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Journalists Cover Microsoft, Using Macs

It’s not an easy time for Microsoft — with Steve Ballmer having to field questions about being “buffoons” and an “evil empire”  at the shareholder’s meeting (.doc) — so when they get together “the world’s most influential technology pundits and online writers” (nb: we weren’t invited) for Mobius to discuss super-secret mobile tech you’d think [...]

Guide To Black Friday Apple Bargains: Cheap MacBooks, iPods and Accessories Galore

Here’s a guide for finding the best bargains on Apple-related gear during the infamous Black Friday sales on November 27. We’ve compiled a comprehensive list of gear from leaked photos of sales flyers and descriptions of sales.
The bargains include a 2.26 GHz MacBook + $150 gift card at Best Buy for $999.99 ; a 32GB [...]

Review: Voices Is Today’s Best Thing Ever, Grab It Now While It’s Cheap

New on the App Store is Voices from the clever folk at Tap Tap Tap. You can guess what it does.

Open it up, pick a silly voice. Helium is pretty silly. A microphone appears and the app even clears your throat for you (try it, you’ll see what I mean). Now speak your brains, and [...]

Review: Sony Walkman S540 Series Video MP3 Player

Press releases, you will hardly be surprised to hear, are rarely very interesting. But one arrived in my inbox a couple of weeks ago that made me double-take.
“Sony’s S Series Walkman,” it chattered, “is a serious challenger to the iPod Nano.” Gosh, really? Perhaps the Cult had better have a look at one, then, despite [...]

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.

Email the author | Read more posts by Lonnie Lazar.

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 [...]

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