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A New Kind Of Heist: Six Apps For Free

Those crazy MacHeisters are at it again, and this time the deal is even harder to resist.
The first ever MacHeist Nano won’t cost you a penny. You can download, without charge, fully licensed copies of ShoveBox, WriteRoom, Twitterific, TinyGrab, and Hordes of Orcs. If 500,000 people take part (which I think is a pretty safe [...]

Getting More iPhone Home Screens – And Keeping Them

A couple of weeks back, I wrote Temporarily Get More iPhone Home Screens Via Cunning Bug Exploit, but had heard staying away from the iTunes Applications tab within my iPhone was probably a Very Good Idea. Reader Larry Pressnell noted that since the most recent iTunes update, his extra screens have been accessible in iTunes.
Since [...]

Cult of Mac Favorite: MobileStacks Is the Best Reason To Jailbreak. Period.

I really like Stacks on my Mac. Stacks makes it fast and easy to find files, folders and apps right from the Dock. It makes managing a Mac pretty slick with all sorts of little UI tricks. That’s why I recently gave MobileStack a go on my jailbroken iPhone.
I must say that it lives up to the [...]

Gallery: Behind the Scenes From Two Classic Apple TV Ads

Is this Steve Jobs driving a tank in a classic Apple TV spot from the late 1990s? That was the rumor at the time: Jobs was making cameos in Apple commercials.
Ken Segall, the TBWA ad man responsible for naming the iMac and Think Different, reveals the truth after the jump. He also shares some rare [...]

iPhone Development – A New Frontier for the American Dream

Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak became fabulously wealthy using minimal resources beyond their own time and talent, working out of Job’s garage. Today, Jobs and the company he and Wozniak founded are making similar rags-to-riches stories possible with the iTunes AppStore and applications created by third party developers for Apple’s iPhone.

Steve Demeter, developer of a popular $5 iPhone game, Trism, announced he made $250,000 in profit in just two months, according to a story by Gadget Lab blogger Brian Chen. If his profits continue at their current rate, Demeter will earn $3 million by July 2009.

Demeter by no means tried to reinvent the wheel. Trism is basically a version of Bejeweled that uses the iPhone’s accelerometer to good advantage, giving the game what Demeter believes are the fundamental requirements for success at iPhone app development: unique gameplay and high replay value. He also designed support for an online leaderboard that creates community and says applications with great content sell themselves, something the developer of another popular game, Tap Tap Revenge, agrees with.

Bart Decrem was one of only four people who originally worked on Tap Tap Revenge, a free application that hit a milestone of 1,000,000 downloads just two weeks after its launch. Decrem’s company recently began inserting advertisements in the game, and it also has plans to release a premium version that will cost money in addition to the free app. He says iPhone development is “reminiscent of the early days of the web in terms of the amount of green fields and opportunity,” according to Chen. “You really don’t need a huge amount of capital. You need attention to detail and product, and that’s going to keep increasing.”

About the author

Lonnie Lazar

Lonnie Lazar is a writer, musician, web designer attorney. He writes about Apple for Cult of Mac and Mac|Life, and about VoIP and telecommunications for Voxilla. Follow Lonnie on Twitter @LonnieLazar, join the Cult of Mac on Facebook, and find Lonnie's photos on Flickr.

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12 comments

    [...] rare weekend conference, made more poignant by some headlines about how popular iPhone applications are [...]

    [...] the iPhone continues to gain popularity in the lucrative smartphone market and the possibility of striking it rich as an iPhone developer becomes more solidified in the public’s imagination, it is difficult [...]

    [...] the iPhone continues to gain popularity in the lucrative smartphone market and the possibility of striking it rich as an iPhone developer becomes more solidified in the public’s imagination, it is difficult [...]

    [...] the iPhone continues to gain popularity in the lucrative smartphone market and the possibility of striking it rich as an iPhone developer becomes more solidified in the public’s imagination, it is difficult [...]

    [...] the iPhone continues to gain popularity in the lucrative smartphone market and the possibility of striking it rich as an iPhone developer becomes more solidified in the public’s imagination, it is difficult [...]

    [...] the iPhone continues to gain popularity in the lucrative smartphone market and the possibility of striking it rich as an iPhone developer becomes more solidified in the public’s imagination, it is difficult [...]

    [...] the iPhone continues to gain popularity in the lucrative smartphone market and the possibility of striking it rich as an iPhone developer becomes more solidified in the public’s imagination, it is difficult [...]

    [...] the iPhone continues to gain popularity in the lucrative smartphone market and the possibility of striking it rich as an iPhone developer becomes more solidified in the public’s imagination, it is difficult [...]

    [...] the recent spate of stories on of developers making big bucks on iPhone apps, the idea is good, though savvy programmers are sharing iPhone-related gigs [...]

    [...] the recent spate of stories on of developers making big bucks on iPhone apps, the idea is good, though savvy programmers are sharing iPhone-related gigs [...]

    [...] the recent spate of stories on of developers making big bucks on iPhone apps, the idea is good, though savvy programmers are sharing iPhone-related gigs [...]

    [...] have experienced. Flight Control’s 1.5 mil sales record. Trism’s incredible $250,000 short-term bonanza. But for every one of these lottery wins in the store, there are hundreds, if not thousands of [...]