Utah Symphony | Utah Opera Facebook App

We were asked to help the Utah Symphony | Utah Opera create a Facebook app to increase fan engagement. They had an awesome idea and needed us to run with it, design the user interface, code the backend and put it up on Facebook. We created a small app that lets fans:

• Choose an image.
• Choose from a few pre-populated phrases. 
• Insert their own text. 
• Publish to an album on the USUO page and the fan’s Facebook profile. 

Stay tuned on Friday for a behind-the-curtain look at the Utah Opera Costume Shop!

Happy Holidays & Thank you to our Clients and Consultants

Thank you to our 2012 partners. Everyone should have received their card already — please appreciate the 20¢ George Washington stamp that had to be added to the holiday stamp. He was roundly regarded as the most merry of all presidents.

Our clients are our passion & our success.
Thank you for being part of our business and our lives.

Thank you to our 2012 clients:

• Age Performance
• Amanda Nelson Photography
• Brach Design Architecture
• Boart Longyear
• Bruges Waffles & Frites
• Chow Truck
• Carrera & Company
• Davies + Allen
• Fluid Heart Yoga
• Knome
• The Mandate Press
• Mazza Middle Eastern Cafe
• Philliou Partners
• Provo River Water Users Association
• Red Queen Book Arts
• SmartMouth Communications
• SOS Employment Group
• Top Agent Guide
• TimeMD
• Utah Symphony | Utah Opera
• Wilkinson Ferrari & Co

Special thanks to our 2012 consultants:

• Michael Carey
• Kira Griffin
• Karen Kaminski
• R. Brian Moncur
• Dave Morgan
• Rob Neal
• Kipp Sorensen
• Beth Turner

We continue our tradition of donating to the Lend a Hand Program on behalf of our clients. This program provides heat in the winter and air conditioning in the summer to elderly and disabled Utahans.

Age Performance Holiday Slides

One of the fun things about working with Age Performance is that I get to bascially be their in-house designer. I get to do all the little projects we don’t nomally get to do for clieints. I come from an in-house design background and it’s where I preferred to work before I joined Sawaya Consulting.

Ball Wall at Age Performance — the slides display on the center TV panel.

Age Performance has this big plexiglass wall panels with TVs mounted inside. At the gym we throw medicine balls at them. We swap out the TV slides on occasion and I wanted to share these with everyone:

Building a Mobile App Launch Party + Updates

It’s here! Our book Building a Mobile App: A Resource Guide for Clients & Corporations launches this Friday!

Starting on Friday you can grab the book for FREE on Kindle for the following 5 days—my only request is that you leave me an honest review on Amazon and let me know what you think. There is also a paper version of the book.

Launch Party

Grand Prize at Launch Party – Deluxe Edition of Building a Mobile App, Chow Truck Gift Certificate, Antigravity Yoga Gift Certificate, Amazon Gift Certificate, App Store Gift Certificate.

If you are a reader of this blog you are invited to the launch party:

Friday, Noevember 9th
from 6 – 8 PM
Red Queen Book Arts
171 East Broadway (300 South)
Salt Lake City, Utah

There will be prizes, enter to win here › 

Bring your mobile device (with the Kindle app installed) to the launch party to download the book for free. We’ll have a limited number of paperbacks on hand for $10 cash or credit and you can reserve one on the launch party sign up page linked above.

Website Changes

We’ve had this mobile apps page on our site for sometime. We’ve updated it to include mention of the new book and added both the book page and the mobile apps page to the homepage of the site.

Book Mentions Around the Interwebs

This book is the first book I’ve published, but not the only one in the works. If you want to stay up to date on future books, please consider joining my author mailing list on ambersawaya.com ›

The book has a companion document to help you plan your app build and start internal conversations. This is the App Planning Blueprint and is available for free after registering on buildingamobileapp.com ›
(if you are a client please contact me for a copy of the blueprint without requiring registration)

I want to write a book!

I’ve heard this from many of you as I’ve finally released my precious words into the world. You’ve all heard me say the same thing, “just get started! my book was finished before I sat down to write” or my other favorite phrase, “every part of writing a book is the *new* Worst Part of Writing a Book”. Tune in on Friday (launch party day) for a short round up of what it takes to write a book.

Letterpress Handbook app trending in the App Store

We just launched a new app that we’re excited to tell you about… but first something interesting is happing in the App Store. As part of our new app launch we installed Distimo App Anlytics for all of our accounts. It’s a great tool. We were looking through it and we noticed something.

Downloads

The Letterpress Handbook has been moving along, a few downloads a day for months and months… but then suddenly…

BAM! 600 downloads a day for a couple days!

Which has now caused this:

Ranking

Top Free Reference Apps… look at #44 — remember there are ~700.000 apps in the App Store.

What did we do? What is the magic formula for a ranking? Well, we think it’s a bit of a misstep. A developer of a really popular app released a new Letterpress game — so we believe this is run off from that.

We’ll keep an eye on it and let you know what happens next—who knows what a top ranking can do for an app?

In the meantime, get the app for yourself —it’s free and available in the App Store.