Ok, there’ll be plenty of these kind of post floating around, but I wanted to get my thoughts written down anyway.
Before the iPhone event today, my thoughts on iPhone OS 3.0 were that it would be a worthwhile upgrade and I was excited to see what new features Apple had in store (you can ask anyone at my work and they’ll say how excited I was!). But it turned out that Apple went far above and beyond what I had expected…
Subnet Calc Pro has now been out for just over a month and I can safely say that it’s had a lot more uptake than I thought it would! It’s not been massive in sales, but the best thing is that it has been steady. It’s not going to mean I can quit my day job, but it has meant I feel rewarded for my hard work of learning a whole new programming language, fighting through Apple’s tax forms and releasing an application.
I hadn’t had any reviews of Subnet Calc Pro, but I was using AppViz today and I noticed a review! I thought, oh it’ll just be a short one, but no, it was a full blown review! Awesome! And better still, it’s a glowing 5-star review which I thank you (whoever you are) very much for 
.
The funniest bit of the review was where he says:
The only con I can see is “Organizer” is misspelled as “Organiser,” but no big deal. The concept is still there.
And if the only con is that I’m English and therefore, speak English, then woo!
Here is the review in full:
I must admit, I was initially skeptical when I saw this advertised. I immediately thought “oh, another subnet calculator, how novel.” Upon downloading and trying it out, I was amazed at it’s capabilities.
Pros:
1) Organizer – solid understanding of the radix (or binary if you prefer) tree when creating the subnet entry. Also the ability for it to calculate and display the host portion of the ip address so you can add a hostname and a description to each is a very nice touch. The use of the iPhone’s memory is also very efficient.2) Finder – finally, an application that can aggregate! This excited me the most and it does work and give you an accurate prefix. Now, granted, any network admin is able to create a prefix summary in 2 seconds, but this is actually nice and convenient. In addition, you also get other useful info such as network id, broadcast, usable range, etc.
3) Calculator – handy feature to quickly help you break down any ip address with your cidr selection into the same useful information such as network id, subnet mask, usable range, maximum number of hosts, etc. Even better is you can see the addresses broken down into both binary and hexidecimal addresses which are both handy in their own rights.
4) Email data export – handy when you want to send a summary of what you had added in the organizer section.
The only con I can see is “Organizer” is misspelled as “Organiser,” but no big deal. The concept is still there.
Future suggestions (if the developer is taking any):
-calculate binary and/or hexidecimal to decimal format.
-Add screenshot to show off the Finder selection when advertising within iTunes.
-shorten the application’s name on the iPhone home screen. Currently, it shows as “Subne…cPro.”Overall, a very nice job!
So, I immediately jumped on the review and I’ve changed the screenshots around to show the finder, which I had previously omitted from the screenshots (you only get chance to put a total of 5 up and I didn’t have room, but now the finder has taken priority over another one). I know I should make the application name shorter, but I didn’t know how I could shorten it really – any ideas? SCPro maybe?
I have been playing with SQLite recently and toying with the idea of creating some kind of framework upon which I could build persistent data objects, much like the Zend way of doing things in Zend Framework for PHP. That was, until I came across SQLite Persistent Objects…
A few weeks ago, Softpedia reviewed Subnet Calc and classed it in their freeware picks section. So when I released Subnet Calc Pro I thought I’d let them know. They have kindly responded by reviewing Subnet Calc Pro.
Hopefully this will be the start of something more with respect to iPhone apps. I’ve got plans for others, which I will be starting work on one of them soon. It’s quite an interesting app which uses the GPS function of an iPhone which should be fun to try and play with!
Since releasing Subnet Calc Pro three days ago, I have been checking my sales stats each day. I released it at £2.39 / $3.99 because I figured it’s quite a niche application and there’s plenty of 59p / 99c ones out there which are just a copy of Subnet Calc – i.e. not including all the extra features of Subnet Calc Pro. I’m not really sure where to go with the application because I have sold 6 copies in 2 full days of sales and I know it’s very early, but this is kind of what I expected to be honest. I’ve done absolutely no marketing so I am just going on people finding it themselves on the App Store.
So I’m now considering what I should do regarding marketing… should I do some advertising? Subnet Calc was reviewed by Softpedia as an app which “you’ll have remorse not paying for”, so perhaps I should contact them. Or maybe even I should use promotional codes to try getting some decent reviews.
Any comments, ideas, advice anyone?
I’ve checked my reports on the iTunes Connect page and I noticed that one person in the US has bought Subnet Calc Pro already! Many thanks for the purchase if you are reading this.
I really hope that people like it…
I feel that I worked extremely hard on it and it was at a stage where it was ready to be released. However, I do plan to release updates in the future as and when I implement new functionality. I do have some plans, but any feature requests are much appreciated – simply pop over to the application page and submit a comment saying what you’d like to see.
Subnet Calc Pro was released onto the App Store last night and I have set the initial price at £2.39 / $3.99. This is the first version and I expect to see how it goes and then I will look at releasing new features over coming versions. Version 1.0 includes very useful features over Subnet Calc such as being able to define hosts inside a subnet which can help to keep track of IP allocations.
I will be releasing a little guide onto this website soon which will show some screenshots to explain some of the features of Subnet Calc Pro
Over the past couple of days I’ve been updating the look of this site because I realised that the old design wasn’t all that great. The new site should be generally easier to navigate around slowly I will move over my iPhone SDK tutorials into this site so that all things iPhone are in one place.
Please let me know any feedback which you might have.
I’ve had another hard working few days and have got quite a way with the design of SubnetCalcPro. I’m beginning to realise the wonders of the iPhone SDK, but also I am regretting not planning the project better. I think that it’s still a reasonably small project and so I can safely make a few mistakes with planning because they won’t affect things too much. However, I have learnt so much for future projects with respect to working out in advance exactly what controllers will be implemented and the importance of a proper specification for each one.
Anyway, in spite of all that, it’s coming along well and here are a few more screenshots:
I have been hard at work the past couple of nights on my new version of Subnet Calc. I’ve managed to get the basics of it working and I have learnt a lot along the way. But because I feel I’ve achieved quite a lot I thought I’d share what I’ve done so far by showing off some screenshots of Subnet Calc Pro running on my iPod Touch. So here they are:
