Ever since Apple introduced the App Store, there’s been a gold rush of sorts to the iPhone & iOS platform. With the release of the iPod touch and iPad, interest in the devices has only grown, but unfortunately so have development costs. So what is it going to cost you to get that app developed for the iPhone? It depends on a number of factors, so here are some numbers on hourly and project rates to give you an idea. It’s generally not cheap, but there are some solutions for affordable app development.

FYI, I’m going to refer to the iPhone here but obviously this pertains to the iPad and iPod touch just the same, it’s all the iOS platform.

It’s no surprise that iPhone developers are short on supply and high on demand, and naturally this means it’s going to cost quite a bit to develop an app. There’s really two routes to go if you’re looking to have an iPhone app developed; you can pay a contractor hourly, or you can pay a flat bid rate from either a company that specializes in app development or to an outsourced agency that pumps out apps.

For developers in the USA and the EU zone, it’s not unusual for an iPhone developer to charge well over $100/hour to do contract iOS development, but realistically the hourly range is anywhere from $50/hour to $250/hour, with experience and name recognition usually setting the price. The hourly costs have been this high for going on two years now, and given the limited pool of dev talent it’s no surprise that it’s a developers market. If this is completely out of your price range, read on and you’ll find cheaper solutions thanks to outsourcing to overseas developers.

Coming along for the iPhone ride are a number of boutique development companies that focus only on mobile app work. If you decide to go with a company that specializes in iOS development you’ll likely be given a flat project rate that covers all the development costs. Depending on which outfit you go through, you can get a decent deal this way or be in for major sticker shock. Here are some examples:

Relatively Simple or Small App: $3000-$8000 – this is based on a sample of data from TechCrunch that polled 124 developers, and found the average development cost was $6,453. This is in line with what LOLerApps paid for the development of their app called Baby Maker, which isn’t terribly complex and cost around $5000 via outsourcing on ELance. After 50 days LOLerApps sold just enough copies of Baby Maker to break even on development costs, which isn’t terrible but who knows what they spent on marketing and advertising the app.

If you’re interested in developing an iPhone app and want a realistic assessment on sales numbers and development costs, LOLerApps is amazingly candid and their blog is well worth a read since they share just about everything.

More Complex or Recognized Brand App: $50,000-$150,000 – it was reported that the official Barack Obama app was developed in 22 days at a rate of $100-$150/hour, with roughly 500-1000 hours put into the app. The Obama app isn’t simple but it isn’t as complex as some of the other apps out there, so I imagine some of the costs here are scaled up based purely on the recognizable brand associated with the app itself.

The bottom line; if you’re looking to develop either a very complicated app, or you’re a large recognized entity and looking to put out an iPhone app, it’s going to cost you some serious cash.

The big question remains: Is app development cost effective? This really depends on so many factors that it’s impossible to answer for everyone. Things to consider when you ask this question are: which category of app you fall into, how strongly you feel about the idea, how complex the app is, and what your marketing budget looks like.

A post on O’Reilly Digital Media blog sums up the situation for higher expenditure apps:

a full-time contract iPhone developer costs $5,000/week and it may take four to six weeks for an application to be developed. Sometimes it will take less and sometimes it will take more. Add to development the other costs – project management, design, QA, and marketing, to name a few. It’s not uncommon to spend $30,000 and up on an iPhone development project.

You’ll need to run the numbers yourself and see if it makes sense. It’s obviously not cost effective to spend $150,000 on development and marketing to sell only 2000 apps a year for $1 each. The solution might be to find a cheaper route to get your product to market.

Before you get totally discouraged with some of the costs and numbers, realize that you can certainly find cheaper app developers, particularly if you outsource the development through a site like ELance or oDesk, where you can get experienced developers in India, Russia, and Ukraine, for as little as $15/hour. Outsourcing has it’s own pros and cons, and I’ll leave it up to you to decide if it’s a worthwhile approach for your apps development. The big advantage of going the ELance/ODesk route is obviously price, you set a flat budget and have developers bid proposals for the project, which will save you a lot of money.

Regardless of which approach you take, it’s best to have your idea as fleshed out as possible so there is little question in terms of what you want. The more details you can document and explain the better, a developer can’t read your mind but will certainly charge you while attempting to. Any ambiguity on things like the apps functionality or GUI just leads to longer development time and ultimately more money out of your pocket. Be as specific as possible, sketch out the functionality in something like Visio clone for Mac, and be very clear when communicating your vision.

Of course the other option is to just learn Cocoa and Objective C and write an iPhone app yourself. If you decide to go this route, be sure to download and install the iPhone SDK first, and then pick up a good book on the topic, like Beginning iPhone 3 Development: Exploring the iPhone SDK. This certainly isn’t the easiest route, but it may be the cheapest if you are technically inclined.

iTunes 10 has a cool feature where you can use album art as a HUD mini-player on your desktop, it looks pretty great and reminds me of the iPod music player on the iPod touch and iPhone where it’s centered around the album art, being totally barebones except for when you hover over and click the album art.

You’ll need the latest version of iTunes, if you don’t have it yet you can download iTunes 10 from Apple or Software Update.

• Launch iTunes 10
• Within iTunes 10, click on the small vertical arrow button in the lower left corner to bring up the album art display
• (Refer to the screenshots below if you’re confused as to what to click)
• Now click on the actual album art
• The iTunes 10 HUD mini-player will now appear, you can resize it and drag it where ever you want.
• Hover over the mini player to access music controls

If you like the iPhone/iPod style music player you should especially love this, it’s like having the iPod player right on your desktop. This album art player behaves just like any Quick Time window, so hover over it access the window controls to close it, as well as controls to pause, play, and skip songs, adjust sound volume and more.

The controls fade in and out of the album art which blends seamlessly onto the desktop just like the new version of Quick Time does. Drag the album art onto a spot on your desktop and enjoy the music.

I think this is a pretty cool feature of iTunes 10 and it looks a lot better than keeping the iTunes mini player somewhere on the desktop.

For most people if you want to change your Mac computer name you just do it through the Sharing system preference, it’s quick and very easy. For those of us that are more geekishly inclined, we like to do things through the Terminal.

Here’s how to change your Mac hostname with the command line and make it permanent:
scutil –set HostName new_hostname
Simply replace new_hostname with whatever you want your hostname to be changed to, for example I want to change my Mac’s hostname to MacBookPro, I will use this command:
scutil –set HostName MacBookPro
You will be asked for your admin password since you’re using the sudo command. After the command is executed you can verify that the changes took place by typing:
hostname

You can also set a temporary hostname change by using the following command:
sudo hostname new_hostname
This will reset itself after your Mac reboots though, so if you want a permanent hostname change, use the above command instead. Thank you to commenter Jim for pointing this out!

That’s all there is to it. By default Mac OS X will usually assign the hostname as whatever the admin account username is. Changing your Mac’s hostname can make it easier to find your Mac on a network and to connect to.

The release of iOS 4 brought multitasking to the iPhone and iPod touch (and the iPad in November), which is a great feature but I’ve had more than one person ask me how to quit apps that are running in the background.

You can quit these multitasked apps by double-clicking the Home button to bring up a task manager of sorts, and then tapping and holding your finger on an apps icon. You’ll then see a red icon appear in the left corner of the app icon and when you click on that the app closes.

As TheGraphicMac points out, this is kind of inappropriately hidden to the average user for no clear reason. I’ve had to show people how to use this feature a few times so hopefully it’s use is clarified a bit in future versions of iOS. [multitasking picture borrowed from The Graphic Mac]

If you’ve seen the new iPod Nano commercial featuring the newly released touch screen iPod Nano, you’ve heard the new song playing in the background. Apple commercials have a certain power to them, they typically propel a song into popularity rather quickly and people start asking what song is playing in the latest Apple commercial.

The song is called “Short skirt, long jacket” by Cake.

You can listen to the full song below via YouTube:

What I think is interesting about Apple choosing this song is that it’s not a new song, it’s been out since 2007. Typically Apple will feature songs in their commercials that are new and from somewhat obscure bands, which then propels them into stardom. This is an older song from a well known band, but I’m sure the song will gain in popularity anyway.

You can also check out the new iPod touch commercial song and the iPad commercial song. You can always find out what song is playing by using the Shazam app, it’s quick and free.

Those of us waiting for the iOS 4.1 release don’t have too long to go, Apple is set to make the iPhone and iPod touch OS update available for download next week on Wednesday, September 8. Apple didn’t announce an official date, but their UK iPhone site has publicly marked the availability date as just a few days away.

The software update is hotly anticipated, not only for its additional features but for some significant bug fixes including the proximity sensor issue on iPhone 4, and apparently iOS 4.1 improves the speed and performance of the iPhone 3G, which makes it a necessary download for any owner of a 3G running slow iOS 4.0.

The iOS 4.1 download is actually available now for developers, and while other iPhone and iPod touch owners have just a tad longer to go, the iPad will not be included in the update. Instead, iOS 4.2 for iPad will be released in November.

Apple took the functionality to buy a ringtone out of iTunes 10 for some reason, but that doesn’t mean you can’t have custom ringtones. You can make your own free iPhone ringtones directly within iTunes 10, this is the best way to go since you don’t have to get any additional software or pay for a service to create the files. Don’t download or pay for one of the iPhone ringtone maker apps, just launch iTunes and follow this guide, it’s easy to do and totally free.

If you’ve made an iPhone ringtone before the process will be familiar to you. This will work the same on both Mac and Windows versions of iTunes 10:

• Launch iTunes 10
• Find and select the song you want to make a ringtone out of in iTunes 10
• Right-click on the song name and select ‘Get Info’, then click on the Options tab
• Select the playback period of the song that you want to ringtone to be, make sure it’s 30 seconds

• Now click “OK” and then right click on the song again, and select “Create AAC version” to create a new version of the song with the 30 second interval you specified
• Locate this newly created 30 second clip in iTunes (at the top of the playlist if you search by ‘date added’ and right click on the file and then select “Show in Finder”
• Now in the Finder (or Windows explorer, the process is the same for Windows iTunes 10), rename the file extension from .m4a to .m4r

• Accept the file extension change to .m4r
• Now back in iTunes remove the file from the playlist (do NOT move to Trash, select ‘keep file’) and then re-import the file into iTunes 10 by double clicking the .m4r file within the Finder or Windows
• The file will now be added back into iTunes as a ringtone and you can do what you want with it

• Sync it with your iPhone and assign to contacts as usual with custom iPhone ringtones

If you used iTunes 9 to make custom iPhone ringtones the process is very similar.

Enjoy your free iPhone ringtones!

Before the iPad and before iBook’s were the digital iBookstore, the iBook was the predecessor to the MacBook. I had a few of the white iBooks and they were good machines. I always just resell my old Mac’s when I upgrade, but it’s kind of nice to see the older models still in use.

[ via Flickr ]

Apple announced iOS 4.1 to a big hooray from iPhone 3G owners, since the iOS 4.1 update supposedly fixes the speed problems on the 3G. But how does the iPhone 3G actually run with iOS 4.1? I like real world tests, and this video from LifeHacker demonstrates the speed of the 3G with iOS 4.1.

If you own an iPhone 3G and you are running iOS 4, you’ve certainly suffered from the performance and speed issues. To say that iOS 4 runs slow on iPhone 3G is an understatement, it runs terribly slow almost to the point of being unusable.

The big question is about iOS 4.1 speed… here’s the video:

As you can see in the video iOS 4.1 runs much better on the 3G iPhone. It’s mostly good news: Google Maps is responsive again, you can actually type a text message in under 5 hours, and opening apps is quicker again. Lifehacker notes that Photos and Safari are just barely faster with iOS 4.1, but any speed improvement is better than none in my view. Just don’t expect to achieve the performance of the iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4 since their hardware is vastly superior to the 3G.

I look forward to further testing iOS 4.1 with my older iPhone 3G and seeing if some of the tips to speed up the slow iPhone 3G + iOS 4 work doubly well in the newer iOS version. I don’t use Spotlight on the iPhone so I’ll certainly keep it disabled. Perhaps with the latest update and some tweaks, we can actually get a usable iPhone again? Woohoo!

You can download iOS 4.1 right now if you’re a developer, the rest of the world has to wait until sometime next week for the full release with its various fixes and feature improvements. iOS 4.1 is only for iPhone 3G, 3GS, iPhone 4, and iPod touch. The iPad will get iOS 4.2 in November.

Along with new iTunes 10 download came a number of interface changes, ranging from a new icon, vertical window control bars, album art displays, and the greyscale conversion of the sidebar icons. If you preferred the colorful sidebar icons of iTunes 9 and prior, you can swap out a rsrc file within iTunes 10 and be done with the plain greys icons once and for all.

Changing the iTunes 10 sidebar icons back to color from grey is pretty easy:

• Quit iTunes
• Right-click on the iTunes 10 app icon within your /Applications folder, click on ‘Show Package Contents’
• Open up the ‘Resources’ folder and location the file ‘iTunes.rsrc’ and save a backup of this somewhere, or rename it to iTunes-backup.rsrc
• Download the color icons iTunes.rsrc file and drop it into the Resources folder
• Close the folders and relaunch iTunes 10
• Enjoy the color icons again!

The color iTunes.rsrc file is courtesy of a MacRumors forum user who modified and hosted the iTunes files on his own site.

If you’re not thrilled with the new interface, you can combine this tip with a few others to replace the iTunes 10 icon back to iTunes 9 and also change iTunes 10 control buttons to horizontal a la iTunes 9. Suddenly your iTunes will look like it did before, but still have all the great features of iTunes 10.

If you have an older MacBook or MacBook Pro and you envy your friends with newer models and their fancy inertial scrolling, envy no more. InertialScroll is a simple freeware utility that allows you to enable inertia scrolling on older Mac laptops, the only requirement is that they have multitouch trackpads (this covers at least 2009 and some 2008 models).

The app is very simple to use, you just enable the feature through the app in your menubar, and you can disable it the same way. You can check out InertialScroll here.

(For those that do have newer MacBook models and don’t like the feature, you can disable inertia scrolling rather easily too.)

If you’ve ever created an icon for an app in Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, you may have noticed that the colors are represented slightly differently, and sometimes a bit washed out or saturated after you save them. Apparently this is because of Snow Leopard’s color management and how it handles colorspaces.

Have no fear, there is a solution! The folks at Panic Software (creators of my favorite FTP client, Transmit) have a solution to accurately save icons in Snow Leopard, and it goes something like this:

• Within PhotoShop click on “Edit” and go down to “Convert to Profile
• Select “Generic RGB Profile”
• Now “Save for Web” and make a Generic RGB PNG of the icon (be sure to uncheck “Convert to sRGB”)
• Drag the new color-corrected PNG file into Icon Composer, and save

Now your icon should render colors exactly as intended with the proper Generic RGB profile applied to it.

Head on over to the Panic Blog for a full walkthrough with screenshots.

I’m liking iTunes 10 but I can’t say I’m a fan of the vertical control buttons, which some are calling ‘traffic lights’ since well, it resembles traffic lights. Sure it saves space but it breaks away from the standardized UI convention. Thankfully we can change back to the classic horizontal buttons without much effort.

If you want to get the classic horizontal close/minimize/maximize buttons back in iTunes 10, type the following into the Terminal and relaunch the iTunes app:
defaults write com.apple.iTunes full-window -1 If this gives you trouble try this command for the same effect: defaults write com.apple.iTunes full-window -boolean YES

If you want to reverse the changes back to the newer iTunes 10 style vertical buttons, use this:
defaults write com.apple.iTunes full-window -0 or defaults write com.apple.iTunes full-window -boolean NO

Again you just need to quit and reopen iTunes 10 for the changes to take effect.

A big thanks to Paster who provided this tip in the comments on how to change the iTunes 10 icon back to the iTunes 9 icon style.

If you haven’t downloaded iTunes 10 yet, it’s a worthwhile upgrade and the Ping social music system is fun to play around with.

The official Twitter client for iPad is now available to download, and it’s pretty impressive. Centered around consumption, it features panes that allow for easy viewing of photos, news stories, tweets, and even a built-in media player that allows you to watch videos directly in the app either within a floating window or fullscreen. It’s still sort of shocking to me that the screenshot above is a Twitter client, certainly doesn’t look like what you imagine when you think of Twitter does it?

Naturally the iPad client supports touch gestures and interestingly enough, they made the iPad Twitter client not require a login initially, meaning you can start consuming without signing up for anything.

This is a pretty interesting direction for Twitter to go, the iPad client is now more full featured than their website… what’s that tell you? You can download the iPad version directly from iTunes, it’s free.

I think it’s safe to say that this is the best Twitter client for iPad at this point. Perhaps not for its simplicity, since it’s a pretty complex client, but for raw consumption of media and link sharing in the Twitter world it’s pretty amazing. If you have an iPad, don’t miss it.

It seems like it was just moments ago that iTunes 10 became available to download, but already there are some complaints about the new blue button icon. 6ix Passions points out that it looks awkward in their Dock and offers a simple solution; revert back to the old iTunes 9 icon. Here’s how to get the old iTunes icon back:

• Go into your Applications folder, select iTunes.
• Right click on the file and select Show Package Contents.
• Go under the Resources folder and make a copy of iTunes.icns on your desktop (for backup purposes).
• Replace it with the old iTunes.icns file from the previous iTunes version (9 and below).
• Start or restart iTunes.

Now you’ll have the old iTunes 9 style icon back, featuring its music note layered on top of a CD. Perhaps it’s just that people don’t like change, or maybe they’re still attached to their CD’s, who knows.

Apple has released a new iPod touch that has all the great features of the iPhone 4 (minus cell), and along with any new iPod release comes a new commercial. The newest iPod touch commercial is called “All kinds of fun” and it shows the iPod touch shooting video, in FaceTime calls, and using other cool new features on the device. Of course there’s a catchy song playing in the background, and that song is about to get really popular per the Apple Commercial Effect.

The song is called “Come Home” by the artist Chappo, and it’s off of the ‘Plastique Universe EP’. You can listen to the full song below.

This is the full Chappo song “Come Home” via YouTube:

You can find out what song is playing with the Shazam app for iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch. I used it to find out what song was playing in this new iPod touch commercial as well as to discover what the new iPad commercial song is. It’s a great app and worth a place on any iOS device.

Some users are experiencing problems trying to download iTunes 10, and there’s even a few rumors circulating that iTunes 10 will not be available to download yet – these are not true, iTunes 10 is available to download now. If you encounter problems with downloading iTunes 10 from Apple’s iTunes site, you can try one of these direct download links from Apple:

These direct download links have been verified to work as of 7:20PM PST, the files are on Apple’s servers and are not rehosted or mirrored elsewhere yet.

iTunes 10 for Mac OS X – Download now

iTunes 10 for Windows 64-bit – Download now

iTunes 10 for Windows 32-bit – Download now

Announced at the September 1 media event, iOS 4.1 for iPhone and iPod Touch is now available to download from Apple. Well, for developers anyway. The iOS 4.1 GM seed is listed on the iPhone developer page for immediately download for developers, but everyone else will have to wait until next week to get the full release.

Version 4.1 of iOS includes several important bug fixes as well as a couple new features:

• Proximity sensor issue fixed for iPhone 4 owners
• Bluetooth problems fixed
• iOS 4 slowness problems with iPhone 3G fixed – this is a big one for iPhone 3G owners
• HDR photo features
• HD video upload over WiFi
• TV show rentals
• Game Center

Developers can access and download the iOS 4.1 GM from the iPhone Developer home page right now.

Everyone else will have to wait for next week where to get the iOS software update, you’ll open up iTunes and click on “Check for Update” if a manual notification doesn’t inform you of the available download on it’s own. You can then choose to just download the update or download and install the update. Presumably you will need iTunes 10 before everyone else can download and install the iOS 4.1 update.

iOS 4.1 will not be released for iPad, but iOS 4.2 will be available on the iPad in November which will bring all the iOS 4 software features to iPad.

Apple has announced that iOS 4.2 for the iPad will be available in November when it is also released for iPhone and iPod touch. This is in line with previous rumors suggesting iOS 4.2 would unify all the versions of iOS across the i-device product lineup. This also fits into Apple saying that iOS 4 for iPad would be available in the fall.

iOS 4.2 will bring all the existing features of iOS 4.1 to the iPad plus new features that are exclusive to iOS 4.2:

• Multitasking
• Folders
• AirPlay wireless music, movie, and photo streaming
• Printing support over wireless networks
• Game Center for multiplayer and social gaming
• Unified and improved Mail inbox
• Search text within Safari
• Enhanced enterprise support
• Accessibility enhancements
• Keyboard and dictionary enhancements

Of course the most anticipated features are multitasking and folders, but some of the other additions look to be great as well. Airplay looks promising, which will allow you to stream music and video to and from the iPad over WiFi, and Print center, will allow you to wirelessly print and manage documents from the iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch. The total new features and improvements count over 100, which will make the iPad function almost as if it’s a new device.

The exact release date isn’t known but November isn’t too far off, we’ll let you know when you can download the update. You can read more about the upcoming iOS 4.2 update for iPad at Apple.com

iTunes 10 has been announced and will be available to download starting today via Software Update. Featuring a fancy new icon that finally ditches the CD, iTunes 10 also has a more attractive album management system and a built in social network.

Perhaps the most interesting feature of iTunes 10 is Ping, the new social music discovery network from Apple. Built directly into the iTunes app, Ping allows iTunes users to follow artists and other users, get concert listings, discuss music, share your music preferences, and more. With 160 million existing iTunes users and the ability to access Ping on your Mac, PC, iPhone, and iPod Touch, Ping is looking to quickly dominate the social music scene. Ping’s feed looks a lot like Facebook and I’d expect a way to cross-publish between the two shortly. Ping will only be accessible via iTunes 10.

To get the newest version of iTunes 10, go to either Apples iTunes download website or load up Software Update from the Apple menu, it will appear as an available download.

Apple’s iTunes download website is here, you do not need to enter your email address, you can just click on ‘Download Now’ and the download will start.

Update: Some people are reporting problems downloading iTunes 10 or that they can’t download iTunes 10. If you are having troubles downloading iTunes 10, refresh the iTunes download page and try clearing your cache. I can confirm that it is available for download.