A lot of developers have complained about the App Store feedback process. For one thing, nothing prevents a rival developer leaving a bad review. For another, Apple only solicit reviews from dissatisfied users. What can be done to get better reviews to counter-balance the bad ones? Maybe we could invite happy users to leave a review…

I’m a little sceptical that this will work. As a developer it’s easy to imagine that a user will be happy to sing the praises of your application. As a user, however, my time is precious, and it’s just too easy to hit the cancel button. Having a “Review this app” button on the Info page might work better — I’d be interested to see what people think though!

A friend of mine over at Taptu Mobile Search pointed me to Valgrind. Valgrind is a debugging and profiling tool, and was ported to OS X by Greg Parker. It works for iPhone development too (simulator only) with a simple mod. We haven’t used it in anger yet at Airsource, but we’ll be sure to report results when we do….

There is now a short video demonstrating the scanning process with Optiscan, at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9pB-i0xQKs

We are about to release the next version of Optiscan, featuring improved image processing algorithms, internationalisation (including Japanese), and bug fixes. It has been submitted to Apple, and will go on sale at the normal Optiscan price of $4.99. BUT – you can get Optiscan right now for $3.99, and benefit from the reduced price AND free updates.

One of the features of Optiscan about which we thought quite carefully prior to the initial release was how to stay connected to our users. We included several entry points through which our users can send us feedback when they have trouble with the application.

Here is some analysis of the user reports we’ve had, some of which contributed to the new features we’ve been working on for our first post-1.0 release, which should be out shortly.

• Several users have reported a crash when selecting a contact created by Google sync. Contacts synced from gmail using Google’s Exchange server appear to have email addresses with no label (such as “other”, “work”, “home”, etc.). If you select such a contact, Optiscan 1.0.2 will crash. We have a fix for this issue but it will be a few more days before it’s available on the App Store. Work-around: add a label to your contact’s email address, or simply sync via a different method for the moment.
• What can we do with a QR code generated on the iPhone? During our pre-release testing, one of our beta testers asked this question. They wanted to (e.g.) email it to someone, or save it to their photo album. We didn’t add this feature for the initial release because we didn’t really believe it – we thought it would be obvious that sharing a QR code is something you do in person, with someone else with scanning the code you have displayed on your screen. We were, of course, completely wrong. Several reviews and feedback emails made this very clear to us. Chastened, we’ve added a feature to save a generated QR code to the photo album to the next release. At this point we’re not planning to support direct export by email due to limitations in the iPhone SDK (you will still have to go via the Photos app). If Apple opens up more functionality to us, we will issue an update allowing you to email straight from the app. Work-around: in the mean time, you can just take a screenshot and email that.
• Failed scans. Although we’ve found and fixed a few small image processing bugs identified as a result of user reports, Optiscan’s QR code scanning is actually pretty good. Most of the reports we get turn out to be people scanning visual codes that are not QR codes, or scanning QR codes that have been printed quite small, so that the iPhone camera struggles to cope. As for the former problem, we’re considering adding support for other 2D barcode formats, but the challenge when doing so is to avoid slowing down the scan process too much; this may take a bit longer to sort out. As for the latter, we have yet to add software deblurring, so in the meantime must refer users who really need this functionality to Griffin Clarifi, which adds an extra lens to help the iPhone camera focus at short range.
• Bad QR code generators. For instance, one user has sent us a picture of a QR code with the version bits inserted in reverse order (we’re introducing a work-around, ignoring the version bits where they’re clearly invalid). In another case, a certain website claims to generate QR codes encoding vcards but instead generates something that is a slightly broken and hence unparseable VCard (at least at present). There’s not a lot we can do about these, except try to extract email addresses and phone numbers that might be of use.

So in summary, if something doesn’t work, tell us and we’ll fix it. If Optiscan doesn’t do what you want it to, tell us, and we’ll fix that too.

We’ve had quite a lot of feedback about Optiscan, from various sources. Where possible we’ve replied, but in some cases email addresses haven’t been correct, and in others no reply is possible — such as on the App Store Reviews.

We’re currently working on an update for Optiscan which will include the following features:

• Handle QR codes with invalid version bits — we found that there is at least one generator out there which produces technically invalid codes. Since it’s possible for us to support these, we will.
• Add a setting for “When code recognised, just launch the URL with no confirmation query”.
• Improve handling of partially shadowed images.
• Improve handling of blurry images.
• Localization into Japanese and several other languages.
• Tap-and-hold to save a barcode to the gallery.

We are, of course, still collecting feedback at optiscan-feedback@airsource.co.uk

We’ve added a brief FAQ for Optiscan, which is available here.

Airsource are delighted to announce that Optiscan is now available for purchase.

Optiscan is a professional quality QR Code tool, featuring by far the fastest scanner available on the App Store. Optiscan automatically locates and scans QR codes in the camera viewfinder. No more failed scans or blurry barcodes. Scans well from paper, monitors and other device screens.

• Share contacts, web addresses and text with other devices.
• Scan a wide variety of QR code data formats, including locations, email addresses and phone numbers.
• Save specific QR codes for quick sharing — perfect for sharing your business card.
• Keeps a history of QR codes created and shared for easy recall.
• Want to scan or generate codes in French? Japanese? No problem. Optiscan supports UTF-8, ISO-8859, and Shift-JIS.
• Select the contact details you want to send, to ensure the right people get the right information.
• Safari lets you save images (tap and hold the image) to the photo gallery – and Optiscan will decode them for you.

Optiscan runs without a network connection, and keeps your data private. Why put up with anything less?

Optiscan is available right now from the AppStore, priced at $4.99, £2.99, or €3.99 If you’d like to review the application, then promotional iTunes codes are available. Please email, mentioning the website where your review will be posted.

I discovered an incredibly useful resource yesterday – Mobclix. Among other things, they let you see a graph of how your iPhone App Store application – or anyone else’s – is getting on. For instance, here’s Home Barista. (more…)

I just noticed that number 24 in the UK AppStore is mBoxMail – a Hotmail client for the iPhone. That’s impressive in its own right – you don’t see many non-entertainment app that high in the AppStore. But the really interesting thing is the price – £5.99 ($9.99). Looks like there’s a good market out there for high quality applications – even at premium (for the AppStore) pricing.