The iDevBlogADay survey I posted was available for 3 weeks, and received 109 entries. Thanks to all those who filled it out, hopefully this information will be of use and/or interest to the community. Here's the info:

Q1: Please select the description that best applies to you regarding your mobile development experience.

Q2: Please select the description that best applies to you regarding server side development.

Q3: Please select the description that best applies to you regarding server administration.

Q4: Please select the description that best applies to you regarding your source code.

Q5: Which of the following are you interested in learning more about?

Q6: Which do you prefer?

Due to upcoming changes in the way iDevBlogADay is going to operate, I may be rotated out of active duty shortly in order to make room for some new blood. If you've enjoyed my previous posts, and would like to read my upcoming ones that will make use of the above info, please follow me on Twitter: @CerebralGardens.

This post is part of iDevBlogADay, a group of indie iPhone development blogs featuring two posts per day. You can keep up with iDevBlogADay through the web site, RSS feed, or Twitter.

Last week I posted a short survey for developers to fill out, in order to get a gauge of the type of posts you're interested in. I had planned to post the results of the survey this week, but the number of responses doesn't yet seem large enough to be accurate. So I'm going leave the survey up for another week, please if you've got 2 minutes, fill it out (if you haven't already).

For the regular post today, I'm going to cover some awesome developer tools that can make your life easier. These are listed in no particular order.

AppViz: http://www.ideaswarm.com/products/appviz/

AppViz is a tool for automatically downloading your sales, trends and financial reports from iTunes Connect, as well as the reviews for your apps. The app works by scrapping the information from the web so it breaks whenever Apple changes something at iTC, but, IdeaSwarm, the creators, are insanely fast at analyzing the changes and pushing out an update to accommodate. This is by far the best $30 I've spent, and to be honest, I don't know of a single developer with published apps, that isn't already using AppViz. So I guess this tip is for newbies. Get this app now, you'll love it.

MajicRank: http://majicjungle.com/majicrank.html

MajicRank by David Frampton (of Chopper 2 fame) is the tool to use to track how your apps are doing in the top 200 lists. It scans all regions, so you can see results in countries you can't normally access. It's similar to AppViz in that it scraps info from the web and so it can break, but it rarely does. MajicRank is free so there's no excuse not to use it.

TestFlight: http://testflightapp.com/

I mentioned TestFlight a couple of weeks ago but they're worth adding to this list too. They've created a great service so far, it's almost too easy to use! There are still some kinks to work out, but note that they moved quickly to resolve the security issue I pointed out in the last article.

DropBox: http://dropbox.com/

DropBox is a fantastic cloud storage system for users. It lets anyone backup important files or easily transfer files to another place/person effortlessly. They provide an SDK that lets you add DropBox support to your apps so that you can let your users backup and/or transfer their app data easily.

Amazon AWS: http://aws.amazon.com/

Amazon Web Services actually consists of several great tools. The two most popular so far seem to be S3 (another cloud storage system, but intended for companies not users), and SimpleDB (a simple database in the cloud). If your app is data intensive, there doesn't seem to be a better solution than Amazon for hosting that data. They now have a free starter plan too so you can try it out at no risk.

Matt Gemmell: http://mattgemmell.com/

Mr. Matt Legend Gemmell isn't really a dev tool, but he does make a few that you can use in your apps. The most popular ones are MGTwitterEngine (an implementation of the Twitter API) and MGSplitViewController (a replacement for the iPad's UISplitViewController that gives you more control/options). Check them out here: http://mattgemmell.com/source

Accessorizer: http://www.kevincallahan.org/software/accessorizer.html

I found out about Accessorizer through Jeff LaMarche who said it was one of his favourite apps. I can see why. The app is a source code generator. You teach it your coding style, and then it pumps out code for you. No, it won't build your next app for you, but it will save you tonnes of repetitive typing setting up all your class properties etc. If you value your time, Accessorizer will save a lot of it for you.

TouchXML: https://github.com/TouchCode/TouchXML

TouchXML is a library for reading in and parsing XML files. If you store your app's data and/or configuration in XML files, this is a far faster way of getting that info than using libxml. You can quickly extract exactly what you need from XML in just a few lines of code. Truly indispensable. And if you'd prefer JSON over XML, there's a TouchJSON available too.

Hopefully something above will help you or a friend on you next project. Now, please don't forgot to fill out the short survey. It's only 6 questions. Thanks! :)

This post is part of iDevBlogADay, a group of indie iPhone development blogs featuring two posts per day. You can keep up with iDevBlogADay through the web site, RSS feed, or Twitter.

For this week's iDevBlogADay post, I'm going to give you some numbers. A different set of numbers than usual, not sales numbers (unfortunately they've not been interesting enough to publish yet); I'm going to give you the number of visits to my other iDevBlogADay posts so far.

I love being a part of the iDevBlogADay rotation, it's forcing me to write and communicate more with the iOS community (I'm usually a very quiet person). I appreciate the opportunity to be able to give a little something back. To that end, I want to maximize the reach and the impact of the little that I do get to write. So, following the numbers, I'm going to have a tiny survey for you. I'll publish the results next week and then use the information gained to create a series of posts that should interest and help, the most people.

Here are my numbers so far (all stats current as of Jan 30th, 2011).

The most successful post (judging solely on web traffic) was the Tips & Tricks post. By far, nearly double the traffic of the second most popular post about reducing piracy. The Tips post had a tonne of people tweeting the link.

My theory, is that the Tips post had 9 pretty different tips, and so there was 9 times as many chances for a topic to be interesting to someone. That's why it was linked to more often than the others. The second, regarded piracy, a topic almost every developer is concerned with.

I have no idea if the stats I'm seeing are similar to others, I only have about 200 followers on Twitter, which is pretty low. But then again, I don't say much, so it's not surprising.

So, please help me by answering the 6 questions in this survey so that I can write on topics that are the most interesting to you!

Thanks!

This post is part of iDevBlogADay, a group of indie iPhone development blogs featuring two posts per day. You can keep up with iDevBlogADay through the web site, RSS feed, or Twitter.