When the major release of Kwik comes next year, several new things will be announced, including the end of the Flash settings process. To celebrate the dead of this painful/annoying process, I would like to invite any Kwik user (paid or not) to participate in a contest to create the illustration that will replace the actual beta image below: This image will appear when the user launches Kwik for the first time. It has the purpose to salute new users and remind them about the importance of properly resize the plugin panel and personalize the Settings. Welcome Image Contest Design an illustration that covers the window purpose (mentioned above) and…
Archives for 2013
Crossing the Chasm with Mobile Apps
Reading my emails this morning, I was surprised with a particular one coming from Moglue, a long time competitor of Kwik. After three years promoting and selling their DYI (do it yourself) storybook tool, they just announced they are closing the business due lack of continued funding (according CrunchBase, Moglue has received a total of $990K in the period of 2 years). Although the announcement is really surprising (I wish Kwiksher had the almost $1M in investment as well), there are a few indications happening in the market at this moment that may explain some of their reasons. Just to make things clear, my words below are just assumptions as…
Introducing Kutt
Today we introduce Kutt, the fastest way to design interfaces for different platforms! Kutt, our second Photoshop plugin, aims to support creatives by speeding up the creation of user interfaces for a variety of device resolutions and sizes. Design once and Kutt does the rest of the job, exporting images to different resolutions and creating a “Developer Report” that shows size and positioning of each file generated, speeding up the task of your developer re-creating the interface while coding. Kutt also exports icons and compress all png files for you. While other competitors can also generate more than one image per layer, usually they create only images for iOS (@1…
Update on Kwik and other things…
First of all, I would like to share my discomfort with the lack of updates on Kwik. Many of you are patiently (other not so much :)) waiting for the Storyboard integration that seems never get alive from Corona Labs. The last info I have says it is coming in a near Daily Build (meaning only Corona Pro users will get access to it first). Unfortunately no dates are set for that yet. The good news is Corona just released their latest Public Build (2013.2076) and, probably they will work the beta testing of the new Storyboard in the next daily builds. Fingers crossed! Although I can’t do much about…
Interview with Julian Stokoe
Today I talk to Julian Stokoe, from Yoozoo Books. He is the author of Have You Heard?, our October’s App of the Month. Tell us a little bit about you and your studio. Where are you based and what is your “story”? Yoozoo Books is the book + game app department of Yoozoo Ltd based in Auckland, New Zealand. We are a small but perfectly formed team consisting of myself and my wife Sarah. Our two kids are also a big part of the company, being an endless source of inspiration. Yoozoo Books was formed as the home to a menagerie of characters who will appear in a series of stories planned for release as book +…
App of the Month: Have You Heard
October brought several great apps, including the Bean’s series, education 123 da Gabi, the funny I Feel Super and two new adventures from August App of the Month winner François Walter. Congratulations to all submissions and thanks for keep trusting in Kwik to share your passion with others! We are happy to announce that Have You Head, by Yoozoo Books, is the winner of our contest in October! Have you Heard is an incredible storybook which shares what happens when (words from the author) Farmer Blue came clattered off past Peko on his way into town to pick up a few things. But when Peko tries to tell Summer what those…
Update on Kwik
Some of you have reached me directly, asking about when the publishing process will export code for the new Storyboard API. Others have asked about integration with the recently announced Graphics 2.0 features from Corona SDK. Unfortunately I still don’t have many answers but I would like to update you on the things I know already. Storyboard API I have been working directly with Corona’s main developer here. Until the previous internal beta, almost everything was working fine with Kwik (only issues we had were with timer disposal and refreshing on coloring pages). However, I was informed that he managed to fix them but had to change a few other…
Are the basics of marketing being applied to the app business?
Some of you may know already I spent 11 years working, mostly at marketing positions, at Microsoft. Although the topic is not my passion, I can say I have learned a “thing or two” there. Disclaimer made, the answer for this topic’s question is “for the majority of publishers, the answer is NO”! Marketing 101 A quick search at Wikipedia will tell you that marketing is the process of communicating the value of a product or service to customers, for the purpose of selling/promote the product or service. The marketing geniuses agree on the basic principle that 4 “Ps” are the key concept for marketing anything (mobile apps included). The Ps…