Tracks of Southern African animals was my first iPhone app, and it still sells slowly but consistently. This is no Angry Birds and I will not become a millionaire with my app sales. The second app was a companion to the first, Tracks of Central and East African animals and covers Zambia north to the Gabon, the DRC, Uganda and Southern Sudan.

The most recent app is Hula 101 and is a video based instructional app that displays basic Hula steps using short video clips that are looped until the user has had enough or just gets tired of watching the same thing time and time again. The next step is to "localize" the app, that is to add other languages so that, for example, when a Japanese user of an iPhone views the app it displays in Japanese. I enlisted the help of a Japanese hula dancer to do translations for me and the rest was more straight forward than I had feared, except, and there always seems to be an except, the app with this localization no longer loops properly on my iPhone. On the simulator on my computer it behaves properly, but on the iPhone it does not, so it is back to Apple Technical Support for answers. I rather fear that I may have run into another bug in the moviePlayer element of XCode which is the program used to write apps for iPhones. We will see. Karen designed the icon and did all the video editing for me, all I did was the programming.

Hula 101

I have recently released two new books, Flight 5 to Johannesburg and British Spy in the Bushveld. The latter had been in work for some time, but was overtaken by the former in the publishing process. I wrote both using iBooks Author, an Apple program specifically for writing, which I have to say I like. What I discovered that I did not like was that when uploading to Apple iBook Store, buyers may only view the books on iPads using iBooks 2.0 or higher. That is too restrictive, so I used another ISBN and created a separate imprint for an e-book that I sell through Amazon Kindle, add to that a third imprint which is the print version that either I sell directly through Kilihune Books or through Amazon. There is a war brewing between at least Amazon and Apple over e-books, Apple through their use of iBooks Author, the format of which may be used for no other e-book platforms and Amazon Kindle with their Kindle Select which purports to offer greater market penetration, but may only be used if there are no other e-book versions.

So that you may recognise the books and rush out and make purchases, here they are: