Amazing Escape Released

Amazing Escape Main MenuWe are really excited to announce our new game Amazing Escape has been released on the App Store and is available now! Amazing Escape is a fun arcade/puzzle game that is similar to Pac-Man with some additional fun and challenging puzzle type elements.

Your goal in Amazing Escape is to help a mouse named Mousy and his friends collect all of the cheese before being caught by the cats! There is currently one location, a science lab, with two additional locations that will come in the future if there continues to be interest in Amazing Escape. There are really cool power-ups that you can use to help in your battle against the cats. You can use the cheese that you collect to unlock additional power-ups or two different characters. Amazing Escape is free to play and is a universal app that with retina graphics. What are you waiting for? Click on the icon below to download Amazing Escape! Please let us know what you think!

Amazing Escape Icon
App Store Link: Amazing Escape, FREE

Photo Filter Factory Released

We are pleased to announce that our newest application was released today: Photo Filter Factory! This is a great app that allows you to easily enhance your photos by applying filters from our filter library and then easily share your frames with friends and family. There is a large list of unique filters to choose from currently with more being release in the next update. You can style your frame by using an easy to use color picker or choosing from our pattern library. Once you are pleased with your photo then you can save it to your Photos or share it via Email, SMS, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Dropbox, and more. Please try out Photo Filter Factory and let us know what you think!

I am working on a really great update that will give you incredible control over creating your own custom filter effects. You will still be able to use or start with any of the filters from our filter library, but you can then customize the filters to create your own unique filters.


App Store Link: Photo Filter Factory Pro, $0.99
App Store Link: Photo Filter Factory, FREE

Announcing Photo Filter Factory

We are excited to announce our latest app: Photo Filter Factory. This is an easy to use photo filter app that allows you to quickly apply filters to your photos, add borders, labels, and easily save or share your photos with friends and family. The app includes a large selection of custom filters and we will continue to add to this selection with future updates. This is a universal app that will run on any of your iOS devices and includes support for the new iPhone 5 display.

The first version was submitted to Apple late yesterday so if all goes well it should be released later next week. Please follow us on Twitter to get notified as soon as this app is released!

 

Emoji Factory Update (Previously Emoji Builder)

Yesterday we released a new update to our Emoji Builder app! Emoji Builder has been renamed to Emoji Factory to better fit into our growing suite of “Factory” apps. Along with the rename comes a completely new icon and below I will share my findings of using this icon on a Facebook ad campaign alongside the previous icon. We also added iOS 6 and iPhone 5 display support to this new version of the app. The app now has a completely new look and feel that we think everyone will like. Please give it a try and let your friends know. You can grab it here!

Now that the shameless marketing plug is finished I will share the results of the second comparison ad campaign that I ran on Facebook using the previous published icon and the new one you see in this post above. I ran the campaign all day on a Thursday and Friday as I had with the original test and targeted the same audience. The results were pretty obvious! Within several hours the new icon’s ad had generated 7x the clicks as the old icon did. Now that the icon is released with the updated application it will be interesting to see how this affects downloads within the App Store. I would advise anyone wanting to use Facebook as a test market for icons to use several icons that have differences that are not so subtle, as subtle differences made little difference in my testing.

Photo Collage Factory 1.1 Update Released

The new 1.1 version of Photo Collage Factory was released today! As we mentioned in a previous announcement here are the new features. This is a huge update with a lot of very useful improvements so go check it out and let us know what you think!

  • Now a Universal app for the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch
  • iPhone 5 display support
  • Panorama photo frames
  • iOS 6.0 support for Twitter and Facebook
  • Easily reorder your photos within a frame
  • Add your own labels
  • Updated default message in the share posting message


App Store Link: Photo Collage Factory Pro, $0.99
App Store Link: Photo Collage Factory, FREE

CocosBuilder & iPhone 5 Resolution

CocosBuilder and cocos2d-iphone both now have support for the new iPhone 5 resolution, but when using CocosBuilder and fixed sized background images you still need to do a little custom coding as cocos2d does not have any image prefix handlers for the iPhone 5 resolution.

The first thing to do is add iPhone 5 resolution support to your CocosBuilder project. You do this by selecting the View->Edit Resolutions… menu option within CocosBuilder. Next select the iPhone 5 Landscape | Portrait option from the “Add Predefined Resolution” selector. We will assume we are working with an application that only supports Landscape mode from here on. Now you are set and you should be able to view your ccb file in the iPhone 5 resolution. Everything should look great if you used percentages to setup your positions and content sizes. Now you can publish your CocosBuilder project as normal.

If you run your cocos2d project at this time and have a CCSprite as your background image that should fill the entire screen, you will see that your background image is centered and has letter boxing on the left and right. This is because cocos2d does not automatically load an iPhone 5 version of your background-hd.png. At this time I do not know of any plans for cocos2d to be updated to support a new image file prefix for the iPhone 5, but it would be nice for situations like this. The current fix is simple enough so this is really a very minor issue and not worth complaining about.

To fix the issue you need to create a 1136×640 version of your background image and name it whatever you want, I used background-568h.png to somewhat follow Apple’s pattern. After you have added this new version of your background image to your Xcode project you should open CocosBuilder again and select your background image CCSprite.  Next you should add a “Doc root var” with the name of backgroundSprite. Make sure your document root element is pointing to the correct “Custom class”. Save and publish your CocosBuilder project. Now in your Xcode project add a new CCSprite instance var in your custom class .h file with the same variable name you specified in CocosBuilder. The final step is to go into the didLoadFromCCB method of your custom class and add the following code. This code will detect if the app is running in the iPhone 5 full 568×320 mode and if so replaces the background sprite with the new one and updates the texture rect. That is all there is to it and now you have easy support for the new iPhone 5 resolution in your existing CocosBuilder user interfaces.

CGSize winSize = [CCDirector sharedDirector].winSize;
if(winSize.width == 568)
{
    [backgroundSprite setTexture: [[CCSprite spriteWithFile:@"background-568h.png"]texture]];
    [backgroundSprite setTextureRect:CGRectMake(0, 0, winSize.width, winSize.height)];
}

Here is a screenshot of the final results of this solution. The existing menu and other elements position and sizes look great.

Photo Collage Factory Featured!

Thank you to all that have downloaded Photo Collage Factory over the past week since it was released! Starting today Photo Collage Factory is being featured in the iPhone Photo & Video “New” section (previously “New & Noteworthy”) in iTunes and the iOS App Stores in a pile of countries including the US. Next week we will report how this affects downloads after we have enough data to be interesting, but so far it is huge and our rank is climbing fast in the US!

The timing couldn’t be better as we submitted an enormous update today that adds a lot to this already great app! Here is what is coming next week when this new update is released.

  • Now a Universal app for the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch
  • iPhone 5 display support
  • Panorama photo frames
  • iOS 6.0 support for Twitter and Facebook
  • Easily reorder your photos within a frame
  • Add your own labels
  • Updated default message in the share posting message

Sheeple Free & Sheeple HD Free Released

Sheeple Free and Sheeple HD Free were both released today! If you haven’t had a chance to try out Sheeple then this is a great opportunity to try out both. These are essentially two different games with the same core gameplay. Sheeple Free is for the iPhone/iPod touch and has smaller levels, but a lot of fun and challenging puzzles to solve. Sheeple HD Free has levels designed specifically for the iPad and they are huge with unique puzzles just for this version of the game.

We will be spilling more information, but the design phase has finished up on our next game and the artwork is now being created. This upcoming game is going to be a fun arcade/puzzle game. More to come!


App Store Link: Sheeple, $0.99
App Store Link: Sheeple Free, FREE

App Store Link: Sheeple HD, $1.99
App Store Link: Sheeple HD, FREE

Photo Collage Factory Released

This has been a very busy and exciting week for us at Tomato Factory! Today our newest app Photo Collage Factory was released! The first version of this application was rejected by Apple and that was a first for us. We resubmitted the next day after addressing the issues Apple reported and this app sat in the queue for some time waiting. Now the long wait is over and Photo Collage Maker is available!

This is a great app that allows you to easily create photo collage frames and then more importantly easily share your frames with friends and family. There is a large list of unique frames to choose from currently with more being release in the next update. You can style your frame by using an easy to use color picker or choosing from our pattern library. Once you are pleased with your frame then you can save it to your Photos or share it via Email, SMS, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Dropbox, and more. Please try out Photo Collage Factory and let us know what you think! We have an exciting update planned for this app in the next few weeks and some great plans for addition additional features moving forward.


App Store Link: Photo Collage Factory Pro, $0.99
App Store Link: Photo Collage Factory, FREE

iOS App Icons: The Facebook Test

As an indie developer gaining visibility for a new application is a real challenge. The initial visibility in your application’s primary category and any initial PR can help drive some traffic towards your application, but both of those sources are short lived. So what chance does an indie developer have? The most important things that any indie developers should do when releasing an application is to focus on your app icon, the name of the app, the keywords, and the screenshots. No matter what you do to drive traffic to your app, once the user is in the AppStore they still need to decide if they want to purchase or download your app and the icon and screenshots are the quick decision factors. The description is useful if your icon and screenshots creates enough interest. Now with the new version of the AppStore in iOS 6 an apps first screenshot is going to become extremely important.

There are several ways you can evaluate the effectiveness of your keywords. You can use Google’s AdWords keyword tool or I would recommend using AppCodes service for selecting effective keywords. With icons I have had mixed results in the past where a group of users like a really simple icon design and the another set of users like a really elaborate icon. I was recently talking to a friend that suggested using Facebook to run several ads for different icon designs and see which one resulted in more click-throughs. I thought this suggestion was great so I created four ads, each with the same description and target audience. The only difference between the four ads was the image. Here are the icons, also in the order shown in the Facebook ad campaign results below.


I ran the ads for two full days on 9/13-9/14 . At first I thought the experiment was successful as the icon for the application I had originally selected to use in the AppStore was receiving more click throughs than the other icons, but then as we reached the end of the day on 9/13 a second icon quickly collected as many clicks as the first. Then on 9/14 both of those ads hovered and a third ad quickly collected as many clicks as the first icon.

So what is the result? I believe that my experiment showed that either it takes a lot of ad impressions in Facebook to draw in users that even take the time to look at the ads or simply that my icons were too similar to one another and were lackluster. I think my alternate icons had too similar of a core design, with just small design differences in the background and border of the icon. I have a new icon in design currently that is completely different that the original icons and has a 3D look. I will run that against the icon in the AppStore currently when it is finished to see if a much more visually appealing icon has any difference in a Facebook campaign.

Another interesting aside is that the additional clickthroughs generated through the Facebook ad campaign made absolutely no difference to my daily download/sales averages. I should have also created a separate campaign for each ad as Facebook will automatically prefer the more popular ads in a given campaign. More thoughts to come after I finish the test with the new icon, but please share your experiences with such Facebook ad campaigns in the comments!