This is the sort of evening where Stockholm flirts with me. I’ve spent too long with colleagues I seldom speak to, talking about things we never talk about during work hours. It’s so entertaining, I lose track of time, and suddenly it’s too late, I’m missing my train, and I may as well wait. A few colleagues invite me out to a pub, but I’m just short of time; going there would mean I’d miss even the next train.

Leaving the office, the air is wet but remarkably warm for late April. I could take off my jacket, but I know that would be an invitation to Thor. In the alley, I witness a short but intense gang-fight. At first I can’t tell the combatants apart (these people look the same to me in the gray dusk), but eventually I get clear sight of one of them: It’s a fox. So close to the city. I clap my hands and shout, and he runs off, leaving the cat alone to lick its wounds in the bushes.

Walking on, here it smells like pipe tobacco. Not a person in sight, just grey concrete, but the scent is unmistakable. When is the last time I smoked tobacco in a pipe? Ten years? Fifteen years? Some habits leave a trail that you can never run from. Stockholm is more than flirting with me, it’s kissing me hard and grabbing my crotch. Every vista, every beetle, every shout heard around a corner, reminds me why I live here.

It’s true! At long last, after months and months of late nights, the book is done. Available in digital and paper form from Apress, as well as Amazon.com and elsewhere. I’ve also set up LearnCocoa.org to be a gathering-place for readers of the book; Right now, there’s not much there except for links to buy the book, and to a discussion forum where you can post questions, and also find the source code to all the example apps created in the book.

Big thanks once again to everyone who made this possible!

For years, I’ve been running a comment system here that’s been plagued with a variety of problems. I’ve gotten tired of fixing it, and it looks like Disqus is a much more capable system anyway, so I’ve changed. The old comments are still around, and will probably still be around forever, but for new comments, it’s all Disqus now.

My wife just pointed out that I haven’t blogged at all since last August! But, I have a good excuse: I’ve been writing Learn Cocoa on the Mac. And to top things off, I’m basically done! The book itself isn’t yet in print (though it will be soon), but as of a couple of days ago, the actual writing is done; All chapters are complete, all the screenshots are in place, and it’s all passed off to copy editors and layout people and whatnot (the parts of the publishing process that I really don’t know anything about). All that’s left for me is a bit of proofreading, approving editorial changes, etc.

So, sometime in January, the book should appear on bookshelves near you! Or, if not near you, at least it’s on Amazon and elsewhere. More info when I know the exact release date.

Anyway, this has been a huge project. Lots of work, and extremely satisfying on any number of levels. And now that it’s basically done, I find that I already miss it! I guess I’ll have to go on writing.

It has come to my attention that I haven’t said a word here about my current side project, which I’m spending all my spare time working on: I’m writing a book! This comes as a surprise to me as much as anyone, but there it is. Through a happy set of coincidences, I’ve been given the opportunity to work on the upcoming Apress book “”http://www.apress.com/book/view/1430218592">Learn Cocoa on the Mac" along with Dave Mark and Jeff LaMarche, not to mention Mark Dalrymple doing tech review, and of course Clay Andres and the rest of the team at Apress.

This opportunity came about through a string of coincidences. Some of them hinge on things that I’ve done over time without any hope or intention of writing a book, which goes to show, perhaps, that sometimes when you reap what you sow, the harvest may be quite unexpected!

Anyway, this is a huge undertaking, and I feel like a bit of a hermit, eschewing the watching of TV and the reading of blogs in favor of the writing of pages, but I am truly having a blast.

At a party last night, a friend of a friend made a startling observation about my current appearance, saying that I resembled a combination of Wolverine and Swedish journalist Göran Greider, in terms of mutton-chops and wild-hairedness. See image below for astonishing proof!

You have no idea how hilarious this revelation was.

I don’t know if it’s been exactly 1000 days, but sometime during the fall of 2007, some friends and I created Band of None. Our first 1000 days of existence have been, frankly, uneventful. The band’s members and their families have all socialized on several occasions, and in fact the Band of None new year’s eve “we should be performing at this party” discussion has become an annual tradition of its own. Our self-confidence and faith in our destined future as rock’n’roll superstars is matched only by our lack of available time to pursue our dreams. At this point, approximately 1000 days into our journey to musical stardom, I’d like to recap some of our accomplishments thus far:

• Number of live performances: None
• Number of recording deals signed: None
• Number of paid sales of our songs: None
• Revenue from merchandise sales: None
• Number of rehearsals where all band members were present: None
• Number of drug-related deaths: None
• Number of hotel rooms destroyed: None
• Amount of money spent on equipment: None
• Number of days traveling on the road: None
• Total radio plays of all Band of None singles (approx): None

As you can see, we don’t have a lot to be proud of! Be that as it may, I’d strongly encourage you to check out our website and maybe even our myspace page and listen to some of our future classics. “Hoffburger” may be the best, but “Your Myspace Page” has something going for it as well.

Yesterday I released a new pair of games for iPhone and iPod touch in the App Store, Diabolotros and Diabolotros Lite. Diabolotros is a retro arcade shooter, most of the gameplay is lifted straight from classics like Space Invaders, but I’ve given it a few twists of my own, and added iPhonetastic tilt’n’shake controls: You tilt the device to steer your ship, and when you have special weapons available, you fire them by giving the the phone a little shake!

Things for you to see and do:

• Diabolotros info page
• Diabolotros “sneak preview” on YouTube from a few weeks ago
• Dave Mark’s kind words about the game
• Purchase Diabolotros on the App Store
• Download Diabolotros Lite on the App Store

Last night, I spoke at an iPhone-themed event hosted by Excitera as part of their Mobile Cup, presenting some information for “iPhone-curious” developers and entrepreneurs about the iPhone development process. I gave a non-technical presentation of the series of steps/tasks that any new iPhone developer will need to go through. The slides are available <a href=“http://nuthole.com/app_store_ten_steps.pdf”.

Aaron Ardiri also presented his experiences developing his series of games, and John Chang talked about some of the things he’s dealt with working on Skype’s iPhone app as well as some insights from his previous work at Apple. There will be some video available later, I’ll post a link here when it’s up!

Big thanks to Hannes Dernehl for arranging and hosting the event, and Cristobal Viedma for asking me to be a part of it!

Some time ago I posted some charts showing how my first iPhone game, Scribattle, was doing after the release of its free sibling, Scribattle Lite. It turns out that the game was at that time already nearing the heights of its popularity (but oh, what heights it hit!) The absolute peak occurred on March 3rd and 4th; during that 2-day period, the full version sold 800 copies and the free version was downloaded a quarter of a million times (that’s 250,000 times).

The charts below show the progression of events after that. Unlike the previous charts, here I’ve chosen to include the actual numbers of sales and downloads, instead of just showing them in relative terms. In both charts you’ll see a temporary sales up-swing, lasting about 5 days, from the 13th to the 18th of March; That’s the time period I ran a “sale” on Scribattle, selling it for $0.99 instead of $2.99. It didn’t impact my revenue much during those days (roughly triple the sales numbers, but each sale yielding in one-third the revenue), but it may have temporarily delayed the inevitable decline, since the increased sales numbers helped keep it in the charts a little longer.

The chart on the left is a plain linear plot of Scribattle purchase and Scribattle Lite free downloads, with the downloads for Scribattle Lite divided by 100. Without doing that division, you wouldn’t see any difference in sales of Scribattle, just a solid blue line along the bottom, because the ratio of Scribattle purchases to Scribattle Lite downloads has normally hovered between 1:200 and 1:100. So, on the big peak day, March 3rd, Scribattle was bought 373 times, and Scribattle Lite was downloaded 131,000 times.

The chart on the right is the raw data (no dividing anything by 100), but this time plotted on a logarithmic scale. Doing this tends to flatten out the peaks, while at the same time accentuating the differences in the smaller ranges. Here you can more clearly see the nature of the “long tail” that Scribattle and Scribattle Lite are currently experiencing; free downloads and sales have both been holding pretty steady for about a month! Granted, I’d be happy to see the steady-state numbers be higher, but I really can’t complain about it either.

One interesting spot in these graphs is April 9th. That’s when I released an update to Scribattle Lite containing ads (they don’t affect the gameplay, but instead turn up between levels every few minutes). Looking at the logarithmic chart, you may detect a slight spike in sales, followed by a slightly sharper decline, leading down to the current steady state a few days later. I’m not sure if this was caused by the inclusion of ads, or just happened anyway, but there it is.