[NSBlog date:@"8 August 2007"].comments = 0;

A topic I feel strongly about is trial-ware limitation. The most used solution these day is time limitation, and I hate it.

On the MacSB mailing list:

Hi all,

I’ve got a client who really wants me to work up an expiring trial-ware system
for one of their
 apps.

However, I have to say that I’m always really wary of such solutions. I regard
them as easily
hacked (vs., say, a build that just doesn’t contain certain features) and
bypassable; therefore,
I usually try to steer clients away from them, and don’t use them in my own
 stuff.

But, I’ve known these people a long time, and don’t want to just give them a
“gut reaction”
answer. I thought I’d ask here first to see if anyone has any real-world
experience in favor of
either solution.

For that matter, if anyone is willing to discuss how they created a good
expire-ware solution,
I’d love to hear about it.

Many thanks,

B

My reply:

I don’t like either expiring demos nor feature limitation because of the following reasons:

Expiring demos: Easily hackable (easiest to hack, infinite demos). Say a user tries out V1.0, but doesn’t like it. When V2.0 comes out, he hears good about it, but can’t try it and therefore will not buy it.

Feature-limited demos: Can’t try out the full product.

What I prefer, and what I do is Nagging.

It works surprisingly well. It’s timeless, and annoys the hell out of the future customer without impairing functionality.

There’s different kind of nagging:

-iGetter/Ambrosia-style nagging. You gotta wait for a minute or so before being able to use the software.
-Exces-style nagging. A nag comes up periodically. The user can immediately close it, but it comes up in front-most ever so often.
-The 3rd nagging style is where a window is constantly open (user can’t close it) reminding the user to register. That’s IMHO the most annoying one.

Cheers,
 Kenneth

The key to becoming a rich mac-dev

[NSBlog date:@"5 August 2007"].comments = 6;

Update: Please keep two things in mind while reading this article: 1. It’s focused on marketing. I did not mention that you obviously need a good product to market with. 2. It’s meant to be humorous. I do not own a Ferrari, Lamborghini or any other kind of sports car.

The key to becoming a good rich successful Mac shareware developer.

We all want to be rich, don’t we? This is a guide on how to become a successful (ie. rich) mac developer. This is the process I used in my own app, Exces. It worked really well for me.

What you need

To start off, you need a good decent application idea.
An important point to keep in mind is that you must focus on you target market’s needs, not yours. If you’re making an app that prints receipts, no one gives a damn that you own a shiny receipt printer, it’s gotta work with normal A4 Inkjets as well.

Also, when writing your cool new app, pay very close attention to the interface. The UI is what your users will see and work with.

The Fun

Alright, that was the boring common sense part, here comes the fun!

Here’s where you start investing. Being rich is about taking risks. Taking the risk to put money into your unfinished app. You might lose that money, but if it’s a success, it’s totally worth it. Look at Wil Shipley and imagine yourself owning that same bright red sports car.

Alright, so you’ve decided to be a true brave Gryffindor and to take the risk? Start by getting yourself a good graphic designer. *poke* *poke*. But be warned, don’t start throwing up slugs when you see the number of zeros after the price! Now’s the point of no return, when you pull out your credit card and make the first real investment. I’ve emphasized the word “credit” because it’s a good option to borrow credit if you don’t have any of your own cash to spend. In fact, that’s what I did.

You might ask yourself what you need this designer guy for. Well, most important of all, you need him for an icon. I cannot stress enough how important the icon is. It’s probably the most important thing about your app. It’s the app’s public identity.

Nearly as important as the icon is the website. This is where users will read about your app, and in the end hopefully buy your app.. Get the designer to create that too. Go for a stylish but simple site, but definitely stay clear from getting inspiration from big company’s sites. They’re multi-billionaire companies, it’s all right for them to have sites with thousands of pages. But for you, small ISV (independent software vendor), it’s not. Huge complicated sites will scare customers away.

A few simple rules for your site

Time to whip out your credit card again! You need hosting now, and a domain name. When you start you don’t need a 100% super-reliable host - yet. Go for something cheap, you can always change after a few months.

Release time

Right, everything ready for release?

What we need is some hype. Blog about that secret app of yours that’s coming out soon. Make a heavily hyped private beta (What I mean by that is making a private beta, but advertise it a lot so that people will be contesting for the few private beta-tester places. Ahem, do I need to point the finger? Disco and Flow, for instance, did this.) Set up a pre-ordering system. Another good idea is to get yourself interviewed by the Mac press.

If you succeed, you’ll have a lot of buzz and excitement around your app. And then… release your app! Add your app to MacUpdate, VersionTracker and so on. Send your press release to all major mac sites (find an already-made mail list for mac sharewares). Get your app reviewed by the press as soon as possible.
If you’re lucky, you’ll make up for the past months’ investments in the first few days.

After the first huge wave of noise and sales has calmed down, after a few weeks / months, get your app into promos such as MacZOT! or MacHeist. This will create continued interest in your app. Release updates from time to time, and post ‘em to MU / VT, they’re a big traffic income.

A big tool in helping you get traffic and attention is digg, use it.

From now on, everything will work out from itself, while you can enjoy your brand-new Lamborghini.

 —  — 

Conclusion

The key to becoming a rich mac-dev is to have good marketing for your good app. Simple, ay

Untweeting from your Mac

[NSBlog date:@"22 July 2007"].comments = 0;

Daniel Jalkut of Red-Sweater created a really useful script that adds an Undo functionality to Twitterrific.

Wouldn’t it be cool if you could undo a tweet from right in Twitterrific? You can, with my spanking new script: Undo Tweet. This script requires FastScripts by default, but can be easily modified to use “display dialog” instead of the more user-friendly FastScripts message display.

Even though I hate Twitter, I thought that lil’ script was so cool that I had to improve it even more.

Here you go: my version of the script has three little modification:

Now, if you don’t mind having many different apps running at the same time, then Daniel’s script is great. But if you, like me, like to keep everything centralized, Then my edit will probably make you even happier. :-)

Update: Oops… shame on me, I forgot the download link.

Excellent LangSwitch Review

[NSBlog date:@"16 July 2007"].comments = 1;

LangSwitch just got reviewed 5/5 by softpedia.

This is mainly a little tool that I created for myself, it turns out that people actually like and use it.

Maybe this will motivate me to improve it: add Locales support, Undo, better drag-and-drop support. Drag-and-drop on the application icon support, and lotsa other cool stuff.

Coolloquy

[NSBlog date:@"10 July 2007"].comments = 5;

Coolloquy, the last Linkinus style you’ll ever need.

If you’re like me, you probably are a heavy IRC user. One thing that lacks on OSX is a good mac-like but powerful IRC client. Not anymore. With Linkinus, there now is a mac client that is both powerful and user friendly.

So what’s the catch? The catch is that the styles it ships with are either not practical, or really really ugly. The default style uses so much space in the window that no more than 10 lines can be seen at once unless the window is as big as half a decent-sized screen. The other good-looking theme is blurred green on blurred black… Looks nice but so not readable (I know green-on-black works nice in a Terminal window, but 1. this is not Terminal.app and 2. it’s all kinda blurred and unreadable).

Colloquy has a nice user-friendly default style, and Linkinus is really powerful (staying connected with app closed, bouncer support, and all the rest). Which to choose, the user-friendliness or the power feature?

Both! I have ported Colloquy’s stylish style for Linkinus.Update: Coolloquy now supports Emoticons! (Only in smiley version, we’ve noticed that it breaks links :( … normal version is without smiley again)

Download Coolloquy
Download Coolloquy, Smiley version (breaks links, but shows smiley faces)

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