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Posts Tagged ‘q·.:CARD’

Tokens of appreciation

December 6th, 2010 by Martin No Comments

Trying to sell software in the iTunes store can be an interesting experience. You have to be prepared for any kind of comments from users. Sometimes it’s just funny. A recent comment on our App q·.:card from the user TheMonstar was this:

Had no idea what these barcodes were until today and decided to get the app… Would be 5/5 if it was free

The user eventually rated our App with 2 out of 5 stars. So, how much money does our App cost to warrant such a down-rating? 0,99$. In words: ninety nine cents. That’s really a lot of money, right? In our opinion, this sheds light on an attitude which can be frequently observed on the Web:

What, you ask for money? Naw, I don’t like this commercial stuff. You should give it away for free.

It appears that only a fraction of users think twice and put themselves in the shoes of the developers. Creating software is work – sometimes really hard work – and this work should be appreciated. Positive comments are valued tokens of appreciation, but since we do not live in a Star Trek universe – where you do not need money to make a living and positive comments suffice – we consider money (99 cents for our App) as small tokes of appreciation for our work.

your laughing ikangai team

Writing Scientific Papers

August 27th, 2010 by Martin No Comments

We did it! We submitted our first scientific paper to a conference. Our target conference is the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE) which will take place at Hawaii (obviously a very nice location :-) ) between May 21st and May 28th 2011. The competition is more than tough – we expect an acceptance rate around 10 per cent. Thus, we consider our paper more or less a “stunt”: high risk, but potentially high rewards.

So what is our paper about? Well, it is about the application of SOA principles on mobile operating systems like the iPhone OS and the implications of this approach. We investigated the role of Apps and App Stores with regard to the SOA triangle and discussed how to use our Apps (q·.:Launcher and q·.:Card) for this. Interested in more? I guess then you’ll have to wait, until we receive notification of the ICSE program committee, which is due on November 19th. In the meantime we will continue working on our new project with woodapples and write another scientific paper which is a joined effort with Distributed Systems Group of Vienna Technical University. This time, the topic is centered around crowd sourcing and how we do this at ikangai solutions.

your ikangai team

Concours Worldvision de la q·.:Launcher

July 29th, 2010 by Martin No Comments

The Concours Worldvision de la q·.:Launcher is already entering it’s second week. The United States of America are still in lead with 54 points by a comfortable margin, followed by Austria with 16 points (a big thank you goes to the Austrian voters) and the UK who is slowly loosing ground on Austria with 13 points.
While the top 5 remain stable, there were some spectacular changes in the midfield: in an unprecedented chain of events, South Korea gained 13 positions and now holds on to the 10th place. Brazil closes in on Germany with 6 points. And with Malaysia and Romania two new contestants entered, which brings the number of contestants to 32.
Your country is not listed ? Or not happy with your countries performance? Well, then help your county collecting points by downloading q·.:Launcher or q·.:CARD from the iTunes Store.

your voting ikangai team

We’ve got mail from Apple

July 23rd, 2010 by Martin No Comments

We got an interesting mail from Apple today. We are using Apple’s private UIGetScreenImage API which was opened to the public in late 2009. Now, this is obviously not permitted any more and Apple sent us this mail:

Hello ikangai solutions,

We noticed that your app, q·.:CARD with Apple ID 365095972, is using the private UIGetScreenImage API. As you know, the use of private APIs is not permitted in apps. However, in late 2009, Apple announced it would begin to allow iOS apps to use the private UIGetScreenImage() function, but as noted in the announcement https://devforums.apple.com/thread/34908:

“A future release of iPhone OS may provide a public API equivalent of this functionality. At such time, all applications using UIGetScreenImage() will be required to adopt the public API.”

With the availability of the AV Foundation framework in iOS 4, public API equivalents are now available. Applications using UIGetScreenImage() to capture images from the camera should instead use the AV Foundation AVCaptureSession and related classes. Note that use of AVCaptureSession is only supported in iOS4 and above, so make sure your min OS is appropriately set. More details on how to capture video frames from the camera as images using AV Foundation can be found in Technical Q&A 1702:

http://developer.apple.com/iphone/library/qa/qa2010/qa1702.html

For applications using UIGetScreenImage() to capture the contents of interface views and layers, the -renderInContext: method of CALayer in the QuartzCore framework should used instead. For more information, see Technical Q&A 1703, “Screen capture in UIKit applications”:

If these APIs do not provide the functionality you want, we recommending filing an enhancement request using the Apple Bug Reporter at to let us know what you need.

As always, should you need code-level technical assistance implementing these APIs, you may with consult Apple Developer Technical Support here: . To ensure that Developer Technical Support can best help you, please be sure to include any crash logs, screenshots, or steps to reproduce any issues you’ve encountered.

We ask that you move to these new APIs in your next update.

If you have any questions about this response, or would like to discuss it further, please feel free to reply to this email. We look forward to reviewing your revised app.

Best Regards,
App Review Team

We believe that’s really good practice and keeps developers happy and in the loop. After some “not so nice” encounters with the Apple during the approval process we think that this is exactly what Apple needs to do: Tell the developers what is going on and how they can avoid problems.

your ikangai team

q·.:CARD feedback

April 26th, 2010 by Martin No Comments

We take complaints about our software seriously:

I have a biz card in front of me with a qcode and this app is telling me it’s not a valid qcard. Something is wrong. Please fix this faulty program I just bought.

Unfortunately we can only guess what the exact problem was. The user didn’t include more details and iTunes offers no possibility to contact the user directly to ask for details. Our guess is that the user scanned an arbitrary business card with a qr barcode printed on it. Since we currently support only our own format, the scanning of a barcode with a different format has exactly this effect. However, this means that we do have to improve on a couple of things in the following updates:

  1. Add the possibility to email us directly from the program (including debug information)
  2. Add more parsers to qcard (MeCard, vCARD)
  3. Clarify the use of q·.:CARD

Your ikangai team

PS: Thank you for your feedback, Journalismo!

q·.:CARD – update

April 25th, 2010 by Martin No Comments

We are already working on the next q·.:CARD update. We’ve found a small bug when decoding telephone numbers that contain spaces. We will fix the bug and add Japanese and German localization. Of course, we are also fine tune the usability of q·.:CARD. We will include user feedback and ask the user if he/she really wants to add a contact. We will also tweak the user interface a bit and make it even better ;-) .
If you want to give the current version of q·.:CARD a try, you can use the following promo codes (valid in the US iTunes store only):

LXP43F7K73T6
YMKLKR79LX6N

And, oh… one more thing: the update is free. If you use your promo codes now, you’ll get all future updates for free :-) .

Your ikangai team