Create the World

Making an app with AppMakr is fairly straight forward. You create graphics for your iTunes avatar/icon (512 x 512 png), a splash page (320 x 480 jpg) and a header (320 x 46 jpg) if you want. You then supply AppMakr with an RSS feed from your website that you want them to publish into the app. You can even include advertising from Admob or even Google Adsense if you'd like to get affiliate ad sales.

You can test out your app right on AppMakr's website using their iPhone simulator. Once you like what you see, you can then publish your app by paying AppMakr the publishing fee. AppMakr will then review your app then send it to Apple for review. Once Apple approves your app it will appear in the iTunes store for all to download.

How much does it cost?

AppMakr has two levels of pricing: $199 if published under AppMakr or $499 if published under your very own Publisher Account. By choosing the $199 option, AppMakr will be listed as your iPhone / iPod app publisher. There is no further cost to you to create your app. Your app will be available for FREE in the iTunes app store.

The $499 option is geared toward folks who have a Apple Developers Account and want to have the app published under their name and have control over the publishing process as well as setting a price for the actual app. This is not only more expensive but also a bit more complicated to do.

We chose the $199 option because we wanted the app to be free to everyone, and mostly because it was the cheaper option of the two.

So how easy was it?

The actual making the app with AppMakr was really simple. Getting the RSS feeds and sections in the app working the way I wanted them to was the hard part.

AppMakr's interface is basically a webform that you fill out. You upload an icon. You upload a splash screen. You paste in a RSS feed then choose an icon that represents that RSS feed and that's about it. The hard part was creating the different sections of the app and getting them to work the way I envisioned it.

Unfortunately, AppMakr doesn't currently have a template that will link to static webpages. It can only grab content from an RSS feed. While most of nemu*nemu's sections have RSS/atom feeds, there were a few things that I wanted to build into the app didn't have one, such as the comic archives. While I could have simply create an RSS feed that loaded all of the comics since 2006, that really wouldn't have created a great user experience and would probably put a strain on the server each time it was loaded. (Not to mention take forever to load over a 3G or EDGE connection.)

Instead, I had to figure out a way to embed the static page elements into an RSS feed, then somehow get the RSS feed to update automatically for me. Luckily, nemu*nemu uses Movable Type as its foundation. With a little time and effort I figured out how to create a new RSS template with the comics archives in separate chapters. Once that was done, I easily adapted this to my other static pages.

Next, I ran into some issues with the iPhone app simulator on AppMakr's website. I had created a special "thumbnail" for each nemu*nemu comic that featured just the first frame. The AppMakr iPhone simulator kept creating a thumbnail of the entire comic instead of showing that first frame. It drove me crazy because I kept redoing my entire RSS feed since I thought -I- was doing something wrong. I finally decided to email AppMakr support, who told me that the iPhone simulator had some limitiations but that it SHOULD work once I published my app.

If I wanted to be absolutely sure the app worked the way I wanted it to, I was told that I should register for an Apple Developers account. Once I had an Apple Dev account, I would be able to build my apps and test them on my iPhone as many times as I wanted to before submitting the App for publishing. An Apple Developers account costs $99 a year, which is an added cost but in the end it was worth it because I got to beta test my own app until I was absolutely sure it worked the way I wanted it to. This is NOT something you have to do, and it is kinda complicated to set up. However, if you are a stickler for perfection - like me - it's an investment you should make.

I built the nemu*nemu app 18 times before I was satisfied with it and paid to release it for publishing. The best part was that Audra and I got to really play with the app first hand.

Caveats

There are drawbacks to using AppMakr. One of them is that they are extremely popular right now and are getting swamped with app builds. I know they are increasing their staff to handle the demand though. Although it might sound unfair to call this a drawback, if you need answers right away for questions not covered in their documentation or FAQ, it might be.

Another is that once your app is published, you cannot update it unless you pay to do an update. AppMakr hasn't stated how much an update would cost, but I'm hoping as they get more clients the price will be lower than the $199 to build an app.

If you plan to charge for your app, you'll have to go through the process of getting an Apple Developers account and paying $499 to create your app. I haven't investigated this option, but I did go through the process of getting my Apple Developers account. That part was easy. Creating the certificates and authentication details to work with AppMakr was difficult, although it is all documented on their website.

If you are looking to support all versions of the iPhone OS and iPod Touch, you are out of luck. AppMakr's builds only work on version 3.0 of the iPhone/iPod Touch OS and support ONLY the 2nd generation and up iPod Touch devices. According to AppMakr, this is a hardware limitation of the 1st generation device. I have already heard from a few disappointed nemu*nemu readers and I've already seen a one star rating on iTunes because the app will not work on their first generation iPod Touch. So if you are looking for the widest compatibility, you'll have to look elsewhere for now.

Update: This would probably only affect webcomic developers but it I thought I would mention it anyway. AppMakr apps can cache rss content so you can view your app when there is no wireless / 3G connection, but it doesn't cache images which are actually links to images in your RSS feed. This means folks will be able to read your blog entries and other text based RSS feeds material but anything that requires images to be fetched from a server will not show up unless there is some sort of internet connection. Not a deal breaker, but something to be aware of.

Will you make an iPhone app?

So now that you have a snapshot of what it took for us to create the nemu*nemu iPhone app, you can decide if it's something you'd like to do as well. It was a really easy way to create an iPhone app and I can only imagine that they will be adding more features in the future.

The good folks at AppMakr also gave me a little gift to share with all of you who are interested in building your own iPhone app: Use the code NEMUNEMU and get $50 off your app build until February 28, 2010!

I hope you all have fun making your iPhone apps!