Clockwise

Beyond giving me a good pocket Swedish-English word book on my iPhone, Lexikon has been about gaining experience with developing and selling for the iPhone. Selling an application above a free application has its own complications with the agreements and bank information.

Lexikon has so far has had three prices and seen three releases. On January 10th the first version was approved for sale. It was a free application and over the next 10 or so days would be downloaded 4190 times at that price point. Then I priced it as a tier 1 price. Then a few weeks later as an experiment and more importantly cause I felt that Lexikon was underpriced, even in the current AppStore, to a tier 2 priced app. Downloads about halved, but my revenue stayed about the same. Here is a graph of my weekly sales (week 4 was when the price doubled to tier 2):

I’ve averaged over $30 a week. Nothing too great and it hasn’t even paid for the marginal cost of my billing time. Though it has led already to other iPhone work so the experience and work gained from the exposure it gave me has it as a worthy investment of my time. Things I’ve seen are sales usually peak on Sunday and Thursday/Friday being my weakest sales days.

Lexikon is helped by it being a niche application, but at the same time it hurts it. I have less direct competition, but then I don’t appeal to the mass market.

There are still improvements I would like to make to Lexikon. I would like to refactor my code, support all the languages Lexin does (though this is complicated since English will be a different site in the future), offline access to the database and suggestions for when words aren’t found.

Having the entire database offline will be enabled once Folkets lexikon releases the database. I’m either going to make a separate application for the offline only version, or perhaps make use of the new iPhone 3.0 SDK ability to have add-on content for sale inside your application. I’ll charge a nominal fee for my time making the application, and not for the actual content. Offline content is perhaps the single most requested feature to add.

The other items on the list are fairly straight forward at this point. It’s merely a matter of executing on the ideas properly and well. The correction suggestions is the second most requested feature. Unfortunately it isn’t really part of Lexin’s API, but it’s implementable.

Today while looking over at the Lexin site I noticed that there will be a replacement for the Lexin Swedish-English dictionary. It is called The People’s Dictionary and will allow people to download the entire dictionary later this spring. It is based upon Lexin’s Swedish-English dictionary, but will be improved by the people.

I’m not quite sure what will happen to the existing system, will the Swedish-English dictionary be removed with just a link to The People’s Dictionary and all the other languages remain on Lexin? Probably good that I won’t have time for Lexikon in the next while so I can see how this develops before I commit to one action or another. One great thing is it that The People’s Dictionary will be downloadable, and so chances are high that I can make everything completely offline on the iPhone. Exactly how I will do that is up in the air, either as a free upgrade or as a completely new application.

I’m only two weeks late in blogging about this. Lexikon version 1.2 has been approved for sale for two weeks. The biggest new features are:

- Swedish localization of the interface (provided by my wife), though it might need some tweaks.

- The search now has a filter akin to the Contacts for seeing if a word has already been cached. The search is insensitive to special characters so a with match a, ä and å, just in case you can’t quite remember how it is spelled.

- More refinements on the UI to give it some extra polish.

This cleared my list of features I wanted to implement with Lexikon and it seemed like it was going to be shelved as a project. Then inspiration hit and I’ve got a full to-do list again. It is looking like the next version will be 2.0 as I will be bringing a lot of functionality to the table. I’m hoping to provide users with suggestions in case their search fails, as provided by Lexin, support all or most of the other languages Lexin supports (with an English or Swedish interface) and the final item I’m toying with is including something so you can autoload common Swedish words (due to the support for all secondary languages I won’t bother with the reverse look up) to populate the cache. It won’t be an extensive auto lookup list, but it should be handy for those that don’t always have internet access to have a healthy cache established quickly. Due to the copyright I can’t provide these translations with the program, but I can make it so you can quickly and easily grab the data on your own device.

Version 2.0 will also incorporate some under-the-hood changes I’ve wanted to make to the code. Things that need cleaning up if I’m going to support all the other languages Lexin does. Unfortunately version 2.0 is going to be a long ways off as I have another iPhone program for a client, one with a partner and some web development to do first.

I just got an email that Lexikon version 1.1 is ready for sale. I expect it to hit the store on Monday sometime. While I wanted to do some more refactoring under the hood, I decided to cut a quick release with some new things. Mainly I did two things, I turned off Pinch Analytics use of CoreLocation. This means no more requests to use the GPS. Secondly I polished the UI a bit more. Nothing has changed functionally, but it should look nicer.

I’ve got some plans for version 1.2 that should further refine the UI. I’ll also be exploring some suggestions from users to see if they work. I’m also hoping to refactor the models cause right now they are skinny and my controllers are too fat, when ideally it should be the other way around.

If you have any other suggestions feel free to email them to me or leave a comment. I’d love to do what I can. Unfortunately I can’t provide offline access and beyond switching to the Swedish keyboard provide suggestions for spelling. Though I am looking in to other options to do those, but it would require licensing a Swedish-English dictionary’s content and thus would go in to a more expensive paid app. I’m not sure I can compete with the existing offerings. Personally I find the Lexin dictionary to be most helpful with its examples and structure as opposed to most Swedish-English dictionaries.