Mobile Ads do not work (for app developers)

In my humble opinion mobile ads just doesn' work for App developers as a mean to generate revenue from their apps.
You have an average CTR of 0.21% , but you only get one cent or two cent per click. Meaning that you need millions of viewers per month to get a decent revenue.

In my own experience I had an app with AdMob ads, and indeed I got a daily CTR of 0.17/0.2/0.22; much in line with the average CTR found.
But I only had a few thousand visits per day, and that was strange because my app was downloaded much more.

And than I came to conclusion that the only thing that prevented from ads to be shown, was AD BLOCKERS !

And that my friends is why the mobile ads do not work ! More and more people install ad blockers on their devices and less and less ads are shown.

I'm participating in contest for the best mobile e-Gov app !

Please vote for me: http://tinyurl.com/cpn2rkm 

Thank you in advance

My company website is online

I finally found some time to setup my company website, you can have a look here.

it has been ages...

since I published something.
But now I'm back, I was too busy with setting up my own business, start developing for iOS 5 and iPad, etc.
So it was a very hectic 1 year and a half.
I have now 8 apps on the appstore (and 1 under review) and my experiences are mixed , the free ones are very well downloaded , the payed however....
It becomes more and more difficult to be found on the AppStore, I'm currently spending more time in marketing the apps via different social media than really developing and that's a shame I think.

Anyway for those who want to know what my apps are here we go :

iSignals for iPhone , using CoreGraphics, financial integration with yahoo, PDF generation , email etc etc.

iSignals for iPad , same as above is a port from the iPhone version for iOS 5 and higher

TRACK , is an app to follow an art exhibition in Ghent, using CoreLocation, Augmented reality, GPS functionality etc (for iPad)

Equity Option Calculator , a professional option calculator for the iPhone

The 4 other apps are for Belgium only and for specific purposes.

Next time I'll discuss a bit more in depth on the different new technologies I used.

PS: You can now also follow me on Twitter via @isignals1 or become friends on Facebook.

NSNumberformatter for special currency formats

Another day somebody asked me if it was possible with an NSNumberFormatter to format currency values like $1k , $1,02m etc.

So instead of displaying a value like $1,020,000 to display it as $1,02m

Now with a standard NSNumberFormatter its not possible, so you could create a custom formatter for that.

The following code snippet will do the job

- (NSString *) formatCurrencyValue: (double )doubleValue

{

NSNumberFormatter *nformat = [[NSNumberFormatter alloc] init];

[nformat setFormatterBehavior:NSNumberFormatterBehavior10_4];

[nformat setCurrencySymbol:[[NSLocale currentLocale] objectForKey: NSLocaleCurrencySymbol]];

[nformat setNumberStyle:NSNumberFormatterCurrencyStyle];

NSString *stringValue = nil;

NSArray *abbrevations = [NSArray arrayWithObjects:@"k", @"m", @"b", @"t", nil] ;

for (NSString *s in abbrevations)

{

doubleValue /= 1000.0 ;

if ( doubleValue < 1000.0 )

{

if ( (long long)doubleValue % (long long) 100 == 0 )

[nformat setMaximumFractionDigits:0];

else

[nformat setMaximumFractionDigits:2];

stringValue = [NSString stringWithFormat: @"%@%@", [nformat stringFromNumber: [NSNumber numberWithDouble: doubleValue]] , s] ;

break ;

}

}

[nformat release] ;

NSLog(@"Value = %@", stringValue);

return stringValue ;

}

Input :

[self formatCurrencyValue: 1235.0f] ;

[self formatCurrencyValue: 10351.0f] ;

[self formatCurrencyValue: 100522.0f] ;

[self formatCurrencyValue: 1235111.0f] ;

[self formatCurrencyValue: 12351234.0f] ;

[self formatCurrencyValue: 192351234.0f] ;

[self formatCurrencyValue: 1872351234.0f] ;

Output :

Value = £1.24k

Value = £10.35k

Value = £101k

Value = £1.24m

Value = £12.35m

Value = £192.35m

Value = £1.87b

Note : you can add additional parameters to the function like number of fraction digits