The 1.5 release for Mac is free for existing customers, and $9.99 for new customers. It can be found either in Fortunate Bear’s online store or Apple’s Mac App Store. The iOS version is $4.99, and can be found in the App Store.

See the press release for more information.

• The App Stores need to support upgrade pricing. rdar://11131356 or Open Radar

• The App Stores need to support free trials. rdar://11133210 or Open Radar

• The App Stores need to support tracking statistics. rdar://11133330 or Open Radar

• The App Stores need better discoverability of apps. rdar://11133573 or Open Radar

I know there’s been a lot of pessimism about writing up Radars lately, including from yours truly. But the truth is filing bugs is the only official way Apple will listen, so the pragmatic side of me wins out. It’s not that I necessarily think filing bugs will cause a change, but it’s the only possible way of affecting changing that’s been given to me.

If you want to learn more, you can visit Black Maria’s product page or read the press release.

I’ve never been much for twitch-based computer games, instead preferring ones that require a little more thought and strategy. In fact, I tend to prefer real world card and board games to the computer kind. One of my favorites is the hearts card game, which requires dodging hearts (penalty cards) while trying to force other players to take them.

The only problem is I don’t always have pocket space to carry around a deck of cards, nor do I really want to. And don’t get me started on finding three people who know how to play hearts, and finding the pocket space for them too. Apparently these people have standards, and sometimes restraining orders.

Anyway, Black Maria is how I like to play hearts. It uses the rules I prefer (although they’re configurable through expansion packs) and fits nicely in my pocket. Even better, it comes with three witty opponents who — as far as I know — don’t know any lawyers. The difficulty, rules, and even opponents and backgrounds can be changed through expansion packs.

If any of this sounds remotely interesting to you, I encourage you to try out the Black Maria beta, and leave me some feedback about what you think about Black Maria. Despite the price tags listed in the app, the expansion packs are actually free for the beta, so be sure to give them a whirl too.

So what’s the deal with Order N?

They’re still around, successful, and offering custom development services for the Mac and iOS platforms. However, I sold my shares in the company back in October and I’m no longer part of Order N.

What do you do now?

Mainly sit around in my underwear, playing solitaire.

…uh, anything else?

Sometimes I pet my cats, Luna and Pasha.

Alright, I guess we’re done here.

Wait, before you go, let me tell you about my new company.

You could’ve mentioned that earlier.

And miss out on all the interesting tidbits about Mac indie life?

Anyway, so you have a new company?

Yep, still shiny and everything.

…

…

…anything you want to say about it?

Yeah, it’s going to be awesome, sweet, sick, and possibly jivetastic, if that’s still a word.

I’m not sure that was ever a word. What’s the company going to do?

Be awesome. Gonna have our own tree fort and everything. See:

It’s like Panic’s Founder’s Room, only cooler. I’m also working on the official company super secret handshake, but I can’t think of anything after “patty cake, patty cake, baker’s man.”

Wow, there’s so many things wrong with that, I don’t know where to begin. But I see the company name appears to “Fortunate Bear.” Where does the name come from?

Insomnia induced delirium, and possibly the sheer jivetasticness of myself.

Really?

No, I just randomly matched up adjectives and nouns until I found one I liked the sound of, and my wife wouldn’t divorce me over.

Is Fortunate Bear going to be a software company or what?

Oh, right, software. Yes, software will be involved in the process. I’m not much for playing solitaire with real cards. It’s the reason why the iPad is so magical.

Is the whole FAQ going to be this way? Because there’s a netiquette FAQ I could be hosting.

Alright, fine. Fortunate Bear is a software company focused on creating Mac and iOS apps to sell under the Fortunate Bear brand. I am the sole owner.

What about contracting/freelancing?

I might have to do some in the early years of Fortunate Bear, but it will be kept a bear minimum (see what I did there?) and phased out as soon as possible. I am not currently available for contracting. I’m focusing on building my own products.

What can you tell me about the products you’re working on?

I’m working on a Mac app for window management. It’s like Exposé except it doesn’t suck. I’ll be announcing a beta for it soon.

What about Hearts Attack?

I bought the source and rights for Hearts Attack from Order N. I’m renaming it, adding a few features, and changing the way it will generate money. I’m hoping to release it soon, but not until I get my Mac app out.

How can I get more information about Fortunate Bear and its products?

This blog will continue to be the main place I write and make announcements. However, I have a placeholder site for Fortunate Bear. You can sign up for the company newsletter to get announcements about products as well as tips and tricks after the products are released. There’s also an official Fortunate Bear Twitter account you can follow.

Anything else you want to add?

It’s gonna be jivetastic.

Please shut up.

Step 1: Sign up as an iTunes Affiliate

First you’ll need an affiliate account, so go to Apple’s iTunes Affiliates page and click on “Apply to be an affiliate,” which will take you to LinkShare. The sign up process asks for your company and website information.

You’ll need to apply to advertise for “Apple iTunes.” I don’t remember how long it took me to be approved, but I think it was less than 24 hours. They do check the website you provided to make sure it is legit. I have heard that they will reject your application if the website is just a placeholder or if it has trademarked names in the URL, such as “iPhone.”

You need a LinkShare account because Apple has provided LinkShare hooks into the App Store so it knows when a click turns into an actual sale. As a bonus you’ll earn a 5% commission.

Step 2: Create a LinkShare link for your app

Next, you’ll need to create a LinkShare link to your app in the App Store. Using this link will allow LinkShare to magically know if a click turns into a sale.

In LinkShare, select the Links > Deep Linking menu item, and select Apple iTunes as the advertiser. Enter your app’s iTunes URL in the URL field. Don’t worry about the U1 Value field right now, you can just leave it blank. Click Create Link and copy the resulting URL.

On your product page, wherever you link to your app in the App Store, use your LinkShare link instead. If you stop here, LinkShare will be able to track how many clicks from your product page result in sales. This is useful in itself, but it would be even better if you could track each promotion separately, and know how many sales a specific ad resulted in.

LinkShare supports ad/promotion tracking through “signatures” which is what the U1 Value field above was all about. Signatures are simply a user defined string that are passed to LinkShare via in the u1 URL parameter.

Step 3: Tracking referrers through the product page

When creating ads or links to your product, you’ll probably want to direct potential customers to your app’s product page on your website instead of directly to the App Store. This allows you to provide a video of your app, cross promote other products or services, or actually use HTML formatting. The complication that arises from this is remembering which ad the user clicked on to get to your product page by the time they get to the App Store.

The first step here is to know how the potential customer got to your product page to begin with. The easiest way to do that is to simply add on a URL parameter for the referrer and give each ad or promotion a different parameter value, which we’ll call a “signature.” For example, an ad for Hearts Attack could use this URL:

http://www.orderndev.com/hearts-attack.html?u1=GAD001

Here the referrer parameter name is u1, just to be consistent with LinkShare, and the ad signature is GAD001.

Next, you need to get the ad signature passed on to LinkShare. This is done through the u1 URL parameter, so you will need to modify any LinkShare URLs on your product page based on the signature parameter. You can do this either server side or client side in JavaScript. Dan Wood talks about how to track referrers server side for Mac apps, and his examples can be modified to work here. I chose to modify the LinkShare URLs client side using JavaScript. The basic algorithm is:

1. Check for the u1 URL parameter. If it exists save it off into a cookie.
2. Check for the signature cookie. If it exists, append “&u1=signature” to the LinkShare URLs.

At the bottom of my product page, I have code that looks like this:

	<script type="text/javascript">
		saveParameterInCookie('u1', 'hearts-attack-src');
		restoreCookieToParameterInAnchor('u1', 'hearts-attack-src', 'buy-link');
		restoreCookieToParameterInAnchor('u1', 'hearts-attack-src', 'app-store-link');
	</script>

The first line saves the URL parameter named u1 into a cookie named ‘hearts-attack-src.’ The next two lines update anchor tags in the HTML by appending the value of the signature cookie as an URL parameter. The second line says: update the ‘buy-link’ anchor tag by taking the contents of the ‘hearts-attack-src’ cookie as the value for the ‘u1′ parameter and appending it to the anchor tag’s URL.

Here’s the code for implementing saveParameterInCookie and restoreCookieToParameterInAnchor:

function getURLParameter(name) {
	name = name.replace(/[\[]/,"\\\[").replace(/[\]]/,"\\\]");
	var regexS = "[\\?&]"+name+"=([^&#]*)";
	var regex = new RegExp(regexS);
	var results = regex.exec(window.location.href);
	if (results == null)
		return null;
	else
		return results[1];
}

function addParameterToURL(url, name, value) {
	if ( value == null )
		return url;
	return '' + url + '&' + name + "=" + value;
}

function saveParameterInCookie(parameterName, cookieName) {
	var parameter = getURLParameter(parameterName);
	if ( parameter == null )
		return;

	createCookie(cookieName, parameter, 180);
}

function restoreCookieToParameterInAnchor(parameterName, cookieName, anchorName) {
	var cookie = readCookie(cookieName);
	if ( cookie == null )
		return;

	link = document.getElementById(anchorName);
	link.href = addParameterToURL(link.href, parameterName, cookie);
}

Hopefully the code is self-explanatory. It relies on functions createCookie and readCookie, which I got from this article on JavaScript cookies. I should also point out I am not a professional JavaScripter, so there may be bugs in the code. I make no guarantees about this code.

As complicated as all that might have seemed, you are now tracking potential customers from your ads or promotions, to your product page, to the App Store where LinkShare knows if they are actually buying or not.

Step 4: Tracking the performance of ads or promotions

The final step is viewing the results of your ad or promotion in LinkShare. LinkShare will be able to tell you how many visitors actually made it to the App Store, and how many of those actually bought something. To know how many visitors an ad or promotion is driving to your product page, you’ll need to use something like Mint or Google Analytics.

In LinkShare select the Reports > Advanced Reports menu item. Select the “Signature Activity” report type, and click View Report. You’ll get a table that looks like this:

The Member ID column is where your ad or promotion signature will show up. It will be whatever you pass to LinkShare via the u1 URL parameter. It also shows how many clicks the link got, and how much sales it generated. As you can see, my ads aren’t doing so hot, but at least I know that now.

Oops, sorry, wrong graphic. I meant this one:

Hmmm… not much difference really. As you can see I actually sold nothing on Sunday. Apparently everyone was interpreting “day of rest” as “don’t buy any iPhone apps today.”

This article is kind of a postmortem for the launch of Hearts Attack. I attempted a few different things in order to drum up sales. Some were more successful than others.

• One of the things I did before the launch was some search engine optimization on the Hearts Attack product page. Dan Wood of Karelia has some good resources on how to do SEO.

  I was fairly pleased with the results. The product page ended up on the first results page for a few of the keywords I was targeting. It could be better, but not bad for a PageRank amateur such as myself.

• On the day of launch, I issued a press release through prMac. I opted for their “extended press release” which sends the press release the same day and to more people. It’s only $20 so it’s low risk.

  I did see a couple of obvious benefits from this. The first benefit is “link juice” to the Hearts Attack product page and our company website in general. I had done some SEO earlier and discovered the biggest thing we were in need of was links. This helped immensely with that.

  Secondly, I mentioned in the press release that promotional codes were available upon request. Only three people ever asked for them, but I happily gave them away. I have not seen any reviews as a result, but hopefully at least I garnered some good will among reviewers.

  Speaking of reviewers, one thing I did not have ready at launch, that I should have, was a press kit. I kept mine simple in that it just contains screenshots and images of the app icon. I should have linked to it in the press release and product page, because it was something the reviewers immediately asked for.

  It terms of how many sales were made because of the press release, I don’t know. It did noticeably increase traffic to our site, but I didn’t have LinkShare hooked up at the time, so I don’t know how many of those visitors became customers.

• I wrote about Hearts Attack here and tweeted about it. I both published my own press release and then followed up with the story about Hearts Attack came about.

  This drove a decent amount of traffic to our website, and resulted in a few sales from my friends and other people who follow me on Twitter. Like the press release, it also helped with the “link juice” of our website.

• I asked my wife, Elaine, to write about it on Facebook since she has approximately 30 bazillion friends on there and I have none. Some say this is because I haven’t even created an account, but I think Facebook is just being stuck up.

  Anywho, this didn’t create much traffic, but it did create a couple of sales from friends who follow Elaine on Facebook, but not me on Twitter.

Of course the biggest driver of sales is being listed at the top in the App Store, which by default is sorted by the release date. Unfortunately being at the top is fated to be temporary, and I could easily tell when I fell down the list by looking at my sales.

In summary, I learned: I should have had LinkShare up and running to begin with so I could properly track conversions and know what approach is the most successful as far as sales. Second, I should have a press kit ready at launch and linked to it from the press release.

Way back in 2008 the original iPhone SDK came out, and I, like a lot of people, was excited about developing apps for the iPhone. My company is primarily a software development services company so I was mainly interested in learning the SDK so we could pick up iPhone contracts in addition to Mac ones. It also happens to be the case that my favorite card game is hearts, so I decided a good way to learn the iPhone SDK was to write my own hearts game.

After a couple of weeks I had the basic functionality implemented, and noticed I was playing it a lot. I realized then that I could probably make this into a product. Furthermore, releasing an iPhone app through the App Store seemed like a good way for us as a company to begin making the transition from a services based company to a product based one.

If I was going to release Hearts Attack as a published app, I knew the UI and presentation had to be greatly improved. I went through a lot of mockups for the main playing view, including one where everyone’s cards — all 52 of them — were always visible somewhere on the table (a truly horrible idea). Unfortunately I don’t seem to have most of the mockups around anymore, but I found a couple which you can see below. (See the product page for the end result.)

The biggest challenge I had was fitting everything on the screen and it still being legible and usable. By trial and error I figured out how small I could make the cards and still make them tappable, as well as their optimal position to make them accessible with one hand.

I began thinking about what would make Hearts Attack unique or different from its competitors. Back then there were literally just two iPhone hearts games in the App Store, and I felt pretty confident that what I had was already better than them, but I wanted to be sure. I decided on: oddball talking computer opponents, a tutorial that gave not only card suggestions but the rationale behind the choice (a pet peeve of mine), and multiple undo support for mis-taps and tactical errors.

The last step was to get professionals to do the sound and graphics. I ended up hiring a sound designer, a graphics designer, and a character illustrator. The sound design went smoothly, but getting the graphics done was a lot more involved than I anticipated, which is another story for another day. Jordan of OneToad Design created the app icon, playing backgrounds, and the special card backgrounds for the queen of spades and jack of diamonds. Lara Kehler did the character illustrations, which turned out great.

Unfortunately, Hearts Attack went on hiatus in early 2009. I was working full time on an iPhone contract, and simply didn’t have a lot of time to put into Hearts. Secondly, I had lost all desire in finishing it. It was becoming increasingly apparent that iPhone users didn’t want to pay more than $0.99 for anything, despite all the whining I did about it. I convinced myself it wasn’t worth releasing Hearts because it would never make back the money it cost us to make. Hearts stayed dormant for an entire year.

A couple of months ago, I decided to pick Hearts Attack back up again. I had the time and, as someone pointed out to me, it would never make money if I didn’t release it. I was tempted to update the app to the latest SDK (I started Hearts back before you could even use nibs on the iPhone) and add some features. I decided against this, because I really just wanted to ship it. I did have to update it to the 2.2.1 SDK because the current Xcode tools no longer ship with the 2.0 SDK.

Instead I focused on fixing the bugs and adding polish. Fortunately for me my wife happens to be a professional software tester with iPhone experience, so I got lots of good bugs to fix. I also prepared a press release, created a website, and otherwise got ready for the release. After I felt the app was stable enough, I submitted it to Apple on Friday. It was approved on Monday.

At this point, I’m still not convinced I’ll ever make back the money we spent on sound and graphic designers. A hearts card game simply is never going to be a big seller, and price point isn’t high enough to make up for that. Right now, I’m tending to think pessimistically about sales, but I’m going to do what I can to drum up sales and see how things go.

It’s a “wait and see” situation as to if we develop any more iPhone applications to sell ourselves. Of course, regardless of how well Hearts Attack does, we’d be happy to develop your iPhone app for you.

The player competes against three of seven possible colorful computer opponents, each of which has their own distinct looks and personality. The personalities range from a communist kitten trying to overthrow oppressive humans to a vegetarian vampire to a pacifist pirate who sells insurance. They always have something interesting to say about how they and their opponents are playing. The computer opponents can be configured to play at trivial, easy, normal, or hard difficulty levels.

Unique to Hearts Attack is its in-depth tutorial system. The tutorial begins by giving the player a brief introduction to the rules and strategies of hearts. Throughout the game it offers suggestions for which cards to pass or play, including the rationale for choosing those cards. The suggestions are useful to beginners learning how to play, and to more advanced players looking to improve their game. The suggestions can be used apart from the tutorial.

Since players always have their favorite way of playing hearts, Hearts Attack allows flexible configuration of the rules. Players can choose how cards are passed, which player leads and with what card, how penalty and bonus cards are scored, and what is required to shoot the moon or the sun.

Device Requirements

• iPhone or iPod touch
• Requires iPhone OS 2.2.1 or later
• 4.7 MB

Pricing and Availability

Hearts Attack 1.0 is $2.99 (USD) and available exclusively through the App Store in the Games category. Review copies are available upon request.

Links

• Order N Development, LLC
• Hearts Attack 1.0
• Purchase and Download

Company Information

Order N Development, LLC is a software engineering company providing contracting services for the Macintosh, iPhone, and iPad platforms. Order N Development was founded in 2002 in Dallas, TX by a small band of experienced Mac developers. Copyright 2002-2010 Order N Development, LLC. All Rights Reserved. Apple, and the Apple logo are registered trademarks of Apple Computer in the U.S. and/or other countries.

This year they aren’t content with bringing conference justice to only the UK, so they’re branching out to the good ‘ole U.S. of A. by way of Atlanta, GA. To help you decide which conference you should attend, US or Europe, I’ve prepared the following quiz:

1. What is your opinion of Seattle?

   1. It’s nice, but isn’t nearly rainy or dreary enough.
   2. I like their coffee.
   3. The residents have too many teeth.

2. Describe your driving habits

   1. I like to drive on the left side of the road.
   2. I like to drive on both sides of the road.
   3. I like to merge right six lanes without signaling while going 147 mph on the off ramp and giving the finger with both hands in my black Camaro.

3. The pinnacle of human achievement is…

   1. Afternoon tea
   2. Sliced bread
   3. Hee Haw

Scoring: Give yourself -1 points for any 1 answer, 0 points for any 2 answer, and 1 point for any 3 answer.

If you scored is less than zero, you should attend NSConference Europe; if greater than zero, NSConference USA. If you scored exactly zero, you are truly a cultured individual and should attend both.

Personally, I’ll be attending both, and not just because of peer pressure and insightful quizzes. I’ll be presenting a talk on how to implement a watercolor brush using Core Image and OpenCL and maybe some duct tape. If you enjoy the graphics articles that I post here, you’ll probably enjoy my presentation. If not, I hear Steve “I’m Batman” Scott does a mean Adam West impression.