To honor the release, we’re dropping our price to $4.99 and we have stuffed Bombora 2 with tons of great new goodness!

To name a couple of the more salient upgrades:
• Beautiful new custom status icons
• Integrated map display with station data
• More stations and lots more forecasts
• Exciting under-the-hood updates
• Over-the-air content updates!!!

Under the hood, we’ve added some new plumbing and the ability to deliver over-the-air content. All of these developments make it easier for us to make Bombora better in the future.

The radical changes warrant a bold new version number like 2.0, and a whole assortment of new icons and information. Enjoy these preview shots from the upcoming release of Bombora 2.0!

For a complete list of buoys, stations, and forecasts available in Bombora 1.0.2, visit the Bombora 1.0.2. Station List.

This new version of Bombora contains approximately 50% more buoys than previously, bringing the total number up to about 225 stations and covering new areas such as the Great Lakes and introducing a number of internationally-owned stations. We’ve also included an additional four forecast products, as well.

Bombora 1.0.2 is a FREE update for all existing paid customers.

The NDBC has a vast network of stations that provide us with access to meteorological data. Weather instruments can be placed just about anywhere, so we see data not only from buoys, but from lighthouses, lightships, the tidal observation network, and more. Not all of the stations have a complete set of instrumentation, in fact, most of them only provide wind and atmospheric conditions, leaving out wave data. During the initial phase of development, our focus was restricted to stations that provided wave data; we sacrificed a number of them for the sake of completeness and presentation.

Now that Bombora’s been out for a while, we’ve heard from a number of sailors/ boaters who don’t only want wave data – so of course we want to include all that information…

What that means is that we’ve submitted a previously unplanned release of Bombora, with the existing interface, and with about 50% more buoys added to the “Buoys” tab. There are hundreds of more stations (not buoys) that provide non-wave data, and they will be included with the next version of Bombora.

Bombora 1.1 will be a pretty big update – work is already underway and it’s going to be an iPhone 3.0 required application – the enhancements to the platform are just too much for us to ignore. We’ll post some more info on Bombora 1.1 as it progresses and let the world know when Bombora 1.02 hits the App Store. All App Store updates are of course FREE to those who have purchased Bombora through iTunes.

We hope that this update will satisfy our customers’ desire for more data, while we continue to work to improve Bombora. Cheers.

This sale will run until the release of Bombora 1.1 in late May or early June, and for the first few days that Bombora 1.1 is in the App Store. Depending on what The Oracle says, the price will probably be raised back up to $9.99 at that time – Bombora 1.1 is a pretty big content update and it’s a great purchase at that price.

After the recent deluge of new users running a cracked and illegal copy of Bombora, we hope that dropping the price for this period of time will make it “more accessible” to those users that are not comfortable spending ten dollars for a comprehensive ocean forecasting app.

The Gonz Consortium’s pretty familiar with the App Store pricing tales of the App Cubby developers and we’re curious to try our own experiment, and look forward to sharing any insights that we may gain.

Be sure to check the iTunes App Store on Saturday for Bombora at it’s temporary sale price of $6.99!

After last weekend’s debacle of a surf forecast from every major player in the market, I feel like it’s high time everyone took off their training wheels and learn how to make your own call. The great thing about being your own Sean Collins is that all the information is free and easy to find, you’ll impress your friends (or depress depending on the situation) with this new found knowledge, and most importantly, you’ll know when the waves are good, not when a Web site says the waves are good…

Bombora charges a nominal amount for putting all this wonderful ocean data together, and it’s only going to get better and more feature-rich with time. We’re adding more stations, more forecasts, and more tidal stations; and don’t think for a second that we’re not looking for ways to include swell models in Bombora, too!

So naturally, when I caught a tweet that looked like such (edit: link and username removed) I was eager to see what new site this Twitter user was pointing to … Until I found myself at Appulous. Sure enough, there in the directory, was the app that my business partner and I had invested *hundreds* of hours of hard work in – cracked and available free outside the iTunes App Store. “Maybe nobody’s noticed” I delusion-ally thought to myself, as I quickly logged into our Pinch Analytics account.

Bombora had been posted to Appulous on Thursday, April 30th, and Pinch Analytics was showing new unique users at 5x our average daily count for new uniques, starting on that very Thursday. Something was definitely amiss.

“Maybe we got some free marketing I don’t know about” I thought optimistically, as I logged into iTunes Connect to check our sales data. Unfortunately, my hopes were quickly dashed: our sales remained at or below our previous average daily sales. For every user that was buying Bombora through the proper channels, there were now five or six users getting it for free. Although it’s somewhat flattering to be cracked (somebody wanted Bombora bad enough to crack it) we are hardly jumping up and down with joy.

Over the last five days, this trend has continued… and our sales have declined. We don’t have a lot of data right now, given that this *just* happened last week, but our daily average sales have decreased by 30-40% in the last three days. Other influences, like placement on the Recently Released page for our category (Weather) surely have an affect on app sales, but the appearance of cracked Bombora seems to be more than a conspicuously unfortunate coincidence.

Fully 30% of our total user-base has “stolen” Bombora, which is priced at $9.99, and are now continually “stealing” our server utilization, for which we pay a monthly fee (Slicehost – good stuff.) It’s not just the development costs – tens of thousands of dollars in labor – but the cost of providing ongoing support that we are being deprived of. We think $9.99 is a pretty good deal for Bombora when you consider how much data we’re providing easy access to. The iPhone costs $200-$300, with a minimum $70/ month service plan, yet people still complain about a $9.99 app. But I digress – the app store ecosystem is another post entirely.

Of course, an illegal download is not the same as a lost sale – we’re not the first app to be cracked and we won’t be the last. Other developers have written about the problem and even devised some unique approaches. We will be taking some steps ourselves to prevent this from happening to future versions – Bombora calls home to our servers for data, and without data, the app is pretty worthless, so we’re fortunate to have this optional barrier built-in. That gives us the choice, as ugly as it may be, to change the server process to respond only to particular versions of Bombora, forcing an upgrade. Do we want to do that? Absolutely not. Will we? Probably not.

Both myself and my business partner have full-time day jobs, and work on Bombora in our spare time. So now, instead of just working on making the app better (which we’re constantly doing anyways, because it’s fun, and because we want to make money!) we have to invest time and effort into devising a method to protect our intellectual property. What a pain-in-the-ass.

Who do we blame? Apple? Somali Pirates? Having known the ‘net intimately for some time now, and being a couple of sharp cookies, we recognize the futility of pursuing action by legal means, or trying to have a server taken down only to have three more mirrors appear. It’s not like we want to willingly shoulder the burden of extensive legal costs to detract from our already diminishing sales revenue… So where does that leave us?

We will continue to be bummed that people are stealing our app. We will add some form of minimal copyright protection to our client-server communication process to try and protect future editions. We will hope that Apple takes some steps to remedy what appears to be a significant problem.

Most importantly, we’re going to continue to try and make the best app we can – there are plans to add some really cool features to Bombora and I would hate to be distracted from achieving that excellence.

We hope to have version 1.1 submitted to the App Store in late May, so if you have specific, constructive feedback that you’d like to pass our way, contact us now!

Work has commenced on Bombora 1.1, which will contain a large number of new buoys, some new marine text forecasts, and a healthy quantity of new Tidal Stations. We’ve heard the feedback clamoring for more stations (and we are eager to please,) so look for Bombora 1.1 in the coming weeks.