Day 1 Of Unretina In The Mac App Store … Wowsers

by @Stuart 496 days ago

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 how did it do? Not too bad at all, it was featured at the top of developer utilities:

And with over 80 tweets (generally positive), 14 store reviews (again generally positive), a stack of rankings average 4 stars we were blown away.

We were expecting maybe 100 download on the first day, hopefully 1k or so would find a use for it over time….

Wow. And given it was only open for a few hours in countries like Australia, we expect there should be some good numbers tomorrow as well.

The Mac App Store is an amazing user experience, no installers, great utilities, easy purchases and seamless updates. Imagine what it will be like in 12 months time.

EDIT: Here are the stats for day 2

13 Comments • #Business#Ventures
  • http://Website Deki

    Wow, I saw that but I didnt know it was you guys. Great work!

  • http://Website Bernard Krummenacher

    Looks like to be a really useful tool, if only it worked as it should.
    I tried to unretinate a 640 x 570 picture and the result picture size is 70 x 62. Not really what is expected. Same for a 71 x 570 picture which is resized to 7 x 62.
    Maybe I didn’t catched the purpose of this app.

  • http://urssur.com urssur

    Interesting, do you have plans for a PRO paid version or how do you monetize this ?

    Or is this more of a foot in the door aplication :D … kinda like saying “You loved unretina … buy … iDoctor for 9.99 NOW !!! ”

    Congratulations for your achievement !

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  • http://www.vivexsoftware.com Craig

    Im definitely going to try to get some of my work up there too! Thanks for sharing your stats!

  • http://bonobolabs.com Stuart

    @ urssur not too sure yet :) we might add a few new features, but I’d say we’ll keep that one free :)

  • http://www.galveston.se Johan

    Strange, I tested once and it worked but now I got the same problem as Bernard. I got a 24 bit PNG with 320 ppi 126×64 px and it’s converted to a 72 ppi 14×7 px…

  • http://Website Cahit

    The problem with the application is about dpi of the image, i am working with 300 pixel/inc
    I tested it with 72 px/inc dpi too, here are my results

    The output for 200×200 png image with 300 px/inc is 24×24 image

    The output for 200×200 png image with 72 px/inc is 100×100 image

    I believe Bernard is having the same problem with me, so although it is a wonderful app, it is not use for me,
    Hoping to get an updated version which supports high dpi images.

  • http://www.turdhead.com VeryVito

    It’s a nice little app. My only complaint is that it only uses images w/ the “@2x” suffix. When developing Cocos2d apps, the necessary suffix is “-hd.” Would be nice to be able to specify the source suffix.

  • http://Website Bernard Krummenacher

    I just downloaded the latest update and now it works like I hoped: just dividing by two the number of pixels, regardless of the resolution (DPI).

    Thanks a lot for this simple but great tool.

  • http://www.javoid.com Javoid

    The only feature I could see adding is scaling down from iPad graphics. This could work if you allow the user to select the crop region from the iPad image. Usually it would be in the center, but some may prefer to have it set to the left or right side. I mention this because its a tedious, time-consuming task I do all the time: Make an iPad graphic with a wider background layer, then copy and paste into a retina sized art board, reduce the width of the background, export it, then Unretina. By adding this simple feature you could export all three graphics at the same time. It would be an awesome update.

  • http://www.javoid.com Javoid

    Oh, and don’t forget the extensions: art.png, art@2x.png, art-iPad.png

  • http://Website vito

    The app is great, but when resampling greyscale gradients there are quite bad artifacts…

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