App update

My first App, Tracks of Southern African animals, was accepted by Apple and released for sale. Sales have been steady at the rate of about ten a week, mainly to South Africa. Obviously I will not get rich from this adventure, this is no Angry Birds gaming App that must have sold in the millions. I did take advantage of the code I had already written and modified the image files to release a companion App, Tracks of Central & East African animals. The main differences being the distribution maps and the addition of the higher primates and the deletion of some antelope species. Sales have been dismal to date, so I am thinking of marketing plans to hit the safari booking agencies in the US with a flyer that advertises the App and points out why any discerning client would be just thrilled to have their own personal track guide, not in a clumsy books to consult, but on the iPhone that they are probably clutching anyway, and which is likely to be the last thing they consult and let go of while your friendly lion decides that they would make a nice lunch. 

Spring

Spring is now here. The signs are subtle but there. The na kolea (Golden plovers to non Hawaiians) have now gone into summer plumage and are making the most of the last opportunity to devour anything insect like being that creeps, hops or crawls in the yard. That high protein will be necessary when today or tomorrow they form into flocks and depart for their long flight to Alaska and summer breeding. 

The resident francolin pair that has adopted us is now scouting the yard again looking for a suitable nest site. They must be much better at raising chicks than the chickens from down the road. The chickens will have broods of eight or ten and in about two to three weeks that is down to two or three, whereas the francolins can start with a brood of ten to twelve and finish with eight to ten that survive to adulthood.

The jacaranda trees are in flower. The jacaranda is interesting, the individual blossoms have no real discernible scent, at least not to me, perhaps to my dogs, but when you walk by the tree there is a distinctive scent that, for me, evokes memories of Zambia and South Africa. For me it means dryness and heat if that can be related to odor.

The avocado trees have flowered and are now releafing. They are not deciduous, but there is a definite change in leaves as last season's leaves dry, whither and fall off littering the ground, while now leaves spring forth. The all spice tree has also flowered so later this year there will be berries to gather, while they are still green, and then dried to yield all spice.

The sun, or rather the earth's aspect to the sun, has moved around and the dawn now comes up with the sun shining into Karen's studio while the sunset is now hidden behind trees and no longer directly to the west of the house over the ocean and the hours of daylight have increased slightly. We will never have the long evenings of the high latitudes, but the extra hour of so is nice.

Track ID

It's official, my App, Tracks of Southern African animals is now up and available on the iTunes App Store. When the status changed from Waiting for review to In Review, things went very quickly and it was only a matter of hours before the iTunes message that it was approved and up for sale. Now I need to finish adding to the data bases in the App and do the updates I had planned. My greatest problem is finding images that I can use. There are images on the Web, but a great number of them are owned by Getty Images or Lightbox, both of which demand large sums of money for licenses, large enough that the number of Apps that i would have to sell to just cover their cost is ridiculous. The most helpful group has been the South Africa National Parks, who have not only provided images but have asked if I need higher resolution images. Their only requirement is that I make attribution to their images on the pages, so you will see some of the icon images on the Notes page have their web address and copyright notice, a small price to pay in my book.

So what's the next App? I'm not sure at this time. I will have to see what draws my interest. Meanwhile, it's back to the written word and "On the Trail of Smuts".

Writing or programming

I have been remiss lately in doing any serious writing. I have been distracted by Apps. It is a different kind of writing, not so much is it "its" or "it's" but, "if ([[segue identifier]isEqualToString:@"Notes"])".  I have by sheer dint of persistence managed to begin to understand the niceties of Objective C, the programming language used by Apple for its devices, iPhone, iPad, etc. It has not been without a fair degree of blue air at times, but I have succeeded. The result is a first App that to a user will likely invoke the comment, "is that all?", but then that is the whole idea of Apple's app development, the user experience needs to be simple and intuitive. The technical support is interesting. Apple provides two instances free within a year and any further need to be paid for. The blogs tend to fall into two distinct populations, the really simple and the arcane with not much between. I did get some help from a roundabout source in England, and his help was mainly asking me a couple of questions that made me go back and look at the code and rethink my approach. Now I await Apple to see if the App will be accepted as is or if they will ask for changes. I know it does not crash, or at least it does not crash on my iPhone, so perhaps they will be generous and accept it and then add it to the myriads of apps that populate the App Store. When it is available I will post again with more details.