Yesterday news hit that the iPhone will be available on Orange in the UK, and today we hear the exciting news that the iPhone will be available from Vodafone in Ireland!

This is really great news for both customers and developers. From the customers point of view, there will soon be some real competition to O2 in Ireland. Prices are likely to drop and features currently unsupported by O2 (Internet tethering and visual voicemail) may come to O2 customers if Vodafone decides to add these to increase the value of their iPhone package.

From the developer’s point of view it means a whole lot more customers! Developers might soon see Vodafone customers who wanted an iPhone but didn’t want to move to a different company, or those who found O2’s tariffs too expensive.

I’m certainly looking forward to seeing what happens to the Irish iPhone app market in 2010!

This week ENN very kindly published an article by yours truly.

Thoughout my experience with App School I have consistently found that the iPhone SDK’s difficulty is underestimated by developers. This has ranged from comments such as hearing that the iPhone SDK is “one of the easiest” to people seriously studying it, reading two to four books and still finding themselves struggling.

There are definitely a lot of interesting concepts that don’t appear very often outside of Objective-C or its close relations such as Smalltalk, and these are quite difficult to assimilate.

In the article, I address one or two of these concepts and give a few reasons for sticking with the iPhone in spite of these hurdles.

Tim Roberts attended App School last week.

It’s Monday morning after my week at App School.

There is a distinct sense of optimism around my office as we now possess the tools to start rolling out iPhone apps from the ground up and begin to tap into a whole new revenue stream…

With our well-honed design skills, interpretive copywriting strength and, now, a new found iPhone app programming ability we are on track to break a whole new market in our field.

This has all been made possible by a bit of hard work, a willingness to learn and a fantastic training program from Daniel Heffernan and the App School team.

All we can say is, “Thank you App School!”

Tim Roberts
Imagemakers
www.imagemakers.uk.com

Tim Roberts is attending App School this week. The following is his account of the course after 3 days.

Wow!! My mind is blown!!

I came to App School from a business background, sent to retrain to build apps for our customers. My background is design and media (Photoshop, Final Cut Pro, inDesign, etc) so getting to grips with Objective-C and discovering how to write the code that iPhone understands was always going to be a real challenge to me.

Providentially, App School’s resident guru, Daniel Hefferman is blessed with an ability to explain even the most intense coding process in just the way I needed. Indeed, 3 days in to the course and I’ve built 4 simple apps from scratch and had them running on iPhone!

So, yes, my mind is blown…. but in a very productive way. :O)
Roll on the next few days!!

Tim Roberts
Imagemakers
www.imagemakers.uk.com

I am delighted to announce that we have a winner for the App School Scholarship competition for a free place on App School!

Mark Mulvany’s idea won in the end, but since the submission was a private email-based submission (as most of the submissions were) I cannot discuss his ideas right now. What I can say is that he has some very exciting ideas and I’m looking forward to writing about them once they go live on the App Store!

There were many great submissions and there were so many others that I would really like to see created and live on the Store, so for next week’s course we have extended our half-price offer to all those who submitted their ideas for the competition.

A big thanks to all those who participated in the competition and to those who retweeted it! Looking forward to seeing you on the course, Mark!

There have been many interesting applications to the App School Scholarship that we announced a couple of days ago. Among the Scholarship competition entries there have been a number from students and people who are unemployed. Many were very keen to win the competition because they wouldn’t otherwise have been able to fund App School.

This has been something that had been brought to our attention, but the competition really brought home the point.

We all put our heads together and came up with a new offer, which should hopefully lower the barrier to entry for these people. The offer we came up with is the following:

App School is now half price for students and the unemployed

Just prove you are currently registered as a student or unemployed, then App School will be available to you with a 50% discount: that’s €750 (or £675 for our London course).

App School will be presented by Daniel for Engineers Ireland in the last week of September i.e., the 28th September – 2nd October.

If you go into Engineers Ireland website today, you will see under latest news.

‘Engineers Ireland, the professional members’ body for all qualified engineers in Ireland, launches a course this September that aims to exploit entrepreneurial flair in the software engineering sector.

The course, entitled Developing Business and Personal Applications using the iPhone, is the first software engineering course to be run by Engineers Ireland and as such could be described as expansion into a new area for the organisation.’

This is an interesting collaboration for App School.

There are a lot of people with good ideas for iPhone apps, but who aren’t yet familiar enough with iPhone programming to develop them. So we’ve decided to run a competition to give away a free place at the next App School (starts on Monday) to someone with a really good idea. (Standard cost: €1500.)

App School is an intensive, hands-on, week-long course. During it, we’ll teach you the essentials of iPhone programming, and get you started on your app. If you decide to charge for it, you’ll get to keep all the revenues. Basically, there are no strings attached.

To enter, you just have to describe an iPhone app you’d like to develop. You can do so by leaving a comment on the blog here or send a tweet with the hashtag #iphoneappschool. If you’d rather keep your idea private, you can enter via DM on Twitter or email kim@appschool.ie. And if you do decide to keep the idea private, we won’t reveal it until you launch your app.

Ideas should be anywhere up to 300 words in length. You don’t need to describe everything; just enough to convince us that it’d be cool to build.

To enter, you have to be able to attend App School in Dublin next week. Other than that, there are no restrictions.

We’ll pick the winner at midnight (Irish time) on Friday, and (if it’s public) announce the idea on the blog. We might also highlight some of the other interesting (public) ideas we receive.

If you want to see what some previous attendees thought of App School, have a read of the blog posts from Cathal Garvey and John Long.

Questions? Let us know in the comments.

Our Encyclopedia app is now available in 27 languages, and as a result, we needed a good way of tracking both overall sales and the break-down by individual app. Many people have pointed out that iTunes Connect’s analytics capabilities are sorely lacking, so we decided to go ahead and roll our own. As usual, Mathematica came fairly quickly to the rescue:

The code is available as a gist here.

It generates charts that look like this:

(Normally, total sales (in USD) are displayed on the Y axis.)

The script has EYSalesLastMonthPlot and EYSalesByWeekPlot built-in. If anyone cares to add more functionality, we’d be happy to turn this into a proper GitHub project.

We just released Ciclipéid, the App Store’s first Irish app. It’s basically the Irish version of Encyclopedia, and like its English counterpart, stores a complete copy of Wikipedia on an iPhone/iPod Touch.

Will be interesting to see what uptake of Irish apps is like. We’ll let you know!

Update (Sep 16): Over 16 days, 3 copies have been sold. App School recommends sticking to English apps…