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.

What Makes Tweetbot So Special?

Yes, Tweetbot has all the polish and shine you’ve come to expect from a Tapbots app, but that’s not enough to convince everyone to try it. We needed to bring something new to the table.

The most important feature in Tweetbot is its powerful gesture system. This system makes interacting with tweets much more efficient. Want to reference the source of a conversation? Just swipe the tweet to the right. Did someone ask a question on twitter and you are interested in seeing replies? Just swipe to the left. Want tweet details? Double-tap a tweet. You can also double-tap links and a user’s avatar to go straight to the link or user’s profile respectively. Want to quickly block a spammer? Hold down on the user’s avatar for quick options. The same goes for accessing link options.

The second big feature is being able to use your lists as your timeline. Many other clients provide access to lists, but they don’t seem to make them any more important than Twitter does themselves. We wanted to make lists as useful as your main timeline. Sometimes you are following too many people and want to view tweets from smaller groups of people. Tweetbot makes them very accessible.

Another problem we wanted to solve was having more than 5 items in the tab bar. Many apps waste a tab with the “more” button. We decided to keep all 5 tabs as primary navigation and allow the user to quickly select a hidden tab item from either of the last two tabs. Just hold down on one of the tabs and select a new one.

Watch the video demo and learn more about Tweetbot.

Tweetbot is Missing Feature X!

Before you instantly dismiss Tweetbot from having every single feature on the planet, keep in mind that this is version 1.0. We have a big list of features that just didn’t make the first release. Some take longer than others or are just not as important. The bottom line is, we had to ship at some point. We felt Tweetbot in its current state made a good 1.0 and we decided to ship now instead of 2-3 months later. So please be patient with us as we continue to make Tweetbot a better client. Landscape support for composing, viewing images, websites, and videos is coming. We are also looking into our options for native push notifications. We’ve got a big list.

Launch…Crash??

A small percentage of users might have been disappointed to have Tweetbot crash on launch. If you are still running an iPhone 3G or 2nd Gen iPod touch, we are very sorry for this issue. There’s a bug in Apple’s compiler and we screwed up by not testing it enough and catching it earlier. But the good news is, we already submitted a fix for this and have asked Apple to kindly expedite the approval process. We hope it comes out soon. To reiterate, this only affects the older devices.

What Next?

We’ve had many people ask if we will do an iPad or Mac OS version of the app. The answer right now is, “We don’t know.” We will wait and see how things pan out regarding Twitter and the life of [new] 3rd party apps in general.

Thanks!

We truly thank all the alpha/beta testers and our localizers for their hard work, support, and feedback. We also thank our customers for supporting us over the past 3 years. We would not be able to live our dream creating great software without you.

So what are you waiting for? Grab Tweetbot now before the sale ends!

Not convinced?

Here are a few mentions about Tweetbot from various sources:

“Go buy it, trust me. I’ve been using beta versions for the past few weeks and it quickly became my favorite Twitter client.” — John Gruber, Daring Fireball

“It’s simply very well designed and great for power users — particularly those who use Twitter Lists.” — MG Siegler, TechCrunch

“Tweetbot was a risk for Tapbots, but they managed to build the best Twitter client for iPhone I’ve ever had.” — Federico Viticci, MacStories

“Tweetbot has more personality than any other Twitter client out there.” — Shawn Blanc

“If you spend a good deal of your life on Twitter, then you couldn’t find a more pleasant client to spend it with than Tweetbot.” — Matthew Panzarino, The Next Web

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.

App #0003 has finally launched! It’s been 6 long months since we started on this project. I don’t want to turn this into a long post about how we got here, because all that really matters is we made it and hope you’ll enjoy it. Pastebot is definitely different than our previous apps. Some would say it’s riskier. But there’s no other way to grow and move forward without taking risks. After all, who would have thought anyone could make a living creating software for mobile devices? Pastebot was a lot more work than our previous apps, but it also does so much more than them. We are happy with the results and hope you are too.

Visit the Pastebot Website for videos, screenshots, and more info

Download on iTunes

A Quick Thank You

We want to thank our customers for keeping us driven to make more apps. The reviews, emails, and twitter posts have really kept us excited about what we do. We also want to thank our beta testers for all the support and feedback they have given us. They truly helped make Pastebot a better product than it was. And last but definitely not least, we want to thank our localizers (Guy Parrot, Yuzuru Shiraiwa and Tobias Brummer) who have taken their free time to help translate our app into other languages.

Weightbot 1.4

So what’s new? Not much on the outside. OS 3.0 has enabled us to re-engineer the date and weight select scroll views so that they behave as they should. You can now scroll faster and enter weight data back 10 years. We’ve also added a few tap gestures to make things a bit easier. Double-tapping each end of the date view will quickly scroll you forward or back 30 days. Single-tapping the weight-select view will move you one-tenth of a number while double-tapping will move you to the nearest whole number. And that’s pretty much it for this Weightbot update. Remember, this update requires OS 3.0.

We also wanted to quickly mention that the updated graph views are still in the works.

Convertbot 1.4

Convertbot 1.4 is in its final stages of development. Here’s what’s new:

Calculator

We’ve gotten a few requests for the ability to do calculations in Convertbot so we added a simple calculator. We made this optional so if you don’t need this feature, you can still have the simple number pad. It’s disabled by default. As you can see in the screenshot, we had to make slight UI changes to the number pad for consistency.

(Click the image to view the full interface.)

Copy and Paste

You can now copy and paste numbers in Convertbot. To access this menu, just hold down the LCD for a second.

(Click the image to view the full interface.)

Other Options

Aside from the ability to enable/disable the new calculator, we’ve added 2 more options that may be useful to you. The first option is the ability to disable the automatic currency updater. This has been requested by many international travelers in order to conserve data consumption. We’ve also added the ability to limit decimal places for your conversion results.

A few new units will be added, but the final list hasn’t been determined yet. This next release of Convertbot will also be OS 3.0+ only. It should be submitted to Apple in about week or so.

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.

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!

Enable/Disable Categories and Units

The biggest change for 1.1 is the ability to enable or disable individual categories and units. Just go into settings and you can customize Convertbot to only show the units you are interested in.

More Categories and Units

We built Converbot with an eye towards supporting a large number of categories and units. While we may not get every single thing in that someone requests, we do plan to aggressively add new units. Because of the new ability to enable and disable we now support over 100 different currencies and a number of new categories. Click here for an up to date list of new categories and units added to 1.1.

OK

OK, OK, OK we’ve heard a lot of requests to get rid of the need to click the OK button. Well the OK button is still there and can be used exactly the same as before, but you can now touch the From/To/LCD buttons without having to touch OK first. Convertbot will behave exactly the same as if you had touched OK and then whatever button you touched.

Increased button hit area

File this under a non obvious change, the hit area for the keypad buttons has been expanded. This should make it a bit easier to hit numbers on the keypad. The buttons still look the same, you are just now able to touch slightly outside of them and still have it registered. In the below image you can see the hit area as the red areas around the button.

Increased conversion accuracy

Not sure if anyone will notice this one but I tweaked the low level code that does conversion to use the NSDecimalNumber class instead of the good old double. This means that conversions should be more accurate then ever, though this is somewhat hard to notice in day to day usage.

Coming up next

Over the next few weeks we are going to spend some time on Weightbot (cleaning up the graphs and adding the long awaited data forecast view). While we are doing that please continue to send in your requests for new categories and units, we’re at a point now where we can add them in fairly easily so expect to see many new Converbot releases. Depending on how Weightbot work comes along we’ll probably also start doing some localization of Convertbot. I think we’ll start with German, French and Japanese and take it from there. Finally expect a really cool new announcement from us over the next couple weeks. I think it’ll make everyone happy, I know Mark and I are thrilled about it.