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In AppControls version 1.2, the minimum size for designs is reduced from 12 to 8 pixels. This means that it can now easily be used to create sliders or progress indicators.

At the same time, the maximum height is increased from 200 to 480 pixels. This will allow you to create backgrounds with custom gradients for iPhone apps.

Click here to download the update

“Would you like us to collect some statistics of your website traffic?” said Google Analytics.
“Sure,” I answered. “What kind of data can you give me?”
“We can generate tons of data. Would you like to see charts or do you prefer tables?”
“Can I have both?”
“Of course, no problem. We’ll throw so much data your way, you won’t know what to do with it.”
“Wow, great. I’d like that.”

Ever since I’ve started Blue Crowbar in 2007, I’ve used Google Analytics to get an idea of how many times my website is visited, where visitors come from, what keywords they used to find me in their favorite search engine, etc. And until recently, I was very happy with what I had. I mean, I like statistics, and Google is offering me tons of it. And it’s free. What’s not to like?

A few days ago, I came across Mint, a self-hosted web site analytics tool with a clear focus on simplicity. I got curious, bought a license (it’s only $30) and installed it on my server to see what it could do for me. After just a few hours of collecting data, I realized that it was exactly what I needed. Even with the default installation (it has plugins too; more about that later), I started learning new things about my site. Among others, it answered my two main questions:

1. Are people who find my site on Google finding the information that they’re looking for?

I started thinking about this when, about three months ago now, I took two of my existing products, iPhoto2Twitter and Aperture2Twitter, and merged them into one product with a new name: TwitExport. On August 31, Twitter pulled the plug on basic authentication, so my old products stopped working and I started seeing an increased number of searches for the old product names. What Google Analytics didn’t show me is whether these people ended up finding the new product page or the new FAQ page while trying to find out why the old products stopped working. With a few extra clicks, you can drill down in GA’s data and figure out the landing pages for the used keywords and you can add the resulting table to your “dashboard”, but that gives you one table per keyword, which is way too much information, and of course only shows you the search terms that you’ve selected. That basically means that you’ll only learn about the things you already know.

With Mint, things are much simpler. By default, you get a list of terms that people have searched for and underneath each term you can see what page was found. That’s all the information I need in one simple table.

2. What are the exact addresses that my site is being linked from? (and what’s being said about my products there?)

With GA, you get a list of sites that link to your site or blog, but you only get the domain name, not the full URL. This is something that I’ve never been able to figure out. Either the information isn’t there or I’ve never been able to find it. If Macworld is linking to your site, it will probably be from the main page, which is easy to find. But if the click comes from a forum, it can be very difficult to find out exactly where it’s coming from. Mint shows me the complete URL and I can click it to see exactly where my products are being mentioned.

Mint also has a very useful plugin system. A plugin is called a “Pepper” in Mint-terminology and is easy to install. Here are a few that I’ve installed:

iPhone Pepper — I can now view my statistics on my iPhone. Google Analytics uses Flash for its charts, so I can’t see them on my iOS devices. I know there are a few apps that you can use for GA on your iPhone or iPad, like Ego, but I like being able to just browse to my own Mint page in Safari. The iPhone Pepper doesn’t collect any extra data, it simply creates a mobile view for the data that you already have.

Outbound Pepper — If you have links to external websites on your site, you might be interested in knowing how often your visitors click those links. With GA, if you want this information, you need to add an extra bit of JavaScript code to each of those outbound links. With Mint, you don’t need to add anything to your web pages. All you need to do is add the Outbound Pepper to your Mint directory and external clicks are automatically tracked.

Downloads Pepper — Same story for tracking downloads. Add the Downloads Pepper. Done.

Create-Your-Own-Pepper — Since Mint is installed on your own server, if you have some knowledge of PHP, it’s not too difficult to create your own Pepper to track any data that you have access to.

I took an existing Pepper as my starting point and converted it to track my product sales. I want to add some more detailed information to it (e.g. make it show the sales per product instead of only the total number), but for now it’s a nice thing to have.

On its website, Mint promises “A Fresh Look at your Site” and that’s not a false promise. It shows me everything I expect from a website analysis tool on one well-designed page. It’s a pleasure to use and, in the couple of days that I’ve used it now, it has already taught me a few things that I didn’t know about how people find (or don’t find) information on my site. Go check it out.

A few days ago, I’ve set up a small survey for recent Impression customers to help me get an idea of how they would like to use Impression 2.0, the next major release of the watermark plug-in for iPhoto and Aperture that I’ve started working on.

The survey only had one question: “Impression currently stores the watermarked photos within iPhoto or Aperture. What’s your opinion on that?”

There were three possible answers:

• Import
  I like the current workflow. I keep my watermarked photos in iPhoto or Aperture and export them from there when needed, using iPhoto’s or Aperture’s built-in export tools.

• Import small
  I like the current workflow. I store my watermarked photos in iPhoto or Aperture because I might need them again later, but I would prefer to store them in the file format that I need, e.g. in JPEG format at 50% of the original image size.

• Export
  I mainly add watermarks to photos that I publish on my website or that I send to my customers. I don’t want to store watermarked photos in iPhoto or Aperture. I would prefer to always directly export my watermarked photos to the location (folder) of my choice and in my preferred format.

There was also a fourth option where you could enter your own answer. Almost everyone who has used this field instead of one of the above wants to have both Import and Export, so I’ve put these answers in the Both category.

114 people have responded. These are the results:

It’s clear that a vast majority of the users who have responded want to have an Export feature. At the same time, especially in Aperture, almost half of the users are either happy with the current Import workflow or at least want to have that feature available next to an Export feature.

Conclusion: Impression 2.0 should have both features.

Thanks to everyone who has responded!

Here’s a preview of the new color controls in Impression 1.2 for iPad, iPhone and iPod touch.

One of the downsides of having a universal app in the App Store is that it’s difficult to know what percentage of users use it on an iPhone or on an iPad. That is, without having the app phone home, something that I’m not doing in Impression. The app’s About window contains a link to impressionapp.com though, so to get an idea of what devices the users are running the app on, I analyzed my webserver’s log files for August and counted the number of hits from each device. Admittedly not a very scientific analysis, it gave me a ballpark estimate of what devices people are using and what version is installed.

Knowing that there are more than ten times as many iPhone devices sold to date, it’s surprising that the iPad represents almost 50% of the total number of hits. Also interesting: 80% of iPhones are running iOS 4, which brings the total to only 11% of users who are still on 3.1.3 (the required minimum for my app).

For a small developer shop, it’s very hard to support every version of a fast-moving OS. There’s obviously the high cost of having to buy several iPhones to be able to test on different iOS releases, but even more important is the time that is required to test all those different versions. This data tells me that I probably shouldn’t worry too much about not supporting 3.1.3 anymore in a coming update.

AppControls can now automatically render high-resolution images for use with the iPhone 4 Retina display. It will automatically add “@2x” to the end of the filename.

Original image - zoomed to 200%:

High-res “@2x” image for iPhone 4:

Besides this new feature, the 1.1 release improves the accuracy of the cropping and the positioning of the text. It also fixes a number of bugs. You can read the full release notes here.

Obj-C-Comment is a simple Service that you can use with the Xcode 4 Preview to comment or un-comment large chunks of code. To install: unzip the file and put it in ~/Library/Services/. You’ll then find it in the Xcode 4 Services menu if you’ve selected some code. You can change a flag in the Automator workflow if you prefer block comments instead of line comments.

My perl scripting is pretty rusty, so feel free to send me corrections and/or improvements.

Download Obj-C-Comment.zip

TwitExport 2 is the successor to iPhoto2Twitter and Aperture2Twitter. These two plug-ins were released in the first half of 2009. So, with a few thousand users and about a year’s worth of reputation-building, why would I want to change the name? Well, I didn’t want to, but I had to. In November 2009, Twitter published new Guidelines for Use of the Twitter Trademark. This is in the “Naming your Application or Product, Applying for a Domain” section:

I only found out about that a few weeks ago. As you may have heard, Twitter will very soon switch off its currently used system for authenticating users and replace it with something called OAuth, a completely different way of verifying a user’s identity. Because of that, every application that’s interacting with Twitter needs to register with Twitter in order to be allowed to use the new system. And that’s where the iPhoto2Twitter and Aperture2Twitter names got rejected.

This finally gave me a good reason to merge the two products, something I had been wanting to do for some time now. TwitExport now only has one installer that will give you the option to install the plug-in for iPhoto, Aperture or both. It will automatically uninstall iPhoto2Twitter and Aperture2Twitter. The user interface was redesigned to be even easier to use than before and the plug-ins now use the new authentication with Twitter. That means that your password no longer has to be shared with external services like TwitPic and Mobypicture.

Once Twitter switches off their old authentication, you’ll no longer be able to use iPhoto2Twitter or Aperture2Twitter. It’s been delayed before, but the deadline is now set for August 16th.

→ TwitExport product page

UPDATE: This problem is fixed in Aperture 3.0.2.

There is a bug in Aperture 3 that affects Aperture2Twitter and many other 3rd party Export plug-ins. Impression for Aperture still works fine because that’s an Edit plug-in.

This is the problem: Aperture 3 seems to completely ignore the export format that is selected in the plug-in window. Instead, the photo is exported using the last export preset that was used in Aperture’s standard Version export window.

Specifically for Aperture2Twitter this may mean that, even though you’ve selected JPG or PNG as your export format, the plug-in might actually try to export your photo(s) as PSD or TIFF. As these file formats are not accepted by TwitPic or Mobypicture, your photo upload to those services will fail. By design, your tweet also won’t be sent because the plug-in always checks if the photo upload was successful first.

The bad news is that, until Apple fixes this bug in Aperture 3, there is no way I can fix this problem in Aperture2Twitter. The good news is that there is a workaround, albeit an ugly one. If you want to use Aperture2Twitter or another Export plugin, you’ll have to set the export format in Aperture’s standard Version Export window first.

1. Select File > Export > Version from the menu bar
2. Next to Export Preset, select the preset that you’d like to use (this should be JPG or PNG)
3. Cancel out of the Export window
4. Select File > Export > Aperture2Twitter

You can now continue using Aperture2Twitter. The preset that you’ve selected in step 2 will be used. If you’re using the unregistered trial version of the plug-in, there is no need to go through these steps, but you’ll need to install the latest version. This new version of the plug-in also fixes a few other problems, one of them a 64-bit related crash. You can download it here.

I’ll update this post when Apple fixes the problem or when someone comes up with a better workaround.