apps by phocus

This is Due’s scrolling performance, now.

After months of optimisation, Due has finally hit the elusive 60fps scrolling performance.

The next version is so going to be insanely great.

This was Due’s scrolling performance with 300 reminders in the logbook from 1.0 through 1.2 Beta 3 Build 1101.

Japanese Tax Form 3: Just leave this blank.

Back before Due went on sale, I wasn’t sure how well it would do in various markets.

Some 45 days later, it’s clear that the Japanese market is going to be pretty huge (about 7% of my sales now).

Because of how Apple prices the app in Japan, you also end up getting more per copy of your app sold on the Japanese App Store than on any other store. After Apple’s 30% cut, I get about US$3 per copy of Due sold in Japan and about US$2 per copy sold elsewhere.

However there’s the infamous 20% withholding tax by the Japanese government of all app sales in Japan. Thankfully, there’s a way to not get taxed twice if your country has signed the ‘Avoidance of Double Taxation Agreement’ with Japan.

Singapore has one, so take advantage of it. Fill up the Japanese Tax Form 3 under iTunes Connect and send it in way in advance, because it takes 90 days to get approved.

Filling up the Tax Form 3 sounds harder than it really is. Basically, you fill up a web form on iTunes connect, and Apple sends you a PDF of the contract with what you’ve filled up. You print it out, sign both copies (no need to fill up anything else), mail it to the Austin address and that’s that.

The last part of the web form where it asks about the ratio of ownership looks mind boggling though, especially for us where we sell Due through an LLP (Limited Liability Partnership). I’ve asked, and Apple says leave it blank. So, just leave it blank.

For the longest time, I was wondering if the blur in the header on iPhone 3G and 3GS was simply due to the fact that I was too accustomed to the iPhone 4’s retina display.

Turns out that it was indeed blurry on non-retina displays like the 3G and 3GS. It didn’t help that this problem was not pronounced at all on the iPhone 4’s retina display, which I’ve been using since I made this header.

Problem? I was laying out the header programmatically because I wanted to centralise the header and its icon. Turns out that the calculation was so precise it ended up suffering from sub-pixel rendering problem.

Thanks to Stuart Carnie on Stack Overflow for suggesting the possible cause, and Alex Reynolds for asking the question, we have sharp logo and text again.

Phew.