You can purchase ads for only $75 a week, down from $250! Book now and you can get this incredibly low rate for every week until the end of November.

How effective are they? Kevin Kachikian, Developer of My Living Desktop

Since its launch, Bodega has doubled sales for My Living Desktop.

Email us at ads@appbodega.com to book your slot before September 29.

See our advertisers page for more information on our ads.

After missing out on the last 2 years of the highly regarded C4 conference in Chicago, we’re happy to say that we’re going to be there with bells on this year! Look for @philletourneau @rickfillion & @cverwymeren, we’ll be wearing our nifty new Bodega pins and maybe our Bodega t-shirts too. Come up, introduce yourself if we haven’t met we’ll even give you a pin! Don’t worry, we’re bringing more than just the one.

Let’s take a look at some statistics so far:

• We have more than 50,000 users
• More than 45,000 applications have been downloaded via Bodega
• We have 654 apps in the catalog
• Almost 370,000 listings have been viewed
• The “Buy Now” buttons have been clicked more than 1,900 times

We’ve had developers use Bodega in some really interesting ways. Some have decided to run their beta programs exclusively through Bodega. Others ran discounts for Bodega users. This is all really great.

However, interest in advertising has slowed slowed in recent weeks. Ahead of Bodega’s launch, we crunched some numbers to try to come up with a fair price for advertising, settling on $250 per week to book one of 10 spots for the swinging ads on the featured screen. Based on user traffic, we feel as though this falls in line with industry norms.

We had a good first round of advertisers. They’ve been fun to work with and created some great ads that really fit with the theme.

Lately, advertising revenue has declined and we’d like to know why. If you’re a developer who has an application on Bodega, or if you’re targeting Mac users as customers, what would you like to see from Bodega in terms of advertising? What would make you more inclined to advertise with us?

Would you prefer if the cost per week was lower, but we rotated through a higher number of ads? We’re you scared off by our initial payment problems (we’ve fixed that, by the way, as we now accept PayPal)? Or do you favor other forms of advertisement?

For the three of us, Bodega has been a full-time job for the last eight months. We’ve put a lot of work into it, and we’re prepping another release with some added goodies, which will come out later this week. However, we need to improve the advertising model for Bodega to remain successful. We’ve never expected advertising would support the entire project, but we want it to at least cover the cost of maintaining Bodega.

Let us know what you think in the comments so that we can get a dialog going. Like you, we’re also developers, and we’re successful when we can help you be more successful.

What’s a bundle id?

A Mac OS X application is a bundle, which is a directory with a special bit set on it to make it display as a single file instead of a directory in the Finder.  An application bundle contains files that OS X will read to determine how to run it.  Apple has a great document that explains the structure of a bundle which I recommend reading:

Mac OS X Reference Library – Bundle Structures

One of the files contained in the bundle is Contents/Info.plist, which details all of the critical information such as the name of the executable file, the version of the application, whether the applications is scriptable, what types of URLs the application can handle, etc. This is also where you set the bundle id of the application, under the “CFBundleIdentifier” key.  From the document linked above, here’s what apple says about that value:

The bundle identifier string identifies your application to the system. This string must be a uniform type identifier (UTI) that contains only alphanumeric (A-Z,a-z,0-9), hyphen (-), and period (.) characters. The string should also be in reverse-DNS format. For example, if your company’s domain is Ajax.com and you create an application named Hello, you could assign the string com.Ajax.Hello as your application’s bundle identifier.

The bundle identifier is used in validating the application signature.

This bundle id is used as a unique identifier for your application. When an application is installed, its bundle id gets registered and from then on it can be located using that (more on this later). So here’s what we know about bundle identifiers:

• They uniquely identifier your application
• They can contain A-Z, a-z, 0-9 and hyphens (-)
• They’re case sensitive
• They should be in reverse-DNS format, and contain your company name as well as the application name

During development, it should get set in the Info.plist file (or now $TARGET_NAME-Info.plist, as of XCode 3.2).

Why does Bodega need to know this?

Bodega uses the bundle id to reconcile applications a user has installed on their system with a Bodega listing.  There are two specific cases where this is used right now:

The check before “Write A Review”:

Before allowing a user to write a review or rate an application, Bodega checks to make sure that this application is installed on their system. Bodega queries OS X and asks if there’s a bundle on the system whose bundle id matches what was submitted to our database.  If so, then the user has this application installed.  If not, Bodega won’t allow them to rate the application.

Checking for updates to applications installed on a user’s system:

Bodega tries to determine which applications a user has installed on their system to see if there are any updates available.  It will only display applications that have been submitted to Bodega, since these are the applications for which we have the information needed to determine if there’s an update.  The process is a little more complicated than I’m going to describe here, but it basically boils down to:

• Get a list of all identifiers for all bundles on the system
• Send this list to the Bodega server for processing
• The server then loops through each identifier, and checks our database to see if we have any applications matching this bundle id.  If so, we can show information, if not, it gets discarded.

What can go wrong?

If the bundle id is wrong, users won’t see the application in the Applications section of Bodega, nor will they be able to write reviews for it.

This is bad for the developer of the application, but it’s also bad for Bodega because it looks like a bug in Bodega.

We currently don’t check the bundle identifiers of all applications submitted to Bodega during moderation. A random sampling of them get checked, and others are scrutinized if the submitted value looks like it’s likely wrong.

If a user reports an application isn’t being detected properly, this is the first thing we check and in 95% of cases it ends up being the culprit.  We take the liberty of fixing the error in the database without consulting the developer. We try to notify the developer after the fact that we’ve modified their listing when time permits.

Do us a solid

When adding an application to Bodega, consult your project’s Info.plist file.  Don’t trust your memory to know it, especially since it’s case sensitive.

Apple’s AppStore routinely comes under fire for inconsistent and sometimes outright bizarre behaviour when it comes to approving and rejecting applications for the iPhone and iPod Touch. From the very start of our work on Bodega, moderation has been an important issue. How much influence should we have on the content that people submit to Bodega?

We thought we’d give you a glimpse behind the scenes of our moderation system, both technically and ideologically, and tell you what we’re working on to make it even better!

Our primary concerns are malware, profanity, and spam. We want to ensure that Bodega only displays legitimate and appropriate content. Whenever a developer submits a new application, a change to an existing application such as screenshots and release notes, or a user writes a review of an application, we route it into a moderation queue.  We have one full-time moderator, Patrick, and the rest of us help out when the load gets really heavy. We review the new content for profanity and spam, download and test the application, check all the URLs, examine the screenshots and icons, and ensure that text is properly formatted.

We’ve spent a considerable amount of time building the moderation front-end to make it as efficient and easy as possible. When a change to an application listing is submitted, say a new release, moderators are presented the existing content on one side, and the new content on the other, with highlighted text showing the changes. After examining the changes, there’s a text area where we can address the developer by email once we click approve or reject. This lets us explain to a developer why we’ve rejected a particular change, and what they should do to correct the problem before re-submitting. The feedback has been overwhelmingly positive, because developers have an open dialog with moderators, they can reply to a rejection email if they have any questions or concerns.

Our system works well, but we’re always looking for ways to improve it. One of the initiatives we’re working on is something we call Trust Points. We have over 650 registered developers, some of which have had their accounts since our first developer beta back in April. The majority of our users are good citizens, dutifully respecting the rules and submitting perfect content that breezes through moderation. We believe these developers should be rewarded, thus we’re going to issue points for every trouble free submission a developer makes. Once certain thresholds are crossed, developers will not be subjected to any moderation delays when posting new content.

We are very fortunate to have a great developer community on the Mac platform, and we can’t wait to tell you about more of the upcoming features in Bodega.

It’s been a whirlwind week of excitement for us! We’re pleased to report over 475 applications in the Bodega catalog, with more being submitted every few minutes. With this much activity, we quickly finished our sign up promotion, which started before our public release. We were giving developers who signed up and submitted at least one application a $10 US iTunes Store gift card. Our gift to you for giving Bodega a try.

If you’re bummed about missing out on free iTunes credit, turn that frown upside down! We still have 10 $50 iTunes gift cards we’re giving away to random selected developers who have signed up and have at least one application approved in Bodega. Every subsequent application you submit is another ballot to win.

The deadline for the contest is August 21st at 12:00AM CST. After which we will be rewarding the lucky developers with their prizes.

Sincerely,

The Shopkeeper

Mac users have never had an easy time finding new applications. Bodega, free for both
users and developers, changes all of that. A one-stop shop for software needs, Bodega
makes it simple for you to discover great, new software.

We’ve been working closely with developers in advance of the first
public release. With an already impressive line-up of software companies
on board, Bodega features an extensive catalog of applications – a catalog that
continues to grow daily – and includes paid, free and open-source apps.

In addition to a simple, easy-to-use search interface, you can also browse the top-
rated and most-downloaded applications, giving them an easy way to see what’s hot in
the Mac community. And Bodega’s ratings and comments make it easy to find software
others are raving about, while skipping those not worth the download.

The storefront also provides links to press clippings and blog postings, so they can
see what tech writers have to say about an app.

Bodega lets you buy directly from developers, giving you the lowest price while
making sure your money ends up in the pockets of the people who built it.

You’ll never again have to waste time hunting for old license keys or receipts. When
purchasing an app through Bodega, you can save their receipts in the application,
making reinstallation a hassle-free process.

Bodega also takes the headache out of updating by checking for application updates to
make sure your software is up-to-date. When Bodega finds outdated apps,
downloading an update takes a single click. Future versions will include a batch update
feature, allowing a you to stay current with a single click.

There are some advertising spaces available, now is the time to get your ads in for maximum exposure.