Well it’s been a few days since I received my iPad, my initial thoughts when opening the box was wow it really is a giant iPhone, it is also heavier than I expected as well.
I’m struggling to find a day to day use for the iPad, it’s great for using whilst in front of the TV or in Bed in the morning to check emails / browse the internet but apart from that I have not used it much yet.
Maybe it’s just that there are not many good iPad applications out there at the moment, I have downloaded the WordPress iPad application but it seems rather limited, there is also no Facebook application, calculator or clock application.
How is everyone else getting on with the iPad in the UK?
Yesterday I struggled for ages trying to get my iPad on the O2 3G Network, first of all you should install the micro sim into your iPad then sync with iTunes, this downloads new mobile carrier details to enable 3G. However in my case the APN Details were incomplete and it took me ages to work out what to do.
Under Settings – Cellular Data – APN you need to have the following entered:
APN: ibrowse.o2.co.uk
Username: browse
Password: password
I also found that you could only register your micro sim on the iPad, which is also very confusing at first I disabled WiFi and launched Safari, a pop up appeared and mentioned that I was not registered for 3G Network and would I like to register, when I clicked Now i got an error not found message.
To register i enabled WiFi Network then went to settings Cellular Data and clicked a register button in this screen, this took me through a wizard which let me choose my data plan and then pay via credit / debit card.
It’s a shame the iPad / O2 does not make this more simple It would be great if you was not registered and only on 3G that the Safari popup asking you to register actually worked and allowed you to register, as it seems a shame for WiFi to be a requirement for registering for 3G.
With my list of things to improve with Calc VAT, I have just had a new shiny icon created for the iPhone VAT Calculator - Calc VAT.
The new icon hopefully looks more appealing compared to the old version and helps sell the story of what our application is all about.
iPhone VAT Calculatornew icon
Calc VAT – The iPhone VAT Calculator is still ranking no.1 on iTunes searches with the keyword “VAT” and no.4 with the term “UK Tax” here is how Calc VAT appears today in the iTunes search with it’s new icon.
Calc VAT has now been available in the iPhone app store for almost five months, and was first released on the 1st August 2009. The application started off as a fairly simple one and took me by surprise when it quickly climbed the UK Top 100 Charts and reached the number two spot on the 30th August.
Since then a lot has changed with the application and two major versions were released, however over the past two weeks we have started to see that Calc VAT iTunes rank is slowly dropping and now it is time to take action.
VAT Calculator Rank
The Vat Calculator application seems perfectly fine but with the help of some users on the iPhone SDK Forum I now have the following action items to take:
Update app icon to look better and match the application look / colors.
Rank Higher on Google for particular terms such as “VAT Calculator iPhone”
Edit the application iTunes Description – mention recent reviews.
Update this website with more up to date pictures of Calc VAT.
Create a new video of the application.
There is quite a few actions to do, and hopefully at the end we should start to see the Calc VAT rankings improve.
It would be great if apple in the future provided.
Analytical data – It would be great to see exactly how buyers find our applications.
Last night I ran into some issues whilst trying to code sign my new application and found that I had to upgrade to the latest version of XCode to be able to install the application on my iPhone.
However once I had upgraded XCode to the latest version version, the application would then install on the iPhone but it then gave me a new error which I have not seen before and this puzzled me because the provisioning profile had not expired and was installed correctly.
After much googling i found that it is perhaps a bug with the new version of XCode basically if you have any other provisioning profiles installed which have expired it will stop your new applications from running until you either remove the expired profiles or update them.
As you can see from the picture below I had many profiles installed which have all expired so I deleted these and the new application works fine.
This morning we were checking reviews left on our iPhone application Calc My Margins and noticed that someone called “Company Sec” has left us a great review yet listed an error within the application.
After checking the application we found the error and created an update to fix this, with the current version 1.2 it is not possible to select .6% with the percent scroller.
The application update has been posted to apple for approval and should be available within seven days once apple approve the update.
Due to how the app store works we have no means to contact a reviewer but would like to say thank you to “Company Sec” whoever you may be.
This is great news for Calc VAT and we are looking forward to many other new online sources to link back to us and review us as a top business application for the iPhone.
So there you have it my very first video, these will improve over time if you have any comments or suggestions of what you would like to see in the future just let me know.
Today I was looking through one of my websites raw log files and noticed that a couple of websites are using my site images directly on their website.
Content linking adds unnecessary traffic to your website and you never get the full credit from the visitor looking at the images, in particular the site where I have all these images is a site which earns me a small amount of money from AdSense adverts and sales of my Colouring Book application.
Luckily on the One Smart Host servers we utilise ISAPI Rewrite V3 so blocking this type of content linking is very easy.
I simply added the following to my websites .htaccess file
This basically only allows images to be served up from my domain www.kidscd.co.uk and if a content link is detected from another domain they are directed to the blocked.png which I have uploaded.
Have a look at the site which is linking directly to my images if you scroll half way down you should see this:
This image will now be displayed to any sites which content link directly to my images on www.kidscd.co.uk
