Now this isn’t a particularly big deal for us since we already had code in place, for Tweetbot 2.3, that removes the need for UDID. It was a simple matter of moving that code back into 2.2 and re-submitting to Apple. We had a fixed version updated and uploaded to Apple within 2 hours of getting this message and are once again waiting for approval. If you are an app developer and depend on UDID for any functionality it’s time to migrate away from it, sooner or later Apple will catch you.

Why did we use UDIDs? We used them only for our push notification services in order to be able to match up a given device to its push notification settings. This allowed us to restore push notifications settings after Tweetbot was deleted and re-installed. With this new change in place this is no longer possible, if you delete and re-install Tweetbot you’ll have to setup your push notification settings again. Your device’s UDID never went anywhere besides our push notification services and has never been shared with anyone.

Fixed:
* DMs not working for iOS 4.x devices.
* Lists losing their positions.
* TweetMarker not working properly.
* Arabic, Thai, possibly other keyboards not functioning correctly.
* Video upload settings lost on restart.

We have no control over how fast Apple approves the update, but we’re hoping that it’ll be sometime late next week.

Valid as of version 1.0.2

• tweetbot://<screenname>/timeline
• tweetbot://<screenname>/mentions
• tweetbot://<screenname>/retweets
• tweetbot://<screenname>/direct_messages
• tweetbot://<screenname>/lists
• tweetbot://<screenname>/favorites
• tweetbot://<screenname>/search
• tweetbot://<screenname>/search?query=<text>
• tweetbot://<screenname>/status/<tweet_id>
• tweetbot://<screenname>/user_profile/<profile_screenname>
• tweetbot://<screenname>/post
• tweetbot://<screenname>/post?text=<text>

The <screename> argument is optional. You may include it to go to a specific account or leave it blank and either the current or default user account will be chosen instead. As usual all query <text> should be URL encoded and other then that everything should be pretty obvious.

Valid as of version 1.3

• tweetbot://<screenname>/post?text=<text>&callback_url=<url>&in_reply_to_status_id=<tweet_id>
• tweetbot://<screenname>/search?query=<text>&callback_url=<url>
• tweetbot://<screenname>/status/<tweet_id>?callback_url=<url>
• tweetbot://<screenname>/user_profile/<screenname|user_id>?callback_url=<url>
• tweetbot://<screenname>/follow/<screenname|user_id>
• tweetbot://<screenname>/unfollow/<screenname|user_id>
• tweetbot://<screenname>/favorite/<tweet_id>
• tweetbot://<screenname>/unfavorite/<tweet_id>
• tweetbot://<screenname>/retweet/<tweet_id>

The argument callback_url is an URL encoded URL that will be opened in Safari once the Post view closes.

Valid as of version 1.4

• tweetbot://<screenname>/list/<list_id>?callback_url=<url>

Any questions stick them below and I’ll update the docs as needed.

Version 1.0.2

This is going to be a bug fix release. We’ve been working on this for a couple weeks now and it should be ready to ship off to Apple sometime this week. There’s over 2 dozen tweaks and fixes in this release, some of the major ones are listed below.

• Greatly improved performance when switching accounts.
• Profile view cleaned up to make it more obvious how to see a user’s timeline as well as including tweet count.
• Fixed performance slow down when app is running for a long time.
• Made it much more obvious that we have support for Read it Later and Instapaper.
• Added “Tiny” font size.
• Readability support.
• Posterous support.

Version 1.1

The main focus in this release is going to be Landscape mode. One of the thing that makes our apps special is that our entire UI is custom. This means our apps look like nothing else, it also means that we can’t just add a couple lines of code and get landscape support. We have to redesign a number of elements in our UI so that they work properly in landscape mode. This takes time and it’s the reason it didn’t make it into the 1.0 release. Once this is done we’re going to support landscape mode on the Post, Media and Web screens.

Native Push Notifications

This is a tricky issue. There’s the technical complexity of having to deal with hundreds of thousands of clients and two totally different services (Twitter’s and Apple’s) but that’s just a matter of time and elbow grease. The thing we worry about with this feature is the costs. We’re not a huge company like Twitter that has a server infrastructure already in place. We’re also not a backed by VCs and can’t afford to lose money and make up for it in “volume”. Servers cost money and bandwidth costs money. There are 3rd party services that help dealing with push notifications but they all charge either by messages or by the user. In other words push, specially in high volumes, isn’t free. I would hope even the people complaining about paying the $2 sales price wouldn’t want to see us lose money on each sale of Tweetbot.

All that being said we do plan to figure out what to do with native push notifications. Hopefully we can get the price per user down enough that it can just be a free feature for everyone. If not we may have to resort to a nominal yearly subscription fee for the service. We’re not looking to make money on push notifications but we also don’t want to lose our shirts on it either. In the meantime, Boxcar is a pretty decent alternative.

A Little Bit of Patience

I’m going to be blunt here–we’re slow. There’s only two of us and everything we do is very purposeful and requires a lot of testing to make sure things work right the first time. Add in all the custom UI, pixel-pushing, localization, beta testing and week long Apple review times and even small changes can seem like they take forever. Please be patient. We do hear your requests and will get to many of them.

Thanks for All the Support

So far Tweetbot has been our most successful bot launch by quite a large margin. It’s really gratifying to see all the hard work pay off with thousands of satisfied users. We’ve been inundated with notes of congratulations and features request. We can’t reply to all of them but we do read them all. Thank you.

Version 1.2 lets you connect multiple devices to your Mac at the same time. If you copy something on the Mac it’ll show up on all your connected devices. If you Paste something from your iPhone/iPad, you’ll get the choice of either sending it to the Mac or to your other connected devices. It’s all pretty cool and should make life easier for all of us with multiple devices.

Pastebot has no eyes for you.

You may have noticed Pastebot v1.2 has an updated app icon. About 2 weeks ago we received a letter from a company claiming that our old Pastebot app icon infringed on their trademarked face logo. After consulting with different lawyers, we were given two simple choices. Try to settle with the company or spend upwards of $250k in legal fees to fight it. We feel that the logos, market and customer base are different enough that we aren’t infringing on their trademark, but we don’t want to waste our time and energy in a protracted legal battle. We want to focus on creating software. After much discussion we decided that the best solution for us was to just settle with the company. We originally suggested changing the color of our icon but that wasn’t sufficient enough. Removing the eyes was the only solution that didn’t make Pastebot unrecognizable and appeased the other party.

We’ve been asked not to publicly identify the company, so don’t ask us who it was. I will say that their trademark was issued before Pastebot was even started, so this isn’t a case of a company using trademark to extort another company. Trademark is also an interesting brand of law in which you have to proactively defend against anyone you think is infringing on your rights. So while we don’t agree that we are infringing on their rights, we understand where they are coming from.

We aren’t happy that we had to change the icon, but really didn’t have a good choice. I’m sure that most people won’t be crazy about the change, but by putting this behind us we can continue to focus on our next app.

The Data

When Convertbot launches, it grabs the latest currency conversion data from our server. Using the headers that Apple includes as part of every HTTP request and a couple extra ones that we throw in for reporting purposes we are able to see unique requests by OS and device version through each day of June. The average number of requests per day is ~3250. The number of iPhone devices is about 6 times greater then the number of iPod Touches. I also filtered out anyone not running Converbot 1.3 and then normalized each day’s numbers so that each day adds up to 100%. The reason I filtered out anyone running an older version is because those folks aren’t likely to be impacted by changing Convertbot to 3.0 only.

The Graphs

The data seems pretty clear. Prior to June 8th we have a fairly low adoption rate of ~3%. Starting on June 9 this jumps up to 6-8%, which can be directly tracked to the developer release at WWDC. Starting on June 17th we get a huge jump as all the non devs start upgrading. We’re currently running at an overall 75% upgrade rate which is pretty insane considering the number of devices and the fact that its only been 5 days.

Overall Upgrade Rates

This graph adds up both the iPhone and iPod devices and just measures overall upgrade rate for both devices.

iPhone Upgrade Rate

Given how many more iPhone devices there are vs iPod Touches it isn’t very surprising that this graph looks fairly similar to the Overall graph. The iPhone upgrade rate is a bit higher then the overall rate, currently sitting at 79%.

iPod Touch Upgrade Rate

This is somewhat more interesting and shows the impact of that annoying $10 fee that Apple charges for upgrades. While the iPhone upgrade is almost 80% the iPod Touch has just passed 50%.

Conclusion

It’s somewhat early to draw an overall market conclusion from our single sample. It’s pretty clear that at least our customers are upgrading to 3.0 at an incredibly fast pace. We’ll be keeping an eye over the next couple weeks and will update this post as needed with newer numbers. As I said before we don’t currently have any plans to make Convertbot or Weightbot 3.0 only, though they both have been submitted to Apple with some minor 3.0 bug fixes (which are still pending approval). However, our third app will be 3.0 only, as will anything else we do after that. So if you haven’t upgraded yet, what are you waiting for?

Quick Update

To answer some of the questions that have been asked in the comments. The Convertbot 1.3 update rate is ~87%, if you add in folks running 1.2 that goes up to ~94%. There are a few folks still running the original 1.0 version which I find quite interesting. If you add in the folks running all the older versions we are looking at 70-71% as far as the conversion rates to 3.0 goes. And for those folks running the older version the OS 3.0 conversion rate is only ~37%.

Convertbot 1.2

The second major update of Convertbot adds localization. We managed to add in support for French, German, Japanese and Spanish in this version. Many thanks to Guy Parrot, Maximilian Schöning, Yuzuru Shiraiwa and Martín Marconcini for spending a lot of time in getting all the hundreds of strings translated over. We’ve also managed to sneak in a few extra currencies, speed up the launch time and fix a couple minor UI bugs. And just for our English speaking cousins outside of the USA, Meter and Liter are now spelled as Metre and Litre (though the “correct” spelling is kept for folks in the US).

Weightbot 1.3

For Weightbot 1.3 we finally added in the long planned Data/Goal view. This view gives a simple way to look at your progress in reaching your weight loss or gain goals. I think it adds an entire new dimension to Weightbot and makes the app much more useful.

We also did a bit of visual clean up in the app, this is especially noticeable on the main screen. Here are the before and after shots (the left side is the updated version):

The change is very subtle, but it feels more in sync with Convertbot. The first thing we noticed about Weightbot when we finished Convertbot was that it looked so dated in comparison.

Coming up

Up next for Convertbot is more units, we’ve gotten a ton of suggestions and we’ll be going through them and implementing a number of them. For Weightbot we plan a full re-tooling of the Graph view, we’re not ready to share details, but we plan to make them a lot more useful. We also plan to get started on App #3 sometime in the next couple weeks.

The Past (aka The Start)

Around the start of August of 2008 Mark and I were wrapping up a project at Oakley. We were chatting about something insignificant when I asked Mark, “Want to design an application for the iPhone? I’m thinking of doing a Weight Tracker”. I was thinking a simple application with a good feature set, a nice clean look to it. Well, Mark’s beautiful design had other ideas. After about 2.5 months of nights and weekends and about 70 custom classes we finally released Weightbot 1.0. The rest is history.

The Present (aka The Exciting Part)

We’ve been juggling day jobs with Tapbots for almost 9 months now. As of now that’s no longer the case. This month, Mark and I both gave our respective notices and we’re now going to be able to give Tapbots 100% of our energy. I think it’s nothing short of amazing that we are able to support ourselves with $0 investment (other than time) and all of it $1-$3 at a time. Weightbot sold 100k copies in its first 100 days, Convertbot is selling at about twice that rate. To say we’re excited about the future is an understatement. We’d like to thank all of you guys for getting us to this point.

The Future (aka The Big Plan)

So starting May 1st, we are both 100% focused on making the best iPhone software we can. We are putting some finishing touches on the 1.3 releases of Convertbot and Weightbot and hope to have them both over to Apple by the end of this week (just in time for the ADAs). Sometime in May we’re going to start on our 3rd application, we haven’t decided exactly what it’ll be, but the front runner concept should be really cool.

Longer term we aren’t looking to get any VC funding, grow to 100s of employees or get bought out by some big corporation. We may get help with support, testing and/or marketing, but development and design is going to just be us two for the foreseeable future. We think that’s the best way to keep the quality of our applications at the level that everyone expects. Our goal is to produce about 4 applications a year. We aren’t going to shovel out crap-ware to cash-in on our names. We aren’t going to write the next Office or Filemaker. We are going to write simple but incredibly polished applications that are created specifically for the iPhone/Touch devices. Two guys, lot’s of passion and a lot of hard work, that’s the Tapbots way.

There is no proper definition for a kilobyte. Most people think it’s 1024 bytes, however a number of organizations (IEC, IEEE, ISO, Drive Manufacturers, etc..) claim 1000. So we are left with a tough choice. Pick the value people expect or pick the value that the standards suggest. We’ve had similar questions to this in the past (like how many days in a year?) and I’ve always gone the way of the standard bodies. In this particular case, I thought long and hard about which way to go. I personally prefer a 1024 byte kilobyte, however if we had done that, what would we have called a 1000 byte block? Well, turns out that there is no alternative name for a 1000 bytes other then a kilobyte. On the other hand, a kibibyte is recognized as a 1024 byte block without any sort of ambiguity. So given all of that, I think the 1000 byte kilobyte was the least worst choice we could make.

Now I think one could argue that maybe the kilobyte should’ve been disabled and the kibibyte should be enabled by default. Of course the problem there is we’d end up getting a million emails with, “Where’s kilobyte?” or “What’s a kibibyte?” Maybe we should’ve just split the difference and used a 1012 byte kilobyte, so everyone would complain.

Convertbot Mini is Convertbot’s FREE little brother. Same UI that everyone loves, just fewer units and categories. Did I mention FREE? Anyways, go download a copy now! Even if you already own Convertbot, you can show your support by downloading his little brother and writing a review!