What We’ve Been Doing Lately

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Firstly, thank you to all of our users for your feedback over the last few weeks and months. We’ve been working furiously to make Kickfolio as awesome as possible for you. Performance and reliability has been greatly improved, and we’ve added additional servers in London, Sydney and Hong Kong.

A few of the bigger updates:

SSL

Kickfolio is now entirely SSL. Besides offering improved security, this also significantly improves cross-browser compatibility and resolves issues with corporate firewalls. If you have had issues using Kickfolio before, we encourage you to give it a try again.

Custom Location & Language

When embedding apps, you can now specify a custom location and language. For example, you can append “language=ja”, and your app will start with a Japanese keyboard and localizations (if available). For location, appending this, “location=40.7484,73.9847″, will set the location to the Empire State Building. You must specify valid lat/long coordinates. A list of all valid parameters is available at http://docs.kickfolio.com.

Improved Documentation

We’ve launched a new website, http://docs.kickfolio.com, which contains documentation on our API, app parameters and other info.

MonoTouch? RubyMotion? Appcelerator Titanium?

No matter how you have built your apps, Kickfolio will work for you. We’ve added specific information for how to use Kickfolio with a range of services on our documentation page (http://docs.kickfolio.com).

Partners!

We’re also extremely excited to have cisimple and AppLaunch integrate with Kickfolio. cisimple is a fantastic continuous integration service for iOS apps, and their integration lets you try your app directly inside the browser within seconds of the build finishing. AppLaunch is dedicated to getting your app launched and in front of the press, and what better way than with an engaging Kickfolio demo? We have a whole bunch more integrations happening, but if there is one you’d like to see, get in touch!

Thanks,
Ed and the Kickfolio team

[Guest Post] Continuous Integration & App Testing With cisimple & Kickfolio

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cisimple

Today we bring you a guest post by Kevin Rohling, CEO of cisimple:

cisimple is a Continuous Integration service developed specifically for mobile developers.  With just a few clicks cisimple will automatically rebuild, retest and redeploy your mobile application every time you commit code.

“Over at cisimple we’re announcing a ton of new features today. Our users have told us that testing is a big pain-point and as a result we’ve been cranking away to make cisimple the easiest way to test mobile applications on the web. As part of this release we’re also really excited to announce our integration with Kickfolio!

The incredibly bright folks over at Kickfolio make it possible to run mobile applications right in the browser (as if you didn’t already know). Combine that with our Continuous Integration solution and… you can see where we’re going with this. cisimple users can now pull up their build history, pick any previous build and click “Run in Browser”. Yeah, kind of like magic… And, we’re adding Kickfolio support to all of our paid plans at no additional cost!

ipad-landscape

We think this is really interesting when paired with cisimple’s automated testing capabilities. In addition to knowing when your tests fail, our integration with Kickfolio makes it possible to step through the exact build that caused the failure and reproduce the error.

test-results

We’re really excited about this partnership and believe it will help mobile developers build better apps even faster. Furthermore, we’ve really enjoyed working with the Kickfolio folks and integrating with their API was a breeze, thanks guys!”

- Kevin Rohling
CEO of cisimple

 

Kickfolio & Trigger.io – Getting mobile app builds to your customers

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trigger-io

We’re excited to be working with Trigger.io to make it easy for contract developers who build on their platform to get app builds into the hands of customers easily. They’ve blogged about the options here and recommend Kickfolio as the simplest practice for getting feedback on your app early and often.

Trigger.io make it simple for people to developer native mobile apps using only web skills, with no need to setup Eclipse or Xcode. They share Kickfolio’s philosophy of simplifying app development and distribution. You can use Trigger.io and Kickfolio together today and can expect more integrations down the line. Here’s how to use the two together:

  1. Use the Trigger.io Toolkit or command-line tools to build your app and run it on your own iPhone Simulator. On Windows or Linux simply create the build with our ‘forge build ios’ without running it. Sign-up for Trigger.io and follow the get started docs if you haven’t already.
  2. Sign-up for Kickfolio and upload your build. Your build is created at ‘development/ios/simulator-ios.app’ inside your app directory. Zip it up using a command like ‘zip my-app.zip –r simulator-ios.app’ and then click ‘Upload New Version’ from your Kickfolio dashboard.
  3. …Actually there’s no more steps, it’s that simple. You’ll now have a preview link that you can email to your customers where they will see a browser-based interactive demo.

We’ll be working more closely with Trigger.io in the future. Stay tuned for some more exciting integrations – we have some really fantastic partnerships coming soon!

API Now Available, Xcode Integration Coming Soon

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Exciting news – Kickfolio now has an API!

We quietly launched the API a fortnight ago, but we’re officially telling the world about it today. We already have some great partners working with it, and we can’t wait to see what the community does with it!

How To Set It Up

Firstly, you’ll need your API key. Login to your account (Don’t have one yet? Create one!) & head on over to the settings page on your dashboard. You’ll find your API key at the bottom of the page.
Our docs, http://kickfolio.com/api, will help you get started. They list all the routes available for creating apps and versions.

A Quick Overview On How To Create An App

  1. Create a new app using “POST /api/apps”
  2. Create a new version for that app using “POST /api/apps/:app_id/versions” – you’ll need to supply us with a publicly-accessible URL for your app bundle.
  3. Now, you can create an iFrame and embed your new app anywhere, using the new app’s public key.

Thats it! We’re really excited by the possibilities this opens up. If you’ve got an idea for an integration or if you’re using the Kickfolio API for something cool, let us know!

Pro tip: make sure you’ve set your HTTP “Content-Type” header to “application/json” when working with the API.

App Parameters

This is really cool – you can now customize each instance of the app by specifying key/values which will be available in NSUserDefaults. Each instance is you unique, so you can make the parameters dynamic based on who is browsing your site. Say you want to automatically log a user in when the app launches – simply specify their ID as a parameter, read it from NSUserDefaults when your app launches, and use that to log them in.

You can also use it with your favourite analytics platform to help you segment Kickfolio users from other users.

To use it, simply append a URL-encoded JSON dictionary to your iFrame’s source URL as a “params” argument. For example, to launch an app with a key of “foo” and a value of “bar” in NSUserDefaults:

  1. Create a JSON dictionary, eg: “{ “foo” : “bar” }”
  2. Encode it to make it URL-safe, eg: using JavaScript’s encodeURIComponent(); method
  3. Append it to your iframe’s src url. It’ll look something like this: http://kickfolio.com/embed/E_puBg?params=%7B%22foo%22%3A%22bar%22%7D

Feel free to experiment with the app and URL above – it’ll display all the NSUserDefaults available so you can test them there.

Xcode Coming Soon!

Lastly, we’ve been cooking something up to make Kickfolio even easier to use. Here is a little preview:

Xcode-Kickfolio

As always, if you have any questions or comments, leave a comment below or email us at  hello@kickfolio.com.

Cheers,
Ed and the Kickfolio Team

Yesterday’s Outage

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Yesterday, Kickfolio’s international servers went down. I’m really sorry that this happened, and we are committed to ensuring it doesn’t happen again. I wanted to take the time to reach out and explain what happened and how we plan to stop it from happening again.

As you can image, Kickfolio’s architecture is a little different from most web companies. We use Mac hardware on our backend to run iOS apps, and we’re doing things that not a lot of people have done before. Yesterday, we were featured on 9to5mac.com, and this led to excessive traffic hitting our servers. While we can certainly handle the load when everything is configured and running properly, it quickly became apparent that a small configuration issue with our international servers was causing apps to crash on launch.

Mac OS X (like all *nix systems) has a process limit in place. Kickfolio’s software needs a slightly increased process limit, and this configuration setting has been in place on our US servers since launch without incident. However, due to a configuration oversight, this increased limit was not placed on our new international servers.

The operating system did not have any spare processes available under load, and this was causing apps to crash when they were launched.

We identified the problem quickly, but took the time to investigate the solution to ensure it didn’t happen again. Late last night, our exceptionally talented CTO, Chris, rolled out a fix and bought our international servers back online.

I am very sorry about this. Errors like this should not happen. We value every single one of our users, and we want to a build a company and a platform that is stable, trustworthy and transparent.

Going forward, we are investigating several deployment solutions to ensure consistency is maintained across all of our servers. We have also modified our testing procedures to ensure each new server is stress tested in a variety of conditions before coming online. We will also be more vigilant in posting server status updates to our blog (http://blog.kickfolio.com) and Twitter account (@kickfolio) so that everyone will be kept in the loop.

If you have particular expertise in Mac deployment, please reach out by emailing me directly. We are always eager to talk to experts in the field.

I’m truly lucky to have a great team – both Chris and Diesel worked tirelessly yesterday to solve the issue and to keep our customers informed of the situation. Yesterday, we received some very kind words of support over Twitter and email. Thank you for your patience and understanding.

We are continuing to monitor the servers closely for any issues. Please email me directly (ed@kickfolio.com) if you have any questions or problems.

Thanks for being part of the Kickfolio community,

Ed Dowling
CEO, Kickfolio

Embeds and iPads and More, Oh My!

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We’re excited. Like, seriously excited. The updates that we mentioned in our last post are ready, and we’re releasing them to you all today. We’ve made a few improvements, and have added some huge new features to make your apps look awesome, on any web page.

It’s only been 7 weeks since we launched Kickfolio, and today marks another big milestone. We’ve been hard at work on refining and improving Kickfolio based on your feedback, and cannot wait to share it with you.

tl;dr: Every trial re-opened and extended, support for iPad apps, ability to embed your apps on any web page, much cheaper pricing with unlimited apps for everyone, international servers and integrated download links.

Revised Pricing

We messed up. We made Kickfolio too expensive, and we’re sorry about that. We had some extremely honest feedback from our users about it, and we’ve revised it to make more affordable for all developers. Pricing now starts at just $9. Each plan now includes unlimited apps. The testing pages can be used as much as you want. Now, we only charge for our new feature – the embeds.

The ‘Solo’ plan includes 500 embed sessions for $9/month, the ‘Business’ plan includes 2000 sessions for $29/month and the ’Pro’ plan includes 5000 sessions for $69/month. Additional sessions can be purchased as you need them.

If you’re expecting a lot of usage and need a special deal, just get in touch and we’ll work something out for you.

All trial users have 500 sessions to give it a try. We’ll be in touch with users on plans to migrate them to a new plan, equivalent to what they used to pay.

iPad Support

We now support iPad apps. Feel free to upload apps, and get going. If you’ve already upload universal or iPad-specific apps, simply log in to the dashboard and set the device type to ‘iPad’.

Embeds

Apps can now be embedded onto any web page. This is huge, and we hope you enjoy it. This allows you to easily embed your apps onto any web page or blog post with a simple iframe. We do the hard work for you by generating the embed code for your app automatically. Just go to your dashboard and configure the embed options. Put it in your blog posts, landing pages, anywhere!

Each embed also includes a “download” screen. Users can just click the cloud icon while using your app, and instantly send the download link straight to their phone via SMS or email, or they can go straight to the iTunes App Store. Make sure you add a link to your iTunes URL in the dashboard!

What is a Session?

With all this talk about sessions, what exactly *is* a session? A session is counted when an app loads and the user begins interacting with it. Each session is limited to 2 minutes (after 2 minutes, we display the download screen). We’re open to feedback on the time limit, so please let us know what you think.

International Servers

We now have servers up and running in Sydney, London and Hong Kong. We hope this helps improves performance. We’re always doing things to improve performance and this is one of the many things we have in the works.

Every Trial Re-Opened

We’ve opened up every single trial account for 15 days so you can experience the new features and give it another shot. We had a lot of feedback that trials expired over the holidays, so people didn’t have a chance to try it properly.

We hope you enjoy the new features, and that Kickfolio changes the way you test and market your apps. As always, let us know your feedback – we truly value it.

Cheers!

- Ed, Chris and Diesel

Post-Launch Update

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kickfolio-update

We launched the new Kickfolio 10 days ago, and since then we’ve been blown away by the feedback and response. We never expected to have so many people using the platform in such a short space of time. Our users have been fantastic in letting us know when they’ve run into difficulty, or when they’ve felt something wasn’t quite right. Thank you for letting us know – we’ve already pushed several updates to the service to fix bugs and improve the UX.

We’ve also had a huge influx of feature requests. We have listened and made note of every single one. Over the past few days, we’ve prioritized them and have started working towards them.

Today we have added in two small, but heavily requested features: passwords and default orientation. A lot of people let us know they were concerned that their apps were public. We understand this concern and have implemented the ability to set a password for each app. If you set a password, anyone besides you will need to enter it before they can see it. To enable a password, simply visit the Dashboard and select your app. 

With default orientation, you can now set which orientation you want your app to launch in. We do our best to automatically set this for you when processing an app, but if you want to set it manually, now you can.

The need for speed!

One of the big things we’re working on is speed and latency for our non-US users. We really want to deliver a great experience no matter where you are. That’s why we’re speeding up our server rollout, and will be placing regional servers in Hong Kong, Sydney and London. We’re working as hard as we can to get them online – you can expect them early next year.

Coming up next…

We don’t sit still for long at Team Kickfolio! Based on your feedback, we will be working on iPad support, sound and embeds. iPad support and embeds will be available in January or February, while sound may take a little longer. A little bit more about embeds: your apps will be available on any browser – meaning you can incorporate them into your landing pages or blog posts. You’ll also be able to set a specific version of your app for embeds, so that you can be testing your next version, while using your current release version to promote your app.

Feedback

Lastly, I wanted to share some feedback we’ve had from our users. We’ve been truly humbled by the kind words of our users, and hope we can continue to deliver an outstanding service for you.

“Adding an app was very simple, and the result is simply mind blowing!! I can’t believe you guys have achieved this!” - Emilien

“Just wanted to congratulate you on an excellent product. Kickfolio is very impressive.” –  Dillon

“Trying out your product for the first time was one of those ah-ha moments. Thrilling.” – Norman

“Wow guys, mind blowing. Brilliant. I absolutely love it.” – DhilipSiva

“Wow. Kickfolio is really sweet. Shut up and take my money.” - Clay

As always, feel free to email us with any questions or feedback – we read everything.

Happy holidays!

And so it begins!

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Today, Kickfolio is really excited to be sending out the first wave of invites for our new platform. Over the next few days, everyone who registered will be receiving an invite for access.

The new platform represents several months of work. We’re exceptionally proud of what we’ve built, and hope our users love it just as much as we do.

We genuinely believe experiencing mobile apps is too hard. Today, we’re enabling developers to send test builds out faster and to a much wider range of people. We want to make the feedback loop as tight and short as possible, to encourage regular and fast iteration. Over the next few months, we’ll be bringing this technology to marketing and advertising, changing the way developers and publishers build a user base and stand out.

Included in today’s launch is full support for iPhone apps. Over the next few months, we’ll be rolling out iPad support as well as a host of other features. What we build will be driven by our users – please reach out and let us know what you want to do with Kickfolio.

Thanks for joining us on the journey – we’re only just getting started.

A Change of Direction

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Kickfolio is now six months old and during that time we’ve had the pleasure of seeing how our users have used the product. Particularly exciting has been the diverse range of apps people have added, and discovering a few gems through Kickfolio.

Recently, we decided to make some changes to Kickfolio. As with any startup, we’ve learnt about what our users want and the product we want to provide. To that end, we’re extremely excited to announce the new Kickfolio. We’ve rebuilt and optimized our technology extensively to create the first service that lets you share test builds for your iOS apps inside any web browser.

With the new Kickfolio, we wanted to make testing apps a whole lot easier. The Kickfolio team has designed and developed a lot of iOS apps, and quickly distributing and getting feedback from test builds remains a challenge. With Kickfolio, developers will be able to simply upload their test builds and share a link with their testers and clients.

Without needing to install anything, the app can be used directly inside the browser and comments (with screenshots automatically attached) can be left for the developers. It streamlines the feedback loop, and allows developers to iterate faster and ship quicker.

We encourage you to visit http://kickfolio.com to find out more, and sign up for an invite.

But what about the current pages?

For the next few months, existing users will still be able to access and update their current pages. They are now available at http://pages.kickfolio.com, and we’ve set up redirections so existing links will still work fine. We do encourage you to update any external links to use http://pages.kickfolio.com, though. Upon activating the new Kickfolio app testing service, we will be closing down landing pages and current live app demos by the end of the year.

For our paying customers, we’ll stop billing from today and they’ll be able to continue on their current plan without having to pay.

We understand that this is a big change, so feel free to email us or leave comments if you have any questions or concerns.

We hope you’re as excited about the new Kickfolio as we are.

Thanks,
Ed, Chris and Diesel

The Hustle – A 500 Startups Story

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It has been a big few weeks here at Kickfolio. There are some major changes to the company and the product that we will be announcing early next week. In the meantime, it is now no secret that we’ve been accepted into 500 Startups, the Silicon Valley investment fund and accelerator. We are part of Batch 5, and the ride so far has been unbelievable. The past three weeks have bought with it some sensational experiences.

For the full rundown of what happened, co-founder and designer ‘par excellence’ Diesel Laws has written a great blog post, ‘The Hustle – A 500 Startups Story‘. Check it out.

In the meantime, the team is working at a breakneck pace on the next iteration of the company and product, and we’ll be taking the wraps off that on Monday. Stay tuned!