPhone app – Singles for Foursquare – is live in the app store. It’s a dating app for Foursquare users and is super-easy to use. Here’s how it works;
You download the app (and write a short personal description)
Check in someplace
See who else is checked in at your location (and whether they’re single)
If you see someone interesting, send them a private message (and if you’re lucky, maybe they’ll message back).

The app uses Foursquare for checkins but all messages go through our own private servers.

We’ve put a short demo of the Singles on to Youtube – do have a look.

The app is available free – download it from the app store and give it a try!