Two new bundles were announced this week: “The Indie Mac Gift Pack”:indiemacgiftpack.com (6 great Mac apps for $60) and the “Fusion Ads Holiday Bundle”:fusionads.net/bundle/ (an assortment of web design-related apps, icons, and more for $79). I love apps in both of these bundles and recommend you check them out, buy what you need, or gift them to a friend. There’s a fear among many developers that a bundle can cheapen the healthy Mac software market, but both these bundles avoid that with a higher price and the feel of being put together carefully.

As a comparison, here’s a “Macworld article on holiday bundles from 2009”:www.macworld.com/article/1… That collection seems kind of random despite several good apps in the list.

And sales for the Indie Mac Gift Pack are split evenly to the developers, so we know it’ll be a nice revenue boost for them during the holidays. From the FAQ:

"Hey... you're ripping these developers off, aren't you?" ... "No... we ARE these developers. Our six small companies decided to band together and do a promotion, to see if it works for us. We're splitting all the proceeds evenly. There's no middleman here."

I’ve never participated in a bundle, but after some of the “MacHeist controversy”:homepage.mac.com/simx/tech… I developed a set of rules that I run Riverfold promotions on. These are the easy things that I can always say “yes” to without much thought:

Coupons are great. My coupons rarely expire and I don’t care if sites like “retailmenot.com”:www.retailmenot.com keep a list of them. Saving a few bucks might be the difference between someone buying my software and not.

Giving out software to bloggers is great. Inspired by “Wil Shipley’s C4 talk”:www.viddler.com/explore/r… I’ve “blogged about this”:www.manton.org/2008/04/w… Apple employees get free licenses too.

Small promotions are great. I freely give out copies to small sites that want to give away licenses of my software to encourage people to post comments. I think readers interpret these (correctly) as software developers doing something generous for a small site, instead of the gut reaction when you see software listed on MacZot or MacUpdate Promo (“are sales so bad they had to sell their software for half price?").

Charity is great. I loved being a part of “Indie+Relief”:www.indierelief.com/, the Pan-Mass Challenge auctions, and other bundles that go directly to a cause. Just like smaller promotions, these are good for users (deals on software), good for developers (helps with marketing), good for charity (donated money), and good for the software market (these aren’t developers who are making a sacrifice because their sales aren’t doing well — it’s charity).

Now that I’ve seen a bundle like the “Indie Mac Gift Pack”:indiemacgiftpack.com, I think I can more clearly judge a unique bundle opportunity when it comes along. Does it minimize the middleman? Does it respect the individual apps as peers? Does it use the total bundle price to underscore the value of software rather than cheapen it? Then it’s probably a good deal for everyone.

On “episode 35 of Core Intuition”:www.coreint.org/2010/11/e… I mentioned attending the 360iDev conference, and we brought it up again on the next show while plugging 360MacDev. I had a great time at the conference and hope to attend another one in the future.

The best part was meeting all the iPhone developers who I’ve never crossed paths with, and catching up with others I’d only met briefly before. iPhone developers come from a mix of places, from old Mac developers to web developers to traditional mobile or game developers. While there’s a risk that having so many small regional conferences will fragment the community, this concentrated group of mostly iPhone-only developers made for a great few days of sessions and discussion.

And my main concern leading into the conference — that the hotel location would make it difficult for people to head downtown or see other parts of Austin — turned out to be mostly a non-issue. I had a great time hanging out with everyone in the evening, and hope some of you will be back for SXSW.

I used Tweet Library to “collect about 120 tweets from attendees”:www.tweetlibrary.com/manton/36… at the conference: reaction to sessions, quotes, speaker slide URLs, dinner out, and more. Capturing an event like this is why I built the app. What you had for dinner isn’t interesting by itself, but in context it is powerful because it tells a story.

In an “interview with Kevin Hoctor on episode 5 of the iDeveloper Live podcast”:ideveloper.tv/shows, Scotty referenced my comment from Core Intuition that customers are so used to terrible support that they don’t mind a few days or even a week delay. I thought this was maybe taken out of context a little since we were talking about vacations, so I went back to listen to what I said:

"Most people are thrilled to get a response in a few days, maybe a week they're still cool with it. They are used to sending support email to companies and not getting a response any time soon or maybe not at all in some cases."

Of course I didn’t mean I strive for week delays before a customer gets a response, but looking back I think Scotty’s interpretation was right: in a way this was a confession that I’ve fallen down when it comes to support. My response times for Tweet Library questions are still very good (usually same day), but it’s dragging for my other products. Even when I’m quick to respond to an initial email, difficult follow-up questions often won’t see an answer for some time. I’m just not as responsive as I was when I wrote “this blog post about good support in 2007”:www.manton.org/2007/02/c…

The worst part are the emails that fall through the cracks. They are on their 2nd or 3rd response to a problem that I don’t understand, or they’re waiting on a solution that isn’t ready, and months go by before I can pick up the thread again. I hate this.

I’m going to use this opportunity to get back to where I should be: less than 24-hour response in all cases, for all products. I’m adding a “stats section to my support page”:www.riverfold.com/support/ to keep me in check, and I’ve seeded it with response times for the most recent support questions via email and forums. This will also give customers an idea of what to expect without an explicit promise from me.

“Marco Arment wrote an interesting piece”:www.marco.org/143215691… on the Mac App Store shortly after it was announced. I was nodding my head in agreement for much of it, until I got to this part:

"And if the Mac App Store is only populated by a subset of today's Mac software, a few key points (such as 'Inexpensive') still won't be true. This is why I believe that the Mac App Store will be dominated by (and become known for) apps that don't exist on the Mac today."

He makes great points, and I think his assumptions about Apple’s rules are correct. But newcomers dominating the store? And $1 apps as the second most popular price point on the Mac? I’m not convinced.

Many iPhone app hits lend themselves to a mobile environment, but the Mac is different because people usually buy computers to get work done. You don’t have your MacBook Pro with you while you’re waiting in line at the grocery store. You don’t have it at a party when your friend tells you about the latest game. You don’t hand your computer to your kids when they’re bored in the car and want to play Angry Birds.

If $1 apps will be so common on the Mac App Store, why aren’t they common on the iPad? In the iPad top 10 right now there are only two 99-cent apps. Prices around $2.99 or $4.99 are much more common, and there are plenty of $10 apps as well in the top paid and especially top grossing lists. The iPad app making the most money right now is a $20 music app called “djay”.

I think $10-$20 will be pretty common on the Mac App Store, but not $1, and not even $2 or $3. Something that’s priced so cheap sends a clear message on the Mac: this app is useless and should have been free.

As I said recently on “Core Intuition”:www.coreint.org/, I absolutely wish all the best of luck to iOS developers and designers moving to the Mac. I had a great time hanging out with a mostly iOS group at 360iDev last month; these guys are ambitious and smart and bring innovation to the platform because they don’t have the baggage that the rest of us have. 2011 will be a fantastic year for new Mac software and for indie developers!

But take a good look at some of your favorite apps for iPhone and iPad and you’ll see that for the most part they lack the depth to compete with established Mac software. The workhorses on your Mac — text editors, image editors, file transfer apps, version control clients, web site tools — won’t be knocked off by new competition easily.

Maybe 10.7 Lion will be a revolution, but when the Mac App Store first launches on 10.6 it’s going to contain familiar software at familiar prices.

Apple’s announcement yesterday of a Mac App Store is big news. As soon as the event was over, journalists reached out to developers to get feedback on what it means for existing Mac shops. Reading the variety of responses is fascinating to me, and I contributed some quotes for articles in “Macworld”:www.macworld.com/article/1… and “Cult of Mac”:www.cultofmac.com/mac-app-s… There’s also a “write-up on Ars”:arstechnica.com/apple/new…

Here’s “Wolf’s take on the guidelines”:rentzsch.tumblr.com/post/1369…

"My fellow Mac developers are laughing at the Mac App Store guidelines. They're reporting that apps they've been shipping for years — a number of them Apple Design Award-winning — would be rejected from the Mac App Store. These are proven apps, beloved by their users. The current guidelines are clearly out-of-touch."

Every developer I’ve talked to uses at least some private APIs on the Mac, often to work around bugs or limitations in current APIs. It’s disappointing that the Mac App Store is shipping before 10.7, because 10.7 would be a good opportunity to find out why developers still need private APIs and bake support directly into the next version of Mac OS X to solve common issues.

Can you imagine such rock-solid apps as BBEdit or Transmit being rejected from the Mac App Store? It’s going to be a lonely launch day full of hasty iOS ports if Apple doesn’t show some common sense when approving Mac apps.

Before I released “Tweet Library”:www.riverfold.com/software/… I talked to everyone who would listen about the price. Several people suggested I go with a free app, but use in-app purchase to upgrade to the full version. Two apps that handle this well include “Twitterrific”:twitterrific.com and “SimpleNote”:simplenoteapp.com/. Countless games also take this approach.

It’s the closest thing the App Store has to demos, but it comes at a cost: anyone can leave a 1-star “too expensive” review of your app without even upgrading to the full version. At that point they are not even rating the app they downloaded (a free, limited version that probably works just fine); they are simply commenting on a portion of the app they didn’t want to buy.

There are two ways to give me feedback about Tweet Library:

• Email support, post to Twitter, or write on your blog about the software. This is free.

• Leave a review in the App Store. This is $9.99.

I'm very comfortable with this model. The quality of feedback I get in email is extremely high, whether the customer has bought the app or not, and the App Store reviews aren't cluttered with pricing rants.

If you purchased, tweeted, blogged about, rated, or mentioned Tweet Library thank you. I’ve been very happy to see how well it is being received. I built this app because I wanted to do more with Twitter, but I didn’t really know until it was released if anyone else would care.

The truth is, I released it a tiny bit too early — there are a few annoying bugs that I’ll need to fix soon for 1.0.1 — but it was a long development cycle, and faced with getting burned out on a project the only thing I know how to do is ship it. Then I can use the reaction from real customers to tell me if I’m on the right track and where to go next.

I’ve already blogged about the pricing and viability of third-party Twitter apps, though I hadn’t officially announced the app yet:

"When Twitter for iPad shipped it jumped to the number 1 spot in free apps, but maybe you don't have to compete directly with that. Maybe if you hold your ground somewhere in the top paid list, that's enough to find an audience."

Tweet Library has only been out for 3 full days, and I don’t want to jinx it, but so far this theory is holding. The app went to #2 for top grossing iPad apps in social networking in the first day. I didn’t expect that, but at $10 I can see how it might happen. Then it also climbed to #2 in top paid iPad apps in the same category, and stayed there for a couple days before dropping to #3 as I write this. The only other Twitter apps in any of the top 10 lists for iPad are Twitter’s official app and TweetDeck, both free.

Let me repeat that because it kind of blows my mind a little: Tweet Library has been the best-selling iPad Twitter app since it was released.

How did I successfully ship an app in a crowded market at literally 2x the price of any other app? Two things:

Refuse to compete on price. I felt so strongly about this that I was willing to launch and fail. If the App Store couldn’t support $10 Twitter apps, then I would bow out. I saw in a comment on TUAW that someone would wait until the price lowered, but I hope to avoid the pricing gimmicks common to the App Store. There’s no intro price for Tweet Library, and the price is not going to change. I believe consistency is the best long-term plan for app pricing.

Market the app as something new first and yet another Twitter app second. I believe the key to selling Tweet Library is to focus the marketing around what makes it special: archiving tweets, curating tweets, filtering tweets. Yes, you can also post to Twitter and see mentions or reply to DMs, but that is just the price to get in the door. Tweet Library doesn’t do those common tasks perfectly yet, but customers seem willing to cut me some slack because of all the other unique features that the app offers.

So, up next I’m going to fix bugs, and I’m going to add features, and I’m going to listen to customers. I’m sure it will soon drop out of the top 10 and other Twitter apps will take its place, but I feel like the launch was strong enough to prove that I’ve got something. I intend to carve out a little niche in the Twitter market and execute on it.

I submitted my new iPad app to Apple earlier this week. It hasn’t been reviewed yet, but Ryan Irelan has been using the beta to curate a “collection of ExpressionEngine conference tweets over on the EE Insider blog”:eeinsider.com/blog/eeci… The app may still only be in the hands of my friends and beta testers, but it’s great to see how it could be used in the real world.

So that’s one feature of the app: grouping tweets together around topics, events, conferences, categories, whatever, and then publishing them with one click so they can be shared with friends and indexed by Google. There’s more of course. I’ll be getting the marketing web site up soon, and a screencast too, hopefully before the app is approved! Although I’m quick to complain about App Store review delays, in this case I’m counting on a week delay so that I can get my act together.

He snuck it in under a commentary on Alex Payne’s excellent “last post about Twitter”:al3x.net/2010/09/1… but we now have a “Birdfeed postmortem of sorts from Buzz Andersen”:log.scifihifi.com/post/1144… I’m particularly interested in where Buzz thinks the Twitter app market is going:

"Does this mean that there's no longer room for third party Twitter clients? My suspicion is that people will continue to make them, but it seems to me that they're already on the road to becoming increasingly uniform and commoditized as the Twitter experience is more sharply defined by Twitter itself (as my Birdfeed collaborator Neven Mrgan has suggested to me, Twitter clients are going the way of email clients)."

It seems nearly everyone thinks competing with Twitter’s official app is a bad idea. “Here’s Tapbots revealing Tweetbot”:tapbots.com/blog/busi… shortly after the Tweetie acquisition:

"But this news changes things for us. We probably won't be able to charge for the app anymore. Who's going to pay for a Twitter client when 'Tweetie' is free?"

I think the problem isn’t trying to build any Twitter app. The problem is building a mainstream Twitter client. The official iPhone and iPad apps, plus the redesigned web site, are so good that it’s futile to go head to head with them. You can’t undercut on price, and they are so well coded you’d need a talented full-time team to out-engineer them.

As I said in “my last Twitter post”:www.manton.org/2010/09/n… the trick is to look past the API. What would I want Twitter to add to the platform if I had my way? Design an app around that and you might have something interesting.

The theme in Buzz’s post that resonated the strongest with me is the emotional drain that building an app like this can have. The competition is intense. There’s a feeling that if you don’t have every little feature when you ship, you’ll be laughed out of the App Store. That is certainly on my mind, especially as “I intend to push the price”:www.manton.org/2010/06/1… in this market, and even with beta feedback I’m still not sure how my app is going to be received in the real world.

Although I had worked a little on iOS apps before, updating an existing app for the iPad and tinkering with unfinished apps, the first 1.0 for iOS that I played a significant role in just shipped last week: a “mobile version of Bookshelf”:itunes.apple.com/us/app/vi… for VitalSource. The iPhone version has been in development off and on for a while, but I took over the project fairly late in development, with a coding frenzy through the summer as we switched file formats and scrambled to finish in time for fall students.

Today the app broke into the App Store’s top 25 for free Education apps.

It’s designed for existing VitalSource customers, supporting both our file formats (for XML-based reflowable content or PDF-like fixed layout), with synced highlights, figure search, and offline access. At its core the app is 3 parts: a large C++ codebase, brand new Objective-C UI code, and a bunch of clever WebKit and JavaScript work. In many ways it’s a more difficult project than my other iPad app (still in development), but some great coders contributed to different parts of the architecture, before and after I joined the project.

Nearly 10 years ago, when I was hired at VitalSource to build the Mac version of our e-book reader, we delivered textbooks on DVD-ROMs and our technology was years ahead of everyone else. Today, and especially post-iPad, the market is a lot different, with some beautiful competition like “Inkling”:itunes.apple.com/us/app/in… Bookshelf for iPhone wasn’t first to the App Store, but it inherits an existing user base, strong platform, and large book inventory. I like VitalSource’s chances.

I like “Seth Godin”:sethgodin.typepad.com/. I haven’t read all his books, but I really enjoyed “The Dip”:www.amazon.com/gp/produc… and “Tribes”:www.amazon.com/gp/produc… They were quick reads (I got the first on audio, the other in print). He seemed to crack the problem of getting a business book down to its core idea and not using any more pages than needed.

So it surprised me when I picked up his latest, “Linchpin”:www.amazon.com/gp/produc… and months later I’m still not even halfway through. There’s nothing wrong with the content; I like what I’ve read so far. But it doesn’t flow the same way his other writing does, and at twice as long it doesn’t have the same structure.

Finally I realized I was doing it wrong. The best way to approach Linchpin is non-sequentially. Now I just jump to any random page, read a few profiles for the people and companies he uses as examples, and then 5 minutes later put it down again. I get just as much out of the book, but without the guilt of staring at the remainder of unfinished pages.

“Via Daring Fireball”:daringfireball.net/linked/20… I’m loving “this blog and idea”:sparkabout.net from newlyweds Simon Willison and Natalie Downe, who are traveling the world on a working honeymoon:

"We've been in Morocco now for just over a month. We launched Lanyrd from a rented apartment in Casablanca, and we're writing this update from a Riad in Marrakech. So far, travelling and working on a startup have complemented each other surprisingly well."

In 1999, Traci and I took a similar but shorter 2-month vacation to Europe where we both worked remotely. This was before wi-fi, so much of the destination planning centered around pay-by-the-hour internet cafes or reliable hotel phone lines for dial-up. Lots of backpacking, cheap rooms, and trains and boats between 6 countries. We were constantly broke and our accommodations varied between the crummy (freezing showers at a hostel) to the beautiful (freezing showers with a Mediterranean view), but those were easily some of the best weeks of my life. At the end of the trip we got engaged and came back to America to get married and have kids and never leave our neighborhood again.

Someday we’ll go back.

I feel bad admitting it, because some of my friends are betting on iAd revenue to feed their family, but I’m just not on board with Apple running an advertising network. I don’t want to see ads in my apps, and I don’t want Apple to ever lose even a little of what it means to be a product-driven company.

We talk about this on Core Intuition. Nearly every chance I get I like to point out that all these free Google apps come at a cost. Take this tweet from last year:

"Google Voice is so awesome but I just think it's dangerous to give Google this much power. Slippery slope, folks. You are not a customer."

And this comment on MetaFilter:

"If you are not paying for it, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold."

Some apps should absolutely be ad-suported (such as a search engine or social network), and many can be freemium (free versions supported by higher-priced subscriptions), but when given a choice I’d rather pay a fair price for a good service. When your customers are not your users, the product will suffer.

I know the world is full of ads already. We’re used to it — numb to it, maybe. But think about what the App Store has done: millions of people are paying real money for apps that complement ad-supported web sites. These same people would never pay a subscription fee to use the web site, but they’ll pay a few bucks for the same features in an iPhone app and it seems perfectly normal.

Do we really want to give that marketplace up? Because once it’s gone, and iAds are the norm, it will be an uphill battle to get anyone to pay for anything.

I’ve been thinking about and playing with the official Twitter app for iPad since its release last week. The best praise I can give Loren Brichter and his team for the UI “stacking” breakthrough is: I wish I had thought of it.

But it’s clear after an informal survey of friends, and listening to folks on Twitter, that the UI might be too clever for its own good. Many people can’t quite figure out if they love it or hate it. And on top of the UI risk, Twitter for iPad doesn’t bring any new features to the table.

Third-party Twitter clients won’t be wiped out by this. So now what?

The first Twitter clients (led by Twitterrific for Mac) provided a quick way to check on your friends without visiting the web site. The second batch of Twitter clients (mostly on mobile) provided a full replacement for the site.

I believe we’re about to see a third generation of clients that will go way beyond what the web site can do. There was worry when Twitter bought Tweetie that it would destroy the third-party Twitter market, and sure, some developers will fail or be discouraged from trying to compete against a free official product. But really what it does is raise the bar — that to succeed Twitter clients should be more than just a one-to-one mapping between UI and the Twitter API.

One feature is filtering. “TweetAgora for iPhone”:tweetagora.com has muting and an interesting live aggregation view, like a client-side extension of Twitter lists. “Hibari for Mac”:www.hibariapp.com recently shipped with an attractive UI and keyword filtering, muting, and integrated search results.

And there’s other stuff I want to see, like archiving tweets and better search and curation beyond simple favorites. I’ve been working on some of these too, in a brand new iPad app for Twitter. I can’t wait to share the details as it gets closer to release.

Not unlike “Marco’s post on the subject”:www.marco.org/208454730… my hope is that free apps and paid apps compete in separate worlds of the App Store. When Twitter for iPad shipped it jumped to the number 1 spot in free apps, but maybe you don’t have to compete directly with that. Maybe if you hold your ground somewhere in the top paid list, that’s enough to find an audience.

Jason Fried, “from a recent interview”:37signals.com/svn/posts… “Interruption and collaboration are different things.” If you haven’t listened to a Jason Fried talk recently, this one covers a lot of good stuff.

I also like “episode 19 of their podcast”:37signals.com/podcast/ which is edited from a live recording of a planning session for Rework. My first impression of Rework was that it was too finely edited — that to get to the essence they threw away too much material. I wanted to hear more case studies from their business, approaches that worked or didn’t, and lessons learned.

But I’ve flipped through the book again, a few months later, and it holds up. I don’t know if it was intentional or not, but the lack of filler text gives it a certain timelessness. Each chapter is one core argument, and whether that topic resonates with the reader or not depends entirely on what you and I bring to it from our own job experiences.

Today, Twitter starts “shutting down basic authentication”:countdowntooauth.com for the Twitter API. One of my favorite Twitter clients, Birdfeed, will be allowed fewer and fewer requests until finally at the end of the month it stops working. Likewise for Birdhouse and Twitterrific 2. And the same for my “Wii Codes”:wiitransfer.com/codes/ site, until I have a chance to update it.

“Dave Winer wrote a fairly negative essay”:www.scripting.com/stories/2… a few months ago on this so-called OAuthcalypse:

"When Twitter breaks all the apps in the OAuthcalypse, they will break all of mine, and I have no intention of fixing them. I don't expect anyone to care. But what you should think about is how many of the Twitter apps that you do care about will break and how many of them will say the hell with it? And how many of them will be around for the next time Twitter breaks everything, because that's certainly coming unless Twitter develops some kind of philosophy about itself as a developer platform."

I didn’t want to agree with him at first — I’m a big fan of nearly everything Twitter does — but it’s a fair question to ask whether backwards compatibility is getting the attention it deserves. Software moves fast, but this kind of thing hurts users, not just developers.

In the desktop world, OS APIs are unlikely to change so severely, and if they do you always have the option to run an older version of the OS or app indefinitely. For web services, though, you can’t keep an older copy of the internet around. Web apps are forced upgrades.

I’m not sure there’s a solution to any of this. It’s just part of tech progress, like moving data from old floppy disks to CDs to hard drives to the cloud. But it’s a bummer when apps get left behind as APIs are obsoleted. Over-aggressive deprecation was common in the Rails world, and “I was not a fan”:www.manton.org/2009/01/r…

So, here’s to the future, Twitter. Keep new API changes versioned and maintain the old stuff. If this OAuth switch is a one-time cost, developers can focus on what makes their apps unique instead of always playing catch-up.

The sort of odd “best of both worlds” balance in my different projects at “VitalSource”:www.vitalsource.com and as a solo shop is that I love working with a team, and I also love working alone. I mean really alone, doing the planning and design and coding and marketing. I’ve resisted farming out any piece of my apps at “Riverfold”:www.riverfold.com (except the application icon) so that I can have complete control. It’s brutally hard sometimes, but it’s mine.

If you’re working by yourself and add another person to the project, a funny thing happens: you become a manager. Before, you could spend 100% of your time on the work. Now you can allocate 50-75%, because you’re getting the new programmer up to speed, answering questions, and setting priorities. If you’re lucky (and I usually am), the person you added is contributing so much that it easily makes up for your loss in productivity, and then some.

The trade-off is worth it. Exchange the previous low communication overhead for extra coding man-hours.

You can build something great with a team, something that would be impossible alone, if you surround yourself with people who are better at your job than you are. I love that first moment when a team doubles in size from 1 to 2, or 2 to 4.

But after the initial frenzy of coding and emails and new features, I usually get burned out again. The project doesn’t strictly need me anymore, and I’m ready to get back to starting an app from scratch, when the scope is so small that the whole thing still fits in my head.

I like this paragraph from a “long post by Mike Lee”:le.mu.rs/motherfuc…

"On any project, whether it's a band performance or a team shipping, there's a time to curse, and a time to praise. Someone who gets those in the right order is an inspiring leader. Someone who gets them backwards is just an asshole."

As I mentioned on a recent “Core Intuition”:www.coreint.org/2010/06/e… episode, I have a really hard time remembering who I meet unless I read their blog, or follow them on Twitter, or have heard about their reputation. None of these were true when I first met Mike Lee, walking to pizza one night at C4[1]. I didn’t even know at the time that he worked at Delicious Monster. But it didn’t matter because he essentially opened with: “I was hit by a car last week.”

Bam! World’s toughest programmer indeed, and now I’ll never forget his face or the conversation. We can’t all be as relentlessly passionate and memorable as Mike, but there is a lesson here in personal brand: finding what sets us apart from every other programmer and letting that shape our voice and the projects we work on.

“Mike Rohde racked up $190 in iTunes in-app purchases”:www.rohdesign.com/weblog/ar… without knowing it, blaming an app called “Fishies”:itunes.apple.com/us/app/fi… by PlayMesh for tricking his son into purchasing virtual items without a password prompt. He was obviously pretty upset — I would be too! — but calling it a “scam” probably goes too far. So what really happened?

It is fairly well known that after the App Store prompts for your iTunes password, you can download more apps for a certain length of time (at least a few minutes) before it requires a password again. What seemed less clear is that this applies to in-app purchases as well.

To be sure, I ran a test to confirm the behavior:

• Download a new free app from the App Store (I downloaded the current number 1 iPhone app, Farm Story Summer).

• Enter your password to confirm the download.

• As soon as it finishes, go to another completely different app (in my case it was Iconfactory's Ramp Champ, which I had downloaded months ago).

• Purchase an in-app virtual item.

• It prompts for whether you want to buy the item (the standard Apple prompt), but without requiring a password.

What must have happened to Mike is that he bought something, entered his password, and then handed the iPad over to his son. His son played the fish game and clicked a bunch of random stuff (likely got the Buy prompt), but because the whole concept of virtual currency is kind of confusing, and because it didn't ask for a password, the app happily let him make all the purchases.

I doubt the developer of this app did anything wrong. A reasonable argument could be made that iTunes should either not cache passwords at all, or keep a separate cache for app downloads vs. in-app purchases, or maybe always prompt for a password on in-app purchases. My kids and other kids I know have also used this backdoor trick to sneak a couple app downloads, but usually it’s a few bucks, not $190. Consumable virtual items (that you can keep buying over and over) make this problem much worse.

On “episode 60 of This Week In Startups”:thisweekin.com/thisweeki… Jason Calacanis interviewed ngmoco founder Neil Young about the mobile game business, focusing on the hit iPhone/iPad game “We Rule”:werule.ngmoco.com/. I was stunned to learn from the show that some individuals spend not only hundreds of dollars but up to $10,000 on in-app purchases in We Rule. Neil Young was happy to take their money, but something feels wrong here, like a gambling addiction gotten way out of hand. Or maybe just kids running up their dad’s credit card bill.

Alright, it’s been 2 weeks. How does the iPhone 4 hold up?

For me, there was less urgency to this launch then for previous iPhone releases. I wanted the 3GS on day one (video recording!) and of course I waited all afternoon for the original iPhone (shiny!). Likewise I couldn’t wait for the iPad. This time I viewed iMovie and FaceTime as the killer apps. Sign me up!

But I wasn’t willing to wait all day. I tried the same approach that had worked great for the iPad: show up late in the day after the madness has settled down. No luck this time. I waited about half an hour, then came back before closing and waited a couple more hours to get a voucher for the next day. Total wait time about 3.5 hours over 2 days and 3 visits.

To get it on day 1, most people waited 6 hours. I’m sure “John Gruber’s story on Flickr”:www.flickr.com/photos/gr… was common too.

This was Apple’s most poorly-managed launch I’ve been to. The 3GS line was pretty fast. For iPad it was extremely quick — in and out in half an hour. I mostly blame the extra step of requiring activation in-store, but there were enough problems that I think this whole thing was mismanaged somewhere.

Some of the inconsistent messages I heard depending on which Apple Store employee I talked to:

• AT&T activation is not the bottleneck / yes it is.

• We are selling 30 phones every 10 minutes / no idea how long the wait is.

• We'll shut down the line at 7pm and give out vouchers / staying open until 2am.

• Vouchers will allow you to skip everyone else in line the next day / you're guaranteed a phone but have to wait in line.

I also "collected a few tweets about the launch":[tweetlib.com/manton/ip...](http://tweetlib.com/manton/iphone4.)

Anyway, the phone. It’s the best phone I’ve ever seen. No question.

Now that some time has passed, I think I can comment on the reception issue. It’s real. Outside my house, I don’t notice it. But my street is a notoriously bad dead zone, and while I don’t get any more dropped calls than I used to, I can no longer hold the phone in the palm of my left hand when using mobile Safari. It’s pretty frustrating because I’ve been holding the phone this way for 3 years. It’s awkward to break the habit.

Having said that, I’ll close with the same thing I told strangers who came up asking about the phone. It’s easy to overlook the reception issue because of how great the rest of the phone is, and all existing iPhone users will love the iPhone 4. Eventually I’ll just cave in and buy a bumper.

I’m fascinated with App Store pricing. There’s just so much interesting stuff going on:

• 99-cent apps and the race to the bottom.

• Users expecting apps to be cheaper because the device is smaller.

• The high-end successes like OmniGraffle.

• Sales and pricing gimmicks.

• Whether apps can compete outside of the top 100.

So when 37signals launched their first iPad app — Draft, for sketching mockups and quickly uploading them to Campfire — the first thing I wondered was: "how much?" The comments on their "launch blog post":[37signals.com/svn/posts...](http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2420-launch-draft-for-ipad) are a hilarious and sad mix of the usual cheapskates balanced with 37signals defenders. But the most amusing part is that at only $10, Draft is a bargain compared to Campfire itself, which has an entry-level paid plan of nearly $150/year.

(I’m a big Campfire fan, actually. The best iPhone client for Campfire, Ember, has a permanent spot on “my home screen”:www.firstand20.com/homescree…)

My first indie iPad app, a 3-4 week project that has stretched to 3-4 months, will also be $10. At that price it will be twice as expensive as its competition. I’m pricing it that way for three main reasons:

• It's worth the price of two trips to Starbucks, because it takes the category in a new direction with features no one else is doing.

• It's designed for people who are serious about this stuff, not an impulse buy, not for everyone.

• It's a standalone app but includes an optional web complement, offered for free, but which will incur "real hosting costs":[www.heroku.com/.](http://www.heroku.com/.)

Daniel Jalkut and I talked about this a bit on "Core Intuition 28":[www.coreint.org/2010/04/e...](http://www.coreint.org/2010/04/episode-28-the-ipad-super-episode/) — that it might be okay to overcharge a little for 1.0 rather than raise the price later, and that it should be possible to build a business on the iPad the same way many developers have on the Mac: not by looking for the big overnight hit but by steadily selling some number of copies every day and letting it spread by word of mouth.

Marco Arment wrote about this as “App Store B”:www.marco.org/208454730 in October last year:

"More of their customers notice and demand great design and polish. More sales come from people who have heard of your product first and seek it out by name. Many of these apps are priced above $0.99. These are unlikely to have giant bursts of sales, and hardly any will come close to matching the revenue of the high-profile success stories, but they have a much greater chance of building sustained, long-term income."

We’re three months into the iPad, just passed 3 million devices sold, and not every app has dropped to near-free. I think $10 iPad apps in particular are going to remain pretty common.

I like “this Flickr set from Brent Simmons”:www.flickr.com/photos/br… showing the stages of building NetNewsWire for the iPad. It’s exactly the process I’m going through right now with my new app. Get some placeholder views and tables in there, then iterate, each time filling in more of the missing pieces.

iPad interface design is also proving to be much more difficult than I thought it would be. Concepts that work on the iPhone don’t necessarily translate to the larger device, and there are very few iPad apps to draw inspiration from. There’s no standout app from Apple’s lineup either, at least not in the way that iTunes 1.0 defined nearly every Mac app to follow. With the exception of some very basic ideas like splitviews collapsing in portrait mode, and a generous sprinkling of popovers, I’ve yet to see much consistency from new touch apps.

Apps that have had the biggest influence on me so far: from the iPhone, Birdfeed and Pastebot; and on the iPad, Mail and Twitterrific. Send me a reply “on Twitter”:twitter.com/manton if you have any other recommendations.

My first reaction when I started reading “The Kids Are All Right”:daringfireball.net/2010/04/k… on Daring Fireball was: Well, I had to disagree with a John Gruber essay eventually, might as well be this one. There was no developer program fee when I started building Mac apps! You could write whatever you wanted and share it with friends.

But then I thought more about the $99 hurdle. What was I doing as a teenager and would the procedures Apple has in place now have stopped me? (For context, I’m 34.)

I started programming for the Mac with THINK Pascal, a beautiful little development environment. Then I moved to C with Dave Mark’s book, which came with a C compiler on a floppy inside the back cover. Eventually I saved up and bought Symantec C++. Even at an educational discount these were expensive compared to the free Xcode of today.

At that point I’m pretty heavily invested in the Mac, but the killer was the documentation. I’m sure I spent hundreds of dollars on “Inside Macintosh”:en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insi… books. Our senior year in high school, my friends and I would meet at a restaurant before class for coffee and breakfast. I remember I’d get there early and sit in the booth with one of my oversized volumes of Inside Mac, taking in too much caffeine for my own good while I devoured every page, even the advanced topics that were still over my head.

I lived and breathed this stuff pretty heavily for a few years. To imagine letting a $99 iPhone dev fee and some locked-down APIs prevent me from building apps is laughable. Great computers inspire people to build new software. That’s how it was when I got my first Mac, and I’m sure it’s that way for the new generation of young iPhone and iPad tinkerers.

One day I hope the App Store will be more open. But it is what it is. I’ll point out where I think Apple can improve, and then I’ll build and ship anyway. It makes no sense to sit around and complain on my blog about the good old days while some kid half my age is taking his or her idea all the way to the top of the App Store and owning the platform of the future.

It appears I was too optimistic “in my last post”:www.manton.org/2010/03/2… about the App Store getting better.

The iPhone version of Snowtape, in development for months, “was rejected”:www.vemedio.com/blog/post… because it could let users record and share audio from the internet:

"His sole words were, that there are lots of things missing in the SDK agreement and that they can not foresee any circumstance that leads to a denial of an app. That's right! We did not violate any paragraph of the SDK, yet they forbid us distributing our app."

The developer removed the ability to transfer audio files off the phone and then Apple let the app through.

Then there’s this post “on the developer forums”:devforums.apple.com/message/1… about an iPad app rejection because they recreated a UI innovation from the new Photos app. Apple said:

"The application uses a tap and a pinch to expand feature that is present in Apple iPad Applications. This action is associated solely with Apple applications, and we kindly ask that you update your app appropriately."

I’ve been doing a bunch of iPhone and iPad development this week. The more I work with it, the more I love the platform. But it just takes a couple rejections to sour the whole experience.

And yes, I realize I’m posting this on one of the most exciting days in the history of the App Store. The first round of iPad apps hitting the store today look fantastic.

Three years ago “I wrote the following”:www.manton.org/2007/02/c… about customer support:

"Most people who buy Mac software from independent developers know that it's only 1-5 people behind the company. We can't compete with the Microsofts and Adobes of the world on application size, but we can compete on quality customer service. _Being small is a competitive advantage_."

Seems reasonable, but the fact is that many small companies are struggling to keep up with the support load. “Jesse Grosjean recently downgraded”:blog.hogbaysoftware.com/post/4681… his support expectations for customers. From the official site:

"I'll answer basic questions and license key/order issues as fast as I can. I also appreciate larger questions and feature suggestions, but I'm finding that I no longer have time to answer them all as I used to (mostly). I promise to read and consider everything, but you may not get an individual response."

I’m a huge fan of Jesse’s TaskPaper and his minimalist approach to Mac development. He is very honest with customers and encourages participation starting with early beta versions.

But it can be damaging to set support expectations too low. Here’s what a support page says about support in “Pastebot”:tapbots.com/software/… another one of my favorite iPhone apps:

"We try our best to answer every support question. But please make sure your question hasn't already been answered in our FAQ. If you email us with an issue that has already been explained in the FAQs, we may skip the email."

This seems slightly backwards to me. The questions in the FAQ are the easiest to answer! I respond to those immediately. It’s the hard questions for which I don’t have a good answer yet that usually take the longest time or are more likely to fall through the cracks.

Is the weight of support for iPhone developers just too much? TaskPaper and Pastebot are both very popular. I guess we can all hope to be successful enough that we find out.

Meanwhile, I had a question for “Beanstalk”:beanstalkapp.com yesterday and received a response in just 19 minutes and an additional follow-up response in under 10 minutes. I like to show off impressive companies, so I tweeted how fast their response was. “Their answer”:twitter.com/Beanstalk… to my tweet? “We’re usually faster.”

Yep, that’s the right attitude. Set your standards high.

“At VitalSource”:www.vitalsource.com we now have a dozen Xserves running Ruby on Rails and a couple others running MySQL. While it’s mostly stable now, over the years there have been several mystery show-stopper problems that no one seems to have on other platforms.

Which is why I found this “quote from Rentzsch”:rentzsch.tumblr.com/post/3168… so interesting:

"The trick is to radically minimize all services performed by Mac OS X Server itself, and instead run services in VMware-hosted Debian images. At that point, Mac OS X Server becomes little more than a simple container for VMware, something it seems able to handle with a minimum of tantrums."

It seems kind of wasteful, but Mac OS X Server really is overkill most of the time.

Related: over the weekend I checked into “Heroku”:www.heroku.com/. I’m impressed with what they have built. If it works as advertised, I think I’ll supplement my Dreamhost stuff with Heroku any time I need a Ruby backend.

I’m of two minds about “Trade-Off”:bit.ly/beDE2m by Kevin Maney. I picked up the book mostly on the strength of its tagline: Why Some Things Catch On, and Others Don’t. The Ever-Present Tension Between Quality and Convenience. Pretty good, right?

The premise is great — that you have to choose when building a business whether to have an expensive, high fidelity product or a less expensive, more accessible product. Trying to do both usually leads to failure. It’s like when I see an application marketed as “easy to use, yet powerful!” That’s often a red flag that it is neither.

My issue with the book is that, like most business books, it simply drags on too long. What should have taken a couple days to read turned into months of slogging through a few pages at a time. There are some great stories in the 200 pages, but the idea behind the book, which is captured on the cover of the book itself, gets repeated over and over. It’s almost like Maney copied and pasted some of the key points and scattered them throughout the book as filler.

37signals said that in the final draft of “Rework”:37signals.com/rework/ they cut the page count nearly in half, and I think some deeper edits in Trade-Off would have helped too. Take the first 20 pages to explain the idea, and then another 80 pages of case study chapters with anecdotes, stories, and interviews. Done.

Complaints about the size and structure of the book aside, though, I got a lot out of Trade-Off. While Maney often strains to fit the book’s core on top of successful or failed businesses that are too complicated to be applicable (I didn’t appreciate the Newton-bashing), he makes some great points that helped me put my own app “Clipstart”:www.riverfold.com/software/… in perspective, and will likely change how I market and build new features for it.

I noticed a couple tweets last month about fast, less than 24-hour review times for iPhone app submissions. After I tweeted it, a whole bunch of other people came forward with similar stories. Apps going from submission to ready-for-sale in 12 to 24 hours.

The App Store is still fundamentally broken in many ways, possibly beyond repair depending on who you talk to, but there’s no question that fast review times are great for developers. Even if the progress stops with this, it’s a significant improvement to the App Store process.

Is it just for established devs? Just for minor bug fixes? It’s not the latter, since some of these were brand new apps. The question is whether this was a change for a certain class of developers and apps or whether it represents an overall speed-up to the review process, and maybe even a hint at prepping for the iPad launch.

Review times are a big deal and they’ve gone mainstream. Opera Mini has a very public “count up”:my.opera.com/community… widget as part of their extensive pre-approval hype. You can tell from the demos that Opera put a huge amount of work into polishing Mini before submitting it, to remove as many potential objections as possible, and to get users excited before it ships. A high-profile rejection now would erase any goodwill that Apple has built up recently.

I know some developers are nervous with openly discussing or blogging about their relationship with Apple, but I think more people should follow Opera’s lead. By being vocal on the App Store’s strengths and shortcomings, we force Apple to be more transparent. Bad press has a proven history of leading to overturned rejections. The narrative of the last few months, to me, is that the App Store is getting better, and I don’t think it would be happening without the critics.

I get a lot of great feedback about “Clipstart”:www.riverfold.com/software/… There’s value in almost every feature request, even the ones I don’t plan to directly implement. Some people also suggest that I should copy more from iPhoto. While I understand this — they want a familiar interface — it has always been my goal to be different than iPhoto. Why?

Two main reasons:

• iPhoto never quite worked for me, and only by being different can you hope to be better. I took a few things that iPhoto did poorly (like tagging, video playback, and upload) and built the entire interface around them.

• If I just created a clone of iPhoto but for videos, Apple could expand the video support in iPhoto one day and I would be left with nothing. If my app grows in a completely different direction, however, then even if they add video support to iPhoto my app will still appeal to people who aren't satisfied with iPhoto's approach.

I know I'm on to something because when I show the app to a certain type of person (who has thousands of short videos, or no quick way to share them) their eyes light up. It's now just a matter of pumping out new versions to refine the interface and fill in the missing pieces. I have major features planned for the next few dot release (1.4, 1.5, and 1.6) to try to give customers as much value as I can, and execute on the potential for the application.

Both Aperture 3 and Lightroom 3 now have video support, but I’m not too worried. There’s plenty of room between iLife and $199/$299 for Clipstart to carve out a customer base.

With the iPad set to ship in just a week and a half, I’ve been quietly reshuffling some of my projects around it. I’ve written critically of the iPhone and App Store a couple times, such as how the iPhone is a gold rush distraction that “doesn’t need me”:www.manton.org/2009/09/i… I also stand by “earlier opinions”:www.manton.org/2009/11/t… of how unfixable the App Store is, especially now when it’s obvious that any effort trying to convince Apple to open the store is completely wasted. They never will.

But I really like what I’ve seen of the iPad platform so far and I think it represents a big shift for everyday computing in a way that a cell phone can’t. So I renewed my membership in the iPhone developer program.

I’m working on 2 apps for the iPad. The first is just a minor iPad refresh of an existing iPhone app at VitalSource called “Bookshelf Noteview”:itunes.apple.com/us/app/bo… (iTunes link). It’s for reading notes and highlights synced from our e-book platform.

I’m not ready to announce the next app yet, but it’s a personal project which I had originally written for the Mac over a year ago. I shelved it at the time because I wasn’t sure there was demand, the backend web services weren’t mature, and I wasn’t ready to take it to completion. For the iPad though, it might be perfect.

And that’s ultimately where I see the most interesting potential for the iPad. New middle-ground apps that we haven’t even thought of yet, not ports from another platform. Apps that would feel small or distracting or wrong on the Mac, yet equally oversized for a relatively underpowered iPhone. Maybe the never-tested-on-a-real-device launch day apps will be buggy and the overall quality low, but I can’t wait to try them anyway.

As I “wrote in January”:www.manton.org/2010/01/m… I decided to go to Macworld to show off Clipstart and Wii Transfer, and to experience the conference again and hang out with friends. I ended up doing less of the latter, because I lost my voice and was feeling terrible for a couple days, but nevertheless the trip was great and I’m very glad I went. Worth it.

Here’s my summary of the show, what it took for me to be there and what I got out of it for “Riverfold”:www.riverfold.com/. This is supposed to be in the spirit of “Rogue Amoeba’s excellent series on Macworld”:www.rogueamoeba.com/utm/2007/… but more from a super-tiny company perspective, and just where my experience differs.

I do want to quickly mention costs, since that’s the primary consideration when planning these things. I took advantage of the Indie Developer Spotlight shared kiosk to keep investment low. In fact, I wouldn’t have gone otherwise. I kept the whole trip to about $2700, with a rough breakdown like:

$1250 - space on the show floor

$900 - hotel for 4 nights

$250 - flights to and from San Francisco

$100 - printed “2000 flyers”:www.flickr.com/photos/ma…

$200 - other misc costs, cabs, and food

I could have saved some money in there on the hotel, but in general I think I did pretty well. For a lot indies it’s probably not that much different than a WWDC trip.

I worked 8 hours each day on my feet at Moscone North, in my little booth space in the very corner of the expo. I was lucky for two things: Guy English was awesome and covered for me a couple times so I could take a real break; and the restrooms and water fountain were so close I could slip away when traffic was slow and be back without missing much.

The less expensive booth option was supposed to be for a table shared between 3 developers, with presumably a dozen or more small companies filling the area. But unlike the iPhone pavilion in the center of the tradeshow, which was packed with exhibitors, hardly any Mac developers took advantage of this offer. It was just me and one other company.

This was disappointing at first, since a less dense area doesn’t convey the same excitement and means less foot traffic. But there were other aspects of the deal that turned out better than expected, such as included wired internet even though none was originally promised. Compared to a traditional booth, it was a bargain.

Before leaving Austin for San Francisco I jotted down a few notes on how I could measure success, since I didn’t want to pin whether it was worth it just to direct sales.

See friends and meet new people. Check, but there were a lot of people that I ran into very briefly and didn’t get to really talk to. See aforementioned lost voice.

Get ideas from customers. Check, got plenty of great ideas. I loved talking to random Mac people, not limited to just the ones who bother to send email.

Figure out how to sell the product. There’s nothing like explaining your application over and over again all day to refine your pitch. I feel like I have a much better handle on this, but there’s still work to do, and web sites to update.

Actually sell some copies. I used a coupon code to track sales. During the conference my sales were flat, but in the weeks since I’ve had the best sales days of Clipstart ever.

Get exposure in the press. Check, was interviewed by Ryan Ritchey for “The Digital Lifestyle”:thedigitallifestyle.tv/home/2010… Merlin Mann for “MacBreak Video”:www.pixelcorps.tv/macbreak3… and talked with other members of the press on the show floor. I should have done more but lacked the energy.

Win best of show award. Nope, but wasn’t expecting it. I think it’s a shame that only one Mac application won, but on the flip side it’s great that it was “Inklet”:tenonedesign.com/inklet.ph… Really cool app.

Everyone’s expectations coming into the event were low — the previous exhibitors who backed out, the attendees who wrote Macworld off, and the press who questioned the show’s relevance. But clearly Macworld 2010 was a success. The second day of the expo I was late to the show floor, arriving just a few minutes before they opened the hall. There was a huge mass of people waiting to get in.

There will be a Macworld 2011. I’m really excited to see how it works to move the whole expo and conference to Moscone West. I’m not sure if I’ll be there yet, since as demonstrated this year I can’t plan nearly that far in advance. Throwing all of this together 2 weeks before the show only worked because of everyone who made things a little easier during the week.

Thanks to Jason Snell, Merlin Mann, Adam Lisagor, and everyone else who stopped by and waited patiently through my demos; also Guy English, Paul Kafasis, David Barnard, John Fox, John Chaffee, the RogueSheep guys, my booth buddies from “Hello Chair”:hellochair.com/appsaurus… and the other indie developers I’m forgetting; and especially Albert McMurry, Dan Moren, and John Gruber for telling people about Clipstart. It succeeds only because of word of mouth.

In closing… Maybe it’s because James Cameron is still in the news, but I’ve always loved this line from the character Rose in Titanic: “It doesn’t make any sense. That’s why I trust it.”

That’s mostly how I felt about exhibiting at Macworld. Even though it was “cheap” by tradeshow standards, for me it was real money and a risk. I booked my flight the day I realized that the only reason not to go was because I could fail.

I started this blog exactly 8 years ago today, right before SXSW, so I thought I’d post about something related to the event. This year Gowalla and Foursquare are going to be huge. I was a little late to the location-based game party, initially being turned off by Foursquare when it asked for my phone number just to register, but over the last 6 months I’ve been thoroughly enjoying using Gowalla.

“Jeff Croft has a detailed breakdown”:jeffcroft.com/blog/2010… of the differences between Gowalla and Foursquare:

"Gowalla is capable of having spots which are not addressable, and which are very precise points on the Earth's surface. This, again, points to its geocaching nature. You can create a spot for that really wicked tree in your favorite park, or your mailbox, or the trash dumpster where your favorite bum spends most of his days."

This is one of Gowalla’s best features. I also prefer its design, and the playful personality they’ve baked into the app. While I agree with Jeff that there doesn’t need to be one winner, I’m not interested in checking in with more than one application every time I visit a spot, so I use Gowalla exclusively. And because I have friends at Gowalla, I want them to succeed.

My message to Foursquare users who are coming into town for SXSW: Gowalla is an Austin-based company and they are “doing fun stuff for SXSW”:gowalla.com/sxsw. Why not give Gowalla a try for the weekend?

When “the iPad commercial”:www.apple.com/ipad/gall… popped up during the Oscars, I thought it captured the power and elegance of the device extremely well. But as I commented on Twitter, after repeat viewings you can see that it’s probably faked. The iPad must have been filmed on a stand or table and then composited into the shot later.

Contrast this to “Cabel Sasser’s”:www.cabel.name/2006/03/n… video of the Nintendo DS Lite, which was a faithful presentation of how the game system feels to use and yet still “sold people on the device”:twitter.com/shauninma…

Apple stretches the truth with all the iPod and iPhone ads and it never bothered me before, but this one seems wrong. How it feels to hold an iPad will be the difference between a good product and a great one. Can you hold it still with one hand? How easy is it to rotate it? What is the angle like when propping it on your legs?

This is a pretty minor complaint — I’ll be pre-ordering my iPad this Friday regardless and couldn’t be more excited — but I wish Apple didn’t feel the need to lie about such an important part of the product.

“Wil Shipley on Apple’s decision”:wilshipley.com/blog/2010… to be aggressive on their iPhone patents:

"But when you sue someone for doing something you do yourself, you become one of the bad guys. Can you name a company _you_ admire that spends its time enforcing patents, instead of innovating? Remember the pirate flag you flew over Apple's headquarters when you were building the Mac?"

And “my tweet on this”:twitter.com/manton/st… from yesterday:

"This iPhone preemptive patent war is going to backfire. You're losing the battle for our hearts and minds, Apple."

Whether Apple wins this patent lawsuit or not doesn’t even matter; the old Apple many of us fell in love with is dead and maybe never coming back. I still want to think of Apple as the company that fights the good fight, innovating and putting user experience first. But you have the App Store exclusivity and rejections, and now you have the patents.

It’s a shame they’ve gone so far off course. Regardless of market share and billions in revenue, I’ll always hold Apple to a higher standard than every other mega corp, and hope not just for better products but also for leadership and doing what’s right.

I first met Dan Benjamin in 2005, at an off-site meeting for VitalSource in Telluride, Colorado. I don’t remember much of what we talked about over the course of those few days, but what I do remember, as the team was riding in the back of a jeep heading up the mountains, is that he kept talking about radio and podcasting.

In the five years since then he’s started a couple successful podcasts, and now he’s launched something bigger: a podcast network called 5 by 5 with a strong lineup of new shows.

"I started planning. I didn't want to do it part time or half way — I wanted to do this for real, meaning full-time. I wanted to create an Internet-based broadcast network, a place where I could create and host shows for myself and with my friends."

I love seeing someone’s passion, only loosely related to how they earn a living, go from something in the back of their head to a full core business. Good luck, Dan. It’s off to a great start.

“Brent writes a fair post”:inessential.com/2010/02/2… on when Core Data is great and when it’s a performance bottleneck:

"I optimized as much as I could, spent tons of time in Shark, went all multi-threaded with Core Data, switched away from my own queuing system to NSOperationQueue, optimized the XML parsing, etc. But performance and memory use on my first-generation iPod Touch (my development test device) was still not nearly good enough with a big unread count (of around 10,000 items)."

If I had been writing that post I probably wouldn’t have praised Core Data as much as he did, although admittedly because I rarely use it, and not at all in any shipping applications. Its approach always seemed slightly wrong to me.

My main reason for sticking with SQL directly is that I know by coding at this lower level — with my own lightweight model objects on top of FMDB and utility methods for working with the Clipstart database — that if something is slow it’s my fault. I can fix things that are my fault. I can’t fix fundamental design problems in Apple’s code.

My quote from “Cult of Mac”:www.cultofmac.com/i-have-be… sums up my feelings about the iPad from a business perspective:

"I was so annoyed with the closed nature of the App Store that I stopped developing for the iPhone. The iPad will still have those frustrations, but the large screen opens up a whole new class of applications. It's impossible to resist."

Will there be a “Clipstart”:www.riverfold.com/software/… for iPad? I hope so. This platform will be the future for plenty of customers. Apple lived up to the hype not because of the hardware or distribution or anything entirely revolutionary, but because of the software. Splitviews and popovers. Keynote and Pages. These apps are just as competent as their desktop versions.

Daniel and I talked about the iPad for most of “Core Intuition 26”:www.coreint.org/2010/02/e…

The first couple versions of “Clipstart”:www.riverfold.com/software/… had a very basic search feature. You could enter keywords and it would search filenames, tags, and video titles. You could also enter special terms such as tags=christmas or imported=today, but you couldn’t mix and match different terms together.

When I started working on a more advanced search parser, I realized that I was about to write a bunch of code that surely someone had already generalized and shared with the world. Tada! “ParseKit”:parsekit.com by Todd Ditchendorf is that framework.

Clipstart 1.3 now supports these kind of searches:

christmas and (@julian or @kids)

also…

(uploaded=no and flagged=yes) or (date=2010 and @vacation)

I use ParseKit’s tokenizer to take these apart and then I translate to SQL myself for SQLite. New in 1.3, Clipstart also allows saving any search as a “smart tag” for quick access. I’m very happy with how well it’s working.

Why not use “NSPredicate”:developer.apple.com/mac/libra… and friends? I wanted more control over the parser, for example for the @kids shorthand for tags. Eventually I’ll have a more traditional NSPredicateEditor-like UI for managing searches, but I find that text input is a much quicker way to find things in my video library.

“Lukas Mathis writes”:ignorethecode.net/blog/2010… about removing features:

"You don't _have_ to try to please everybody and eventually create an application that is liked by nobody. In fact, since your users are in all likelihood in a situation where they can switch applications easily, and since they probably are not locked in by the need to open a specific file format in its native application, it might be a really bad idea for you to go down the 'simply add up all the requested features' route of application design."

He also links to “my Wii Transfer survey”:www.manton.org/2009/07/w… so I thought I’d post a quick follow-up. I eventually did remove a feature, and the survey to customers served as a nice sanity check that the feature wasn’t heavily used. The interesting part, to me, is that the feature I removed was the entire 1.0 product for Wii Transfer. Literally everything that 1.0 did is now gone.

It’s been two weeks so far without any complaints. I like to think that it removes a distraction from the app — one less place in the app that could lead the customer down the wrong path. And hopefully it’ll eliminate a tiny part of my support load, as no one can ask me questions or have problems with that feature again!

On an internal company mailing list I once wrote:

"Products that don't exist yet have a way of attracting new features because everyone sees the potential in something that has no form".

I was talking about resisting the urge for everyone on the team to pile on their favorite features before 1.0, but I think this applies to apps with a minimal design as well. A simple app shows promise. A cluttered app with too much going on looks “done”, and sends a message that it is mature and maybe going in a different direction than what the user wants. In that way, the irony is that removing features (the wrong features) may actually make an application more appealing to new users.

I wrote the following before the iPad was announced. The world may have changed since then, but I’m posting it anyway. Enjoy.

I like the content but not the title in “John Casasanta’s blog post about the so-called death of Mac software”:www.taptaptap.com/blog/ipho… He shares some great stats and lays out the case for why iPhone development is more appealing and successful for him, but that doesn’t make the Mac dead. What he really meant and says later is that it’s dead to him.

For those of us who love writing Mac software and who don’t feel the pull of get-rich-quick blockbuster apps, the Mac is alive and remains just as healthy as it was before the iPhone was announced.

That’s not what I want to write about, though. The real question is how do we learn from the App Store and expand the market for Mac software. Compared to the iPhone, the Mac has a fragmented application discovery and an inconsistent purchasing experience.

When Keith Alperin and Rick Fillion “talked on the MDN Show”:www.mac-developer-network.com/shows/pod… about a possible Mac app store, Rick revealed some interesting numbers from “Bodega’s”:appbodega.com installed base: 80,000 downloads and 10,000 active users. They’re not 1.0, and I don’t see anything wrong with these numbers, but it’s not big enough yet to make an iPhone-like impact on how we buy Mac software.

What Bodega does have is a technology head start. “My products”:www.riverfold.com have been listed there since launch, and they have a polished application and feature-rich backend for tracking releases and collecting usage metrics. The key is solving the chicken-and-egg problem of getting the Bodega app in everyone’s hands.

There are two approaches: either get people excited about installing Bodega because it’s useful for updating existing apps (which it is), or sneak a copy of Bodega on to many more Macs (which is what this post is about). This solution isn’t perfect, but short of Apple building a real Mac App Store or a marketing giant like MacHeist getting involved, it’s the only idea I can see working.

First, start with “PotionStorefront”:github.com/potionfac… There are a few of these in-app purchase frameworks out there, but I like the “Potion Factory’s aesthetic”:www.potionfactory.com/thehitlis… and Potion Store is popular. The web service used to submit orders could be supported by other custom store backends, including Bodega’s own purchasing system when they have it.

On top of this in-app purchase foundation, you bundle a subset of the Bodega application discovery UI directly into the framework. Users can download and install demo versions of new apps without leaving the catalog. Think of it as a “lite” version of Bodega, streamlined to fit inside everyone’s app. You also include the full Bodega application so that it can be launched and optionally installed in the user’s applications folder.

What you’ve effectively done here is give everyone who buys a third-party app access to a new store where they can discover other apps. It’s compelling for developers because the more companies that participate, the wider their reach becomes. And it’s great for users because over time it starts to create a consistent user experience, and familiarity reduces the effort in buying Mac software.

Some tricky issues remain, though. You don’t want to distract users from buying their first application, or muddle that app’s branding, and you want to later encourage users to find or be notified about new applications without it looking like an advertisement. The challenge is in finding a balance that most developers would want to use.

Back to the iPhone’s success, from a post by “Guy English”:kickingbear.com/blog/arch…

"People, lots and lots of people, people who have no idea what software even is, will download Apps like they're snacking on potatoe chips. What's my proof? Well, two million downloads of an App in a week supports that and I'd argue that a total of three billion Apps downloaded backs up my argument too."

We’ve never seen anything like it, and I’m really happy for my friends who have had success on the iPhone. Luckily, the iPhone and Mac don’t actually compete. The App Store can sell ten thousand times the amount of software as the Mac does and it doesn’t change the fact that Mac users need software too. It’s our job as developers to continue to provide solutions for users and help those users find us.

I haven’t been to a Macworld since the late 90s. I’ve had it in my head for a couple years that I’d like to go back, but with so many developer-focused conferences it’s been hard to justify an extra trip for Macworld. At the same time, my “indie apps”:www.riverfold.com need a nice marketing refresh. So why not exhibit at Macworld and get to see the show again while reaching a new audience of potential customers?

I knew I’d regret it this year if I didn’t take advantage of the “small indie pavilion kiosk”:macworldexpo.com/indiespot… So with frighteningly little planning so far, I’ve booked the expo, flights, and hotel. I’ll be at the show and I’ll be demoing the just-released Wii Transfer 2.7 and the unannounced Clipstart 1.3. The rest of the details… not so clear.

But I’m pretty excited about the conference and hope to see many of you there. The expo runs February 11th - 13th, and you can “get a free expo pass here”:rcsreg.com/macworld/…

It was “just last week”:www.coreint.org/2010/01/e… that we mentioned “Today 2.0”:www.secondgearsoftware.com/today/ from Second Gear on the Core Intuition podcast, and now Justin Williams at Second Gear is making news again by organizing Mac developers to donate to charity in the wake of the Haiti earthquake.

I’m happy to announce that Riverfold is participating. Since my wife and I already gave to the Red Cross, I decided to donate my sales to “Save the Children”:www.savethechildren.net/, an international organization working in Haiti now. It’s amazing how many Mac and iPhone developers have come together for Indie Relief, and great that we are able to do something that reaches more charities and has a bigger impact than if we were all just making individual contributions.

So if you’ve been on the fence about whether you need Wii Transfer or Clipstart, “buy a copy today”:www.riverfold.com/. Thanks!

I finally took the time to give “Wii Transfer”:www.riverfold.com/software/… some much-needed attention, releasing version 2.7 of the application tonight. It’s got the usual bug fixes and some small visual improvements, but the most important change is better video streaming. The biggest mistake I ever made with Wii Transfer was to buy an Apple TV instead of forcing myself to use my own application.

For this release, I sat down with Wii Transfer and a ripped copy of Star Trek, and I just watched it over and over, experimenting with different Flash Video conversion settings and tweaking networking code. I wasn’t going to release this until I could watch a 2-hour movie without any rebuffering. The quality is never going to be as good as a console or set-top box with dedicated video streaming features — this is Flash on the Wii we are talking about — but I’m happy with what I came up with.

Wii Transfer is still only $19, and version 2.7 is a free upgrade for any customer who ever bought the application going back to 1.0 over three years ago. Also an important reminder: all sales go to charity starting tomorrow, January 20th, as part of “Indie Relief”:www.indierelief.com/.

Seth Godin on an “exhibit for Tim Burton”:sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blo…

"Here's the guy who's responsible for some of the most breathtaking movies of his generation, and the real surprise is this: almost every year over the last thirty, he worked on one or more exciting projects that were never green lighted and produced. _Every year, he spent an enormous amount of time on failed projects._"

This is the kind of thing I’ll try to remember when I look at the apps I’ve started but never shipped, even as they sit very close to finished for a year or more. Almost everyone I know who has successful products also has experiments and failed prototypes and unfinished work you’ve never heard of. That’s okay as long as it doesn’t stop you from shipping the best and making those real.

I have a lot to announce this week. Posts on a new Wii Transfer, the Indie Relief effort, and Macworld all coming up.

“The MDN Show episode 16”:www.mac-developer-network.com/shows/pod… reveals the winner of the MDN Community Award: a tie between Matt Gemmell and Jonathan “Wolf” Rentzsch, with Mike Ash as runner-up. Looking back on 2009 there should be no surprise over these top three. Matt has been sharing great code with the community for years and is now a fixture of the MDN podcast; Wolf started the successful C4 conference and won a Macworld Eddy for ClickToFlash; and Mike Ash has packed more technical information into a year of his weekly Q&A series than would fit in many Mac programming books.

(This also seems like a good time to link to nominee Daniel Jalkut, who got “his own version of a community award”:www.red-sweater.com/blog/1074… last month.)

I had a tough time singling out a specific developer among a dozen or more fantastic people, many who I consider my friends. But for me it was an opportunity to reflect on something at C4 that I didn’t get a chance to write about earlier, and since he won anyway I’ll include the email I sent to Scotty here.

"There are so many worthy candidates for the "MDN Community Award":[www.mac-developer-network.com/news/mdn-...](http://www.mac-developer-network.com/news/mdn-community-award-2009-update-the-nominations-so-far/) — people who are helpful to the Mac developer community by writing books, blogging, and sharing code — but when I heard about this award I thought about leadership. My pick is Jonathan 'Wolf' Rentzsch.

“A leader sets the tone and attitude of the community. For example, at the C4 conference when some attendees used the Twitter backchannel to turn against and openly mock a presenter, Wolf shamed the audience instead of glossing over or ignoring the event. It was a community course-correction and a reminder that Mac OS X developers come from many different backgrounds: old-school classic Mac programmers, NeXT developers, Linux and Windows users, even designers and web application developers.

“The community went through a rough transition point migrating to Mac OS X over 10 years ago, and is in the middle of another transition to embrace everyone excited about the iPhone platform. What I learned from Wolf is that we should never be afraid to welcome ‘outsiders’ to the community even if they haven’t yet caught up on the history and conventions of the platform."

I have nothing but great things to say about everyone listed on the MDN page. Congrats again to Matt, Wolf, Mike, and the rest of the nominees.

I was chatting with some developers the other night about giving away software to Apple employees. If you’re not familiar with the practice, it’s fairly common to give free or discounted licenses to Apple employees as a gesture of goodwill to the people responsible for making our platform, and in the hope that they will spread the word to friends and customers in the Apple Stores. (If you’re a developer and want to set this up, “check out Dan Wood’s overview”:www.karelia.com/mac_indie…)

I’ve given away over 1000 licenses for “Wii Transfer”:www.riverfold.com/software/… and “Clipstart”:www.riverfold.com/software/… to Apple employees since I started doing it a few months ago. I didn’t expect this number to be so high, but I guess it makes sense. Apple folks are getting a link from their internal site directly to my special registration page, and many of them probably request a serial number just in case they need it later.

The question I have isn’t whether it’s worth it; it only took a few hours to set up, and even if it just makes a handful of Apple employees happy then that’s a success. But I was curious about the greater impact of giving away my software. Is the $0 investment in a pile of other free licenses enough to engage someone to, for example, take the time to set up Clipstart and move a collection of videos into it, let alone recommend it to others? (See also: “Worthless apps”:www.manton.org/2009/12/w…)

To find out more, I sent a special newsletter to all the @apple.com addresses in my registration database, asking if they used the software, how they liked it, and whether they’d recommend it to others or not. And I included in “the short survey”:riverfold.wufoo.com/forms/riv… a place for general feedback, and a choice about upcoming features.

Some developers I talked with were concerned about a potential backlash. Although I send a newsletter to my customers once or twice a year, it’s debatable whether some of the people I was including had implicitly signed up by purchasing (with a 100% discount!) or whether I had crossed a line. The last thing I want to do is upset any of my customers, and I provide the same level of support to everyone whether they’ve paid full price, received a free license, or just tried the demo.

In the end I decided it was harmless. The email was short, plain text, and had an obvious one-click unsubscribe link. One of the things I like about using “Campaign Monitor”:www.campaignmonitor.com is that once someone unsubscribes, any new mailings are automatically scrubbed against the unsubscribers list. Even if I accidentally add the customer again in the future they won’t receive an email. So far, 2.2% of recipients have unsubscribed.

As for the survey results, here are a few graphs. Not many people filled out the survey (like unsubscribes, just a couple percent, though they’re still trickling in after 2 days), but the other feedback I received in the comments and feature questions was very helpful. 100% of users said they had mentioned the product to someone else.

Would I do this again? No, not such a narrowly-focused newsletter as this. The quick survey served its purpose, but I am always nervous about wearing out my welcome. I plan to add an explicit newsletter opt-in checkbox to my free license page, and I should do a better job of differentiating free licenses and paying customers in the future. I’ll send another general newsletter out to all customers (and opt-ins from contests) when I have something major to announce later in the year.