As of today, the Public Radio Tuner is the most downloaded free music app in the store. It’s currently three places in front of another awesome music app, Pandora. In fact, it’s the 18th most downloaded app, right behind some app called Facebook (and who has heard of them?)

So why the sudden climb? Well, outside of the obvious – that it fills a need of hundreds of thousands on public radio listeners who until now couldn’t listen to their favorite radio station when they were out of tower range – it’s because Public Radio Tuner is currently featured under “New and Noteworthy” in the App Store. There’s nothing like the 10x accelerator of a worthwhile app being featured in the app store to make a move toward the top!

Congratulations to the Tuner team and collaborators! This is well deserved!

Read more about the tuner.

I have to say I was SUPER excited to find out this morning that Drync Wine’s icon is featured in the new iPhone commercial, “Read.” This is awesome for Drync, which is really starting to get it’s wings

On a personal note, this isn’t the first app icon to appear in Apple Collateral that’s I’ve been a part of.  (WHERE was shown in the store demo reel when the app store first launched.)  It is, however, the first app icon to appear in an Apple Ad on TV and the first icon I designed to appear in Apple collateral. 

Pretty, pretty cool. Congrats to all the Drync’ers!

I read today over on techcrunch that the Chipotle iPhone app has been removed from the store due to “request timeouts” (or, in layman’s tems, it’s been removed because it’s pissing off tons of customer who can’t get their burrito orders through).

It’s funny – well, not ha-ha funny – to think that a large and tech savvy company (they have great online ordering, I’ve been told) like Chipotle didn’t take into account server load when they released their app. But, it’s not in the least bit surprising. People just don’t understand the power of a free app with a compelling user benefit in the App Store

When the App Store first launched, I was a part of a team that launched one of the first apps. Our App was mostly web based and our team naively thought that our servers were up to task. Of course we never expected 10000 week a day, much less 10000 downloads a day. We had 10000 downloads before the store was even officially open! Our servers were toast. We’d get one up just to see three more down. In the time it took to get our servers back, we were handed a boatload of horrible 1 star reviews by the community, all saying that our app didn’t work. You’d think people would be nicer to a free app, right?

So, what’s the moral of this story? Well, take it from someone who has been there (and the folks over at Chipotle will likely tell you the same), if you want to be free and you have a compelling app or well known brand, and you want your users to like you, you should consider the following:

• Take your projections for usage and multiply them by 100. That should keep you in the ballpark for the initial surge.
• The first week or so in the app store is the biggest. Once the novelty wears off, and your usage slows, you’ll want a server that scales down to meet the lower demand so you’re not throwing money out the window on unused bandwidth.
• When you release an update, be prepared for a spike for the next couple of weeks.

If you keep these things in mind when releasing an iPhone App that relies on a server for some of its core functions, you’re one big step closer to a successful app and happy customers.

 I was super excited to get involved in this project as the “user experience” part of the team. To me, as a huge NPR fan, this is the ultimate iPhone application – it streams tons and tons of stations directly to your iPhone!   It’s the one app I wish I had when I used to do the train slog from Worcester to Boston.  So, it may come as no surprise that I’m proud to announce that the new version of the “official NPR” player is now out. Check out the official announcement.  

This is a significant upgrade from the previous version (of which I was not a part) and includes 

• Bookmarking of favorite stations
• Local stations (based on your current location)
• Search station or browse them by State
• Now playing indicator that quickly brings you back to the currently playing station

Like I said, I’m proud to be part of this release.  Download the Public Radio Tuner now at the App Store!