Hello

Hello, and welcome to my iPhone App blog. As you probably already know, if you just stumbled onto this blog, the iPhone is a big thing. Tens of millions of units sold. The iPhone App Store has over 75,000 applications on it. You probably know most, if not all of the capabilities of this amazing phone if you're reading this.
So, why am I writing this blog? The short answer, is I'm an iPhone enthusiast. The more complete answer is, not only am I an enthusiast, but I'm also a developer. An iPhone App developer. Well, not just iPhone Apps, I also do Java, and Enterprise Java solutions, along with a little PHP here and there. Right now, Java pays the bills (Usually. Yes, there's story there too, I may get into it later, I may not, it's not really important, at least not yet.)
If Java pays the bill, you may be wondering why I'm building iPhone Apps. Quite simply, because I enjoy it. I find playing with new and exciting technologies fun. I'd never done mobile device work in the past, never worked with a Mac, and wanted to try both. I thought about Android and Blackberry development, but neither of those really excited me. They didn't seem to have the cult application following the iPhone has, nor did the user base seem to be as app hungry as the iPhone users. So, I got a book on Objective-C and iPhone development, bought a MacBook, and jumped in with both feet. I intend to document how my apps are doing on the store, as well as anything I learn about getting them into the app store, and marketing those apps.
Enough introduction already! Let's get on to the fun stuff. The first app I wrote, was a simple tournament bracket manager. I called it, creatively enough, "Bracket Man". Bracket Man was only really intended to allow the guy in my bowling league who managed brackets to shuffle his paper brackets without cards (works great for that). It must have worked great for others too, because in 2 months, with NO marketing, I had around 1500 downloads. You may be wondering why that's important. Well, because, like a fool, I gave it away. I thought I'd only have 4 or 5 downloads because I didn't market it at all. After seeing over 500 downloads the first week, I figured I better figure out how to monetize this iPhone App. So, out of this, "Bracket Man Pro" (I know, real creative again) was born. Of course, just having a snappy name isn't enough to do anything, so I thought I might need some more features. Where do you look for features on an app for the app store? Reviews. My own reviews weren't much help. In fact, they were raving reviews. People loved it. At least the 8 or 9 who decided to take the time to talk about it loved it. So, I had an app that from my own reviews, looked great. So I looked for other bracket manager apps on the app store. With all those tens of thousands of apps, you'd think there would be a hundred of them. Wrong. There was one more (now I think there's just two or three besides mine). So, I looked at THAT apps reviews. The big thing people seemed to want was Double Elimination brackets. I thought, great, there's no way I can do that with how I wrote Bracket Man, so I'm going to have to rewrite the whole thing.
About six weeks later, Bracket Man became "Bracket Man Lite" and Bracket Man Pro was born.
The interface was 100% reworked, as was the way data was stored, and even how the brackets were drawn. Without getting into boring details, I changed everything but about 10 lines of code. After re-releasing the app, I was curious as to how I would be received by the paying public. The bottom line, I was received OK, but not like I hoped. The new version was released mid September, so it's been out about a month. In that time, it's sold a few copies, but not like the free version did the first time. The free version, now "lite" has had a couple hundred downloads, but the paid version I think is only at around 60. I guess that's not too bad, but I think I can do better.
So, now, I have Bracket Man Lite and Bracket Man Pro, both on the App Store