I got into iPhone development precisely to take advantage of the concept of getting $1 from a million people. The ease of sale (easy to market, easy to collect) thanks to the App Store and the fact that you can develop a program in a weekend that quite a few people are willing to pay $1 for. Crank out one a week and if it doesn't suck and your marketing doesn't suck then you can bank.
I buy few programs for $5 let alone the $50 of a PC or console game but I buy $1 iPhone games. I think a lot of other casual gamers will too.
Except I don't buy the DVD anymore because I'm sick of dealing with stacks of thousands of physical movie tokens that are damaged easily.
What I really want is a petabyte iPhone but they haven't delivered yet. That and a child friendly Apple TV my daughter can easily use.
Seriously though - if they make everything $.99 I'll buy a crap load of their products. It doesn't cost them anything to sell the products to me (I'd pay just for a license and figure out how to get the files off BT myself even) so why not? $.99 is like buying a soda - I don't even think of the cost so I just get whatever sounds good even if it ends up being expensive at the end of the month. If I have to consider the price though then self control comes into play.
Not really into games. Coding is way more fun. I do read a lot before bed - mostly scifi & fantasy - but that just gives me weird things to get tangled in my dream code.
I've been coding most of my life and have never been able to output code as fast as I get new ideas. To me, code is the ultimate artform because it can be anything. It can be as abstract as an algorithm or as concrete as a painting or sculpture. Coders can express themselves in time and space like other artists can only dream.
I have to take both sides. To some extent it can be controlled by writing ideas down, thinking about other things, etc but often I have new ideas when sleeping or non code related things will pop up in dreams as code. Some people dream in English or pictures but I mostly dream in code or logic.
It just hurts them. I buy $.99 things. I don't usually buy things that are more - at higher prices it's worth the 15 seconds it takes me to find the files on bit torrent and download them.
Without BT or affordable downloads I'd just opt to pretend their material doesn't exist. I almost never bought CDs. Even $.99 is high for music because I like to download an artists entire catalog when I hear a song I like - most turn out to be crap but I like to sort through myself. I don't buy much music from iTunes anyway.
My pet peeve is movies and TV shows. Why does a movie cost as much as buying the DVD at Walmart? For that price I may as well buy the DVD. Why do TV shows cost $20-$50 a season? If they'd price movies at $2 I'd buy dozens a month instead of one or two at $5. Make a TV show $.99 an episode or $10 a season and I'd buy whatever sounds good instead of something here and there. And remove the dang DRM so I don't have to remove it after the download.
I don't buy much software but I buy a lot of iPhone apps because at $.99 it's okay if I only enjoy the app for half an hour. It's both cheap and easy to keep track of (for the same reason people like 100 calorie packs of food). Make everything $.99 and you'll make bank if you're offering anything people want at all.
What's worse is if I've been doing math. That gives me really horrible dreams of numbers trying to combine and interact in different ways. I always dream as if I can find some new better way they should work but of course I never can get a better result. Ick. At least with the code my brain actually can find better patterns while I sleep.
What's weird is when you code without fully waking up. You can accomplish some amazing things but trying to understand the code you've written is all but impossible sometimes. When I was working more with AI I'd come up with some pretty good mental leaps and have no memory of having woke in the night much less having coded anything and trying to untangle the code to see how it worked was a total no-go because it just didn't seem like it should work at all.
Yes, and let us put a pack of smokes in every kid's lunch box and a beer in every happy meal because you are addicted.
Not as if I'm suggesting we rip the caffeine out of your clutching shaking fingers. I'm suggesting that it should not be pushed on minors and should not be treated as if it isn't a serious drug when it obviously is.
I'm hardly trying to keep people from having caffeine as I feel illegal drugs should be legalized and regulated. I just don't think they should be force fed to children or mixed into foods without proper warning labels.
Drink enough of it and it doesn't make you happy anymore. You start to shake, hallucinate, lash out at people, etc. The kind of results that we associate with serious drugs.
I'd say 1000 mg of caffeine a day was a slow day for me before I gave it up. Most of my intake was as soda too so by not drinking it I'm cutting back 3000+ calories a day too.
I went luke-warm turkey. I gave it up all at once but didn't try to be overly perfect about it. If I'm eating somewhere they don't have any other beverage options then I'll have a little caffeine but whenever I have a choice I opt for diet caffeine free products.
Now if I could just give up soda completely I could save $5-$10/day. I find it disturbing that I spend around $2000/year just on soda. Talk about a wasteful addiction. Not quite sure what I'm addicted to still since diet caffeine free soda tastes like crap.
I stopped using caffeine because of the shakes, mood swings, and other nasty side effects of massive amounts of caffeine but I still don't sleep. I think that is a geek trait more than a geek lifestyle choice. Who can sleep when you have visions of code running through your head. It was all I could do to keep myself in bed for three hours last night and even then I wake up about every half hour.
I got so bad that I was having serious mood swings and other negative caffeine related issues - not withdrawal but issues when fully doped - so I gave it up. It was hard for a few days but doable. I feel a lot better now although I still don't sleep.
The hardest part is finding a diet caffeine free soda at every fast food place.
I think we shouldn't be feeding caffeine to children. It should be regulated similar to alcohol or tobacco.
I dunno. I threw a metal dart through my foot during my first orgy. Ever try to play darts while people are moaning and groaning in kinky action 10ft from you? It is possible to forget to let go of a dart until it's in the wrong position.
I learned a lot of what not to do as a teenager. A couple of my friends got nasty STDs from that little party. I don't remember what it was they got but I remember them describing having to put some medication on something like a pipe cleaner and shove it up their private parts a couple times a day. Ow.
I have a lot of interesting memories though.. those visuals are probably against the law too. Is it a felony to remember nude teenage girls even if the memories are a couple decades old and the girls were older than me?
I find it amusing that to protect children from people seeing them naked we're making them criminals. After all every time I'm naked it ruins my life whereas having a criminal record, losing my right to vote, etc is harmless. Lets destroy then ti save them.
In my day we all traded naughty Polaroids and then used web cams. We never even considered it should be illegal especially when most of us were sexually active. I went to my first orgy when I was 14 (everyone there was underage) and constantly was exposed to sex just hanging out at friend's houses. It's just crazy that we would today be charged with a major crime for having traded pictures. So, I assume these crimes are still crimes after all these years - are they going to arrest me? I'd say 9 out of 10 of the friends I had when I was a teenager traded nude pics of themselves and their hook-ups and we were just average kids so we're going to arrest 90% of the population?
If we consider this a real problem why don't we add something to sex ed classes about it and let parents deal out what punishment they see fit. Making kids into criminals is idiotic.
You must not have a small child. I get a lot of/sending before the sentence is done/ problems due to my daughter hitting the send button for me.
Having small children requires a lot of quick responses to unexpected events. Yesterday, while I innocently sat coding, my daughter gave me a gooey handful of cat poop she found somewhere. After a quick exercise in emergency bathing my wife and I cleaned/searched the house and were unable to figure out where she managed to find this special gift at. The joys of parenthood.
I have a dual quad-core Xeon server and it keeps all cores busy and is definitely faster than a single or dual-core system. Nothing fancy going on. I run several virtual machines and each of them runs normal software such as web servers.
I hate Windows CE devices too. They are hard to use and developing for them feels like they are a bastard step child. Most programs aren't available for them and when they are they also feel like crappy stripped down versions that don't work well.
I'm currently working on moving a major project from WinCE based devices to iPhone based devices. Much cheaper to build on and a better user experience.
I believe the iPhone runs on ARM. They should switch to iPhone OS. Unfortunately the version of Linux on the XO is sort of retarded. I got one to develop programs for and absolutely hate the XO desktop. It's really poorly designed IMO. Apple probably wouldn't license the iPhone OS to them though. So maybe a Linux distro with a more iPhone-like experience?
The XO hardware is pretty good but the software needs some serious work. It just feels experimental and poorly thought out.
I think most developers suffer from a product that doesn't have a market, is poorly marketed, or is just plain poorly made.
iFart has a market because it's cheap, universal, and doesn't require any investment of time or effort to use. Call it stupid if you like but the truth is that everyone finds a fart joke funny.
Most programs are poorly marketed. They aren't advertised online or are advertised poorly. They aren't properly keyworded in App Store so that people can find them easily. They don't have good descriptions, artwork, etc in the App Store. Often there is no free version for people to try before they buy. And the problem for the program from the article, Dapple, is that it isn't priced correctly for the platform. After reading the article I was interested in buying the app and pulled it up. $4.99? I buy quite a few $.99 apps and a couple $1.99 or $2.99 apps but why would I spend $4.99 when so many other options are cheaper and just as good at being throw-away fun? If Dapple was $.99 I'd buy a copy today.
In my experience most new iPhone developers that I see complain about sales are the root of their own problem. Their apps look and feel unpolished. They need to go that extra mile to make their app desirable.
Fix these three issues and I think you can make a lot of money on iPhone apps. If at first you don't succeed then try try again.
I'd realize that my content is online and therefore available to anyone and just say what the hell. If it created a problem for me then I'd realize I had a stupid business model or had some technical flaws and make changes.
Ad supported content that keeps you from being comfortable in your access of that content is a bad model. Instead of fighting Boxee why not work on a solution such as streaming ads into the content?
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I got into iPhone development precisely to take advantage of the concept of getting $1 from a million people. The ease of sale (easy to market, easy to collect) thanks to the App Store and the fact that you can develop a program in a weekend that quite a few people are willing to pay $1 for. Crank out one a week and if it doesn't suck and your marketing doesn't suck then you can bank.
I buy few programs for $5 let alone the $50 of a PC or console game but I buy $1 iPhone games. I think a lot of other casual gamers will too.
Except I don't buy the DVD anymore because I'm sick of dealing with stacks of thousands of physical movie tokens that are damaged easily.
What I really want is a petabyte iPhone but they haven't delivered yet. That and a child friendly Apple TV my daughter can easily use.
Seriously though - if they make everything $.99 I'll buy a crap load of their products. It doesn't cost them anything to sell the products to me (I'd pay just for a license and figure out how to get the files off BT myself even) so why not? $.99 is like buying a soda - I don't even think of the cost so I just get whatever sounds good even if it ends up being expensive at the end of the month. If I have to consider the price though then self control comes into play.
Not really into games. Coding is way more fun. I do read a lot before bed - mostly scifi & fantasy - but that just gives me weird things to get tangled in my dream code.
I've been coding most of my life and have never been able to output code as fast as I get new ideas. To me, code is the ultimate artform because it can be anything. It can be as abstract as an algorithm or as concrete as a painting or sculpture. Coders can express themselves in time and space like other artists can only dream.
I have to take both sides. To some extent it can be controlled by writing ideas down, thinking about other things, etc but often I have new ideas when sleeping or non code related things will pop up in dreams as code. Some people dream in English or pictures but I mostly dream in code or logic.
It just hurts them. I buy $.99 things. I don't usually buy things that are more - at higher prices it's worth the 15 seconds it takes me to find the files on bit torrent and download them.
Without BT or affordable downloads I'd just opt to pretend their material doesn't exist. I almost never bought CDs. Even $.99 is high for music because I like to download an artists entire catalog when I hear a song I like - most turn out to be crap but I like to sort through myself. I don't buy much music from iTunes anyway.
My pet peeve is movies and TV shows. Why does a movie cost as much as buying the DVD at Walmart? For that price I may as well buy the DVD. Why do TV shows cost $20-$50 a season? If they'd price movies at $2 I'd buy dozens a month instead of one or two at $5. Make a TV show $.99 an episode or $10 a season and I'd buy whatever sounds good instead of something here and there. And remove the dang DRM so I don't have to remove it after the download.
I don't buy much software but I buy a lot of iPhone apps because at $.99 it's okay if I only enjoy the app for half an hour. It's both cheap and easy to keep track of (for the same reason people like 100 calorie packs of food). Make everything $.99 and you'll make bank if you're offering anything people want at all.
Have you tasted the water in most places? It tastes nasty. That is the only reason I get soda usually.
Doesn't work. I'm addicted to code.
What's worse is if I've been doing math. That gives me really horrible dreams of numbers trying to combine and interact in different ways. I always dream as if I can find some new better way they should work but of course I never can get a better result. Ick. At least with the code my brain actually can find better patterns while I sleep.
What's weird is when you code without fully waking up. You can accomplish some amazing things but trying to understand the code you've written is all but impossible sometimes. When I was working more with AI I'd come up with some pretty good mental leaps and have no memory of having woke in the night much less having coded anything and trying to untangle the code to see how it worked was a total no-go because it just didn't seem like it should work at all.
Yes, and let us put a pack of smokes in every kid's lunch box and a beer in every happy meal because you are addicted.
Not as if I'm suggesting we rip the caffeine out of your clutching shaking fingers. I'm suggesting that it should not be pushed on minors and should not be treated as if it isn't a serious drug when it obviously is.
I'm hardly trying to keep people from having caffeine as I feel illegal drugs should be legalized and regulated. I just don't think they should be force fed to children or mixed into foods without proper warning labels.
Drink enough of it and it doesn't make you happy anymore. You start to shake, hallucinate, lash out at people, etc. The kind of results that we associate with serious drugs.
I'd say 1000 mg of caffeine a day was a slow day for me before I gave it up. Most of my intake was as soda too so by not drinking it I'm cutting back 3000+ calories a day too.
I went luke-warm turkey. I gave it up all at once but didn't try to be overly perfect about it. If I'm eating somewhere they don't have any other beverage options then I'll have a little caffeine but whenever I have a choice I opt for diet caffeine free products.
Now if I could just give up soda completely I could save $5-$10/day. I find it disturbing that I spend around $2000/year just on soda. Talk about a wasteful addiction. Not quite sure what I'm addicted to still since diet caffeine free soda tastes like crap.
I stopped using caffeine because of the shakes, mood swings, and other nasty side effects of massive amounts of caffeine but I still don't sleep. I think that is a geek trait more than a geek lifestyle choice. Who can sleep when you have visions of code running through your head. It was all I could do to keep myself in bed for three hours last night and even then I wake up about every half hour.
I got so bad that I was having serious mood swings and other negative caffeine related issues - not withdrawal but issues when fully doped - so I gave it up. It was hard for a few days but doable. I feel a lot better now although I still don't sleep.
The hardest part is finding a diet caffeine free soda at every fast food place.
I think we shouldn't be feeding caffeine to children. It should be regulated similar to alcohol or tobacco.
I dunno. I threw a metal dart through my foot during my first orgy. Ever try to play darts while people are moaning and groaning in kinky action 10ft from you? It is possible to forget to let go of a dart until it's in the wrong position.
I learned a lot of what not to do as a teenager. A couple of my friends got nasty STDs from that little party. I don't remember what it was they got but I remember them describing having to put some medication on something like a pipe cleaner and shove it up their private parts a couple times a day. Ow.
I have a lot of interesting memories though.. those visuals are probably against the law too. Is it a felony to remember nude teenage girls even if the memories are a couple decades old and the girls were older than me?
I find it amusing that to protect children from people seeing them naked we're making them criminals. After all every time I'm naked it ruins my life whereas having a criminal record, losing my right to vote, etc is harmless. Lets destroy then ti save them.
In my day we all traded naughty Polaroids and then used web cams. We never even considered it should be illegal especially when most of us were sexually active. I went to my first orgy when I was 14 (everyone there was underage) and constantly was exposed to sex just hanging out at friend's houses. It's just crazy that we would today be charged with a major crime for having traded pictures. So, I assume these crimes are still crimes after all these years - are they going to arrest me? I'd say 9 out of 10 of the friends I had when I was a teenager traded nude pics of themselves and their hook-ups and we were just average kids so we're going to arrest 90% of the population?
If we consider this a real problem why don't we add something to sex ed classes about it and let parents deal out what punishment they see fit. Making kids into criminals is idiotic.
You must not have a small child. I get a lot of /sending before the sentence is done/ problems due to my daughter hitting the send button for me.
Having small children requires a lot of quick responses to unexpected events. Yesterday, while I innocently sat coding, my daughter gave me a gooey handful of cat poop she found somewhere. After a quick exercise in emergency bathing my wife and I cleaned/searched the house and were unable to figure out where she managed to find this special gift at. The joys of parenthood.
I do to actually. I like how you can configure the VM to not save changes to the filesystem when you reboot it.
That's why I run the keygens on somebody else's computer.
I have a dual quad-core Xeon server and it keeps all cores busy and is definitely faster than a single or dual-core system. Nothing fancy going on. I run several virtual machines and each of them runs normal software such as web servers.
Good reason not to play online games.
How is this any different than having a mobile interface or a web interface? It's just a new way to access banking integrated into a virtual world.
I hate Windows CE devices too. They are hard to use and developing for them feels like they are a bastard step child. Most programs aren't available for them and when they are they also feel like crappy stripped down versions that don't work well.
I'm currently working on moving a major project from WinCE based devices to iPhone based devices. Much cheaper to build on and a better user experience.
I believe the iPhone runs on ARM. They should switch to iPhone OS. Unfortunately the version of Linux on the XO is sort of retarded. I got one to develop programs for and absolutely hate the XO desktop. It's really poorly designed IMO. Apple probably wouldn't license the iPhone OS to them though. So maybe a Linux distro with a more iPhone-like experience?
The XO hardware is pretty good but the software needs some serious work. It just feels experimental and poorly thought out.
I think most developers suffer from a product that doesn't have a market, is poorly marketed, or is just plain poorly made.
iFart has a market because it's cheap, universal, and doesn't require any investment of time or effort to use. Call it stupid if you like but the truth is that everyone finds a fart joke funny.
Most programs are poorly marketed. They aren't advertised online or are advertised poorly. They aren't properly keyworded in App Store so that people can find them easily. They don't have good descriptions, artwork, etc in the App Store. Often there is no free version for people to try before they buy. And the problem for the program from the article, Dapple, is that it isn't priced correctly for the platform. After reading the article I was interested in buying the app and pulled it up. $4.99? I buy quite a few $.99 apps and a couple $1.99 or $2.99 apps but why would I spend $4.99 when so many other options are cheaper and just as good at being throw-away fun? If Dapple was $.99 I'd buy a copy today.
In my experience most new iPhone developers that I see complain about sales are the root of their own problem. Their apps look and feel unpolished. They need to go that extra mile to make their app desirable.
Fix these three issues and I think you can make a lot of money on iPhone apps. If at first you don't succeed then try try again.
I'd realize that my content is online and therefore available to anyone and just say what the hell. If it created a problem for me then I'd realize I had a stupid business model or had some technical flaws and make changes.
Ad supported content that keeps you from being comfortable in your access of that content is a bad model. Instead of fighting Boxee why not work on a solution such as streaming ads into the content?