TapLynx

Today we released some big news: Push IO has acquired the TapLynx platform. Read all the details here. We think we’ve found a great home for TapLynx. We’ve worked with Push IO for years and trust the team knows the product inside and out.

This month, Push IO is re-releasing TapLynx with new features, including in-app purchasing and iAd capability. Later this summer they will take TapLynx for iPad out of beta, releasing a revamped 1.0 version.

Thanks to all of our committed TapLynx users for a great few years. We’re excited to watch the product grow with Push IO and have no doubt the addition of TapLynx to their industrial strength platform will be of benefit to TapLynx users.

Greetings! Lindsay guest blogging here from Push IO – providers of mobile engagement solutions, specializing in push notifications and alerts. We partnered with NewsGator a few months ago to provide all the notifications to TapLynx-based apps, and we’d like to thank our friends at NewsGator for giving us an opportunity to talk about this useful feature. This partnership has been great so far, increasing engagement of participating TapLynx apps and pleasing customers who now have a means to customize their favorite apps at no additional cost. Also, we’re pleased to announce that Discovery News, the first TapLynx app to implement notifications, recently exceeded the one million mark for delivered alerts! Well done, Discovery News, well done!

When the average iPhone user has 50 to 100 applications on their phone, it can be difficult to ensure that your application remains active among users. Push notifications are an effective tool for overcoming this challenge. Among the 60 or 70 apps on my phone, I use about six on a regular basis. Two of these get such regular attention because of the alerts that remind me they’re there. Along with drawing in users even when they’re outside the app environment, notifications provide a means to increase the personalization of any TapLynx-based app.

Today, I’d like to tell you about the two key reasons why notifications are useful: engagement and personalization.

Engagement
Implementing notifications for your application helps to keep users returning regularly. With such a dense number of applications available, it’s understandable that people have difficulty keeping up with all the options. Providing occasional alerts serves as a reminder of the new content being published via your app and keeps users up to date.

Personalization
When a user enables the notifications feature of an app, they’re prompted to select specific sub-topics about which they’d like to receive alerts. This allows them to be notified only about the content that they choose, immediately making the app more personally relevant. While this option for customization is clearly beneficial for the user who no longer has to sift through extraneous information, it’s also an asset for the creator of the app. By presenting users with a tool to align your application more directly with their interests, you automatically increase the relevance of your app for your users – without having to write any code!

One more key feature of the notifications service is built-in engagement tracking that keeps you tuned in to the activity on your app. Once notifications have been enabled on your application, you’ll receive daily emails with your engagement statistics.

So we think it’s clear that push notifications drive up engagement and result in a more relevant and more effective app, but have I mentioned that it’s incredibly easy to set this feature up on any TapLynx app?
Sign up here for an account with us at Push IO: https://taplynx.pushio.com/users/new – and then follow the basic instructions.

Additionally, the first 25,000 notifications are FREE for any TapLynx customer, with no obligation to continue the service, after which point you can choose from a range of packages to accommodate your needs.

We’d also like to thank our technical support team member, Josh Clauss, who’s helped many TapLynx customers to get this service up and running in their apps. Josh makes the setup easy, and he’s always happy to assist new customers with the process.

TapLynx has a complete wiki page with all the details at: developer.newsgator.com/wiki/index.php?title=Push_Notifications

Thanks – we look forward to helping your app succeed!

Over at Tiny Shiny Apps, they’ve posted a list of features comparing TapLynx and Appmakr. There are succinct and fair observations, and they’ve done a good job of pointing out some of TapLynx’s best features, such as the fact that you as the developer have full control over your app. They also note how TapLynx performs better and places no restrictions on the developer once TapLynx is in your hands.

Read the blog post here: www.tinyshinyapps.co.uk/2010/01/26/taplynx-and-appmakr-comparison/

And head over to Tiny Shiny Apps to see the services they offer, which includes apps made from TapLynx: www.tinyshinyapps.co.uk/

There was an article in today’s Wall Street Journal titled, “Three Best Ways to Build an iPhone App.”  While the three suggestions they have are definitely rather general in nature, and not specific, they’re still good suggestions worth keeping in mind.

Their first suggestion: make your app truly useful and not just a novelty item.  ”To get on customers’ devices — and stay on them — your app needs to provide real value or solve a problem.”  I definitely agree with that.  In my humble opinion, TapLynx is perfect for creating content apps that are just that: useful

The second suggestion: beware the potential pitfalls.  They suggest that there is “such a thing as too much information, especially on a mobile device.” I mostly agree with that, but different users obviously have different thresholds for how much is too much — so I’m not sure it always applies.  The converse that they list, “don’t create an app that you never update,” is definitely true though.

The last suggestion? A no brainer: “promotion, promotion, promotion.”  They explain how easy it is to be lost in the noise, so it’s critical to promote your apps and make sure people are aware of them.  You can just launch an iPhone app and expect that people are going to discover it without doing marketing around it. Unfortunately, it — with rare exception — just does not work that way.

You can read the full article here.