Longform
I Left My Wallet in San Francisco
The big news today, of course, is WWDC. With its announcement yesterday, my Twitter timeline is blowing up with people making plans. But to a greater degree than has been usual in years past, it's also blowing up with friends and developers wondering if they can attend this year due to the expense. San Francisco is expensive even on the best of days, but it seems to be off the charts this year. With hotel rooms during the week of WWDC going for ...
DazeEnd.org Microblog
Anyone who was watching my Twitter timeline or RSS feed today may have wondered why I was posting so many pictures of puppies. Basically, they were test posts for a new microblog feature that I'm going to try out here on DazeEnd.org. Like most of you, I share the vast majority of my writing on Twitter rather than in this blog. But for a while now, I've been vaguely uncomfortable with the idea of so many of my thoughts being essentially owned by ...
Serious Business
In October 2015, Pieter Omvlee of Bohemian Coding gave a great talk at the inaugural Release Notes entitled The Great Pretender: Pretend to be More Than an Indie. In his presentation, Pieter talked in part about his experience selling a professional app to professional users. One of the things he suggested is that indies should consider pretending to be a bigger company than they really are in order to instill confidence in the mind of the ...
The Prisoner’s Dilemma
Anyone who's even a little familiar with game theory is undoubtedly familiar with The Prisoner's Dilemma. It's a classic thought experiment that illustrates how people can make rational choices that seem to be in their own best interest, even when another choice would result in a better outcome for themselves and for the group. In the classic formulation of the Prisoner's Dilemma, the prisoner in question is faced with a choice. The prisoner ...
Premium Pricing and Back Seat Driving
A friend of mine, Curtis Herbert, has been writing a series of articles (1, 2, 3) he calls Slopes Diaries about the development and pricing of version 2 of his app Slopes. Although I've found Slopes Diaries to be interesting, and while I agree with a lot of what he's written, a few things that he wrote in his most recent installment of the series struck me as wrong. Curtis begins Slopes Diaries #3 by quoting himself from Slopes Diaries #1, ...
My Delivery Truck (2nd Delivery Attempt)
Since posting My Delivery Truck, I've gotten a lot of responses, both on Twitter and (in the best tradition of blogging) reply posts. Although many were supportive of my post, some developers took me to task. A lot of the same objections were raised repeatedly, so I'm going to concentrate on a blog post from Aleksandar Vacić titled Store your Love which nicely summarizes many of the objections that were raised. Aleksandar writes: The iOS ...
My Delivery Truck
As tends to happen in regular cycles in our community, there has recently been another bout of handwringing over the difficulty of making it as an indie. Brent Simmons kicked this one off in his well written piece titled Love. And I don't mean to make light of his piece. If you haven't done so, I encourage you to read it. It encapsulates well a lot of the emotional angst that many independent developers are feeling about their businesses right ...
Taylor Swift and App Development
If you had asked me yesterday which Swift would be the topic of conversation among iOS and Mac developers today, I would have put money on it being the programming language and not the music star. And I would have been wrong, because Taylor Swift set the world of Apple watchers abuzz today by airing complaints about Apple's new Apple Music service on her blog. In her post she lays out a well-reasoned argument that Apple Music's payment policy is ...