What is Follow Cost? Follow Cost is a interesting and powerful statistic that helps you check the “cost” you would incur by “following” a person on twitter. This is a very useful statistic that I think every twitter client should adopt.  Tweetie for iPhone was the first to implement follow cost and I use this feature of tweetie to check whether a follower is “worth the pain” (as follow cost puts...

In-App purchases is a great way for developers to upsell by giving away their app for free and then allow them to charge for features when users start using it. This freemium model has indeed worked very well for upselling your app in the AppStore. But unfortunately, there isn’t an Apple allowed way to allow reviewers to “download” your in-app purchases for free (like giving away promotional codes for your in-app...

Though UISearchDisplayController is seemingly easy (and yes it’s easy), apart from the sample source code, there isn’t much documentation available from Apple. I won’t be posting code for this tutorial, (as most of them come from Apple’s own source code), however, the tutorial will contain code fragments that I wish to highlight and those I changed for improving the search using NSPredicate Step 1: Create the...

Last week, Apple announced that in-app purchases will be available for free apps as well. This could probably free developers from creating “lite” and “pro” versions of the app and allow developers to “unlock” features inside the app and create business models that the AppStore haven’t seen. This model could be a great boon for developers like us to upsell our apps (provided they are of good...

With the outburst of Twitter and microblogging services, many companies who want to make some quick money started services that include, URL shortening like tinyurl, bit.ly, tr.im and others or image sharing services like TwitPic, yFrog and so on. However, due to lack of a proper business model, some of these sites are struggling to meet their bandwidth costs. Because most of these services are just a week long PHP programming work,...