Pssssht! Hear that? It’s the sound of iBoost version 2, available today! As well as being rebuilt from scratch, this release also introduces an exciting new partnership with performance motorsport company, HKS. Here’s a sneak peek of what’s new:

• Official HKS BOV sound & gauge upgrade pack
• A new free electronic gauge, and stacks of new sound & gauge upgrades to collect
• New and updated authentic turbo sounds recorded from real cars
• Bonus Zilla gauge. Just install Zilla to unlock!
• That Duck Call BOV you’ve all been asking for!
• Put the Human Car Sounds guy Dan in your car and listen to his mad skills in a limited edition pack to support him on Australia’s Got Talent!

We have more announcements to come soon, including information on the upcoming iBoost Android App. You can get notified about those Android details here (don’t miss out!).

To celebrate this milestone we are making iBoost free for a limited time only, head over to the app store and check it out!

Read more…

Everyone is trying to dissect Draw Something and find out how they achieved such enormous success in a very short amount of time. The numbers are impressive – 37m users, 3 billion drawings, $250k in sales per day and a $200m acquisition from Zynga – all in about 7 weeks from launch.

Contrary to what seems to be floating around the interwebs, Draw Something is by no means an overnight success. The game itself has been around for about 5 years, it just didn’t explode until it launched on iOS. It’s worth noting that OMGPOP had 20 million existing users to market to, and have raised $17m in venture capital in the 6 years of their existence. It’s worth having a cheeky read of their Crunchbase profile here.

There are many obvious reasons why it has done well – familiar game concept, social integration, freemium etc. All that is well and good, but nothing new. I’d argue there are several far more subtle reasons that have contributed to their success with equal influence:

Read more…

You might remember from our post “Does the 20mb download limit really matter?” that yes, it freaking matters.

People, as much as we love them, are fickle creatures and if the download limit prevents them buying an app then they probably won’t come back and try again over wifi. It just doesn’t happen.

We have spent weeks of effort redesigning features, optimising artwork and implementing post-purchase downloading of content just to squeeze 1mb from an app to make it fit under the old 20mb limit.

Now, with the announcement from Apple that the 3G app download limit has … Read more…

One configuration for a debug build and another configuration for a release build. Every project I’ve worked on EVER has been this way. It’s a pretty common thing right? Right! So why the fuck is it so difficult to do for an Android project?

2 days of hunting through the Eclipse doco, Intelli J doco, Android doco, Ant doco, the Android SDK Ant build file, the google, the stack overflow and I’ve only just now managed to get a ‘good enough’ solution working using Ant. Ant? Why do I know Ant now? I didn’t know Ant 2 days ago. Is … Read more…

We’ve very much had our heads down for many months at Bonobo, shipping a fairly enormous amount of products for clients and ourselves. We’re excited to announce that the much anticipated version 2 of Zilla will be shipping next week including:

• Choose from 5 new color schemes (in-app purchase required).
• Customize Zilla to match your ride
• Now you can configure metric and imperial units separately
• Performance and UI enhancements
• Added a setting to auto-calibrate Zilla on startup, for our die-hard fans who always keep Zilla running in their car
• Lateral G display corrected
• Smart switching & data logging coming soon..

… Read more…

…only it isn’t a spinoff….and it isn’t ours.

We’ve been working with Jammbox for some time now on one of their hit titles Discovr. It’s been in the press a bit recently and rightly so, it’s awesome! Now, I’m not sure what’s happened in the past few days but the press articles have been getting increasingly strange in relation to our involvement. Like this one I was just sent from one of our partners. There are multiple inaccuracies in this story but the one that concerns us is that Filter Squad isn’t a spin off and isn’t ours. Jammbox has … Read more…

You may of recently read about our nice trademark infringement letter from Apple over the Unretina name.

As fun as it sounds to take on Apple, we don’t have the time or will power to do it for a free app. So the a has become an er, welcome Unretiner:

We also added our most requested feature, now you can drag images straight onto the dock icon.

Update from the Mac App Store, or grab it here.

Rok on.… Read more…

Our app called Unretina, which is a simple free tool to downscale retina @2x images to work on older devices, has been ticking away nicely on the Mac App Store since day 1. On Sunday we got this nice email from Apple:

It has come to our attention that your app, Unretina, is currently using Retina in the app name in a manner that is not consistent with Apple’s trademark guidelines, as required by the App Store Review Guidelines :

5.1 Apps must comply with all terms and conditions explained in the Guidelines for using Apple Trademark Names … Read more…

With the iTunes App Store fast approaching 10 billion downloads, some really interesting research has been done by Horace Dediu.

By his predictions Apps will have overtaken songs downloaded by March. When you start to consider that the App Store has existed for less than half the time iTunes has been selling music, that is a staggering figure.

Even more staggering is the rate at which it is growing, to quote Horace:

“The amazing story of this chart is not that apps are running at above 30 million download per day, but that the figure is growing. Growth like … Read more…

We love being part of new things, especially Apple related. When the Mac App Store was announced we wanted in, but being iOS developers we didn’t have a lot of MacOSX experience. However, we did have a few little in house utilities kicking around. So we grabbed one, polished it up and submitted it, Apple approved it with one day to spare and there we were:

See it in the AppStore.

Unretina is a handy utility to resize images for iOS developers, not a massive audience, but a good target audience for initial adopters of the Mac App Store.

So … Read more…

The Mac App store launched moments ago and there are mixed developer opinions flying around the interwebs. Quite a few articles are speculating it will have dire implications for traditional Mac developers who make their dough by selling software at seemingly oldschool prices of $20 to $60. Some choice quotes from ZDNet:

———

“Tomorrow, the sky will fall.”

“iOS developers are The Flood. They will annihilate everything in their path, and what’s in their path, starting tomorrow, are all the developers who’ve made a living off Mac software since the 1980s.”

“Tomorrow, the Mac App Store opens and traditional … Read more…

We have always been conscious of trying to keep our apps under the 20MB 3G download limit (Basically you have to connect to WIFI to download an app over 20MB).

When we added iPhone retina support to iBoost we really stretched this limit. After adding all the new images to the application we ended up with a 35MB binary. So we spend hours cutting, trimming and squishing and finally got it down to 19.9MB, we patted ourselves on the back and submitted. Two weeks later Apple approved the app, we checked and it was 20.1MB! Damn it! What happened? In … Read more…

Before you get all worked up, let me explain what I mean.

For me, applications I use every day must be a desktop or mobile application, whether its Twitter (Tweeter for Mac, Twitter for iPhone/iPad), Dropbox (Mac OSX/iPhone/iPad), Evernote (iPad/iPhone/Mac OSX), Skype (iPhone/Mac OSX), Email (Mac Mail), Pulse (iPad/iPhone) the list goes on.

Are you a developer? Do you use Git or Subversion? You probably have it hosted in the cloud, but do you checkin/push/pull via a web interface or via the command line or tool on your desktop (Versions, Finder plugin, Tortoise SVN etc)? No doubting it’s nice to … Read more…

There are signs of change in the App Store. Traditionally there were free apps and then there were paid apps. A lot of companies decided to make free or lite versions of their apps to promote their paid versions. Other companies decided to release free applications with advertising.

But now one third of the top grossing iPhone applications are free. These apps use in app purchasing to unlock features of the apps.

We recently tried this with iBoost with interesting results. We decided to add some new ‘pro’ gauges which can be purchased for 99c within the app.

The pro … Read more…

After reading the fantastic post by Matt Mullenweg – 1.0 Is the Loneliest Number it inspired me to share one of our recommendations to clients.

We are always telling our clients to make the simplest possible product as the first release. We believe the key is to build your product with the minimum possible functionality, then iterate quickly based on what your customers and analytics tell you.

Facebook wasn’t built in a day.

When we built Yoink! we had a long list of features we wanted to add, and we kept on coming up with new ones during the build. I … Read more…

Several months after launch we sat down with our fantastic clients Kerry and Damian (www.kezzabee.com) to see what they thought of the whole app development experience.

What inspired you to make a children’s app?

We have an almost 3 year old who at the age of 1 and a half discovered her dads iPhone.  Since she loved playing children’s apps, we decided to buy her an iPod Touch for Christmas so she and dad could play together instead of fighting over the iPhone.  At that point we began tossing up different idea’s to make our own app.

Are … Read more…

Apple recently announced the Mac App Store to compliment the iOS App Store. I don’t think Apple are kidding themselves, it’s not going to be anywhere near as successful as the iOS store.

But we still think this is a great idea because:

• We love having widgets / small apps running with growl notifications. Apps like Tweetie, Dropbox, Skype, Todo apps etc sit there pushing and pulling data from the cloud, telling me when I need to know something has changed.

• We hate having 20 tabs open in our browsers and having to check them all regularly.

• It’s … Read more…

If you’re lucky enough to be hit with the next killer app idea the first question you’ll ask is, “How much does it cost to develop an iPhone application?”. The best answer, it really depends on your idea so you should get a quote from someone who can draw from their vast experience launching top ranking iPhone applications (wink, wink).

The next best answer is to check out this recent discussion on popular Q&A site Stack Overflow. Among the most interesting insights to emerge from the discussion were the figures given by each of the developers of the wildly popular … Read more…

Since day one of Yoink! we have had amazing support from various media outlets. Some of the amazing newspapers, blogs and websites that have covered Yoink! include:

• The NY Times
• Treehugger
• The West Australian
• Mashable
• The Next Web
• iiNet

So What?

Many of these articles focus on the iPhone application over the website, but what does this all mean for iPhone application downloads?

It’s fantastic, for a day or so …

As you can see the press coverage results in a large spikes in downloads on the day of the coverage, but tails off … Read more…

Every year, the Anthill Smart 100 identifies and ranks the most innovative products in Australia. This year our chimp-faces are smiley to announce that our humble product Yoink has made the list.

What number, you ask?  Well that is partly up to you – help us earn points to determine our rank by heading to the Anthill site and voting by:

• Hit the VOTE UP button on the top left (1 point)
• Trigger a reaction by Retweeting and Liking on Facebook (2 points)
• Leave a Comment (3 points)… Read more…

You know when you were a kid and played pretend, there was always that one friend that didn’t quite get it? You’d be charging around as a soldier on a critical mission and they’d be sitting cross-legged with a furrowed brow. We had a significantly more grown-up experience this week where Apple was that kid – our first app was rejected but not quite for the reasons we assumed.

The app is an extremely frivolous homage to Dennis Hopper who died recently. Basically, it emulates the bomb from the movie Speed – if you go over 50MPH the bomb arms … Read more…

We probably don’t need to tell you that GReddy is a world leader in performance parts for race cars.  At Bonobo we’ve always been GReddy fans (in fact, we even have a GReddy remote control car that lives on one of our desks) so we are ultra excited to announce our partnership with them that has resulted in the new GReddy App for iPhone.

Try out four awesome GReddy performance products that look, feel and sound just like the real thing. Mount your phone in your car to see the boost gauges respond to your driving with amazing realism … Read more…

Doctors in training are busy people and the nature of their job involves lots of things to remember. Tracking patients, advice received from superiors, things you’ve learnt and want to remember, overtime…it all ends up a bit of a logistical nightmare usually involving a hefty amount of post-it notes.

Bonobo has collaborated with Dr. Rhys Clark to create the best medical logbook app available, we call it iDoctor. It lets you quickly get things out of your brain and stored for safe keeping. It’s quick and sexy so you will actually feel compelled to use it every day.  You … Read more…

On the eve of the Australian iPad launch, we are excited to announce that The Monthly Magazine iPad and iPhone app is now available.  The app is free on the App Store and comes with the March 2010 edition.  Other issues are available for individual purchase inside the app for $4.95 (AUD) – close to half the price of the printed edition. Great reviews have already started popping up like this one from MacTalk user decryption:

It’s pretty much what I want from a digital magazine. It’s not a PDF. It resembles the the print edition and the iBook

… Read more…

We are proud to formally announce our engagement with the influential current affairs magazine The Monthly. Together we are creating the first iPad magazine app in Australia. At launch, an iPhone version will also be available to match.

The app will be free from iTunes and allow in-app purchasing of each edition, pricing is yet to be announced.

The iPad is an amazing reading device and we think there is a big bright future for publishers who are willing to take a step in the right direction. It’s certainly been a fun project for the chimps in our lab … Read more…