A week ago, we received a pleasant surprise. Apple had featured our ebook, "Rabbit and Turtle's Amazing Race" in the iTunes App Store. The publicity came with an immediate 3-5X pop in paid downloads of our book, pushing it to the #12 Top Grossing Book for iPad.

"Rabbit and Turtle's Amazing Race" is a children's rhyming book with illustrations, quirky interactions and sound. It's "pop-up book meets the iPad." That's the design goal, at least.

I would love to tell you that building a book was a straight path from concept to storyboard to launch and inevitable success. The truth, however, is a bit more complicated.


In the paragraphs ahead, I will try to give you a sense of how we built our book, the mistakes we made, the discoveries, course corrections, and how it all worked out for us. If I miss something integral to you, please follow up in the comments.

Fragmentation lives: Building for iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad

At my company, Unicorn Labs, we have now built 13 apps for Apple's iOS Platform. Eight of them are optimized for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Five are built for iPad.

From a technical perspective, I can say that developing for the platform is not a simple matter of write once, run everywhere.

That is not to say that the experience building iOS Apps and plugging into the iTunes App Store has been unfavorable. Quite the opposite. I am very proud of the productivity that we have realized, the global, automated reach and distribution that we have been afforded, and the goodness of frictionless billing/payment.

But, I would be less than intellectually honest, and strategically dumb, if I failed to underline that that matrix that I talked about here is upon us.

One small example of this is that the newest version of the platform is iOS 4.x. The new OS gives you some wonderful capabilities, such as video capture services, multi-tasking and of course, taking advantage of functionality like Retina display on iPhone 4 and the new camera on Gen 3 iPod touch. Simply put, it is a case of a really solid system just getting better. Don't even get me started on how experientially enhancing iOS 4.2 is on iPad.

However, the point is this: once you call certain functions or use certain libraries that iOS 4 gives you access to, you pretty much no longer will run on iOS 3.x devices.

While this issue will be resolved later this month when Apple rolls out it's unification release for iOS across all devices (the aforementioned 4.2), the other truth is there's now a feature matrix that one can access as a developer to varying degrees, such as camera, telephony, video capture, audio, and photos.

Deciding which of these functions to use, abstract or ignore exposes you (as a developer) to all sorts of reach, performance and support complexity challenges and tradeoffs.

Moreover, in building our family of apps, we have leveraged two different development platforms that are complementary to Cocoa Touch. They are Ansca's Corona and the Cocos2d middleware. Even here, actions like plugging into Facebook and interfacing with native Cocoa Touch functions are slightly different in each of these realms.

Android devotees, I hear you snickering. Before you do so, know that these complexities are materially worse in the Android world, where not only do you have to contend with these same challenges across far more device types, but also the meta-platform "forking" decisions of different handset makers and carriers.

Nothing is free, but the cost is relative to not hopping aboard the greatest rocket ship ride since the advent of the web, and the rise of the PC before that. The apps lifestyle -- aka "There's an app for that" --- is the real deal. The mobile age is upon us.

What exactly is an ebook, anyway?

I have written in the past about where I think ebooks are headed ("Rebooting the book"), but the essence is this.

The advent of sound in motion pictures transformed not only how films were made, but what they were and the economics behind same. This is the rapidly approaching future for the book business and print media in general.

The current state of the ebook business is nominally better than a PDF stuffed into a bookish-sized reader. Think: Amazon's Kindle. It's mostly text, devoid of sound and/or interaction.

By contrast, in iOS an ebook is an app, and there are few limits to what an app can do. Touch, interact, be read to, savor high-definition art and stereophonic ambient sounds and special effects.

"Rabbit and Turtle's Amazing Race" was built in Corona, and we're happy with the decision. Our next book, scheduled for release in time for Christmas, is also built using Corona. In fact, the Play-Doh-like qualities of Corona enabled us to almost simultaneously come out with both full (paid) and lite (free) versions of the book on both the iPad and iPhone/iPod Touch.


Finally, a non-trivial benefit of Corona is the fact that porting to Google's Android is straight-forward, closer to a compile option than a re-architecting.

As noted earlier, we looked conceptually to the pop-up books from our youth for inspiration in cobbling together a book that has a solid story (a re-envisioning of the "Tortoise and Hare" fable) but is also packed with lots of cool sounds and visual interactions.

Now that I built it, will they come?

Here's the rub. The App Store model is hugely competitive. It's got around 300,000 apps, and the ease of development and distribution means that clone versions of your app are coming.

Worse, pick the wrong category, and your chances of being discovered by your target audience get lower.

For example, the Games and Entertainment categories are fiercely competitive. Choose Photo instead. Many iPhone categories are seemingly saturated. Their iPad counterparts are in an earlier stage in the product innovation lifecycle, albeit targeting to a much smaller base than the combined base of iPhones and iPod touches.

So how do we approach this from a go-to-market perspective? For one, we committed to iterating the book. Over a few different releases, we added new features, fixed bugs, and generally improved the product based upon user feedback and proactively monitoring usage data.

This turns updates into pseudo marketing events. And who doesn't like a solution provider that is committed to making their products better for its users?

The idea of marketing events brings to mind the indelible truth that with apps, the initial launch date is such a significant milestone that there's a tendency to underplay events like product updates and market validation news. Don't fall for that trap.

Similarly, we baked social sharing into all of our products. We live the medium by Facebooking, blogging, micro-posting, and tweeting. It's the ultimate drip marketing methodology.

We also assembled a media list and reached out to the folks that we hope will be advocates for our products. We customized, tweaked and tested messages and media kits. Obviously, the product has to deliver.

Finally, We approach app building like a shark that has to keep moving to keep alive. It's exhausting and exhilarating at the same time.

Related:

Rebooting the Book (One Apple iPad Tablet at a Time)
Apple, the Boomer Tablet and the Matrix
Apple's segmentation strategy, and the folly of conventional wisdom
iPhone economics and lower barriers to entry
The expanding influence of apps and mobile

Learn to love vendor prefixes and create full-screen backgrounds that resize to fit the viewport in Issue No. 309 of A List Apart for people who make websites:

Prefix or Posthack
by ERIC MEYER

Vendor prefixes: Threat or menace? As browser support (including in IE9) encourages more of us to dive into CSS3, vendor prefixes such as -moz-border-radius and -webkit-animation may challenge our consciences, along with our patience. But while nobody particularly enjoys writing the same thing four or five times in a row, prefixes may actually accelerate the advancement and refinement of CSS. King of CSS Eric Meyer explains why.

Supersize that Background, Please!
by BOBBY VAN DER SLUIS

Background images that fill the screen thrill marketers but waste bandwidth in devices with small viewports, and suffer from cropping and alignment problems in high-res and widescreen monitors. Instead of using a single fixed background size, a better solution would be to scale the image to make it fit different window sizes. And with CSS3 backgrounds and CSS3 media queries, we can do just that. Bobby van der Sluis shows how.

Illustration by Kevin Cornell for A List Apart Magazine.

Business Insider: Why Tumblr Is Kicking Posterous’s Ass

Posted via web from Does This Zeldman Make My Posterous Look Fat?

Four Possible Explanations for Google's Big China Move (Ethan Zuckerman) -- I'm staying out of the public commentary on this one, but Ethan's fourth point was wonderfully thought provoking: a Google-backed anticensorship system (perhaps operated in conjunction with some of the smart activists and engineers who’ve targeted censorship in Iran and China?) would be massively more powerful (and threatening!) than the systems we know about today. It's deliciously provocative to ask what the world's strongest tech company could do if it wanted to be actively good, rather than merely "not evil".
Gordon -- An open source Flash™ runtime written in pure JavaScript. (via Hacker News)
Pop Software -- great blog post about this new category of software. The people who are consuming software now are a vast superset of the people who used to do so. At one time, especially on the Mac, we’d see people chose software based upon how well it suited their requirements to get a job done. This new generation of software consumers isn’t like that - they’re less likely to shop around for something rather they shop around for anything. These are people who want to be entertained as much as they want to have their requirements met. [...] Apps are not Applications - they are their own things. They are smaller. They are more fun. Pop software has amazing scale, is hit-driven, is a very hard business for developers, and isn't going away. (via timo on Delicious)
Why Hasn't Scientific Publishing Been Disrupted? -- an analysis of the scientific publishing world: what roles it serves, how some of those roles can be better served by new technology, and which roles are still mired in traditions and performance plans anchored to the old models. As is often the case, people won't move to the new system when the amount they're paid is determined by the old system. (via timoreilly on Twitter)

Triple Issue No. 292 of A List Apart, for people who make websites, is all about search.

Testing Search for Relevancy and Precision

by JOHN FERRARA

Despite the fact that site search often receives the most traffic, it’s also the place where the user experience designer bears the least influence. Few tools exist to appraise the quality of the search experience, much less strategize ways to improve it. But relevancy testing and precision testing offer hope. These are two tools you can use to analyze and improve the search user experience.

Internal Site Search Analysis: Simple, Effective, Life Altering!

by AVINASH KAUSHIK

Your search and clickstream data is missing a key ingredient: customer intent. You have all the clicks, the pages people viewed, and where they bailed, but not why they came to the site. Your internal site-search data contains that missing ingredient: intent. Learn five ways to analyze your internal site-search data—data that’s easy to get, to understand, and to act on.

Beyond Goals: Site Search Analytics from the Bottom Up

by LOU ROSENFELD

Top-down analytics are great for creating measurable goals you can use to benchmark and evaluate the performance of your content and designs. But bottom-up analysis teaches you something new and unexpected about your customers—something goal-driven analysis can’t show you. Discover the kinds of information users want, and identify your site’s most urgent mistakes.

Illustration by Kevin Cornell.

Tineye -- reverse search engine; you upload an image and they find you similar images so you know where else it's used. Check out their cool searches.
PDF Pirate -- upload a PDF and this web site will give it back to you minus the restrictions on copying/printing/etc.
Flare -- an ActionScript library for creating visualizations that run in the Adobe Flash Player. BSD-licensed, modelled on Prefuse. When there's a visualisation library for every platform, will we start to get people who know how to make them?
The Importance of Failure (Marco Tabini) -- This is a point that I don't often hear made when people talk about failure; the moral behind a failure-related story is usually about preventing it, or dealing with the aftermath, but not about the fact that sometimes things go bad despite your best efforts, and all the careful risk management and contingency planning won't keep you from going down in flames. This is important, because it forces every person to establish a risk threshold that they are willing to accept in every one of their life efforts.

In Issue No. 290 of A List Apart, for people who make websites…

The Case for Content Strategy—Motown Style

by MARGOT BLOOMSTEIN

Over the past year, the content strategy chatter has been building. Jeffrey MacIntyre gave us its raison d’être. Kristina Halvorson wrote the call to arms. Panels at SXSW, presentations at An Event Apart, and regional meetups continue to build the drum roll. But how do you start humming the content strategy tune to your own team and to your prospective clients? Listen up and heed Aretha Franklin. No, really.

JavaScript MVC

by JONATHAN SNOOK

As JavaScript takes center stage in our web applications, we need to produce ever more modular code. MVC (Model-View-Controller) may hold the key. MVC is a design pattern that breaks an application into three parts: the data (Model), the presentation of that data to the user (View), and the actions taken on any user interaction (Controller). Discover how MVC can make the JavaScript that powers your web applications more reusable and easier to maintain.