I could not resist:

Some of you - the constantly growing Visual Dial user base - have told us that Visual Dial occasionally jumps back to the Home Screen right after application launch. We've investigated the issue and made a minor change to the code which should fix it. Version 1.2 has been submitted to Apple for review today.

For the technically addicted here is a bit of background:

1.) Believe it or not but the iPhone SDK in its current version 2.2 does not offer any call related APIs. To programatically place a call a 3rd party application has to call a specific URL schema. In addition you're limited to supplying only numbers, so internationally coded phone numbers like +49xxx do not work. Placing calls is doable but there is no real phone API as we all know it from other devices/products.

2.) Though widely known to developers most customers are not aware of another limitation 3rd party applications for the iPhone are facing: They cannot run as background processes. For Visual Dial this means that once Visual Dial places the speed call for you, it gets terminated by the iPhone OS. It's not running in the background waiting for the call to be finished. It gets terminated in exactly the same way as if you would press the Home button or switch off the device. In addition once the call is finished the application is launched again by the iPhone OS. And the same as for terminating the app holds true when it comes to relaunching: It's a clean launch. Exactly as if you manually start it by tapping the app icon.

Working around the first part is pretty straight forward. Visual Dial replaces any "+" by the international access code. This option is fully configurable since version 1.1.

However, the constraints outlined in 2. cause a bigger headache. The main problem is that the SDK currently has no built-in means for an app to reliably differentiate whether it got launched by a user or relaunched after a call. Obviously we did not want Visual Dial to fully relaunch after each speed call. And of course Visual Dial gracefully terminates itself and takes you back to your Home Screen right after it has placed a call. But: This involves a couple of workarounds. Version 1.0 and 1.1 had a subtle issue in situations where the iPhone for no obvious reason did not relaunch Visual Dial after a call. We could not reproduce the situation on any of our testing devices but thanks to one of our customers (Paul, it's you!) we were able to troubleshoot it on his device remotely.

That said: Version 1.2 solves any issues with Visual Dial terminating unexpectedly in situations similar to the one outlined above.

One last word: Unfortunately we've found some average (3-4 star) reviews in international stores. Apple does not allow developers to directly respond to these. This is a terrible situation as some of the remarks are either entirely wrong, posted by competition or have been addressed by our updates.

In any case we'd like to reemphasize that customer satisfaction is extremely important for us. In case anything does not work as expected we'd encourage everybody to contact our technical support staff directly through our corporate website.

Visual Dial has entered the Utilities Top 25 today. We're looking forward to receiving your feedback!

We're pleased to hear that AppMinute is featuring our iTree at the Killer App Cast. (Thanks to AppBeacon for the tip!) Here's their YouTube video:

With the latest update to our much acclaimed Home Screen speed dial application for the iPhone we're better supporting our Asia customers. We've introduced settings that allow you to modify the way Visual Dial handles the replacement of the "+" symbol in phone numbers.

In many countries "+" can be used instead of the international access code. For example in Germany +49-xxxx-xxx is equivalent to dialing 0049-xxxx-xxx. The iPhone OS currently doesn't support the programatic dialing of non-numeric numbers. Therefore Visual Dial automagically replaces the "+" symbol with the international access code (default in release 1.0 for this was "00").

The update introduces settings which allow you to change the replacement string to what's appropriate in your country or to turn "+" symbol replacement off entirely. To modify these open the iPhone Settings application and find Visual Dial. Adjust accordingly. (Refer to screen shots below!)

Some users of the first release have notified us that there defaults were blank after the update and thus dialing did not work anymore. You can resolve this problem by simply turning "+" symbol replacement back on and provide the correct international access code. Wikipedia has a full list of these.

Hope this helps and have fun with Visual Dial!

Friday (December 12th) we've submitted the updated Visual Dial version 1.1 to Apple for review. With the review teams on vacation as of Christmas eve we might see a little delay and slow down in the review process but we hope that Apple gets Visual Dial 1.1 out to our customers before the end of this week.

With the updated version – which will be downloadable for free – we have dramatically increased the performance of the application. In addition we made some subtle changes to the user interface based on customer feedback. Check it out, you'll love it!

Meanwhile we're enjoying the enormous amount of feedback we're receiving with respect to the initial release from almost everywhere. A large amount of the emails actually originate from the Asia/Pac market asking for a localized version. We are working on that.

AppBeacon, my favorite site for independent App Store reporting, has surprised us with putting Visual Dial in a very prominent spot on their website. Go check out AppBeacon! They offer far more information than the iTunes App Store.

With all the buzz about Visual Dial I don't want to forget that The Original iTree (link opens iTunes) is also doing fine. iPhone and iPod touch owners are sending out thousands of personal electronic christmas trees to their families, friends and business partners. If you have not done so, go and grab an iTree, too. They are almost sold out! ;-)

We are working on what hopefully will be the next killer app for the iPhone and hope to release a closed alpha to a selected audience in the last week of December 2008.

The iTunes App Store has received a lot of praise and – lately – lots of criticism. Generally everybody seems to agree that for a "version one release" it's pretty awesome. The majority of the feedback found online has been published from an end users/customers point of view. Solving the increasing usability problems and allowing refunds and trials seem to be high on customers' wish lists.

As a developer for the iPhone OS platform I want to highlight another aspect and ask developers around the globe to join forces: Let's create an independent Review Response website. Like the iTunes music store the App Store allows customers to leave a comment and rate an application on a five star scheme.

In the very beginning everybody could submit reviews even without having purchased an application. Thanks God Apple fixed it in the meantime. But there still are a couple of problems:

Reviews are a one way street

I like customer feedback and I hate censorship. So clearly there should be no means for developers to moderate customer comments. However, from time to time there simply is a need to respond to comments. Allowing one way feedback only sort of encourages abuse and guarantees no sort of quality assurance for the content generated by users. There should be no reason to disallow the creators of a product to briefly comment on user criticism. Moreover a dialogue between customers and producers will help improving product quality and drives innovation.

Reviews versus Tech Support

In a quick and by no means statistically representative check I found that a majority of the reviews contain handling questions and sometimes valuable feedback about improving an app. Usually this stuff should be emailed to the Tech support department. In fact the App Store provides means for developers to promote a website for handling technical support questions – it's just that most customers seem to do it via the review feature. (They'll obviously never get a direct response because of the one way street nature of the functionality.) Some developers have started to abuse the App Store description to respond directly to some customer remarks. This in turn causes scattered and crappy descriptions to appear while they should solely function as advertorial content and help driving sales.

Limited Visibility

Customers might think that developers have easy and convenient access to all reviews and might wonder why they never receive any responses to their comments. Well, the problem is that as of today there is absolutely no functionality available which helps developers to keep track of the global feedback pool. iTunes Connect, the web based store back end application used to manage App Store contents, does not contain any feature which would allow me as a producer of an application to read through the review submissions. The only official option is to use iTunes and manually switch to all the local App Stores. This has forced some independent developers to create workarounds which make grabbing the reviews a bit more convenient – but it's still far from ideal.

Highjacking Reviews

Though rarely, I've seen competing producers highjacking other producers' reviews. With most of the apps at a price point below 5 US$ it's just so easy and affordable to buy your competitors app and immediately submit a 2-3 star review pointing out another app – your own – as the better one. As review authors publish under arbitrary pseudonyms there's absolutely no way for real customers to find that they've been tricked.

The Broken Ranking Maths

I don't know why but I've seen numerous examples lately where the maths behind total review scores (Apple's five star system) seemed to be totally screwed. It might have to do with batch processing App Store databases, multiple international sources and time zones or simply just another wired Apple algorithm but more often than not the average review score indicated does not equal the one which I yield manually when I run through each individual review and do the math myself. As matter of fact I've just checked the scores for Visual Dial, one of my apps. The table view of the (German) App Store on my iPhone says "3 reviews". Switching to detail view it says "2 reviews". What happened to the missing comment? Continue to check it for another one of my apps: The table view says "36 reviews" while the detail view says "8 reviews". All of the 8 reviews have full five star ratings. The average rating calculated and displayed in the App Store is a three star rating, however. Why do 8 five star reviews sum up to an average of three?

With all of the above said I'd like to build an independent web site which would encourage a customer <> producer dialogue.

I'd like to ask iPhone developers around the world to join forces and help me in creating Review Response. I've started to work on the overall concept and would love to build it in the very near future. Technology wise I'd prefer to set it up as a shared source project (Subversion managed) build on a Ruby on Rails/MySQL stack. I can provide the SCM repository, the hosting and skills in RoR, CSS, HTML and MySQL. I've also worked out a smart way how to authorize developers and securely authenticate them as the real owners of their respective App Store applications.

I'd like to establish Review Response as a well known, independent and primary site

• for customers who already purchased an app to get feedback to their reviews right from the source
• for potentially new customers to read through the reviews along with the producers responses in context
• for developers to have a one stop place to access all internationally available reviews and comment on individual feedback

If you've got some spare time and want to work with me on Review Response, please drop me an email at ralf[at]24100.net. If you're busy but like the idea, please help spreading the word by linking to this blog post and otherwise let your network know!

Visual Dial is straight2market's latest iPhone production. It's the ultimate iPhone Speed Dial application. Take any photo from your library and convert it into a real Home Screen icon. Link it to any telephone number or pick a contact from your address book. Click the picture right on your iPhone's Home Screen and your contact gets called!

TechCrunch's Michael Arrington, according to Wikipedia considered as "one of the most influential people in the world" by Time Magazine in 2008, officially refers to Visual Dial as one of his favorite iPhone applications and we believe you will love it to.

Today Apple released Visual Dial to the iTunes App Stores worldwide. Grab your copy by clicking the "Available on the iPhone App Store" image below (link will open iTunes).

Here's a brief video:

We've received literally thousands of emails during the beta phase and I'd like to summarize a couple of aspects that have been asked, commented, twittered and emailed over and over:

Privacy & Security

Once you've selected a photo, scaled and rotated it and marked an area to be the final icon Visual Dial transmits the image to our servers. The reason for this is because we have to do some magic on our servers to ultimately save your personal icon to the iPhone's Home Screen. We do, however, not transmit any personal or contact data. So to be very clear: No phone numbers, contact names, etc. are transmitted to our servers at any time. Even the image itself is sent via an SSL encrypted, secure HTTPS connection and deleted automatically 24 hours after creation.

Pricing

Everybody loves US$ 0.99 applications. Free apps are even better. There has been a lot of talk lately regarding pricing on the App Store. I am not going to repeat what has been said here. We've decided to offer Visual Dial for US$ 2.99. We've invested a considerable amount of time, love (and money) into the creation of this application and we're known to offer great free technical support in case of any problems. We believe it's fair pricing and that Visual Dial delivers a great value to its users. (We also think our customers understand that a piece of carefully crafted software has to cost at minimum as much as a good Starbucks Latte). So in case you love the idea of putting images of your loved ones to your Home Screen we believe you'll be willing to invest some three dollars.

Dialing

Some people have asked why it takes a few seconds from tapping the Visual Dial icon to actually dialing a contact. Well, I don't want to get too technical here but it's mainly due to some current limitations of the iPhone SDK. Visual Dial applies a couple of tricks to make the entire scenario possible at all. This includes creating web clips, dynamically crafting a Mobile Safari application and making it available offline. We thought it would be key for you being able to dial even when you're offline. Therefore the Visual Dial icon cleverly links back to the Visual Dial app which then instantaneously performs the call. This takes very few seconds. We designed Visual Dial to allow one-tap dialing from your custom icons. It's not so much about speed at all. Trained iPhone users can surely dial at the same speed via the built-in favorites. We never said Visual Dial is the fastest dialer on earth. But it's by far the coolest!

Got a great iPhone idea?

This is my private blog. Visual Dial is a straight2market production. I'm an investor in and Partner at straight2market. straight2market is specialized in the fields of Mobile Marketing and iPhone strategies. Besides our own productions (like Visual Dial) we are helping corporations all over the globe to realize the potential of the "smartphone for everybody". If you want to partner with us or get in touch feel free to visit our corporate website. A compact summary is also available at the CrunchBase.

What's next?

We are currently working on a couple of further innovations for the iPhone. If you'd like to stay in touch I recommend to subscribe to my RSS feed and follow me on twitter. You can also find me at facebook, LinkedIn and XING. I'm extremely passionate about what the team at straight2market does and I love to get connected, stay in touch and share thoughts with everybody out there.

Visual Dial Links

Finally here are a couple of links related to Visual Dial

• The iTunes App Store link
• The YouTube video (make sure you click the "watch in high quality" link)
• TechCrunch announcing Visual Dial
• A quick tour
• Further public coverage

Thanks for your ongoing support and talk to you soon!

We are pleased to recognize that TechCrunch – one of the most popular technology blogs – loves our Visual Dial iPhone application. Since the post has caused quite some traffic we'd kindly ask you to sign up  to be notified once Visual Dial will be available. We are trying to respond asap but face kind of a backlog with the over 1.000 emails that just flew in during the last 60 minutes.

Let me clarify a technical aspect which we've been asked a lot:

We are NOT sending the details (name, phone number, etc.) to our servers. Your privacy is respected at any time. Visual Dial requires an Internet connection to process the image data that you're selecting. It does not send the contact data to our servers. Even for the image data a Secure Socket Layer (SSL) protected connection is used. Also: Once you've created your Home Screen speed dial Visual Dial does not require an Internet connection when you're actually speed dialing! Hope this answers some of the "concerns" which we've received.

In addition to the post Michael dropped me an email stating that he loves Visual Dial – thanks, Michael. :-) We love it, too, and sit here patiently waiting for Apple to speed up the review process (different story though...).

For my readers who don't know Michael Arrington, here's what Wikipedia has to say:

J. Michael Arrington (born March 13, 1970 in Orange, California)[1] is a serial entrepreneur and the maintainer of TechCrunch, a blog covering the Silicon Valley technology start-up communities and the wider technology field in USA and elsewhere. Magazines such as Wired and Forbes have named Arrington one of the most powerful people on the internet. [2][3] In 2008, he was selected by TIME Magazine as one of the most influential people in the world. [4]

With that out of the way: We'll keep you updated on the progress of the ongoing Apple reviews. Update: Visual Dial is now available in App Stores worldwide. Thanks for the overwhelming feedback!