I have just released an update to my very first commercial app, Calendar Paste. It’s now v3.3.0 and sports iOS 13 compatibility, Dark Mode, and overall better layout. So it’s mostly a cosmetic and “minor tweaks” update.
Calendar Paste 1 was introduced back in late 2012. That’s 7 years ago! So, happy birthday, Calendar Paste!
To celebrate, Calendar Paste 3 will be available for free from Oct 1st until Oct 6th, and then 50% off until the end of October. The App Store listing doesn’t seem to be updated despite it being “Ready for Sale”, for whatever reason, though. Maybe it’s already fixed when you read this. v3.2 will work just fine, but not sport Dark Mode, yet.
The app was my first real app project, sufficiently simple to start with, yet interesting enough to be sold on the store.
Calendar Paste 1 kicked off my indie app developer business. I still don’t make a lot of money and have to freelance to stay afloat, but this is a very cool path to have taken. I’m loving it. In case you wonder: it never was a huge commercial success. For 7 years, it brought in something between $3 and $130 per month, with a guesstimated average of $18.53/month. Unless it didn’t sell at all, that is. So much for the dreams of yours truly in 2012 to get rich quickly, right? But I learned to code in Objective-C, use Core Data, program for iOS 5 (and then iOS 6 before the app was finished). That’s worth a lot.
That’s why I don’t sunset Calendar Paste, even though each year’s iOS update takes away time for maintenance. And I cannot warrant to add all the planned features to the app because the time is better spent on other, larger projects.
I also wrote a diary of the progress, taking extensive notes in a tutorial-like fashion, that I eventually wanted to publish as a $5 ebook – but I never did. It just didn’t seem to be worth the trouble, and shortly after most of the code was already outdated, and the lessons learned not easily applicable to Swift.
Sorry if you’re still waiting for iCloud sync. It’s theroetically possible, but would take about a week or two to implement and test, and that’s just too costly at the moment. One day I’d like to out-source development of features like this, but to do that I’d need to accumulate larger savings – so either me or someone else working on the app depends on the same solution and y’all have to hold out a bit longer.
I’m taking this week off to finish TableFlip for a testing round (for which you still can sign up!) and I decided to run a little promotion and give away Calendar Paste 3 for iPhone and iPad for free. The promotion runs until Sunday (May 15th), so hurry and tell your friends!
I’m knees-deep in code and wait for new provisioning profiles from Apple to release an app for Mac next week. Fingers crossed! Meanwhile, I wanted to care for my recently updated Calendar Paste 2 more and reach out to bloggers and the press to increase coverage.
After working on it in my spare time for the last couple months, I have released a rather large update to Calendar Paste this week. This update is mostly behind-the-scenes stuff. Visible to the user are a few color changes, and adapting iOS 8 looks better. The app looks nice on iPhones of all sizes available for the first time.
Like I promised last weekend, I am going to write about the process of cleaning up the already rotten source code of Calendar Paste. In order to break massive view controllers into manageable pieces and un-tangle everything, I have to make sure that I don’t break the current implementation. Calendar Paste didn’t have any automated tests in place. To change this fact is my first priority.
I have just pushed the current code of Calendar Paste 2 for iPhone to GitHub. I did this in part because I don’t fear anybody stealing it anyway, and also because I want to work on two machines this weekend without setting up my own server.
A Calendar Paste update hit the iOS App Store, in response to a very sound feature suggestion: Display Titles.
User dubble_d pointed out in an App Store review that calendar entries with the same name can’t be distinguished in the template list. Say you have four different kinds of “Team Meeting”, each lasting one hour, but belonging to different calendars or having different notes attached. Until now, Calendar Paste would’ve simply listed these four.
Introducing a Display Title makes distinguishing events with the same name easier and keeps the original title for pasting into your calendar
With the current update, you can add your own descriptive title to a template, called Display Title. This way, you can still call your calendar entries “Team Meeting” while showing something else in the event template list. This is especially useful when the event name would’ve been too long to fit on your iPhone’s screen: simply assign a shorter Display Title to see at a glance which event template is which.
It’s a bummer I can’t respond to App Store app reviews in any way. Apple doesn’t provide any customer support mechanisms. So I’ll say it here: Thanks, dubble_d, for the feature suggestion! I think this feature was a great idea.
This week, Calendar Paste got a huge update. It’s now iOS 7 ready: it looks cleaner and even more sexy than before. I’m happy the app update is ready for you to download. It’s free for everyone who already purchased Calendar Paste. For the rest of you: Get Calendar Paste 2 on the App Store!
When Marko (@markowenzel) and I started to plan our first iPhone app codename “ShiftCal”, we met and used prototypes to get a feeling for the Interface we wished Apple provided built into Calendar.app. The prototypes for the app which later would be dubbed “Calendar Paste” were really fun to make.
When I developed my iPhone event template builder Calendar Paste, I took a lot of notes during development. In 68 plain text files I collected everything I’ve learned during the planning, design, programming and marketing process of the app.
I kept this one in the queue for some time for various reasons. One, I procrastinated making the sales stats public because I wanted to see whether and how I could affect them to look nicer than they turned out to look. Second, I don’t really feel comfortable giving others, namely AppLaunch, bad press.
On Dec 11th I released Calendar Paste. With yesterdays App Store statistics available, I now have a full month of sales statistics recorded. I’m both happy and excited to share a few numbers with you on this first month anniversary.
Interested in some data about app sales? I wrote a Ruby script which parsed my worklog files for timestamps, calculate the difference, add it up and then return in a human-readable form the amount of time it took to develop Calendar Paste. So I logged about 115 hours of active development time, planning, tinkering with the website and whatnot—and I definitely spent more hours on this project before I began logging my progress.
I think about publishing sales stats on my website; maybe this would be a cool add-on for the upcoming e-book as well. I already sold the app 12 times in the past few days without any marketing whatsoever. I’m curious where I’m heading with this niche app.
Also, I got some cool feedback and suggestions! However this is going to turn out financially: It will be a fun ride, that’s for sure.
