Tag Archives: development

Opinion

What Price?

This originally started as a question on Apple’s support boards:

With the current AppStore model (which seems to be a money machine for developers) I do not understand why anyone would give away their applications. At least charge $0.99 and get something back for your hard work.

So, why do you give away your apps?

With the caveat that I have not actually submitted anything yet…

My motivation in writing an application was entirely for the pleasure of doing it. If I never do anything with it once it’s “finished” my goals have been achieved. So my only objective in pushing it to the AppStore is for other people to get some benefit from using it too. There is little incremental cost in doing so and zero cost means that it gets the widest possible distribution.

There are also disadvantages to charging for it. Firstly, by paying something for software users expect more. They want support and bug fixes and enhancements. Maybe they want those same things with free software but there’s less obligation. Also as a non-US citizen there are complications in getting paid the full amount due.

That’s not to say that I won’t charge for it. At the very least I would like to be able to cover my costs. By which I mean the iPhone Developer Program fee, the $99 they charge you for the privilege of deploying your own software on your own phone.

But there are complications in pricing any iPhone program.

The first obstacle is that pricing has not stabilised yet. Disregarding the loss-leaders such as the NYT reader and the Facebook program, there is still a wide variation in cost. Consider something as trivial as a tip calculator. I only had a quick look, but I found half a dozen and they ranged from free to £1.19 with most at the 59p level. I found significant variations in costs for pretty much every category I looked in.

Now the app that I’m writing is a good deal more sophisticated than a tip calculator. My initial assumption was that people would be loathe to pay for it but if others can sell a tip calculator — something you can do using the built-in calculator program — for £1.19 and still garner good reviews then surely I am undercutting myself?

But it’s also easy to price too high. As Daniel Jalkut said, “We hope to hit ‘pretty much on target’ from the start, to avoid embarrassment and second-guessing. If you price too low, you?ll have a hard time imposing a major increase.”

Another popular option is to have a paid-for version and a more limited, free version. The problem I have with that is you have to decide which features would be worth paying for without making the free version so limited that people just bin straight away. I’m not sure that there is an obvious dividing line with my application. Plus I like the simplicity of having a single version. I think it makes the “message” easier to explain — think the single version Mac OS X versus the half-dozen versions of Windows Vista — and, as an added bonus, is much easier for me to administer. I don’t have an economics background, but Joel Spolsky tells me that this is called segmentation.

There also seem to be a few cases where people are offering advert supported free versions. This is not a solution that I am entertaining. As a user I object to precious screen real-estate being taken up by an advert. As a developer I object to the extra work, uncertain income stream and the likelihood of introducing new bugs in a non-critical area of code.

In summary: the more I think about this, the more I get confused.

Opinion

Just for Fun

I’ve not done much programming in the last few years. When I first started working my job was mainly to “cut code” but I’ve done less and less as time has gone by. I now tend to concentrate on high level modelling and writing small utility scripts. I have not been doing much at home either, just minor tweaks to pre-existing software to “scratch an itch” or programs to automate tedious tasks.

For something that I claim to enjoy, why have I been doing so little of it? In short, it’s hard. Writing something useful that does not already exist is an increasingly challenging task. Even if the act is fun, what’s the point of making an inferior version of a pre-existing product? ((I know that for many developers the challenge is enough. I’m awkward in that I also want to be useful.))

It hasn’t always been like that.

In the olden days it was possible for one person to write a whole, useful application alone. Steve Wozniak wrote the original Apple Basic before they licenced Microsoft’s version. Matthew Smith single-handedly wrote the classic game Jet Set Willy. Even I managed to write a database application for my GCSE in Computer Studies and a graphical adventure game on my Sinclair Spectrum that at least one friend was quite impressed with.

But by the end of the eighties, software was getting more sophisticated and typically required a team. Programmers, designers and “architects” were required to make commercial quality programs. The lone, enthusiast programmer was effectively squeezed out of the market.

Fast-forward ten years and a new generation of developers were given their opportunity. Early web applications could be quickly slung together using a few lines of Perl, a rudimentary understanding of HTML and a commodity PC running Linux. I guess if I’d attended Stanford I would have been a dotcom millionaire by now ((I do have a t-shirt that says, “I got £80 million for my dot com idea but now all I have left is this lousy t-shirt.”)) but here in the UK I missed the boat. Just like programs on home computers had done before, useful applications quickly got far too complex for one person to build alone.

And now here we are in 2008. A few months ago Apple released the SDK for the iPhone and the possibilities are there again. If you go to the App Store you’ll see that many of the available programs play Sudoku or are thin front-ends to web-apps like Twitter or Facebook. The more sophisticated games — such as Super Monkey Ball — have tended to be ports from other platforms and so while originally written by many people were ported by a much smaller number. Sure, many applications are tiny and frivolous or just plain poor, but the barrier to entry is much lower than it has been for quite some time.

Undoubtedly the complexity level will rise over time — probably fairly quickly — but until then programming is actually fun again. I am, indeed, writing an application for my iPhone and, who knows, I might actually have something to announce in a few weeks. Watch this space.

Links

My del.icio.us bookmarks for July 15th through July 16th

  • Ars Book Review: "Patent Failure" – Interesting book review about the effect of patents on an industry. Apparently cost more money than they make in anything but chemical and pharmaceuticals.
  • Lucky to be a Programmer – I don't program as much as I used to but this explains why I love to when I get the chance.
  • WordPress 2.6 – Usual drill. I've upgraded to the latest version of WordPress, the underlying software of ZX81.org.uk. If you see anything wrong please let me know!
  • 20 Amazing Facts About  Voting in the USA – Still in any doubt that computerised voting machines are a bad idea for free and fair elections?
Opinion

Byline Bypass?

1 Comment

Earlier today daringfireball pointed me to Byline by Phantom Fish, a Google Reader client-side application for the iPhone.

Since I recently abandoned Safari’s built-in RSS reader for Google, this is just the kind of application that I have been looking for. Unlike a lot of programs I’ve found on the AppStore, Byline seems to be very well put together. The author appears to have included a thoughtful set of features. Not everything, just those elements you use every day; either a good starting point for later versions or an Apple-like approach depending on your perspective.

However, one thing worries me: Google have not released a publicly available API for Reader. Unless Phantom Fish have reached some deal with Google — and there’s nothing on their website to say that they have — then the only way that this application can work is if they reverse engineered the protocol ((My first thought was that it was just a specialised RSS feed. However, the video shows support for the “Star” functionality and they say that it synchronises read status, etc.)).

I’m confident that the interface works now, but what about tomorrow? The popular opinion is that Google are not happy with parts of the API and will publish the full version soon, but until the API is publicly available and stable there are no guarantees and it could change at any time.

Do you want to spend ?5.99 on an application that could be disabled at any time by a third party? As useful as it looks to be, I don’t want to start relying on an application with foundations as shaky as this.

Links

My del.icio.us bookmarks for January 12th through January 16th

  • Apple introduces new Apple TV software, lowers hardware pricing – Now potentially more useful with the movie rentals. But where is the price drop in the UK?!
  • Dell tells customer ‘Mac is good option’ – “Now, it’s possible that the techie was referring to a 1970s rock band, or to an item of waterproof clothing. But we can’t help concluding that he was indeed talking about Apple’s operating system.”
  • Steve Jobs gets cohesive – Some cool stuff from Apple at the MacExpo. I think the Time Capsule is going to be on my shopping list when it ships next month. The movie rentals (when they get to the UK) look interesting but they really need to build their catalogue!
  • How to recognise a good programmer – Great discussion on recognising great developers. The problem would seem to be finding them! Most recruiters just pattern match on CVs which tends to favour the “career” developer.
Opinion

Joel On Software

Let’s cut to the chase: if you’ve read and enjoyed any of Joel Spolsky’s ramblings on the web you’ll like this book. Skip the rest of this review and just go buy it.

For the benefit of those that have not heard of him, who is this Joel chap and what is the book and his normal prose about? The “About the Author” section describes him as an industry veteran that writes an “anti-Dilbert manifesto” on his website. I can’t think of a better description, which is why I have shamelessly copied it rather than finding my own phrase…

He writes about software development at every level from bashing out code right through to strategy and he applies the same degree of pragmatism, common-sense and humour to every subject he covers.

The book is split into four sections and an appendix. In the first he talks about “the practise of programming,” which is the low level stuff. He starts with choosing a programming language (or, at least, why it’s probably not as important as you might think), moves on to the now almost classic “Joel Test” (Google it if you’re in any doubt how influential it has become), moves onto functional specs, schedules and the like.

Section two is all about managing developers. Personally, I think this is the part that he really excels at. Indeed, the best bits of the other sections are actually about the higher level stuff. One of the highlights is about what he calls “leaky abstractions,” basically that clever things that try to hide their underlying details tend to fall down in unpredictable ways. Ever got confused about the way a string class works in C++? This is the chapter for you!

The penultimate section is a random collection of articles, including his thoughts on the 80/20 myth, various business models and open source. I particularly like the piece on getting things done when you have no authority to do anything officially. Most books assume that you just need to learn what the right thing to do is, so it’s refreshing to find a book that deals in Real Life!

The final section is less relevant to someone like myself with a Unix background (and interest). There are three pieces on Microsoft’s .NET architecture. Nevertheless, I did read them and thought that he had some interesting things to say.

There is also an appendix, which is a “best of” collection of questions from the “Ask Joel” section on his website. This is perhaps the weakest section in the book and, although entertaining, most of the good advice in this section has already been expressed more clearly in earlier sections.

You can probably see by that I was impressed. It was an easy book to read — something that a lot of technical writers forget about — and even when I disagreed with certain things I could at least see where he was coming from.

The facts

Author: Joel Spolsky

Cost: $24.99

ISBN: 1-59059-389-8.

Buy from Amazon.co.uk.