iPhone News Updated

New Yorker iPhone Cover Boosts Sales for Brushes App

New Yorker iPhone Cover Boosts Sales for Brushes App

Artist Jorge Colombo may have drawn the dreamy, nocturnal cityscape of Manhattan on the June 1 cover, using his iPhone, but a software engineer named Steve Sprang built Brushes, the iPhone application that transformed Mr. Columbo’s swipes into digital strokes.

The novelty and popularity of the cover has provided a healthy boost in sales for the 32-year-old who works shifts in a coffee shop when he’s not developing applications for the iPhone and Mac.

On Monday, Mr. Sprang said the application had its highest selling day since it was first released into Apple’s App Store in August, with 2,700 copies at $4.99 apiece flying off the virtual shelves.

“That’s even bigger than when Apple featured the application on iTunes,” said Mr. Sprang, who estimated that on average the application sells roughly 60 to70 copies each day.

To date, the application has sold around 40,000 copies, he said.

The flurry of attention and sales was something of a surprise to Mr. Sprang, who said he first learned Mr. Colombo’s illustration would appear on the upcoming cover of the weekly magazine when he received a call from a newspaper interested in interviewing him about it.

“Now, it’s everywhere,” he said.

Before trying his hand at building iPhone applications, Mr. Sprang worked at Apple for seven years as a software engineer, developing presentation software such as Keynote.

Last March, he decided he was ready for a different challenge. “I wanted to strike on my own,” he said. “The iPhone presented a good opportunity.”

Always a fan of graphic design and early drawing programs for Mac computers such as MacArt, he decided to create a digital palette for artists.

“A painting app for the iPhone seemed natural thing given the phone,” he said. “It’s very tactile and touching.”

iLotto stories have fueled the exodus of some developers eager to try their hand on the platform. But in March 2008 when Mr. Sprang quit his job, Apple had just released the software developer’s kit to third-party developers. “There wasn’t really an iPhone developer community at that point,” he said. “No one knew what it was going to be like.”

And although he has yet to rake in the six-figure sums that some developers have accumulated from their creations, Mr. Sprang says he’s thrilled to see an artistic community flourishing around his application.

“Some developers are able to make hundreds of thousands dollars doing this,” he said. “I’m not at their level. But I am able to make a living and support myself doing this, which is what I wanted to do.”

[Thanks: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com]