Tag Archives: ipad

App store sales figures and thoughts on the Terminology 2.0 update

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In the spirit of public information, I have blogged regarding the sales figures from the original launch of Terminology, both for the iPad and the iPhone (which came out several months later). So, I thought I would do the same for the launch of the Terminology 2.0 upgrade.

Terminology has done extremely well in the App store, but it has done well in the Reference category — which doesn’t translate to Angry Birds money. One of the ongoing issues for small developers and the App store is how to sustain over time since there is no direct way to generate revenue from upgrades. As a result of this problem, I think we are seeing a lot of apps with great potential get abandoned rather than improved. A sad thing.

Going into the development of Terminology 2.0, I considered a number of options including but not limited to going free with in-app upgrade, or just abandoning Terminology and moving on to other new projects.

The strategy I decided to pursue was to create a platform around Terminology that could help drive app sales and add value in other ways. This involved two pieces: building term.ly, an online companion for Terminology and trying to cross-promote other apps from within Terminology by providing built-in links to apps that supported URL scheme-based lookups. It is my hope that I can draw attention to some other excellent apps and provide a small amount of additional income through affiliate links. I’ve posted general thoughts on the update, so I won’t go into too much detail. It’s too early to tell whether term.ly and/or affliate links will pay off over time, but I’m confident that term.ly is a good product that will find a user-base in the crowded online dictionary space outside of the context of Terminology.

So, back to the sales figures. To be clear, I am not a marketing guy. My launch strategy for the update consisted primarily of sending out a press release (via PRMac, great service), contacting sites/blogs that had been kind to Terminology in past reviews and spreading the word about the update on Twitter/Facebook, etc.

I was lucky enough to get a very kind endorsement from an influential iOS developer (Thanks, Marco!), coverage from one of my favorite “Mac-enthusiast” sites, MacStories and iPad Insight — all of which drove a lot of traffic in those first couple of days of release.

The update release was in the evening on Monday, June 20th. I got enough buzz to be noticed by Apple and the iPad version of Terminology was featured in the first spot of the Staff Favorites section of the App store for a week starting on Thursday, June 23rd. That positioning sustained the sales during that week.

Figure 1, Terminology 2.0 (iPad) Rank June 19-July 3

NOTES: Peak ranks were #3 Reference, #172 Overall Paid iPad.

Figure 2, Terminology Ph 2.0 (iPhone) Rank June 19-July 3

NOTES: Peak ranks was about #18 Reference. Didn’t make the overall charts.

Figure 3, Terminology 2.0 Unit Sales (iPad/iPhone) June 19-July 3

NOTES: Peak unit sales combined were 337 units on launch day.

Since that first week, ranks and sales have dropped off to roughly the same level as before the 2.0 update with slight jumps due to specific mentions on the web.

PS: This is the indie-insider, embarrassing postscript where I reward you for getting this far in the post by admitting that the release of Terminology 2.0 was somewhat accidental.

I had submitted the apps to Apple just before leaving on vacation, with them set to hold release in the App store after approval. I had planned to return from vacation and spend about a week getting the website updated, press release written, etc., then pull the trigger.

The night I got back from vacation, I was checking on the apps at iTunes Connect and quite accidently clicked the “release to App Store” link. Oops. Really no way to fix that without pulling the app from the store, so I spent that evening and the next day getting things in order and getting the word out. Worked out fine, but it wasn’t the evening I had in mind after two full days on the road.

App links in Terminology, what’s missing?

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One of the features I added in Terminology 2.0, is an extensible list of apps that support directly links from Terminology.  

I’m excited about this feature because I think it’s great for users of the app.  From the start, Terminology has included some web resources to further research terms, but I love being able to integrate locally with other apps as well.  I know Terminology isn’t always going to provide the answer, and I don’t want you to left at a dead end — these links provide the gateway to more information.

What I’d like to know is “what’s missing?”  What research/reference or other apps do you use that you would like to see added to this list?

Also, these links can be used to share definitions, using short URLs from Terminology’s online companion, term.ly. Existing links for Twitter clients use this functionality, and if you have apps you want to share to from Terminology, I’d like to know about those as well.

In order to work with Terminology, the app must register a URL scheme, and support a method that allows lookup of a term to be passed into the app.  Terminology itself supports these incoming links using x-callback-url, but that isn’t necessary.  

If you are a developer and have an app you’d like to see in the Terminology list, please get in touch and provide me pointers to documentation on your URL schemes.  I think it’s a great opportunity to benefit users and cross-promote apps.  

Get in touch, or send ideas to @terminologyapp on Twitter.

Terminology 2.0

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Terminology 2.0 hit the App store today.  I considered a number of different directions for version 2.0.  It’s tempting to add a lot of little things, but in doing so, I think I would have lost a lot of the simplicity that made Terminology popular in the first place. I decided to focus on three areas, and I’m pleased with the results.  

Download it now: iPad | iPhone

The first area of improvement is in the user interface.  It’s still basically the same interface, but rewritten and tweaked.  The ability to customize fonts and font sizes was also added. Readability is important. I’ve generally received positive feedback about the font selections I made for Terminology, but they aren’t for everyone. 

The second area is integration. I wrote a new extensible means to configure links to external resources that appear at the end of each term. I’ve worked hard to try to promote interapp communication through the x-callback-url protocol, and Terminology has supported incoming requests for some time to do word lookups and request replacement words. Incoming lookups in Terminology are now supported by Instapaper, Elements and Mr. Reader — hopefully with more apps on the way. Now, I’m giving back by providing direct links to other apps that support lookups via URL schemes. These links can be turned on and off based on what you have installed and find useful.

I’ve also extended the list of available web resource links, and allowed for the links to be toggled on and off.  I expect to extend the list of resources further in the future, so please send suggestions.

The third area is sharing. I wanted to make it easy to share a definition you find interesting. Ultimately, this led me to create a web companion for Terminology, term.ly.  term.ly has the same great data as Terminology, and is fully functional as a stand-alone web-based reference tool.  The online dictionary space is very crowded, and I don’t necessarily expect to excel on that front alone, but term.ly is made to be very simple for sharing — by being a “definition-shortener”, allowing you to make simple “term.ly/word” URLs.  Terminology takes advantage of term.ly by using it’s links to share via Twitter, Tumblr and other apps using the links mechanism mentioned above.

There are a number of other minor improvements, such as improved handling of multi-word phrases, performance tweaks, etc., but the ones mentioned above are the major items.  Hope you enjoy the update.

What’s in your clipboard? – Ruminations on a “simple” feature.

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I have had several people request what, on the surface, seems a simple and innocuous feature in Terminology: search for the text in my clipboard when Terminology is launched. I’ve been working on this feature in Terminology 2 (shipping in July 2011). What follows is a rumination on how a feature that seems so simple to an end user can present interesting challenges when trying to implement it in an elegant way [1].

Let’s start by unpacking the feature request.

“search for the text in my clipboard when Terminology is launched.”

We have an action, “search”. We have target data, “the text in my clipboard”. We have a trigger, “when Terminology is launched”.

Terminology is a dictionary app, there is a standard search view with an input that returns a list of matching words. The action is pretty straight forward. I’ll set the value of the search input to the target data, trigger the search query just as if you had typed the text. Also, in both the iPad and iPhone versions of Terminology, the search view may not be visible, I need to make sure it’s showing or you won’t know I’ve done this nice thing for you.

What am I putting in the search input? Oh, yes, the target data from the clipboard. Wait, look, you’ve got “http://myfavoritewebsite.com/funny_video” in your clipboard. You probably put that there 5 hours ago and really don’t want to search for it in Terminology. Seems like you might use your clipboard for things that have nothing to do with Terminology. I better run some checks to see if what you have in your clipboard might actually be something you would want to lookup in Terminology.

I suppose I could ask you if you want me to lookup what’s in your clipboard. I’ve run into apps that do that, but it just feels wrong and annoying to me. I’m going to try to discern your intent. That might be a bit arrogant, but even if I fail, that text is still in your clipboard and you can still manually paste it into Terminology’s search input.

If it’s just one word, that’s pretty good. Terminology has multi-word entries as well, so that might be OK, too. If it’s not too long. You probably don’t want to lookup a whole paragraph in a dictionary. How about I only trigger this clipboard search if you have something that starts with alpha-numeric characters and is less that 40 characters long. That’s probably pretty close.

Finally, you want me to trigger this “when Terminology is launched”. On iOS that could be a cold start of the app, or the app resuming from it’s “multitasking” nap. I will check the clipboard on both states, and if it matches the criteria I laid out for something you might want to lookup in Terminology, I will fill-in the search input, trigger the search and make sure the search view is visible. Yippee, we’re done!

Wait, you mean you now looked up some other words, left, checked your email and decided to comeback to Terminology to lookup something else. And, you carelessly left the same word in your clipboard? I’m guessing you don’t want to look it up again, since I just looked it up for you the last time you launched Terminology – unless you have short-term memory issues. I better keep track of what I’ve looked up based on clipboard texts, and if it matches the last clipboard lookup, I’ll skip it. Yippee?!?!?

Darn it, now you went and really confused the issue. You left Terminology again, copied some nice juicy looking word into your clipboard to use in a tweet, then went and started reading your Instapaper queue. Since you had to go Instapaper that New Yorker article with all the fancy words, you need to lookup one up in Terminology using the built-in integration. This integration sends Terminology a URL that let me know what to lookup already – so I guess I need to test for incoming URL arguments to handle before messing with your clipboard, and if I get them, I’ll just pretend that juicy word isn’t in your clipboard after all.

Yippie!?!? Not sure I’m quite there yet, but it’s starting to “feel” right.

[1] One of my focuses is Terminology is to prevent people from having to take this step of copying text to the clipboard. I’ve been developing and championing the x-callback-url protocol for URL schemes in iOS apps largely because it solves this problem, by allowing users to signal their intent to lookup a specific word before they ever get to the app. Terminology lookup support is now in Instapaper and Elements, with other apps on the way. But, however many apps implement support for Terminology, the vast majority of the text on your iOS device is still not going to have an easy way to select the text and jump to Terminology — so one of the primary entry points is still likely to be the clipboard.