While designing Notespark, we did a lot of UI mockups. As it turns out, I prefer using Fireworks for this kind of work over Photoshop, because it’s easier to manipulate objects on the screen. After doing some Google searching, it appeared there weren’t any good templates for doing iPhone mockups, so we built our own.

The toolkit is fairly complete now, so we’re sharing it with the world. You can use it to create your own mockups of iPhone apps.

All items in the file have been redrawn as vectors for easy editing. You can read more about it and download it at the post on Blogspark.

After a lot of hassle with the iTunes Store, we are proud to announce that Notespark v1.1 is now available!

Screenshots and a long, rambling discussion about the design of one of the features can be found at Blog*spark.

Earlier today, we submitted v1.1 of Notespark to the iTunes store, using iTunes Connect, which is the web UI that application authors use to access the App Store.

Apple is the design expert, right? So this UI has got to be, like, awesome, right?

Now take a look at this screen.

What do you think happens when you follow these steps:

* click on “edit information” underneath the 1.1 version of Notespark
* set the “availability date” to 1/29/2009

Possible answers:
A) It sets the availability date of version 1.1 to 1/29/2009
B) It sets the availability date of BOTH version 1.0 and 1.1 to 1/29/2009

If you guessed (B), you are way smarter than I am. And because 1/29/2009 is in the future, it immediately removed version 1.0 from the iTunes App Store. ARRGGHHHH!!!! Setting the date back didn’t seem to help any.

Let’s just hope the app comes back tomorrow.

[Late update] Yes, the app is back. Whew!

Hi folks. We need beta testers for v1.1 of Notespark. This is a quick update with just a few highly requested features (landscape mode, search, and a few more) so the testing period will be short.

Please email us at feedback [at] notespark.com if you are interested.

Well, Note*spark is finally out at the iTunes Store. You can read about it at http://notespark.com.

So we’re very excited, but after a moment of celebration, reality set in. Man, we are going to have to sell a lot of these to make it worth our while.

To make matters worse, Apple listed our release date as Dec 11, which is the day we submitted the app for the store, rather than Dec 17, which is the day they actually posted it. That means it never showed up as a “new app” on the store.

Maybe they’ll fix that. Who knows? But when it comes down to it, being listed as a “new app” is just a momentary bit of mild publicity. After that, you’re just one of 10,000 other apps on the store.

Note*spark is a very simple app, but we ended up putting a lot of effort into it, and we feel it’s very good and very useful. That having been said, there are a lot of apps out there, and lots of them are about notes. For people searching on the iTunes store for apps, how are they supposed to know that ours is good?

So we’re doing the obvious: writing to blogs, magazines, and anyone who will listen to see if they’ll write about us. Beyond that, I’m at a loss. I’m an engineering guy but but from my past life (leading the Dreamweaver team, etc.) I’ve thought a lot about marketing. But you know.. I just can’t get my head around how you “market” a $5 app (which is actually selling for $1.99 right now as an introductory price.. even worse!) The economics are just too different.

Anyway, we knew about all this going into it. Ours was not a unique product — it’s no Ocarina — but we thought we could tackle the problem well and do a good job. We did this because we thought it would be fun, not because we thought it would make us rich. And it has been fun. It’s fantastically exciting to put a tiny team together to publish a tiny product, and the good and the bad of it is that you get to do everything yourself — the coding, art, promotion, business planning… everything!

So we’re scratching our heads over this and giving it our best shot. If you have any ideas or insights into how to promote a product like this, I’d love to hear them. Or, if you’d like to help us get the word out yourself, we would love that. Post about it, tell your friends, review it on the iTunes Store.

In the meantime, we’re also planning some Note*spark updates as well as thinking about other product ideas. Stay tuned…

(cross-posted from Blog*spark)