Archive for the 'Apple' Category

Top 10 Freeware Apps for OS X (Leopard)

Published on March 15, 2009 in Apple and Tech. 1 Comment Tags: , , .

Another Top 10 freeware apps list? Gasp! Why should you download all of the apps on my list? Because my list is the best and that’s how I roll. These apps are in most-useful/descending order. They’re ranked on the entirely subjective (and somewhat arbitrary) amdev scale (max of 5). Just the fact that these apps are on this list warrants high ratings.

1. Adium – Yes. I went there, iChat fans. Unified contact list (without hacks)? Check. Merge contacts into a single cell? Check. Skinable? Check. Cute little duck mascot? Double check. Adium makes chat a breeze and it doesn’t crash. It supports all the popular stuff plus facebook, which you may or may not want to use. Adium gets 5 amdevs.

2. QuickSilver – This is a super useful launcher. I use it tens of times per day and it saves tons of time finding/opening apps. You can do tons of advanced things like select files, hit a couple of keys, and attach them to an email to a given contact in about 3 seconds. Love it. 4.9 amdevs.

3. Cyberduck – Cyberduck freaking rocks. It’s the BEST freeware FTP/SFTP/WebDav/S3 client on the market. It gives my personal fav (Panic Software’s Transmit) a good run for its money. I used Cyberduck for a long time before switching and I could have kept on using it without problems, but I <3 Transmit. 4.8 amdevs.

4. Fluid – Fluid is this neat app that lets you turn webapps into stand-alone apps. Why’s this useful? Ever had Safari crash while you were typing an email because of some blog w/ 8 bajillion flash banner ads? Yes? Get fuild. 4.7 amdevs.

5. VLC – Hey, I’m trying to watch this video I downloaded and I couldn’t because I was missing a codec or perhaps it was in some obscure wrapper. VLC plays damned near any kind of video on the interweb. 4.4 amdevs because the video can look washed out before you adjust it, relative to something on that “other” platform.

6. uTorrent – Finally, the best torrent client for Windows is now on the Mac. 4.3 amdevs because it’s not 100% as good as its Windows counterpart yet.

7. Skitch – Skitch is a cool way to take screenshots. It’s a unicorn that makes command + shift + 4 look like a pony. 4.0 amdevs.

8. Jing – Jing lets one make screencasts for free (there’s a paid option too if you need more flexibility). 3.9 amdevs because the free version doesn’t let one do anything but a proprietary swf.

9. Flip4Mac – Flip4Mac for all of the people who need to play back Windows media without booting up a VM or using bootcamp. It’s been around a while and the free version is playback only — good enough for me. 3.8 amdevs.

10. Burn – Let’s face it, most of us don’t burn many discs anymore. There are better ways of moving data (the internet and external/non-optical storage), but every so often, one needs to burn some MP3s or some other odd and end. Burn is the lightest and simplest burning software I’ve found for Leopard and simply put, it rocks. Grab this. 3.6 amdevs.

There you have it. Ten free, rock-star apps. What are your favorites?

Apple Mail App Will Not Remember Passwords

Published on December 24, 2008 in Apple. 2 Comments Tags: , , , , .

Ugh. What a royal pain. My pal Alan suggested I open Keychain Access and select “Keychain First Aid” to repair my keychain. It worked. I reopened Mail.app and saved my passwords one last time and this time, they stuck.

AppStore: Where It’s At

Published on November 19, 2008 in Apple, castcatcher and marketing. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

This post is a follow up to Marketing an iPhone App. Apple approved CastCatcher 1.3. Good stuff for just about everyone involved. r7 gets to sell the latest version of its software, iPhone users get some indication that Apple isn’t just out there to knock off every bit of software that grabs a few KBs off the cell network, and Apple gets to keep making money off CastCatcher. Win. Win. Win.

CastCatcher is selling reasonably well, but it’s no Trism. The press did boost sales for a short period of time, which makes it worth while to invest more time into the application (and I’ve done so — significant time over the past two evenings). Funny: every so often someone wants a refund but doesn’t understand that we haven’t been paid for the sale yet, if we had been paid we’d only get 70% of the total, and even if we wanted to we’d have no way to verify who actually bought from us and who didn’t. It can be amusing :) . It’s rewarding when people do like one’s apps, though. It’s also rewarding to spend a bunch of time on some issue and finally figure it out. It’s kind of like saying “boo-yah” in the 90s after winning a game of HORSE only with more programming and less basketball. I’m better at the former.

No, I didn’t get rich off the App Store. I never thought I would. If you’re wondering how to get rich using the App Store you should stop as you’re already looking at it from the wrong perspective (unless you intend to dedicate your full attention to it). That expectation is just plain dumb. You need not only a solid idea (easy), but solid implementation and solid marketing to make Trism-like bucks. The App Store is saturated with thousands and thousands of applications and Apple’s the little games people could play to bump their sales. Those games included putting spaces at the beginning of an application’s name so it would float to the top, releasing “updates” to jump to the beginning of a category, etc.

We’ve decided to go the low time-investment, crank out as many apps as we can route for a few months. I’ll let you know how it pans out.

Marketing an iPhone App

Published on November 10, 2008 in Apple and iPhone. 3 Comments Tags: , , .

This post will have at least one follow-up, depending on the result of the “CastCatcher debacle.” Also, it’s probably a bit of a rant so skip to the next to last paragraph if you don’t want to hear about Apple behaving like the Microsoft of the late 90s.

Mobile apps are a strange beast. Users don’t want to pay much (<$5 in most cases), but they want a desktop application’s worth of functionality. Maybe the rationale is along the lines of paying less for something “physically” smaller (i.e. a mobile app fits in your pocket since it’s on your phone unlike the desktop version of Quicken). Until Apple’s iPhone and App Store, your best bet was to buy directly from the developer, through Handango or similar. This sucked. It was a major pain, support was shoddy at best, and you had no idea what you were getting into.

Today, Apple’s App Store eases the distribution pain for developers and gives users trust that the apps they purchase are worth it (screenshots, reviews, etc. all help). It doesn’t solve the support problem, but at least it makes it easy for a user to buy my apps. Cool.

There are some issues with the App Store, though. Some have been addressed, like the review system being open to anyone. You can now only review an application if you’ve purchased it. Other issues, like lengthy delays for Apple’s “approval” haven’t. This delay, though, is manageable. I can deal with waiting a week so Apple makes sure my application isn’t going to take over the world. No problem.

The first major pain of marketing an iPhone app is Apple’s closed policies. Apple prevents developers from releasing competing software on their platform. It’s all very reminiscant of the troubles Microsoft had with IE being bundled with Windows and the United States DOJ. I’m not entirely clear on how Apple gets away with it when Microsoft was unable to. Maybe it’s Steve’s good looks. It’s Apple’s platform, after all, so I won’t fault them even though I disagree. What is a problem, however, is the inconsistency of Apple’s app reviews. One of return7’s applications was just rejected for “using too much bandwidth.” We were asked to neuter the application by turning it into a WIFI-only streaming application. Two things come to mind: that’s total bullshit and I wonder if Apple is going to add streaming functionality to iTunes in iPhone in 2.2 or 2.3. There are at least seven other streaming applications I can think of, off hand, that aren’t subject to this limitation on the App Store. Also, three prior versions of CastCatcher have already been approved. The streaming code is shared among all versions, save for minor bug fixes and feature additions (like Icecast support). The latest version of CastCatcher does not use more bandwidth than many other version and most likely uses LESS bandwidth than most other streaming applications since it does not load its list of stations from an outside source. Bandwidth consumption is strictly based on the streams a user wants to listen to. CastCatcher’s rejection seems like some sort of mistake. Apple has generally been helpful in the past so this was pretty shocking to me.

The second pain is the actual marketing part. Assuming you can get your application on the App Store, you have to make sure it’s an immediate hit or it’s unlikely you’ll make enough money to make it worth your while. You need a well-designed (and built!) application with a leg up on competitors. Originality helps too. Advertising on the App Store probaby pays off in a big way, but I’ve not looked at the costs or tried it so I can’t help there. An alternative is AdMob but I’ve only heard that it’s expensive and I know from experience that the company is not generally responsive (where’s the $250 credit you promised me 2 months ago?) so the return may not be worth it unless you have an application with very high sales. If you fail to make the top 100 list, or at least have a popular application, you’ll be doomed to the 5-15 sales per day grave yard. Bad times.

So what happens now? I suppose it depends on whether or not Apple lets us release the latest version of CastCatcher (we’d really like to get this update in the hands of our users).

More to come.

Hi, I’m Apple and I like to..

Published on June 11, 2008 in Apple and iPhone. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

ban people from using my iPhone SDK to do useful things, presumably so I can do those useful things with less features and sell them for more than the 3rd party would with more features.

Edit: Oh and heaven forbid people have applications that actually run in the background.  That would be the “wrong solution” so instead we’ll wait until september for them to give us a server to push “events” to the phones instead of letting us have the functionality immediately.  Everyone should just forget that practically every other mobile platform out there aside from the ever-crappy PalmOS allows background processes in some form or another without killing battery life.

Edit 2: So it looks like it was a sham (copied from the google maps terms), but the first edit still stands.