8 ms·
From idea to AppStore in 2 weeks
- mgkimsal 14y agoMight just be the fonts, but this looks like a Windows 8 app. Congrats on the launch!
- riklomas 14y agoThe font, called Johnston, is from the London Underground design style and the colours are those of the lines http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnston_(typeface) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnston_(typeface)
- mgkimsal 14y agoI knew it looked familiar but couldn't place my finger on it - yes, london underground. thanks :) I may have been misread - to clarify, I wasn't knocking the app or saying it was bad - it has a distinctive style (or really, is borrowing from the LU) and I wish the author success.
- adam-a 14y agoIt's a great font! I've recently been working on a game and I wanted to include this font in it. I've been a bit worried though because of the vague and scary sounding license that seems to come with all fonts, including Johnston. Did you consider the legal aspects? And did you do anything to make it "legit"? Like pre-rendering your text assets to images or anything? Or did you just include a .ttf in your app bundle? Nice looking app btw!
- purephase 14y agoCongrats. I still can't get by the initial cost of RubyMotion. I know, it will pay for itself, but that's a lot of initial buy-in going on faith. I wish they had a demo version available to try before buying.
- gearoidoc 14y agoThey offer a 30 day money back guarantee: http://sites.fastspring.com/hipbyte/product/rubymotion http://sites.fastspring.com/hipbyte/product/rubymotion
- ceeK 14y agoI'm in the same boat. I WANT to try it, I WANT to love it, but I can't justify paying for it just to find this out, especially given that I already know the Obj-C ways of iOS dev.
- gearoidoc 14y agoGreat post - I love reading about this rapid fast releases, even better when the writer had to learn a new language. I was curious about ruby motion beforehand but now I can't wait to get stuck in. Oh, and congrats! :D
- Kurtz79 14y agoI'm really curious about that. There are about half dozen similar applications on the Appstore, for free. I tried a few, and most of them did the job they were suppose to do fairly well. How did you convince people to choose yours as opposed to the other ones that already existed ? Clearly the Metro article is what pushed people (that possibly didn't know that those apps existed) to actually get and download your app. Congrats and kudos.
- sgottit 14y agoThanks! I knew that there were a lot of similar apps on the AppStore but I went with my conviction that less is more. Nearly all the apps are multifunctional and include journey planners, maps, alerts etc etc. As a Londoner, I know my way around, the only thing I want to know is if the tube is even working – this is how Lines was born. I've tried to make the app's simplicity it's main selling point and hope I've achieved this to some degree.
- Kurtz79 14y agoAgain, congratulations for your conviction. I actually was doing something similar (well, the very same actually) a few months ago, got to a working version, but then saw that there were already plenty of options, got discouraged, and suddenly lost all interest in polishing/publishing it...
- drd 14y agoActually, it is a very useful function. It has usefulness and simplicity. Would you mind to give ROI analysis for your project? This will be helpful to the audience here.
- sgottit 14y agoThanks. As of writing Lines has sold a few thousand copies, so it's made a good ROI. After costs have been paid (servers, iOS dev license etc) I'll be giving some profits to chairty.
- jgranby 14y ago
- ceeK 14y agoThis is great. I spent much, much longer on my first iOS app and it isn't half as successful. Very well thought up and executed.
- robomartin 14y ago> earning me enough pennies to buy some Dominos pizza. To a large extent this has been the real problem in the iOS app domain for a while. Apps are far more likely to make you enough to buy a small pizza than even approach earning you a reasonable salary. Part of it, I think, are the mechanics of the App Store itself. Search has been broken for years. When compared to searching on the 'net the difference is stark. This is unfortunate because developers who do a little financial math will, without a doubt, walk away. You are far more likely to make money with a good website than on the App Store. That's why people hesitate to spend $200 on Ruby Motion...you simply won't get your money back unless you use it to write apps for others and earn money for your work rather than from your apps.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- nicholassmith 14y agoI think there's a lot of factors at work, the search is terrible but there's plenty of app recommendation services now, one of the big issues seems to be that there's now a mindset of "£1.79? That's really pricy" and they'll move on pretty quickly. That's a big barrier and it's not going away anytime soon really, but alternatives like IAP are now getting push back and mobile advertising doesn't seem to be a solid cash stream yet.
- timparker 14y agoThat's just a fun term, safe to say it was a fair bit more than pennies for a pizza. $200 ruby motion was definitely paid off from this app.
- Samuel_Michon 14y agoRight, the author stated that he had a couple of thousand sales. The app is offered for £0.79. That means he earned at least £1100 ($1650). Not bad given that the app has been in the App Store for two weeks.
- gebe 14y agoNot only on iOS. The "App Store" model as it is implemented today on most platforms is bloated and corrupted, it's just a mess. It _could_ be a tad better on Android since Google allows 3rd party app stores (could open up for specialization etc, like Steam for Android or similar) but in reality you still must be on Google Play (which is a hell hole) to succeed.
- AlexeyBrin 14y agoI'm curious if the author was able to earn the initial investment in the tools: 200$ RubyMotion + 100$ iOS Developer.
- sgottit 14y agoYes – as of writing I've sold enough units to pay for the costs a few times over as well as server costs for the custom API I built. Some profits will be reserved for London based charities.
- AlexeyBrin 14y agoWell done.
- brador 14y agoWhat stack are you using for the API server? Any chance of a quick article on that?
- geon 14y agoRuby would be my guess.
- coin 14y agoIs this a new trend to put $ after the amount (eg 5$ instead of the correct $5)? I've been seeing it a lot lately.
- eloisant 14y agoThat's how it's written in French and maybe some other languages as well. I guess people writing this way are not native English speakers.
- AlexeyBrin 14y agoIf you know and enjoy coding in Ruby, you intend to target only iOS, and you don't know Objective-C, C or C++ than RubyMotion is a good investment. On the other hand, if you want to target iOS and Android you'd better learn Objective-C and Java. An interesting alternative is to use HTML5 and JavaScript if you already have a good background as a web developer.
- gebe 14y agoOr, if we disregard costs, C# and use Xamarin's (http://xamarin.com/ http://xamarin.com/) products.
- AlexeyBrin 14y agoSame goes for C# and Xamarin, if you already know C# and enjoy coding in C# ... If you don't know C# I see little reason to buy a Xamarin license (I know you can get started for free which is great).
- gebe 14y agoCode sharing between platforms could make it a worthwhile investment of time and money. But it's quite costly if you are just starting out.
- evilduck 14y agohttp://ruboto.org/ http://ruboto.org/ also exists, so you can stay in Ruby if you like.
- adamors 14y agoThis looks really cool, curious if anyone uses this in production.
- bobthedino 14y agoHi, great looking app, well done! I'm wondering if you ended up caching the Tube status information on your own web server, or if you are directly accessing Transport for London's site?
- vignesh_vs_in 14y agoIncidentally my first iOS app is also a London tube statuses app. But i never made any money out of it, (i deemed it unworthy of 1$). Although i was learning Obj C for some time, i developed my tube map app in 2 weeks of starting with cocoa framework. Its time to start looking at marketing 101 lessons :).
- podperson 14y agoA year or two back three of us (one only very part-time, and two of us inexperienced) developed an iOS app that did two way translation (speech - text - text - speech) using two three different services from two different vendors, from scratch in less than a week. In Objective-C. (It didn't get submitted to the App Store, it was demoed to potential investors and then disappeared, presumably owing to the existence of similar apps.) Not a terribly ambitious app, but no less ambitious than the app described. Ruby Motion looks interesting, but I don't really see how it would make a big difference to shipping something like this in a very short time frame.
- RyanMcGreal 14y ago"BUT, and it's a big butt" - deliberate misspelling?
- mesozoic 14y agoThis looks like a sales pitch for Ruby Motion to me.
- cnp 14y agoIts a good one. RubyMotion is a delight to work with, my absolute favorite coding environment.
- LAMike 14y ago4 days for approval? That's pretty fast.
- leviathan 14y agoFrom my experience it's a hit or miss. I just got an approval for an app I submitted on March 1st. That's the shortest time (6 days) I had to wait for an approval.
- gfodor 14y agoI'm also pushing out a rubymotion app in the next week. Its hard to estimate how much time it saved me but it definitely made building the app a much more enjoyable experience.
- andrewroycarter 14y agoMaybe it's just me, but I feel like because iOS is such a hot platform right now everyone is trying to hop on the bandwagon without learning anything new. Write iOS apps in ObjC. It's not hard, it's not that different, it's just something you don't know yet.