Every iPhone developer cares about their data on iTunes Connect, but Apple just made a very catastrophic offer. Don’t be fooled by the beautiful trending up icons on iTunes Connect page, all you can get from it are just plain CSV files. But it also leaves opportunities for 3rd party developers to innovate on visualizing these CSV files.

AppViz

Price: $29.95, 30-day free trial
Download: http://www.ideaswarm.com/products/appviz/

This Mac application can download all your sales data (including historical), and render them into beautiful and readable charts. And you can check your app’s User Reviews from all countries in one place. Not all options on the market are able to fetch historical data, I’m really wondering how they did it. It’s absolutely worth $29.99.

AppStore Sales

Price: $19.95, 14-day free trial
Download: http://positiveteam.com/

If you search for AppStore Sales in Google, you’ll barely find this application, this name is just too general. But actually this app can download your recent data from iTunes Connect, and turns out very nice charts. Its UI design is sleek and native, it can render your sales number on a world map, really nice feature. Though you can import CSV files on your HDD to render historical numbers, AppStore Sales 1.6.2 is unable to fetch historical data, so AppViz is a clear win on this important feature.

Both applications provide powerful ranking charts, while AppViz can download more detailed data from APPlyzer.com, which is a non-free service, but you can check if your app is in top 1000 in any category or country.

Got my copy of Uncharted 2: Among Thieves at the moment, been playing it for days. This is a must have for all PlayStation 3 owners, I have never seen such a sharp and rich graphic on PS3, much better than my favorite game Resident Evil 5. If you got 10000 points in the game, you can unlock a bonus movie titled Mastering the Cell Processor to tell you how they achieve such a great graphic, finally they use a lot SPU to do various stuff!

These days I’m working on a better implementation of AI for my game Gomoku, and found that when performing pure math & logic calculations, iPhone simulator is vastly faster than real device, maybe 10x times! I implemented a new way to calculate next move for computer in the board name, it took few seconds to calculate inside simulator, but more than 30 seconds on real device. Interesting. I need to put more work on my algorithm, definitely!

iPhone OS 2.2 is a really big update, not only about features, but mostly about performance and stability.

From my real usage, Safari does crash less. Before 2.2, the most unstable web app is Google Reader, it can crash at any time, since I use Google Reader a lot on iPhone, what a pain it was. Now things are much better. And all components has dependency on WebKit also got enhancements, like UITableView, if you have some UIImageView inside UITableViewCell, you’ll find it scrolls much more smoother on 2.2! So, iPhone OS 2.2 is strongly recommended for everyone from newbies to developers.

On feature side, the new Emoji feature is particularly interesting, though it meant to be Japanese users only, but you can turn it on easily with some small helper program in Cydia installer. I really wish the cuteness be part of the whole world, not only Japan.

This is the 3rd National Day week I spent in Shanghai, except two days in Hangzhou, my otaku lifestyle hasn’t changed much. I watched two anime films by Makoto Shinkai: 5 Centimeters Per Second, Voices of a Distant Star.

1080P version of 5 Centimeters Per Second is amazingly awesome, I mean the detailed graphic, almost every single frame can be captured and set as desktop wallpaper. That’s the quality of commercial studio production.

Something is quite memorable in Voices of a Distant Star, if one day your girl friend is traveling to a distant star, and all messages sent from her would take years to deliver, because a distant star means a star in light years far away. Then?

You two are connected, because you’re keeping missing each other, so no matter how many light years away, you’re connected.

Actually I wish I could have one connection like that. Such connection is not meant for telling stories to others, but just a connection that will be kept in hearts for many many many years.

I’ve been in Hangzhou with a friend in past 2 days, a casual trip without any purposes. And we spent the nights at Hanting Inn 汉庭客栈, which is a new brand from budget hotel company Hanting 汉庭, for 99 yuan per night, you got a small clean room for one or two persons. They’ve 3 configurations: one big bed, two beds or one bed room decorated with tatami, all with wired Internet access and manga by famous artist ZHU De Yong. However, you’ll need to prepare your own toothbrush, toothpaste and towel. It’s quite in night. Address and phone number below:

ADDR: #2 Bao Shi Er Road
TEL: +86 571 88905511

Just like in Shanghai, most Starbucks cafes in Hangzhou are covered with ChinaNet wireless network, which is not free to use, but we did discover a small secret, try it with user name chinatelecom and password 654321, it may work. :P

So, R2 is ended. I just watched the last chapter of R2 and am going to say, Code Geass is the masterpiece of masterpiece.

What can I expect from a Japanese anime? State-of-the-art graphic, sentimental songs with sentimental rhythms, war and love, futuristic metal gears, legendary stories from King Arthur and the Holy Bible, the way our human society built and the ideologies, beautiful school girl complex, flattened world, German words, professionalism here and there. And Code Geass just had them all.

Our world is complicated, Code Geass started with a bright boy to discover the whole sophisticated world, and ended with his death. After his death, is the world really changed? This may be a question left to R3, if R3 is coming. And what will change the world or the world never change, will be a question left to me, will my actions for pursuing perfection really change the world?

So finally I received the activation code of iPhone Developer Program from Apple, but after I submit the activation form at iPhone Dev Center, I got an error saying:

We are unable to process your request.

After several attempts I realize that I have to e-mail ADC China for support again. What a system they’re building.

Welcome to my personal blog.

Finally I decided to do something with my favorite domain name, V2EX.com. This blog will be about my life, my work on design, coding stuff on iPhone. I don’t know who will be the readers of this blog, but this actually makes me feel easy about it.

I’m designing my own WordPress theme now, however, good cooking takes time.

If you’d like to read my further posts via feed reader, please take this feed address.

Since this domain is already blocked by Chinese government in September 2007, I don’t need to care about any censorship. Yes, just get rid of them and smile.

What a day it would be today, it’s September again, but 2008 is here.