My Big News

I teased about this over the weekend and it seems most of my friends think that my wife and I are pregnant.

The big news IS about a life-changing event, but not about bringing a new life into this world. Today marks my first full-time day working on my own. I'm phasing out of my day-job and into my own business as an Independent App Developer.

I've been incredibly fortunate to be in this situation and want to thank my wife who has endured the late-night coding sessions and my steering our conversations back to apps and app ideas.

I'm humbled and delighted to know that there are literally millions of people using Flashlight, and I intend to continue to improve Flashlight and release new apps VERY SOON. My plan is to release two new apps this year, with many more apps and updates coming soon too.

I will work from my cloffice (closet office) in my house. My daughter plans to come greet me whenever she wakes up in the morning, and I'll have lunch with my family. I'm thrilled about this new flexibility and freedom and very excited about being able to actually create more of my list of 60+ app ideas!

I'll be blogging a bit more, tweeting a bit more, and coding a LOT more. :-)

Halloween and Flashlight

I have not mentioned yet, but I really really love Apple's iAd web portal. It's really great to be able to see hourly charts and it's fun to be able to see when people begin using Flashlight more during the evenings:

Top iAd countries so far

With the recent addition of iAds internationally, I took a look at my stats and thought it might be interesting to share with you what countries are getting the most impressions right now. All of my iAd impressions right now are from Flashlight

United States
UK/GB
Unknown
Korea, Republic of
France
Saudi Arabia
(Empty)
Israel
China
Mexico
Australia
Japan
Norway
Canada
Malaysia

The UK/GB was about 3% of the US in terms of numbers of impressions, with the other countries trailing off quickly after… Still, this list of the top 15 adds up to around 5.4% of the US impressions

Here are the next 15 countries:

Brazil
Malaysia
Reunion
South Africa
Singapore
Taiwan
Argentina
Finland
Greece
Kuwait
Netherlands
Hong Kong
India
Brunei Darussalam
Serbia

Flashlight top countries

Now that Flashlight is using iAds, I have access to a lot more interesting data, including overall countries of where users are using Flashlight. Flashlight appears to be used far more in the evenings (obviously), and also far more on the weekends.

Top Flashlight countries from last weekend (July 17 and July 18) are:

United States
UK/GB
Australia
Canada
France
Unknown
Germany
Sweden
Korea, Republic of
Brazil
Spain
Denmark
Switzerland
New Zealand
Italy
Chile
Russian Federation
Japan

By the way, I have to say that I continue to be humbled that my app is used by so many people around the world.

Flashlight 3.0 (and the pending 3.0.1)

UPDATE (July 20, 1:55PM CST): Flashlight 3.0.1 is approved and you should see it on the App Store within a few hours. My thanks to everyone for your support and patience during this time.

UPDATE (July 19, 8:30AM CST): Flashlight 3.0.1 is in review by Apple. I'm thrilled that they have responded to my urgent plea and expect to see Flashlight 3.0.1 on the App Store a bit later today!

Greetings,

Friday, July 16, Flashlight 3.0 went live on the App Store. I'm very excited about this update because I added the biggest requested feature, using the iPhone 4's LED light. The iPhone 4 LED is incredibly bright (don't look directly at it!) and it's great to be able to use this for navigating around when you need the brightest light possible.

Unfortunately, this update is causing problems. I have reports from iPad and iPod touch users that the app won't open. I'm very sorry. This is of course the last thing I wanted to have happen and I'm working on fixing this problem. As part of this, I am now the new owner of an iPod touch so I can do proper testing on iPhones, iPads, and iPod touches.

I will update this blog as I learn more. Thank you for your support and patience.

UPDATE (July 16, 11PM CST): I have submitted Flashlight 3.0.1 and requested that Apple give this update an expedited review. In the typical case, this update would appear in about a week (around July 23rd).

The issue is that any device running a version of iOS (aka iPhone OS) before 4.0 will have this crash bug. This means all iPads, some iPod touches and some iPhones.

For the programmers who might be reading this, the specific issue was that I linked to a framework which was new in iOS 4.0 (AVFoundation.framework) to add the LED functionality, but I did not set that framework to be "weak linked". Thus, when the user attempts to launch the app on an iPad with iOS 3.2, the app crashes immediately because it thinks that it MUST have AVFoundation and cannot find it on that device.

Flashlight is useful

I got this email yesterday about Flashlight and it really made my day:

Just wanted to send you a thank you for your flashlight app for the iphone.
Recently, myself and 2 others climbed San Gorgonio Mountain in southern California.
To make a long story short; it took longer than expected and the last 2 hours were in total darkness, on a moonless night.
We had all neglected to bring our headlamps and the trail could not be negotiated in the dark. Then I remembered I had this app on my phone.
It worked amazingly well and saved us from spending a very cold night on the mountain.

I'm happy to have the privilege of being able to make software that you can take with you and that is helpful and useful. Flashlight has helped people find keys, check on their kids at night, do some late night reading, even track footprints.

I just wanted to say thank you to everyone that uses my apps. I'm humbled and honored by your download.