Instead of writing some epic thing about stuff you probably don’t care all that much about anyway, I thought I’d substitute one of my monthly pieces on here for something I wrote over on MacTalk.
I dug up a few apps designed for iOS 7 by Australian app developers, emailed a few guys, and asked some questions.
It took a little longer to write than I would normally spend on the news, but I think it was worth it.
It’s not a bargain if you don’t need it.
Let’s just say there is one of these bundles – lets just call it MacTheft – and the price for eleven apps is $19.95. And, let’s just say they promise to give $5.00 of your purchase to starving children in cataclysmicly devastated regions of the world. Therefore, the price of the software – all eleven apps – is theoretically $14.95. But, let’s just say there is only two apps out of the eleven that you really think you need. Here is a crazy idea to try…
Buy the apps outright, full-price, directly from the developer.
Crazy, right?
[…]
OK, fine. You want a “bargain”. How about this… Contact the developers of the two apps you want and say something like…
“Hey, I see you have your apps available on MacTheft and, while that is great and all, I really don’t need all eleven of them. I really only need two, your’s and this other guy’s. Therefore, I am contacting each of you to see if I could give you $7.50 cents directly. I figure that is about 10 times more than you will get from my individual sale if I buy it through MacTheft. Also, I was planing on giving five dollars to the starving children too.”
via Minimal Mac.
Minimal Mac is, of course, talking about the recent MacHeist nanoBundle which contained heaps of pretty cool apps for the bargain-basement price of just $20.
I wasn’t going to buy the bundle at first, but then Tweetie (the super-mega-awesome Twitter client for Mac) came along, and I figured I might as well buy it for Tweetie, and get the rest of the apps for free (which were valued at over $260 if bought separately). Here’s hoping I actually get around to using RapidWeaver one of these days…
In hindsight after reading the above article I should have really bought Tweetie separately (the few-and-far between ads are so awesome I have them turned on anyway, haha), but the clincher this time was that there was some sort of “public beta” access to Tweetie 2 for Mac – a pretty big deal as 2.0 has been a long time coming, and will probably feature all those cool Twitter features the iPhone version of Tweetie has had for the past couple of months.
The thing is, had I bought Tweetie directly from the developer all those months ago, there’s absolutely no obligation for the developer to come along and say “hey, thanks for purchasing our app, we’ll get in touch when we need beta testers for the next version”. By buying Tweetie from MacHeist, not only did I get into some privileged beta program (along with every other purchaser), but I also got a whole lot of other apps for, what is essentially free. Where’s the loser here? The developers of the other programs? They gain some publicity. The charity who received the 25% donation? Well, any money’s better than no money. Me? I “paid” for an app I use constantly, and got some more apps for free. Who then, is the loser here?
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not against schemes like MacHeist. They’re a great way to get some HUGE publicity for your app – had you asked me a year ago what ShoveBox was, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you. Same for pretty much every other app that came included in last year’s MacHeist bundle, and same again for this year’s nanoBundle. Ambrosia Software recenltly had a pretty good sale as well – I’ve been looking to pick up a copy of EV Nova for a while now, and they had it in a bundle with some other apps. The only catch was, it was the Windows-only version. Ambrosia make some cool Mac stuff and EV Nova is available for Mac as well – so I didn’t end up buying that particular bundle that time around. Just a month or so ago however, I picked up EV Nova from their website, at full retail, and as a result, got both the Mac and PC versions for the same price, similar to what Valve will be doing when they release Steam for Mac sometime later this year.
Yeah, I know I’ll probably never use some of those applications, but the thing is, other people might. I know I’ll almost never need to use a clipboard manager under OSX, but other people might – now that Clips was included in MacHeist, I can now recommend it to other people to try out. Sure, the couple of people I tell in my lifetime that buy Clips for the full price probably won’t make up for the 50,000 or so people who bought Clips for nothing, but even if every person managed to on-sell just one copy, that’s an additional 50,000 copies they probably wouldn’t have sold. I know I’m not taking into consideration things like support costs and all that, but do you kinda see my point?
That being said, if developers actually offered decent discounts (25% or more) on some of their apps, I can certainly see myself buying software more often. Hell, Panic held a sale with 50% off all their software last year, and I picked up Transmit because it was a frequently used app of mine. I wish I picked up Coda at the same time, but I know I’d almost never use it. So, to Cultured Code, Panic, Ambrosia, and all those other software developers that make cool stuff – have sales. You’d be surprised how many people will buy your stuff if it’s priced decently.
That’s how I’m going to justify it to myself, anyway. Your mileage may differ, but here’s hoping you got something out of this. mini-rant.
Several days ago, two files containing Microsoft source code began circulating on the Internet. One contains a majority of the NT4 source code: this is not discussed here. The other contains a fraction of the Windows 2000 source code, reportedly about 15% of the total. This includes some networking code including winsock and inet; as well as some shell code. Some other familiar items include the event log, and some of the default screensavers.
There has been some speculation that while the bulk of the source is genuine, some of the comments have been tampered with to embarrass Microsoft. This is difficult to disprove, but I find it implausible. The embarrassing comments occur on thousands of lines, in realistic places. Furthermore, if someone had done that, it would have been easy to make the comments far more incriminating.
In the struggle to meet deadlines, I think pretty much all programmers have put in comments they might later regret, including swearwords and acerbic comments about other code or requirements. Also, any conscientious coder will put in prominent comments warning others about the trickier parts of the code. Comments like “UGLY TERRIBLE HACK” tend to indicate good code rather than bad: in bad code ugly terrible hacks are considered par for the course. It would therefore be both hypocritical and meaningless to go through the comments looking for embarrassments. But also fun, so let’s go.
via We Are Morons: a quick look at the Win2k source || kuro5hin.org.
Saying that Transmit is a superb FTP program for Mac would be an extreme understatement. Just look at all the features of the program on their homepage, there are far too many to list here. If you are looking for a high quality FTP program for Mac, Transmit is a great choice.
via 30+ Amazing Mac Apps for Developers | Website Design Blog.
Transmit is an excellent program – and this website gets the website of the week award.
Everything from the iPhone OS 3.0 keynote this morning was evolutionary, not revolutionary. There wasn’t anything announced that would change the game for Apple – nothing like, for example, the Pre’s gesture bar, and the implementation of a curved touch-screen.
But enough of being negative. More of that later 😉
For now, we’ll just take a look at what’s changed. For both developers and users, we have:
Right – so onto the big guns, yeah?
Overall, not bad, Apple. Not bad indeed. Definitely one of the better events to get up for, and one that will send the blogosphere into a frenzy.
I was planning to jailbreak my iPhone, but it looks like I’ll hold out till 3.0 is released. June can’t come fast enough!! BRING IT ON! 😀
Personally, I’m hoping we’ll see a lot of tiny improvements not important enough to warrant their own part of the keynote. Like Custom SMS tones, Apple. We’ve got shake to shuffle, judging from the above pic, we’ve got the peer-to-peer gaming via bluetooth (yes, even in the iPod touch, apparently it can be “unlocked” to use the hardware), and we’ve got the copy and paste, and we’ve got the turn-by-turn.
What about all the stuff we didn’t get? At the QandA session, their answer to tethering was “We’re supporting tethering in the client side, we’re building that support in. We’re working with our carriers around the world. We are building that support in.” Sure, it might take 2 years, but it’s coming.
Bluetooth file transfers? I wouldn’t count on it. When the question was asked at Q and A, it stumped the team. Read whatever you want into that, but it’s probably a ploy by Apple. There’s no way they would have NOT considered that to be a very real possibility, esp. with jailbreak apps that do it already.
So… Apple is awesome, and there’s not much more to it. I’m sorry I turned on you when the Pre was released, Apple. 😀
Final thoughts – now, about this evolutionary, not revolutionary thing… While today’s releases were certainly impressive, most of the features weren’t entirely unexpected. Amongst the throngs of turn-by-turn, MMS, and copy and paste, there’s nothing that we didn’t think was going to be put in. While 3.0 will be awesome, it’s really just a filling out of all the features that were supposed to be there in the first place, and even then, there are still things missing – tethering, for one.
Think about it this way – how long has the iPhone been released for? How long have people wanted copy and paste? How long have they wanted turn-by-turn? I know people who bought iPhones primarily for their turn-by-turn ability, and those folks are going to be over the moon from today’s announcements, sure. But what about the rest of us?
I guess the question you’ve got to ask yourself is – how does this change the game for Apple? And the answer? It doesn’t. There’s nothing that changes the face of the mobile industry as we know it.
When it was first released, the iPhone was a completely revolutionary device. No other gadget I’ve seen yet has come close to the market impact that the Apple iPhone has (evidence for this is every Tom, Dick and Harry having one in the streets), and I’m not entirely sure that the iPhone OS 3.0 is the one that’ll change the game for Apple.
Impressive? Undoubtedly.
Evolutionary? Decidedly.
Revolutionary? I’ll let you make that decision for yourself.
Comments below. Thanks to Engadget for the images, and to both Engadget and gdgt for their coverage of the event, of which most of this post is based on.
This conference, which will take place in San Francisco, will give iPhone developers a platform to discuss some of the ins and outs of working on the platform.
via iPhone games summit coming in March.
AHA! I will take your “wow” features, Linux operating system, and copy and paste and raise you one iPhone game developers conference.
Take that, Palm!