Revolutions don’t happen without spilling a lot of blood. And if I sound overly blasé about it, that’s because I’m holding a bag of popcorn rather than a gun.

Plenty of people are up in arms about Apple’s recent decision to charge 30% for all subscription- and content-based offerings on the iOS App Store. And they should be: for these people, Apple is literally taking away their profit margin, and sometimes even more. Prior to this change, large distributors could buy their wares at a lower price, put it on sale in their App Store storefront, and sell it for a higher price. Now Apple is taking a 30% piece of that sale price.

It’s the kind of move that will dismantle business models. Think of the kinds of companies that are currently operating on the App Store that will be affected:

• Book and magazine sellers, such as Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, Zinio.
• Music subscription services, such as Pandora, LastFM.
• Video streaming services, such as Netflix.

There may be other services caught in this net as well (including some Software-as-a-Service offerings, like Readability), but I believe that Apple is really targeting these media services in particular.

The thing these categories have in common is that they are distributors of content. They are not the publishers, nor are they the creators. They are companies whose sole purpose is to take the creative output of one group, and deliver it to another.

There can be no doubt that Apple is declaring war on distributors. And why not? In Apple’s eye, they offer no value; in fact, they might just be vampires on the process. What purpose do they serve in a world where Apple has fielded over 100 million iOS devices? If Apple can offer the book store, or the music streaming service, then what purpose do these other companies serve?

But it goes even further than that. I believe Apple intends to not only remove the distributors but the publishers as well. Print publishing in particular is an industry ripe for tumult. At its core, print publishing is based on moving paper; its entire business model is fundamentally stuck in the Twentieth Century. In a world where companies like Apple provide a hundred million sets of eyeballs, what creator needs publishers to ensure their work gets promoted?

In this vision of the future, we’ll see authors and agents work with editors and designers to provide an ebook to platforms like iOS and Android. And instead of 10% of the sale price (at best!), authors will take 70%, and disburse payment to their assistants as they see fit. This vision puts publishers (as we know them today) in the dustbin of history along with their precious printing presses and forests of paper. And authors will take their place at the top of the money pyramid, right where they belong.

A lot of people will get hurt in this process. People will lose their jobs, companies will collapse, and some people will even cry. I really believe that the future is going in this direction, regardless of whether Apple pushes it. But Apple’s move is going to accelerate the process, providing that opening for ambitious and talented authors to slip in and show the rest of us how it’s done.

While Google is today playing the partner to existing publishers, Apple’s gravity will also provide the motivation for authors to appear on Android as well. The story of the Internet is about separating barriers between writers and readers. Once a critical mass is reached, Google will make a similar store available to authors, and everyone will gush about how awesome it is that we’ll finally have an “open” alternative to the “evil” Apple iBookstore.

And like a maple in autumn, the leaves of the publishing industry will shrink, fade, and flutter to the ground.

Short term pain A potentially big problem with this vision of the future is that it puts Apple at the centre of it. The company’s track record for bringing all media to the table is spotty, at best. They caught the music industry unawares, and the movie and book industries are skittish as cats in a dog pound.

So in practical terms, it may be neither quick nor desirable to have Apple acting as the vendor for all media. A lot of people will be pushing very hard against this eventuality, and I can’t entirely blame them. The result is likely to be that my iPad won’t be able to give me access to every book, every movie, every song out there. I think Apple is betting they’ll have enough, though, to keep building their user base.

Suffice to say, we’re entering a period of dramatic change in the publishing industry. You can say what you want about Apple and its motives, but they are bringing us something that we may not be able to say no to: more content, with lower prices. It should definitely be interesting.

I’m working on a new Mac app. At this stage in the game, I’m too embarrassed to tell you much about it. But in my long, agonizing quest to become a Cocoa Master, this is another stage in the journey, one I hope brings me measurably closer to my goal.

This past weekend, I had the opportunity to give that app my full attention. I took the lovely @erinlthomas for a writing retreat in the middle of winter-locked Prince Edward County, where we had nothing to do but focus on our projects. While she made brilliant progress, I found myself stuck, banging my head against Core Animation. Having read the documentation and poring over code samples, I couldn’t figure out what I was doing wrong. And despite my relentless pushing against the documentation and Build & Run, I wasn’t getting anywhere. It was deeply frustrating, and forced me to question myself (again).

Fortunately, last night was also one of our quarterly Tacow (Toronto Area Cocoa and WebObjects) group meetings. There, I received many encouraging words from my fellow Cocoa-heads. David Leber reminded me again of a great quote from Aaron Hillegass:

"Yes, this is hard. No, you are not stupid."

So it’s time to take a deep breath, revisit my assumptions, and rush once more unto the breach. This project is back on.

It was with thoughts of last night, that I reacted to this tweet tonight:

Of course I nodded my head at that one right away, but I also immediately grasped why that is. Unlike so many other development environments, Cocoa is adopted by people who share a very common purpose. It’s not to become rich. It’s not because our employer made us. It’s not because it’ll get us laid (unless, I suppose, you’re Wil Shipley). It’s because we fell in love with the platform that we’re developing for. We fell in love with the Mac and with the iPhone, and now we want to contribute to that platform.

And it turns out that it’s really hard to do. You can’t take a night course to learn Cocoa, and no university’s computer science department (with rare exceptions) is going to spend much time on Objective-C. There’s nothing (yet) mainstream about Cocoa, compared to the enterprise dominance of, say, Java and Windows. And to my unending dismay, there’s only a couple places you can really get training (Big Nerd Ranch and Pragmatic Studio are the ones I’ve found).

Ultimately, the only way to learn this stuff is to teach yourself. And it’s really, really hard. For many people, even experienced developers have a devil of a time figuring out how to work this thing. There are paradigms at work that are unique to Apple’s development environment — good things, to be sure, but damned different. Learning Objective-C, while not a total cake-walk, was the easy part. Learning about design patterns, delegates, KVC, memory management, Core Data… the entire Cocoa framework. Not easy. Take it from someone who has been trying to learn for years.

But for those who have learned, there’s a common bond. These are the people who have demonstrated a remarkable mental acuity: an ability to stay motivated, and to stay on task. To ship. They’ve learned something because they wanted to, dammit. They felt it was the right thing to learn. They value elegance in both code and in interface design. They understand the beauty of computing, and they want to bring a small piece of it to life on their own computer.

So what Steve Streza is expressing, is this community of autodidactic, aesthetically-minded, highly driven people, who have something quite rare in common: this platform, this mountain that we’ve all been climbing. And without doubt, we help each other up that mountain, and that breeds a community that actually works, and that engenders mutual respect.

So that’s why. And now, in poor imitation of the best of those people, I will attempt to join them on that mountain, one misguided line of code at a time.

I’ve been feeling more contemplative than usual in the hours approaching the flip to the new year. Perhaps it’s the combination of my various Twitter homies making year-end observations, and the fact that so much is in flux right now for me. So I’m going to bloviate a bit over what happened in 2010, as much to help me make sense of it all and to put myself on track for next year.

The Business Angle
On the face of it, my web development business did extremely well in 2010. The year before had been difficult, though it ended well enough. But after several years of no growth, sales this year went up quite a bit in 2010, mostly owing to a simple action: I asked for more money for my work, and I got it. That’s a good takeaway for anyone in this business. If you’re not getting mass complaint about your rates, you’re leaving money on the table.

The extra cash didn’t seem to come in as handy, though, owing to a larger and more systemic issue: I just haven’t been getting paid on time. Clients in 2009 and 2010 had far less trouble holding out on me than in previous years, and it’s been grating at me more than anything else in my work. Programming requires focus more than anything, and it’s been consistently difficult when you have to worry about whether you can pay the mortgage. And I truly did spend hours and sleepless nights wondering how I could extract the cash from these reticent clients.

It got to the point where I was seriously considering a career change. The stress of having to manage the business was starting to overwhelm the incredible benefits of working from home and flexibility. It got to the point where I started looking at job postings. Maybe, just maybe, there’d be something that would both let me continue to enjoy the freedom of my current life, while providing a steady income.

I found such an opportunity. I can’t really talk about it yet, because it’s a startup, but I’ll say this about it: I’m now employed with them full-time, I work from home exclusively, and I’ve arranged to maintain my existing business. That latter move was made possible by the acquisition of a contractor, who has proven to be absolutely amazing: very skilled, very talented, and moreover, totally reliable. I can’t enthuse enough about what a difference it makes to have this kind of talent at my disposal. My business will almost certainly shrink in 2011, but this beats shutting it down altogether. Best of all, my clients haven’t noticed a difference, except for the mentions I make in our emails about my “team”. That’s not a bad feeling to have.

Personal Goals
I’ve always been burdened by what I call “crazy ideas” — those business ideas that end up going nowhere. I try to find projects that combine my strong web development powers, with my long-term goal of becoming a Mac/iOS developer, with a desire to become unnaturally wealthy.

As it turns out, I’ve got a long way to go.

I began last year with this great idea for a backup and versioning service for writers. Called PageSquirrel, it was essentially a web-based service that died almost as soon as it got into the testers’ hands. Dropbox was just becoming well-known at that point, so it seemed I’d been a little late to the party, and so I let it go.

I also joined one of my clients in creating a group-buying site (like Groupon) called WebPiggy. In the year that’s been around, it has done very modestly, while Groupon and others have literally exploded in size and reach. While we get by with modest resources, it seems unlikely to take off in a big way without a change in direction and commitment.

I wrote a book! It was a ton of work to produce Web Development with the Mac for Wiley, but seeing an actual box of real books arrive was a thrill, and one I’ll remember for the rest of my life. But the fact is, sales have been miserable and it looks like this book will join the legion of technology books that sink into obscurity, forever part of the Long Tail. So the book is bittersweet.

In the same vein, I met another personal goal at about the same time as the book launch: I wrote and published my first iPhone app. Code for iPhone and iPad lets you view the source code of any web page. It was a great moment, having published iOS software. And while I wrote the app with no expectation of reward, I was still disappointed by the extremely poor sales. Let’s face it: there’s not a big market for web page source code viewers. An early request from the enormously popular John Gruber to see the app could have led to a huge breakout win for the app. But his silence after getting a promo code said everything about the quality of my software. The pennies I’ve made on it haven’t inspired much confidence in my ability to make money on the app store, but the experience was worthwhile.

A few months ago, I started thinking seriously about another project. It’s a Mac app that I plan on pushing out to the Mac App Store. This plan addresses the weaknesses that I found in my first project, so it’s with my usual (naive? idiotic?) hope that I proceed with this new plan.

Looking Forward
So 2010 was a funny year: I ostensibly met a lot of long-term goals (best sales ever, book published, app produced), but it netted me so little that I wonder what the effort was for.

At the same time, I have new opportunities, both with a brilliant new startup, and with my own ideas in my spare time. As with any of our lives, stay tuned to see how this crap turns out.

Apple announced the new MacBook Air this week, and as of today, they appeared in my nearest (albeit not quite local, per se) Apple Store. As someone long fascinated by the MBA, and who also will be upgrading his 2-year-old 15-inch MacBook Pro in January, I decided to have a look.

The new Air comes in an 11- and 13-inch version, and as I walked into the store, it was the smaller one that happened to be available, so I sidled up and started to play. I was immediately struck by how small it is. The physical size, of course, but also the display resolution. You don’t really get a sense of how diminutive the Air is until you close it and hold it in your hand. This machine is a veritable sliver of aluminum.

It was very snappy to use. Apps opened right away, responsiveness was quite excellent, no doubt owing to the flash memory. I played 1080p video from Apple’s trailers site, and it used about 45% of the CPU; the machine barely got warm. Flash video was a different story: on Youtube.com I watched a 720p video stutter occasionally, and the CPU took 150% between Flash and Safari. In other words, it was exactly as you would expect on a Mac.

I opened the brand-new Word 2011, and it was available almost immediately. I have the previous version myself, and I dread using it because I don’t want to wait for it to start. This was a real revelation. But once open, you can see that the app is kind of a joke on a screen of this size. With the Dock visible at the bottom of the screen, and that grotesque Microsoft Ribbon taking up a ton of vertical space at the top, your document is a postage stamp in the middle. If you switch the view to Draft mode, and hide the Ribbon, it becomes much more usable.

On the other hand, I downloaded and installed Coda, Transmit, and played with Photoshop Elements. You know what? They look pretty darned good on that screen, and worked without compromise.

The 11-incher has a resolution of 1366×768 — the first 16:9 display I believe Apple has produced. Despite most apps working well, I think you really feel cramped with such a short display.

But when I closed that MacBook Air and held it in my hand, it was wonderfully compelling. All that computing power in such a slim, svelte package.

The 13-inch Air was much more convincing as a primary computer. It has more oomph than the smaller one, but its display resolution is a delightfully uncompromising 1440×900 — exactly the same as my current 15-inch MacBook Pro. Of course, the high resolution of this display means that everything on the screen is smaller. My eyes aren’t getting any younger, but they’re still good enough to read it comfortably. But shortly after, looking at their 15-inch MacBook for comparison, I was shocked — shocked! — at how big things looked on that display. It was a dramatic difference in size.

So what do I think of these machines? When Steve introduced them on Wednesday, he suggested that all their computers would be like this down the line, and I can see what he means: this form factor is clearly the future of portable computing. The 15-incher (and definitely the 17-incher) look clunky, bulky and archaic.

We have always been asked to give up power for portability, and the equation remains unchanged. But today’s less-powerful computers are probably more than enough for most users. I’m certain that my Mom could probably get by with an iPad; my wife could easily get by with an Air; but could I?

Putting on my Vulcan hat for a second: In my objective analysis, the 11-inch display is simply too short, and I would probably chafe against that repeatedly. The performance on it was quite brilliant, but I would like to see some metrics from reviewers such as Macworld.

The 13-inch model was very, very compelling. For just a bit larger than the 11-inch model, you get a display that I already know I’m comfortable with in terms of pixel resolution. It comes with a faster processor, and critically, the larger flash capacity (256GB in the upgraded model).

On paper, trading in my 15-inch MacBook Pro for a 13-inch Air would seem ridiculous; the specs suggest I would be losing performance. But raw performance isn’t really an issue anymore; computers are “fast enough” for so many of the things we do with them. What you get instead, with the Air, is a feeling of absolute portability, the sense that it could effortlessly slip into any place you need to use it. It shifts the power of computing into the space that an iPad or netbook would occupy. I could take an Air to my coffee shop, and it would be so much easier to handle.

And yet, I could bring that Air back home with me, plug it into my 24-inch Cinema Display, and still get an uncompromising desktop experience.

So it’s definitely a conundrum. Luckily, I have a couple months to make up my mind!

This time was going to be different.

I knew that going out. For too long, we Canadians have traveled to the US, and essentially shut our phones off before crossing the border. And while I have a great time in cities like New York, Chicago and (most recently) Boston, there’s a great degree of handicap attached to being in a foreign land without that great security blanket. Having ubiquitous Internet is arguably even more important while traveling; so it’s ironic that traveling is the time you can get it the least.

But not this time. For this weekend trip to Boston, I took along my iPhone, and a little plan: to get myself an AT&T account, and get my iPhone 4 running domestically while I’m in the US. Turns out it’s fully possible, but it ain’t nearly as easy as it ought to be.

A Word About The Ethics of the Carrier Lock

The very first hurdle is one I crossed while still at home, and it’s by far the most contentious for anyone looking to accomplish this feat. When you buy an iPhone in most countries, the device is locked to a particular carrier. In the US and Canada, an iPhone 4 bought for $199 is subsidized, and is therefore tied to work only on that carrier’s network. This is standard industry practice, and as far as I can tell, its only purpose is to protect the carrier’s investment in the phone subsidy, forcing you to remain with that network long enough to repay the balance of what’s owed on the phone. This is why you should be within your rights to ask your carrier to “unlock” your phone at the end of your contract term.

But let’s be realistic. In my case, at least, I’m not looking to leave my carrier. They are still getting my money every month. But for three days, I want to get reasonable voice and data rates. So while I’m still paying Fido (my carrier in Canada), I think there is no moral dilemma in breaking the carrier lock to get it to work in another country. After all, that’s the whole point of the GSM/GPRS system: trans-national compatibility! The Europeans have been enjoying this for many years, and by gum, I want to join the party.

This whole conversation would be moot if my carrier made me a decent offer to use my plan in the US. But that’s of course not the case. My carrier does offer a “travel pack”, but to take advantage of it would break that “reasonable” rule from the last paragraph. Here’s what Fido has to offer (I believe that Rogers has an identical plan):

You can see the whole page here. That’s a lot of money for very little data.

Picking the US Plan

Conversely, AT&T offers Pay As You Go plans for their customers, under a brand called “GoPhone”. In their perfect world, you can walk off the street, buy one of their dedicated “GoPhones”, and pay to refill it with voice minutes and data as needed. You can buy a refill card for prices starting at $25, which gives you a certain amount of voice calling. You can also buy a block of 100 MB of data for $20. This isn’t exactly stellar, but it’s way better than what Fido has on offer.

But it’s not an easy proposition. First off, that carrier lock needs unlocking. Then, you have to talk AT&T into giving you a SIM card for their network (and remember it needs to be a micro-SIM if you’ve got an iPhone 4). Then you have to activate the SIM, which gives you a phone number and allows you to add minutes and data.

Unfortunately, much of your success in this will rely on your luck in finding a cooperative AT&T store clerk. In my case, I was able to acquire a micro-SIM from one AT&T store, but he wouldn’t activate it for me, insisting that it wouldn’t work in an iPhone (he’s right, by the way, but there’s a very simple workaround which I’ll get to momentarily). Fortunately, there was another store just up the street where the guy was willing to just do his freaking job and give me what I was asking for.

Okay, that was a lot of narrative to get to a step-by-step process. Here’s exactly what you need to do to go from locked Canadian iPhone to unlocked, American, Pay As You Go:

1. Jailbreak your iPhone. Oh, don’t roll your eyes. Jailbreaking is awesome, and everyone should do it (Reason number one is the brilliant, $20 MyWi, which creates a wireless network using your 3G connection). If you are running iOS 4.0, go to http://jailbreakme.com and it’ll be done in a heartbeat. Otherwise, downgrade to 4.0.

2. Install Ultrasn0w. This is the free tool that unlocks your iPhone. You can find it in the Cydia app store that gets installed with the jailbreak. If you can’t find it, check these instructions.

3. In the US, visit a local AT&T store. Tell them you are visiting from another country, and would like to activate a SIM for your phone. If they ask what phone you’ve got, cough and mutter it under your breath. Don’t meet their eyes. Say it’s for a friend. But above all else, be insistent that it’s cool, you know what you’re doing, and if they could just do what you ask and stop injecting their brain-melting ignorance, then your feelings of stabby-ness will blissfully subside. Tell them you want to use their GoPhone plans. The SIM card should cost you nothing; it’s the gateway to paying them to be on their network. If they have a SIM card to give you, you should be able to get at least that. (In my case, I had to get that on one trip, and visit a different store to activate it.)

4. During activation, choose your options. They have a number of options in their GoPhone portfolio. I chose a $3/day unlimited calling plan, which gets activated automatically whenever you make a call. I also got the $20 100MB data package. Be wary about this one, though: it automatically gets renewed every month unless you cancel it, which you can easily do from their web site. I got plenty of warning about this, but just keep an eye.

5. Change your APN (Access Point Name). This is the trick to making it all work. The first AT&T guy I visited said the iPhone wouldn’t work, and it’s because of the APN. But it turns out you can change it very easily, and it doesn’t require a jailbreak (although let’s face it, you probably had to do it already to get here). Just visit http://unlockit.nz, and follow the instructions to have a profile created and installed for the AT&T network. Essentially, this profile just tells your phone the name of its network, and the server to look to for getting online. When you return to your home country, you can easily remove the profile by going to Settings > General > Profile.

6. Pop in the new SIM card. There is no step 7.

From that point on, it was like I was an American using my iPhone in my own damn country.

Of course, I reset the data usage counter so I could keep an eye on my progress against the 100MB that I purchased (Settings > Usage > Reset Statistics). Turns out that you really can burn through that pretty quick, especially if you tether to your MacBook! And even as I write this on the evening of an unexpected extra night in Boston (damn you, rain!), I just tripped over 100MB, shutting down the wireless party. Ah well. To refresh another 100MB, just dial *611 on your phone and follow the instructions.

I only have one more comment to make before I wrap this up. American iPhone users have been complaining about AT&T’s quality of service since the launch back in 2007. As a Canadian spoiled by the delicious Rogers/Fido network, I very quickly learned how right they are. Of course I can’t speak for anywhere else in the US, but the reliability of my service in Boston was absolutely terrible. In Fenway Park, for example, I spent most of the time on Edge networking, and even that was next to useless. In other parts of the city, I’d show four or five bars, but still not get a connection to the network. It was appalling compared to what I’m used to at home.

But the good news is, having gone through this pain, I now have a SIM card that I can swap into my phone anytime I visit the States, charge it up with data and minutes, and move on with my life. It’s a pretty sweet feeling.

Okay, pop quiz: what’s going to be on the next iPad’s feature list?

You’d probably say one thing right away: the same Retina Display that has made the iPhone 4 such a treat. After all, one look at the precision and crispness of that display, its indistinguishability from paper, its placement directly beneath the glass such that you feel like you’re manipulating the pixels directly, and it’s clear this technology will be propagating everywhere Apple needs to show stuff.

Some developers I follow on Twitter talk about the Retina Display like it’s a sine qua non; without it, the iPad (which lacks it) is a greatly diminished experience. Apple must love to hear that.

This hasn’t been my opinion. Since acquiring the iPhone 4 last Friday, I’ve marvelled at the quality of the display, but I noted that it hasn’t changed the rules for how and to what extent you present information to the user. In other words, while the pixels have gotten smaller, your finger is stubbornly the same size.

But that’s not to say I won’t be excited by the Retina Display-enabled iPad when it arrives. And that’s the nut here: Apple is the expert at this technique of predictive marketing, and they’ve been doing it for a very long time.

For a company that has a track record for introducing “totally new” products (the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad), there’s always a thread, a technology story, that users can trace from what already exists to the new device. The Retina Display is just the latest example. Go back one step: before the iPhone 4 came out, we had the iPad with its super-fast Apple A4 chip. The company went to great pain to tell us all about it. And the early press, along with direct experience, showed us that the A4 was indeed blindingly fast.

Gee, wouldn’t it be great if that chip were in the next iPhone? So when that did happen, we already knew what we were getting, so to speak. No matter what else the iPhone 4 featured, we knew it would run apps like nobody’s business.

Other examples abound, where the company has introduced features on one platform, and rolled it out to successive generations of product. On the Mac side, recall Apple’s introduction of (what I like to think of as) their next-generation power management system, on the 17-inch MacBook Pro. For the first time, they offered a ten-hour battery life, owing to a significantly larger battery and vastly improved electronics for managing it. I had just bought the previous-generation 15-inch MacBook Pro, so I was stuck with my measly 2.5-hour battery life.

Over the past two years, that technology has trickled down into all of Apple’s laptops, even the white polycarbonate MacBook. And I couldn’t be more excited: I know what I’m getting when I get my next laptop, and that improved, well-understood benefit will ensure that I upgrade.

The ignorant people talk about Apple as if they’re all about surface appeal. We know better: many companies — including Apple — nail that on the first iteration of a product. But the company continually hones its offerings, adding new improvements that are so clearly superior to what they had before, that users feel compelled to upgrade. Hence the lines on iOS device launch days.

No other company is in a position to so successfully work their customers in the same way. I dismiss Microsoft and its PC hegemony out of hand — they are more interested in preserving their lead and stopped innovating years ago. Google with Android comes close, but its hardware ecosystem is so complicated that we need a scorecard to tell the difference between identical hardware from the same vendor (Samsung, I’m looking at you).

How the hell are users supposed to connect one innovation with the next-generation’s offering? In short, they can’t. And that means a customer isn’t going to have a particular loyalty to the brand. That customer will buy whatever phone the guy at the store recommends that year, and they’ll probably come in again two years later and do the same thing.

An Apple customer, on the other hand, will actively seek out the next iPhone when their contract is up, and they’ll know exactly what they’re getting: something already great, but even better. Apple has spoiled us for the next model, and every launch is not just an ad for that product, but for the next iteration of the other products.

Ever get the feeling that this company is an unstoppable juggernaut?

I took a call today from a potential new client. As with many such interactions, there’s always an underlying tension. They want to know, “can I afford this guy?”, while I want to know, “can they afford to pay what I’m worth?” Unfortunately, one of the chief struggles in my business is separating one kind from the other.

I’d spoken with this client last December. The general site had been outlined, and she needed to get her ducks in a row before moving any further. A promise to call back “in a week or two” turned into almost seven months! When she called out of the blue today, I didn’t feel bad asking her to bring me back up to speed on who she was.

We spent a good half hour talking about her site and the scale of the job. We were doing the dance. I was aching to get to the part where I could gauge her spending tolerances, while she was just trying to sort out whether I was able to accomplish what she needed to do.

At last, we came to the deciding issue. One part of the job called for an email marketing system. I advised that she look into a solution such as Campaign Monitor or MailChimp, two services that provide brilliant marketing tools, and are dramatically affordable (to say they make it up on volume would be an understatement!) — not to mention, easily integrated into a web app using their APIs.

“I have looked at MailChimp,” she said, “but I didn’t want to spend that much.”

That sound you heard around 2:30 pm today was my heart sinking into the depths of my black, black soul.

In the subsequent clarification, I told her that what we were talking about constituted about $3500 – $5000 worth of work. Turns out she had a budget of about $500. I politely suggested that if she decides to reconsider her budget, I’d be happy to help her out, but until then she might want to consider other options.

After hanging up and taking a moment to utter a curse or two for the wasted time away from a tight deadline, I was left with a sense of powerlessness. On the one hand, there’s no doubt that I was dealing with someone who simply didn’t understand the scope of the work she was asking for. On the other hand, it’s perfectly understandable that these kinds of misunderstandings occur. After all, application development is a non-trivial undertaking, and it’s a black box to those who don’t practice this particular dark art. I get the feeling that clients assume I simply configure a few check boxes, and boom! the site is live.

But that is entirely not the case. As I’ve been learning more and more of late, developing web sites is almost never a simple matter. As soon as you go beyond a simple, static five page site, you’re in a land where you need professional help. This client knew Dreamweaver, but was of course completely helpless considering server-side functionality, e-commerce and email marketing integration. That stuff takes specialized expertise, a great deal of time spent educating, working with third-party vendors, developing, testing and deploying. And then, after those months pass, and the invoice is submitted, there are the requisite months of waiting to get paid!

It’s a difficult business, and I feel quite strongly that clients don’t understand it. So if today’s experience has taught me anything, it’s that perhaps we should be looking for ways to educate our clients on the realities of this kind of work. It’s not an easy job, but i think it would go a long way towards avoiding uncomfortable phone calls.

In the 2000 movie High Fidelity, there’s a scene where Barry (Jack Black) receives a response for a poster he’s put up in the store. The poster is a wanted ad looking for “hip young gunslingers”; a guitarist who is “into” four particular bands. Although the scene isn’t foreshadowed, we come to understand that the poster has been up for a very long time, and that this is the first response Barry’s had for it.

It is in that spirit that I write this post; it is my own standing offer looking for the right partner.

After three years of working as a solo web developer, I’ve come to realize that I will never achieve greatness alone. I’m certainly getting by, to be sure, but I now understand that true success can only come with the contribution of a complementary skill set.

I’m a big fan of the podcasts done by Dan Benjamin. His show, The Pipeline, is my favourite, wherein he interviews fascinating, successful people in the web, Mac and general tech sector. As I listened, these people explained their success as a matter of having the right product, or working hard, or meeting the right people. But what they didn’t dwell on was something they all seemed to have in common: a partner who helped them drive the work forward, who did what they could not, who shared their vision to deliver something worthwhile.

To me the equation is pretty simple: solo developers achieve modestly. Partners can take on the world.

Which is why I am looking for the right partner. Someone who will bring the same enthusiasm as I have to the development of something truly great. And by “something”, I’m referring to developing something for the Mac and/or iPhone.

Let’s start making lists. Here’s what I would bring to a partnership:

* A bunch of (cheap) ideas
* Junior-to-intermediate coding experience for Mac and iPhone (I have one app in the App Store)
* A great deal of web programming experience (PHP/MySQL, Ruby on Rails)
* Design experience, including award-winning logo design
* User interface design accreditation
* A persnickety eye for detail
* Great knowledge of the indie Mac developer community

And what would you bring? I don’t want to be absolutist about this, but here are some things I have in mind:

* Intermediate-to-advanced coding experience for Mac/iPhone
* Energy and optimism
* A love of technology
* A desire to make something great
* A nagging notion that a partner would help realize your dreams

Just as Barry’s gunslinger respondent  had to be “into” some particular bands, you should probably admire these companies:

1. Panic
2. OmniGroup
3. Rogue Amoeba

These are guys who stand for terrific, leading products, developed with care and an eye for detail. That’s what I want to do as well.

As I said at the top, this is a standing offer. I don’t expect the right person to jump out right away. I just want to put the word out. If this isn’t you, take a second to think who it might be, and please forward this along. From time to time, I’ll tweet the link to this post again, and see if anyone’s circumstances have changed.

Who knows? One day, out of the blue, this poster will be torn off the wall and placed in front of me. I’m looking forward to that day.

Want to talk? Email me: aaron AT vegh DOT ca.

Much digital ink has been spilled over the economic and social ramifications of Apple’s App Store. On the face of it, the App Store is a revolutionary platform connecting the users with its developers, doing so with an unprecedented degree of closeness. And while many developers have chafed (to put it mildly) against the fact that a capricious Apple stands part-way between these two parties, there can be no doubt that the vast majority have not suffered for it.

I am one such developer. Around this time last year, I decided that I would, once and for all, start and finish an iPhone app. My goals were modest — learn enough Objective-C and Cocoa Touch to get a useful, working app on the store. I picked an idea that was equally modest: a source code viewer to help patch a deficiency of Apple’s Mobile Safari browser.

While the initial proof-of-concept — pulling source code from a web page and displaying it in an iPhone app — proved trivial, building a useful, working app around it ended up taking many months, punctuated by several periods of self-loathing, frustration, re-reading of documentation, commiserating with fellow developers, or working on my book.

But I finally did it. As of late April 2010, Code is now available on the App Store. And insofar as I wanted to meet a particular set of goals, I would have to say that I succeeded brilliantly. I now grok iPhone programming, to an extent that I am confident that I could learn the bits of the API that I haven’t used yet. When the iPad was imminent, I had the confidence to delay my launch for a couple weeks so I could prep the iPad version, and the code for that platform was cleaner than the iPhone version.

Having done all this, there have been unexpected lessons from my experience on the App Store, and it’s these that I want to share today.

As you know, most apps on the store are set at bargain-basement prices: mostly 99 cents. The iPad lifted the trend to a small extent, but anything over $5 appears to be reserved for apps with near-desktop-like functionality. Consequently, I priced Code at $1.99. I was originally planning to go with the herd at a buck, but with my app available as a universal binary (it works both on the iPhone and iPad), I figured the extra cost was justifiable.

With over a month’s worth of sales under my belt, I realize how laughable my concern over pricing has been. There’s really only one way to adequately express how little money a developer can make, and that’s to show the numbers. I don’t know of anyone else who’s done this, but as you’ll see, I gain little from keeping it a secret. Here, for your education and amusement, are my sales for the month of May (which hasn’t ended yet, but hey, you get the idea):

Date	Sales	Revenue
2010-05-25	5	$7.00
2010-05-24	1	$1.40
2010-05-23	3	$4.20
2010-05-22	4	$5.60
2010-05-21	2	$2.80
2010-05-20	3	$4.20
2010-05-19	1	$1.40
2010-05-18	1	$1.40
2010-05-17	1	$1.40
2010-05-16	1	$1.40
2010-05-15	0	$0.00
2010-05-14	0	$0.00
2010-05-13	0	$0.00
2010-05-12	1	$1.40
2010-05-11	0	$0.00
2010-05-10	1	$1.40
2010-05-09	0	$0.00
2010-05-08	2	$2.80
2010-05-07	4	$5.60
2010-05-06	1	$1.40
2010-05-05	1	$1.40
2010-05-04	2	$2.80
2010-05-03	2	$2.80
2010-05-02	3	$4.20
2010-05-01	0	$0.00
Totals	39	$54.60

The great power and promise of the App Store is that it exposes you to the many millions of iPhone users. The allure for the users is that they get access to “The Long Tail”. Well, one thing they never talk about is how being a creator supplying the Long Tail is a thankless, poverty-inducing task.

While the media and Twitterati focus on the smash hits of the iPhone world, where indeed, you could make millions, it’s equally clear that the vast majority of developers could never make more than an hour’s wages in a month. And be told that their app is too expensive, to boot!

I want to be clear right now: I’m not bitter. Honest! I never planned to become independently wealthy off Code. But seeing these numbers makes it clear that developers need to do some hard, honest math when they consider pricing their apps.

When you price low, you need to sell more. While it’s easy to tell yourself that pricing with the average will help people buy your app, it’s harder to face the reality that most people are simply not going to see your app to make the decision anyway. After Code launched, I went through the motions, sending promo codes to every review site and blogger I could dig up. I ran the gamut of blogs, seeding any relevant forum with a mention of my app. I have Google search notifications and Twitter notifications, letting me know when anyone is wondering about viewing source code on the iPhone, so I can jump in with a helpful hint.

The fact is, there are too many others doing the same thing; consequently, my app hasn’t been reviewed, and likely won’t be. And given the numbers, yours probably won’t be reviewed either, nor mentioned by some influential blogger.

So, you’ve priced your app so you make a buck a sale. That means you need to sell at least 500 a month if you want to make it worth doing (your tolerances will be different, of course, but I’m just throwing out a number here). As you can see, I’m nowhere near 500 sales a month. We’re orders of magnitude away from that.

Moving on

Is that it? Abandoning the iPhone as the failure it so clearly is? Naw. There are certainly planned features that I may not have the time to implement for Code — as you can see, the economics make it hard to justify doing more than bug fixes at this point — but I’m not ready to say that the App Store isn’t worth it.

I’m not seeking limitless riches on the App Store, but I do want to prove that with intelligence (and the right idea) one could make a good living.

As I began by saying, much digital ink has been spilled over the App Store. One of my favourite opinions on the App Store was written a long time ago now, so long that I can’t remember who said it (hopefully you can help in the comments!). The essential point was that the economics of the App Store favour only two kinds of app: the “fart app” class of apps, that provide a very quick feature, and is quickly discarded as the useless trash it is. And the productivity app, which provides real depth, a set of features that will be useful in the long term. Only the latter apps, of course, can justify a higher price.

Code certainly belongs more to the latter category than the former. But when moving on to the next project, I have two goals in mind:

• Quality and utility first
• Priced to reflect the cost to make it

There is no step three!  I’ll be talking more about this project soon. Stay tuned.

 

When I mention to most people that I’m a big fan of Twitter, the reaction I usually get is along the lines of “what is it good for?”. And I think anyone who uses Twitter knows that the answer is “it depends”.

To me, Twitter is where I go to listen to people who matter to me. As my friend @publicfarley repeated just yesterday:

(And yes, I deleted my Facebook account a couple weeks ago. What does that tell you?)

But my use of Twitter is different from others’ use. To illustrate the differences, let me show you the profiles of three users:

The important bits here are the Follower and Following counts. As you can see, these are three very different Twitter users, and they will clearly use and think about Twitter differently.

As your average nobody on the Internets, I have a fairly even ratio of Followers and people that I follow. Then you could step up to the level of @danielpunkass, Daniel Jalkut. He’s a software developer who’s made a name for himself out there, and has a follower count that’s nothing to sneeze at. And then you have folks like @om, Om Malik, who are real big names, cracking a million followers.

I bring these examples up because there’s a fundamental change in the way you should use Twitter if you have anything over a certain number of followers. You go from someone who interacts with your co-Twitterers, to someone who’s broadcasting. I’m not sure exactly where that line is, but I think it’s safe to say that @om has crossed it.

For these broadcasters, I imagine Twitter must be a very challenging medium. Every tweet must bring hundreds of @replies. Every minute, people are probably mentioning your name, and these are pouring into you timeline. It would probably be enough to make me hire someone to take care of it!

But that wasn’t the case yesterday.

MarsEdit 3.0 is Daniel Jalkut’s software for writing for, and interacting with, blog systems on the Internet. (Full disclosure: I’m writing this blog post in MarsEdit 3 right now). He just came out with the new version last week, and most people seem to be happy with it. So I’m not going to spend my time here defending MarsEdit, or Dan Jalkut.

Twitter is full of profound remarks like this one. Most of the time I am more than happy to shrug, think “well, that’s your opinion…” and move on. But not this time.

Remember @om’s follower count? 1.2 million. One million, two hundred and fifty-four thousand, three hundred and forty-nine. It may just look like a big number, but trust me friends, that is a big fucking number. So big that I need to use the “f” word to describe it.

So that tweet went from an off-hand comment to a pronouncement to over a million people. And suddenly there are a million people who have now heard of MarsEdit (that’s good), but who simultaneously have been told it’s “a piece of crap” (that’s bad).

Let’s put this in perspective. Daniel Jalkut is a good guy. I’ve met him in person; hell, I had the pleasure of having dinner with him at Chicago Midway airport while a group of nerds awaited their planes after last September’s C4 conference. So while I hold him in pretty high esteem, the fact remains that he’s just a small business owner. He’s no millionaire (far as I know), and he’s not breaking the world like Om Malik is. To my mind, I can’t imagine a more clear-cut case of an asymmetrical relationship. And what does the giant do? He stomps all over the little guy.

Someone like Om Malik should understand the power he wields. As a human, he is going to throw out off-hand comments. But when that off-hand comment completely slams something without further explanation, then you’ve done a disservice, both to the target of your criticism (such as it is), and the followers who are listening.

So Mr Malik, you owe it to your followers to not just say something sucks, even if you do believe it, and even if you’re right. Your duty to your followers is to say some words about why you feel that way.

And to remember most of all, that there are real people attached to those products.