Really Impressed with Macbook Air

Back in December I decided to get a Macbook Air to develop my iPhone/iPad apps on.

I ended up buying the 11″ version upgraded to 4GB of memory.

It is a really nice machine.  Not much bigger than the iPad and it is so quick.  the SSD combined with 4GB of RAM mean that it boots in about 20 seconds.  Rather surprisingly it can handle running several copies of XCode + Photoshop at the same time without sweating.  Connect it to a nice 22″ screen at the office and it’s just as good as having a desktop.  On the go it’s light enough to forget it’s in your bag.  It’s the best computer I have owned.

Windows 8 preview came out yesterday and I have to say I have no interest at all to see what it’s like.  Mac all the way.

Over the weekend I added some new features to my web server backend that supports my iPhone Apps.

The server provides a number of APIs which the apps use to get updated content, change settings, register for notifications etc.  There are now two new things I can do with my server:

1. Every API call now is getting logged so I can see the usage.
2. I have a new link redirecting service which can geo-target links to the correct affiliate service and onto the iTunes App Store.

The traffic logs allow me to create charts like this:

As you can see in the chart, the traffic on my apps is not insignificant.  it spikes up above 80 requests/minute.  It’s going to be interesting to see what these logs show over time as new apps get released.

The second new feature is the ability to geo-target my links.  Apple has an affiliate program that pays 3%-5% commission on referred sales. the tracking of referrals is handled through three different affiliate networks each of which handles a different subset of countries.  In order to maximize the commissions I can get I need to provide the country specific link to each user on the fly.  It’s pretty clever.  When a request comes in I look at the IP address of the requester and can figure out the country that user is in then build the link for them to go through the correct affiliate network and on to the iTunes store.

It will be interesting to see if that makes any more money.

Pilsner urquell is the original pilsner style beer that spawned off what is currently 50% of the beer market.

I’m not a huge pilsner drinker but this one is good.

Banana beer made in Belgium is surprisingly delicious.

Earlier this week I was on a webinar.

I wasn’t expecting to get much out of it. But figured there might be one or two nuggets in there to help out with my iPhone business.

Turns out I had a eye opening experience and got several ideas for how to take my business to the next level.

I never slept that night.

This weekend I’m getting heavy into development of my server infrastructure to help scale up my ability to cross promote all my apps vastly more than I do right now.

It all comes down to dynamically generating the links to other apps and automating choice of them depending on historical performance of click throughs.  Once the entire system is finished I will be able to correlate performance on several key indicators and generate pages that should be optimal.

The math involved will be interesting to figure out.  The stats collected will provide me with a lot of information about the performance of my apps.  It’s going to be fun to figure out how to get a good dashboard to measure the status of my user engagement in realtime.

Super psyched to get some new apps out with these new features.

Home made fresh pasta.

This past weekend Heather and I picked up a bunch of weight plates to start lifting weights in the basement.

I’ve always wanted that lean runners body, but sooner or later I just had to face the facts that my legs are just too short and thick to really do well in that sport.  However I will continue to train with running since I’m signed up for a few races this year, but going forward I’m going to be putting a bigger focus on lifting really heavy stuff.

The over all plan is to find a weight that I can lift to about 10 reps and build a circuit around the weights and bars that I have available.

It’s been a while since I have done any weight lifting, so it’s interesting to see how quickly the heart rate picks up in comparison to a jog around the block.

I’m going to try to put in at least a 15 minute workout each day.  Not a lot, but should be enough to see results.

For the last month or so pressure has been growing to kick the iPhone app business up a notch.  More and more I’m finding myself running into a fundamental wall where I just don’t have the time or the skills necessary to do all the work required.  I need a team.

Specifically the graphic and art demands of creating apps is quickly getting more than I have the skill to implement and be happy with the final product.  And with ideas for 100+ apps  there is more drawing, photoshop, and animation work than I can feasibly handle.

So more and more I’m thinking seriously about trying to hire someone or outsource all this work.  I’m thinking about business acquisitions to acquire code assets and developers, and looking to make JV deals and find marketing partnerships.

It’s all new territory.

Things have been building up ever since Christmas and when we decided to signup for Netflix.  It’s so easy to sit down at the TV in the evening while eating supper to catch a show and then suddenly find myself several hours later having watched 5 episodes and be ready for bed.

Starting tomorrow I’m going to be trying something new.  5am wakeup and focused effort on completing projects and writing code before heading in to the office.  it was inspired by this post that I saw on hacker news.

Productivity has been waning and my to do list has been getting longer and longer.  So I need to start getting things back on track.  There are countless iPhone app ideas that I want to get to but just haven’t found the time to build yet and it’s starting to stress me out.