Compare these two pictures and tell me why on earth I’d buy from iBooks and not Amazon?

Here’s a tip, don’t try and sell an ebook for the same price I can pickup a physical copy of the book. $9.99 for an ebook is about the right price, $29.99 is not. As much of an Apple fan I am, and as much iTunes credit I have sitting there, I’m not going to spend 3x the amount just for the ‘Apple experience’. Besides I much prefer the Kindle (on iPhone & iPad) app over the iBook app, Apple pay attention to that too.

Cartoon Studio version 1.2.5 is now available in the App Store.  A small update with some minor, but welcome additions:

• Speech Bubbles can now have the arrows on top, to allow for more flexible positioning.
• You can now access a #CartoonStudio twitter search from the main menu to view other people’s cartoons right from within the app.

The little utility that just won’t die has had a small update!

What’s New in Version 2.1.1
* Stability: fixed a crash that could occur
* UI Tweaks including a new Icon
* Ready for iOS 4.2

Photo Rotate simply lets you rotate photos. Sometimes, when holding your iPhone at a strange angle and taking a photo, the orientation of the photo is incorrect. This app lets you correct the rotation of the photo, so you can view it correctly, or upload it to a site such as facebook the correct way up.

The powerful Free rotation function allows arbitrary rotation, scaling and positioning with single and multi-touch gestures.

1. Select the photo from your camera roll or photo library
2. Rotate, mirror or manipulate the photo until it looks the way you want it to.
3. Save the rotated photo. This will save to the “Camera Roll” (for devices with a camera) or “Saved Photos” (for devices without a camera) as a new photo.

Photo Rotate supports the following operations:

• Rotate 90 degrees Clockwise
• Rotate 90 degrees Anticlockwise
• Rotate 180 degrees
• Mirror horizontally
• Mirror vertically
• Free manipulation by manually positioning. rotating and scaling (zoom in or out) with finger gestures
• Works in both portrait or landscape orientation

New Cartoon ‘Mike is dead!’ from iPad Cartoon Studio

New Cartoon ‘Growth’ from iPhone Cartoon Studio. Look at that! I can post directly to my wordpress blog from here now.

Firstly my full time job of the last 12 years is still keeping me busy, managing my small software team producing Windows and Windows Mobile software for the retail market. 12 years of working with barcode scanners. Still, I have been pushing the sales team towards these babies, because it would be immensely more fun writing software for a well designed platform, as opposed to Windows Mobile.

I know this because most of my after-hours time lately has been spent deep within XCode cooking up Cartoon Studio for iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad. We are currently in version 1.0 feature freeze and are a brewing up something that is hopefully full of spit, polish and shiney. Speaking of spit and polish, I have a post about just that over at HawksBed Studios. HawksBed studios is the company founded by myself and my good friend Bort (of Twitter and FARK fame). We make a good team since I can implement things, but have no ideas, while he can’t implement anything but is full of ideas. The first (of many) ideas is Cartoon Studio and we think that so far we’re on track for something exciting. Check us out and if you’re interested in joining our wider (but still private) beta release let us know.

Meanwhile, back in March, an old friend was resurrected: PCW Entertainment. When I first discovered them in 2001 they had a big impact on me. Sure, Professional Wrestling is not a legitimate competitive sport, it is theatre. But it is physical theatre and very much so. As I trained to be a referee, learning how to take bumps and flip around I found a great respect for all of these athletes and new found ability within myself that I could do anything I wanted to, if I wanted it badly enough (even become a local tag team champion being thrown off the top of the ringpost through a table and loving it; me, a geek who avoided all exercise at all costs). So when PCW announced their return I gladly got in touch and asked “what can I do?”. They’re a good bunch of people and if you’re like me and avoid the politics, never a drama. I was back doing commentary with the excellent Christopher Bayliss in March and had a great time. The next show is coming up on the 15th May – if you’re in Melbourne Australia, enjoy WWE or TNA and have never seen local independent pro wrestling – you’re missing out.

Finally, coming back to geeky stuff, I thought a small analysis of the sales figures for Photo Rotate over the last year would be interesting. Obviously such a small utility app was not going to let me retire, in-fact I would have been happy to have recovered the cost of the iPhone developer program. But as you can see it’s been some OK pocket money. What’s more interesting is that even with tiny daily sales, where the ‘sales spikes’ occur are pretty clear:

Click to make larger

Nothing surprising, but interesting. And on that note I need to stop writing and get back to doing what I’ve been doing most lately, putting spit and polish on Cartoon Studio.