With the introduction of Push Notification Services, I envisaged a world of iPhone apps that would deliver countless valuable updates as they occurred. Of course, that’s precisely what hasn’t happened. Few of the apps available in the App Store actually make use of PNS, and those that do are of dubious value. (For example, Ambiance pushes notification of new sounds added to its library. Useful? No, not particularly.)

I also imagined we’d have Push notifications in our Twitter clients by now (Atebits, I’m looking at you!) because knowing what my fellow geeks are doing right now on the other side of the world is crucially important to me. I know you understand.

One Twitter app that’s leading the way with PNS is SimplyTweet 2.0. It’s Yet Another Twitter Client, sure, but it has an impressive feature set and its developer, Hwee-Boon Yar, sat down to answer some questions about the app, including telling me what it’s like developing for the iPhone as well as sharing his experiences of being on the receiving end of Apple’s broken application approval process.

Hwee-Boon, 31, lives in sunny Singapore where he owns and runs MotionObj, a company dedicated to iPhone software development. I wanted to know why he created Yet Another Twitter Client.

“I had used the iPhone for about a year and when the App Store was announced I thought, why not give it a try? I already had a Twitter account for some time but there weren’t any Twitter clients that met my needs -– in fact, I think there were only about three Twitter apps back then.

I already knew Smalltalk and C, and the toolset and languages for developing iPhone applications is based heavily on those language. So I thought a Twitter client would be an easy way to learn the tools and to build a business on, especially since I preferred not to work for anyone else. That was the start of the App Store Gold Rush period, and I was very naive.”

There has been an explosion in Twitter clients in the last year. Isn’t the market too saturated to bring anything meaningful to the table?

“When I started, there was only a few Twitter clients, but I could see the numbers growing. I joked that Twitter apps are the new flashlights in the App Store. But Twitter clients are one of those wonderful applications that can be treated in many different ways. Some applications do very well with a clean user interface and basic functionality, some applications strive to have tons of functionality. Occasionally one will appear that tries to do something innovative.

My aim is to keep SimplyTweet’s interface simple and usable but at the same time add and enhance features, such as conversation threading, push notifications, themes and photo searching.”

Bringing together the various APIs and having them all play nicely together must have been taxing; you presumably had to combine Twitter’s API, the iPhone SDK/Frameworks and interoperability with Apple’s PNS Servers. In the words of Marge Simpson, this sounds like a hassle coupled with a burden.

“The iPhone application itself makes use of Apple’s iPhone SDK, and there are occasional bugs in there, quirks that have to be worked around. Some of the functionality used in Apple’s built-in applications [in the iPhone OS] are not made available to developers. For example, I spent a day building the trash can animation effect similar to how the trash can button in Mail animates when you delete an email –- all because that element is not made available to developers for use in their own apps. But these problems are not uncommon to most platforms.

Interfacing with Twitter can pose problems. Sometimes they make a change that requires the code in the SimplyTweet application to be updated. Here’s where the real problem is. Twitter is kind enough to give sufficient lead time for developers to make changes, usually around five days. This works when you have full publishing control over your application. Unfortunately, with the App Store, even if you make a change and immediately submit the new update, there is no guarantee it will be approved within five days. I have waited weeks, sometimes only to have an update rejected; [I] worked out a fix, then had it rejected again. Each re-submission puts you at the back of the queue again.”

So while day-to-day iPhone software development is built on rock-solid foundations, the complaints we’ve been hearing about Apple’s approval process are valid? Is the process really broken?

“In short, it’s a mess. Approvals are unpredictable and payment is hard to track. Plus we can’t charge for upgrades, but for many software developers, upgrades are a major source of income.”

Including SimplyTweet?

“SimplyTweet has been relatively unknown for a long time, but it has actually undergone more than eight upgrades. All of those were free. But making updates can often take a lot of time and currently, there is no way a developer can make money from them. Add to this the hits-based nature of the App Store and you find developers are not so keen to do upgrades. The App Store apps are relatively cheap compared to what’s available on other mobile platforms, which is great for iPhone customers, but it doesn’t foster a healthy developer ecosystem.”

Hwee-Boon thinks that this low-cost, short-run revenue model will cause the quality of applications to drop and ultimately hurt both developers and users. It’s hard to disagree. We’ve all seen apps repackaged with “Pro” suffixes to justify charging customers afresh for what is, essentially, an upgrade to an existing app. (I invite you to add your own examples of such Apps in the comments.)

So why continue to develop for the iPhone when the outcome remains so bleak?

“Despite major issues with the App store, the iPhone is still the best mobile platform at the moment. Only at the moment.”

Going behind-the-scenes of a real iPhone app’s development, the latest installment takes a candid look at the economics of the App Store.

In my previous entry for the App Developer Diary, I was lost behind a mountain of paper-work. Since then, the rapidly growing mountain of tasks hasn’t changed too much — I’m still working on the game design document and concept artwork, but an array of new tasks have also joined the list.

The game I’m developing with Pear Computers is being created in our spare time. As such, we’re not keeping any records as to how long we’re spending on a given task. We’re working evenings and weekends, any random available hour, to push the project forward.

Although some smaller developers may work in this manner, this isn’t the way it would work at a big studio. A larger studio needs to know how much money they’re investing in an app’s development, ensuring that they’re staying on-budget and able to accurately calculate how much profit will be generated.

As we’re not keeping any official record, without running through e-mails and diary entries, we’re unable to accurately quantify the cost of development. So instead of generating a hasty approximation for the benefit of this diary’s readers, I spoke to Mills, founder of mobile content studio UsTwo, to tell me about the hidden costs of developing for iPhone.

Stepping Back

Founded in 2004, UsTwo specialize in mobile content development, their current largest client is Apple-competitor Sony Ericsson. Having grown to an impressive 43 staff, made up of designers, animators and coders, the London-based team are also opening studios in San Diego and Mälmo, Sweden.

When the App Store opened last Summer, Mills decided to experiment with developing for iPhone. “We do so much work for clients but, more importantly, we wanted to create our own apps. We’re a design-led company, the iPhone is a really exciting device and so we decided that UsTwo is the perfect space to do create apps.”

Released in February this year, UsTwo’s first project was Steppin, a tap ‘n’ drag game that tests the player’s digit dexterity. Looking back, Mills describes the project bluntly as, “how not to develop a game.” He explained that Steppin’s development cost an estimated $50,000, with it only generating around $1600 in profit.

The extraordinary development costs were really due to UsTwo’s drive to experiment and test different gameplay concepts. Mills explains, “We kept experimenting, trying to get it perfect. Rather than prototyping in Flash first, we went straight to iPhone and kept changing it as we went. Nowadays we’d never develop like that.”

Mouthing Off About Costs

With the studio’s next app, MouthOff, Mills felt that UsTwo had learned from their previous mistakes. “Before we began development, we looked at the apps that were doing well, like the fart apps, and decided to make something quickly with minimal effort and cost. It’s only made around £11,000, but it probably broke even. Development cost a tiny amount, however we spent time promoting it and have rolled out updates too.”

Despite MouthOff breaking even, Mills believes the real value for UsTwo is in the contacts the studio has made and the exposure they gained in promoting the app. MouthOff was even used in a video for Tanya Morgan. In a surprisingly candid move, Mills shared the sales figures and stats for MouthOff with me. Sales for MouthOff are revealed as averaging out at around 50 per day, the vast majority of which come from the U.S. and Great Britain.

Although he knows it could have been even more popular, Mills is happy with the general response to MouthOff, “In some ways it was a massive success and in other ways it wasn’t nearly as successful as it could have been. We made lots of contacts though and we’ve been approached by new clients too.”

Looking forward though, it’s clear that UsTwo has its eye on the App Store’s future. “The next wave in the App Store has to be coming soon,” Mills explains. He believes that, as there’s an over-saturation of duplicated app concepts, it won’t be long until people run out of novelty ideas. Hinting at the future, it’s clear that Mills sees UsTwo as a part of the next wave, “We’re in talks with a fair number of clients, discussing some interesting and genuinely useful apps.”

Only a few weeks in to developing an app for iPhone, it’s clear to me that this could be a potentially costly undertaking. Mills, with his straight-talking and utterly candid approach to development costs, gave me a serious reality-check. As a team, we need to take on UsTwo’s approach — building gorgeous, fun apps while keeping one eye on the books.

Next time: I wrestle with Apple’s Developer Center and try to test out the first playable prototype of our game concept.

I love reading interviews with developers, finding out some of the behind-the-scenes information on the makings of their products — even more so when they’re my favorite products, the ones I use every day. Being able to put a personal face behind an end-user application puts a human story on the technology that I find fascinating. So, in the first of hopefully many such interviews, I caught up with Steve Gehrman, founder of CocoaTech, maker of the esteemed Path Finder application — a supercharged alternative to Apple’s own Finder.

TheAppleBlog: Path Finder is the answer for Mac power users, people who want to customize their file-browsing experience and do things that Apple’s Finder doesn’t let you. What was that one feature missing from Finder that initially made you make Path Finder? When was this, and what OS version was it for?

Steve Gehrman: I initially started writing Path Finder as a project to learn Cocoa. I had just been laid off from a dot-com in Los Angeles, and no one was hiring at that time. It was late 2000, when lots of companies were laying off people and the dot-com boom was crashing. I knew I had to get another job, but I didn’t want to get another job doing traditional PowerPlant/C++ Mac development. I wanted to learn the newest OS X Cocoa APIs and get a job doing that. Since OS X was just about to come out, I figured most of the jobs would be porting existing Mac apps over to OS X using Carbon. I didn’t want to do that. I wanted to write a new app that was 100% Cocoa. I remember waking up one Saturday morning and going out and buying a new G3 tower and a copy of Rhapsody Server. I came back, set it up, and started going though the Cocoa tutorials and learning Project Builder (the previous name of XCode). There wasn’t really a missing feature in the Finder that led me to write Path Finder. I just thought it would be a good project to learn Cocoa. Path Finder started off very simply. The initial versions were just a list view that displayed the hard drive contents. I figured that the Finder would remain simple to not confuse novice users, so I figured there was a niche for a more feature-rich file browser. Path Finder 1.0 shipped on 10.0.0 right when it was publicly released.

TAB: At that time, when Path Finder 1.0 was released, what was its main feature that Apple’s Finder didn’t have?

SG: I think the main feature of 1.0 was the Path Navigator — that bar on top that shows the path. I can’t remember what else was different about it, but that was the main feature if I remember correctly.

TAB: At what point did you then think, “Hey I could sell this?”

SG: After a few months of sending out resumes and not getting any offers, I just kept working on Path Finder, and it eventually became good enough to sell. The first version was pretty minimal, but I was lucky that at the beginning of OS X, there wasn’t much competition and people were willing to buy almost anything that was built exclusively for the new OS X. Kind of like the iPhone was at the beginning. Sales were slow at first, but they slowly increased to the point that it was paying the bills. Luckily, I had some savings to burn through for a few months to get things going.

TAB: According to cocoatech.com/about, CocoaTech comprises just yourself. Do you work on Path Finder full time, or is it an after-hours project that you work on between a normal day job?

SG: It’s been my full-time job since the beginning. I work on it every day, and for a while, I was working seven days a week til late at night. I worked at home originally, so I would wake up, work, go to bed, and repeat the next day for the first year or so. It was fun since I was learning a new OS and a new API. I’ve mellowed out a bit recently, but still put in way too many hours. I do have two support guys to handle email support and moderate the forums.

TAB: What does Apple think of Path Finder? It seems to go against Apple’s principle of “there’s one simple way to do something and we will make you do it that way.” How often do you have to deal with them?

SG: I haven’t heard anything from Apple. I have no idea what they think. I know people at Apple have purchased it and are using it, but no one has contacted me. The only time I deal with Apple is to report bugs in the OS that are causing problems.

TAB: How do you find Apple’s bug reporting system? Is it as effective and efficient as their end user products?

SG: It’s nothing special. It’s just a web form. It’s actually not that great as it’s not as easy as just sending an email. You can’t easily just paste in a screenshot for example. It’s also kind of slow and requires you to upload a system profiler report, and you have to fill in the OS X build number. I wish it was a client app that would just find that info on it’s own.

TAB: Path Finder utilizes some private APIs (such as Quick Look and Cover Flow), resulting in a much richer user experience. How much extra work does this require? When troubleshooting issues relating to private APIs, do you report these bugs to Apple, or ask them questions?

SG: Luckily, Quick Look and Cover Flow were pretty easy to figure out, and they worked well without having to hack around bugs or crashes. I try to avoid using private APIs, but in this case it was necessary. Quick Look is now a public API in Snow Leopard. I didn’t have to ask Apple about those two features. I did find a bug or two that I reported to them, but nothing that I couldn’t hack around.

TAB: I know that one of the biggest development tasks you had when developing Path Finder 5 was having to roll your own network discovery code (for SMB, AFP shares, etc). In Tiger, the OS did this for you, but in Leopard this was removed, and it was handled directly by Apple’s Finder. Can you clarify what was going on there?

SG: The AFP shares are handled by Bonjour, and it’s pretty simple, but finding the SMB shares was pretty tough. I’ve never understood the Unix philosophy, and SMB was written by these guys. All I wanted to do was get a list of shares, but I couldn’t find any documentation, and it took me weeks to finally get an answer from someone I had found online. I asked the same questions on IRC and email lists, and no one knew how to do something so basic. I even asked Apple’s Developer tech support and couldn’t get a working solution. Luckily, I found someone who told me the steps necessary to get it working. It involves calling these Unix tools and parsing the output and recalling the tools with other parameters. It’s a real mess to get it working properly.

TAB: Without violating your NDA, I’d like to quickly visit Snow Leopard. How ready is Path Finder for Snow Leopard? Are there any surprise changes such as the Tiger/Leopard network discovery? Will any of the new frameworks (such a Grand Central) have an impact on Path Finder performance?

SG: Path Finder is already compiling and running under 10.6, and I didn’t have to change much. As far as I know, there’s nothing new with network discovery, but I haven’t looked at it that closely. I haven’t had time to look into Grand Central or other new APIs yet. I’ve been too busy getting everything perfect on Leopard. Once Snow Leopard is released, I’ll be releasing a 10.6 only version that takes advantage of all the new APIs and I’ll investigate Grand Central and other new stuff.

TAB: You’ve been busy since the release of Path Finder 5, stabilizing issues reported and fixing bugs. Can you give us any hints on what else is being planned for the future, feature-wise? There are so many options that have been added; I couldn’t rattle any missing features off the top of my head. Is the wish list from users getting smaller?

SG: There are a few things on my list. One is a combined progress window and the ability to queue up copies and moves. Another is improving the desktop and icon view code to allow spacing adjustments. I’m also trying to think of new UIs I can create using Core Animation. The application launcher in Path Finder is my first Core Animated feature, but I want to think up new features. For example, I could do something like the Dock’s Stacks feature in Path Finder. The application launchers code was written to be reusable, so I basically have the code ready; I just need to figure out the best way of reusing it.

TAB: What about other products? Are there any other applications besides Path Finder simmering at CocoaTech that you can tell us about?

SG: Right now, there’s nothing else. I like working on Path Finder, and there’s still lots to do to make it even better.

TAB: You have an iPhone 3G; have you looked into iPhone development at all? Any plans for an app that integrates with Path Finder in some way?

SG: I did start a Path Finder for iPhone project and got it 90% done, but I haven’t released it. There were a few other apps that let you pass files to your iPhone and back, so I figured it would be hard to compete with those. Also, when the iPhone app store was opened I was 95% done with Path Finder 5 and had put down the iPhone project to get that finished first. I mainly started the iPhone project to learn how to develop on the iPhone. I’m very glad it’s similar to desktop development using Objective C. It’s my favorite language.

TAB: Apple has revolutionized mobile application development with the App Store. I read suggestions here and there on the blogosphere that Apple should create a Mac App Store, utilizing the same model. Do you think this a good idea? If there was, would PathFinder have trouble getting accepted? Besides its use of private APIs, it “Duplicates Existing Functionality of OS X.” Does Apple have too much control?

SG: I’ve been thinking the same thing. I don’t know why Apple doesn’t have an app store for the desktop Macs. I think it would be a great idea. I’m not sure if Apple would have a problem with Path Finder or not. Since I’ve been selling it for eight years already, I wouldn’t think they would reject it. I don’t think Apple minds if developers use private APIs in some cases. Sometimes an API works fine, but they don’t have time to finalize it and write the documentation so it’s kept private.

TAB: You claim you’ve never used Windows, apart from a few mouse clicks at a friend’s place. Is that true? How have you been able to avoid this your whole life? What about DOS?

SG: Yeah, I never used Windows and never used DOS. I used an Apple 2 in high school and at college used a Unix mainframe or a Mac to write software for class assignments. My first job out of college was at Alsoft which is a longtime Mac developer. I didn’t avoid Windows on purpose, but I just never needed to use it.

TAB: Your first Mac was a Macintosh IIcx; was this your first computer experience? What other platforms have you come across (such as Amiga, Acorn, Commodore 64) and used regularly?

SG: I used an Apple 2 briefly in high school just doing BASIC. After high school I did a little programming on Unix mainframes and then on Macs. I never used Amiga or anything else.

TAB: What was your path as a software developer? What was the first application you wrote? Did you do it just for fun? What language was it in?

SG: During high school I wrote some really simple BASIC applications. Nothing worth mentioning, and I had just enough knowledge to output text and simple graphics. My first real Mac app was for my senior year project at college. It was a data compression application, and I implemented a few compression algorithms. Stuffit was big back then, so I thought it would be cool to write a data compression engine. I think it was on Mac OS System 6. It didn’t work that great, but it was fun and educational.

After college I got a job at Alsoft. I went to college in Texas and Alsoft was one of the only Mac software developers in Texas, so I got pretty lucky landing that job. I didn’t know much about programming the Mac at that time, but learned a bunch between answering support questions over the phone. This was in 1991.

TAB: You said earlier Objective C is your favorite language. What about it distinguishes it from C++, Java and other OOP languages to you? Is it the language itself, or is it the design of the Cocoa framework that’s more important?

SG: The most important thing is that it’s simple and minimal. There’s not any weird obscure language features like C++ and no weird syntax. One thing I don’t like about C++ is they allow code in the .h file. It just seems unnecessary and just creates another place to look when trying to figure out the code. Another great thing about Obj-C is most programmers have a similar coding style. If I download Obj-C source online most of the time it’s written well or at least it’s easy to read and fix. That’s not true with C or C++, at least the stuff I’ve seen. There are also some Cocoa design patterns which are nice, like delegates and the new properties feature makes it much easier. Obj-C also doesn’t have multiple inheritance like C++ which is basically just one less feature that makes the code complex. Minimizing complexity is the key to software development, and Obj-C is less complex but has everything you need.

TAB: No interview is truly complete without some word association. What are the first thoughts that comes to your mind when you see the following words. Firstly, Steve Jobs.

SG: I have this negative reaction to celebrity and people worship. I don’t like to follow leaders or to put people above others. I don’t like hearing about the gossip and rumors. People should focus on their own lives rather than focusing on other people. None of that is Steve’s fault obviously, but any type of celebrity bothers me. I don’t know Steve and don’t follow all the stuff people say about him.

TAB: Windows 7

SG: I hope it’s good. It’s always good to have a competitor to Apple. The last thing I want is for Apple to become a monopoly and dominate the way MS does. Apple needs to lower their prices for one. Wouldn’t it be great if the OS was free like the old days of System 6? As a developer, it would be so much easier if all my users were on the most recent version of the OS.

TAB: AT&T

SG: I’ve always hated phone companies with their impossible to understand bills and hidden extra charges. I’m hoping that someday WiMAX or some new wireless technology comes out and makes these guys obsolete. It’s stupid that, for example, I can’t use my iPhone when I travel to Japan. I don’t want my devices tied to a USA-only network with crazy roaming charges, etc.

TAB: Thanks for talking with us, Steve, I look forward to see where you take Path Finder in the coming years.

Steve’s personal blog can be found at freshcocoa.com.

No, I’m not kidding. This actually happened. I had a 30-second “interview” with Jonathan Ive.

On the way out of the Moscone Center this morning, as streams of people are leaving to get some fresh air and digest all of the announcements from the WWDC 2009 keynote address, I see a familiar face walking towards me. It’s Jonathan Ive. I can’t believe it. This guy is design royalty.

But I’m from Los Angeles: We’re not afraid to approach the rich and famous in my city. Heck, I produce theater with lots of famous actors and comedians, so I often have to work with known personalities. This was a rare opportunity and certainly not a time for sudden shyness, so I approached the master designer and introduced myself.

The following is an exact transcript of what transpired.

Me: Jonathan…?
Jonathan: [Turns, sees I'm no one he knows] Yes…?
Me: David Koff. Nice to meet you.
Jonathan: Thank you.
Me: May I snap a photo with you?

[Beat. He pauses, looks around, unsure of what to say, clearly uncomfortable.]

Me: It’s not a big deal. If you’d rather not, it’s quite OK.
Jonathan: Well, there are others here who are also deserving of a photo but I can’t accommodate them as well, so…how about we just shake hands?
Me: That would be lovely. I’m a great fan of your work.
Jonathan: Thank you, that’s very kind.
Me: You’re welcome. Keep up the good work.
Jonathan: [Looking at me like I'm insane] I’ll do that. Thank you.

[He walks off. I wait a moment. I follow, calling after him, running and waving my arms wildly as if in a Seth Rogan romantic comedy...]

Me: Godspeed, Jonathan! I love you! Have my babies…!

OK, well maybe that’s not how I ended the conversation, but everything before that was accurate. Ive is a notoriously private and quiet individual, which is why I was surprised to even see him out and about with the crowd — and which is why I was surprised he even stopped to turn and speak with me.

But that’s your dutiful David Koff, folks. Always willing to find the hard-to-get interviews…even when the interviewee doesn’t know he was scheduled to meet me in the first place.

For this installment of the App Store Roundtable, we talked to developers about analytics. On the web we’re spoiled when it comes to analytics. Simple plug-ins allow us to track where visitors come from, and what they look at. We can also use this information to track purchases and referrals over many months. It’s a different story in the App Store, and many developers feel that the lack of quality analytics is hindering their marketing efforts.

Why don’t I know ANYTHING about the people that are looking at my store front. The biggest one is how many people that click on my app, actually buy it. I would love to compare the performance of different screenshots, especially the first one, and see what kind of conversion rate I’m getting. What about how many people are clicking through to my site, and how many of those go back and buy? Or what percent of my customers are reading more reviews than those on the front page?

– Evan McMahon of Veiled Games, developer of Up There

Absolutely! Not knowing where sales are coming from hurts us in two different ways:

1. Hard to tune our marketing strategies. What’s working and what’s not working? How much is it coming from a lite version vs. ads vs. reviews? Impossible to tell.

2. Impossible to set up sales-based partnerships. I actually talked to some flower companies about doing something together for Flower Garden. The idea being they can advertise Flower Garden in their web site or emails and they get a percentage of those sales. But we have no way of tracking how many sales came from there!

– Noel Llopis of Snappy Touch, developer of Flower Garden

We’ve had some success using the LinkShare affiliate program to track an app cross-promotion experiment that I ran with my friend – it was a little “ad” in Scramboni for another app that helps you learn SAT-grade words. We were able to get something like a 12% click-to-purchase ratio. LinkShare allows you to track marketing efforts from clickthroughs to purchasing, and gives you a commission on every copy sold.

– Peter Bakhyryev of Byteclub, developer of Scramboni

I go to great lengths to try to track the efficacy of my marketing efforts. I can track data right up to the point where a user enters the app store, but at that point it’s a black box. How many users who visit my app page buy the app? How many users search for a lite version after visiting the full version page? How many users who downloaded the Lite version bought the paid version? How many users found my app’s page because of a search? All of this data would make me feel more confident in spending more money on advertising and marketing. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate how much information we get right now, but I’d love to have a lot more.

– Owen Goss of Streaming Colour Studios, developer of Dapple

Apple does a great job of taking care of things once an app arrives in the store itself, but they expect the developer to take care of the marketing aspect after that. It sounds like a reasonable proposition, but the reality is that there isn’t enough information available to developers to effectively do that for reasonable costs (particularly for the price tier 4 and lower apps). It’s essentially impossible to tell what marketing efforts have an effect on sales and which do not.

– Adam Byram, developer of Budgee

Join us next time?

If you’re an iPhone developer with App Store experience and would like to participate by sharing some opinions in future App Store Roundtables, please get in touch via our contact form.

In this installment of the App Store Roundtable, I talked to a few developers about issues with supporting their apps after a sale has been made. Many developers are concerned at the difficulty of providing any form of after sales support to customers. Minor problems with an app often lead to a bad review and a dissatisfied customer, when a better support system could have quickly resolved the issue.

The App Store is a wonderful platform, but I would love to have better customer service tools. The App Store asks the shopper to place their trust in the developer with Apple serving as an intermediary. Apple’s reputation goes a long way in building trust, but by providing better customer service tools Apple would turn their developers into a dedicated customer service team. By adding features like an app FAQ section, the ability to send a refund, and a standard “contact” button, Apple could strengthen customer relationships.

– Carrie Segal, developer of Colorific

I see real difficulty in supporting end-users. Apple’s sole concession is a “support” link in the App Store, which most people seem to ignore, preferring to add a review. Of course, we can’t respond to those reviews. We see a number of problems: Users typically see iPhone OS updates at the same time as developers, and there’s that delay in pushing out fixes; the difficulty of remotely diagnosing problems; the obstacles in getting access to logs and databases…The list goes on. Apple is certainly moving in the right direction with the recent availability of crash reports and version numbers on reviews, but things are possibly improving too slowly to help developers building more complex applications. As it stands, the App Store is still geared towards “disposable,” low-cost apps. People aren’t going to pay more for complex apps until developers can adequately support them.

– Stephen Darlington, developer of Yummy

Other developers reported some success by building their own support links and mechanisms into their Apps.

In Flower Garden, I did go out of my way to make sure users can contact me and give me feedback. There’s even a button in the app itself for people to give feedback.

– Noel Llopis of Snappy Touch, developer of Flower Garden

As Darlington mentioned, Apple has just recently started providing developers with access to crash reports via iTunes Connect. Trent Shumay, of Finger Food Studios, is one of many developers welcoming the new addition:

As soon as I heard of the crash reporting, a sense of warmth and happiness entered my soul after years of battling it out on platforms where it simply wasn’t an option. For the average independent iPhone developer, access to crash reports is a major equalizer in the delicate balance between limited resources for Beta Testing and product quality.

Our apps will receive thousands (or hopefully hundreds of thousands) of executions by a group of users not conditioned to its quirks and intended usage. No QA process can possibly reproduce this, so it’s incredibly valuable to have a safety net in case something goes wrong.

Apple’s crash reports deliver key information directly back to the developer, and have the potential to reduce the timeframe for correcting crash bugs by an order of magnitude. This is only a good thing, and a very welcome tool in the development process.

Join us next time?

If you are an iPhone developer with experience of the App Store and would like to participate by sharing some opinions in future App Store Roundtables, please get in touch via our contact form.

For our next installment of the App Store Roundtable, we talked with developers about an issue that comes up time and again: the application approval system and the overall transparency of the inner workings of the App Store. When developers submit their products to Apple, we have to cross our fingers and hope they’ll be allowed into the App Store, as there’s very little consistency or feedback.

My biggest gripe about selling in the App Store is Apple’s lack of status updates during the review process. Even a “we received your app and are reviewing it” would be a big help.

– Doug Davies, developer of JiggleBalls

I guess the single most burning issue with the App Store is the intransparent review process. One submits an app, then after an indeterminate time it is approved or not; there are no clean cut rules; there is no public timeline; there is no ETA; there is no feedback (even a page in the dev center with “Status: Waiting for review,” “reviewing” or something equally vague would help).

– Martin J. Laubach, developer of Moonlight

The whole process needs a lot more transparency because developers are the lifeblood of the appstore and they need to plan their future development and marketing initiatives based on some general time line. If Apple subjectively rejects an app for “being too simple” when there are literally hundreds of simpler apps already in the store, they are hurting the development process. There currently aren’t any guidelines for what is “too simple.”

– Dan of Rareapps

I also feel that apple is not giving the approval process enough attention, we should not have to put up with scandals such as the port of the famous Nintendo Duck Hunt (exact graphics ) in there. Apple should develop a quality assurance process within its approval process so completely ridiculous games wont get through.

– Brynjar Gigja of On The Rocks, developer of Tiltafun

The biggest issue for us is the lack of information on how the App Store really works. So much of what we do hinges on how the store operates- how and when applications are approved, which apps are featured, exactly how the top 100 list is computed, and how release dates work. Knowing how these details work is key, but in depth information has never been provided.

– Andy Korth of Howling Moon Software, developer of Crayon Ball

Featured Slots

If you gather two or more iPhone developers together at any time the conversation will inevitably touch on the featured lists. These are the suggested apps you see in the various App Store lists (What’s New, What’s Hot etc.), and most apps that are lucky enough to get one of these slots find themselves with many thousands of dollars worth of extra sales. This is another area where developers would welcome more transparency.

I’d really like Apple to be clear how they choose to feature apps. Is there anything that can be done to help, or anything which definitely blocks you from being featured?

– Tim Haines, developer of BurnBall

I would like to know more about how Apple chooses it’s featured products, I would like Apple to give us developers more heads up to changes in the market place, what they have in mind for the future so we can adjust.

– Brynjar Gigja

There’s this feeling that the app review and featuring department is completely isolated from the world. There seems to be nothing, or very little you can do as an independent to get their attention.

– Mike Kasprzak

It would be nice if you could pitch your app to Apple (or even a monetary model) so that you could be displayed at the top level (other than by release date) for a few days. As an “indie” it’s frustrating trying to get exposure.

– Doug Davies

Join us next time?

If you are an iPhone developer with experience of the App Store and would like to participate by sharing some opinions in future App Store Roundtables, please get in touch via our contact form.

For our next installment of the App Store Roundtable, we asked developers what they liked and/or disliked about the iTunes review system. It should be noted that the review system for the App Store has seen a few updates since these comments were made, but concerns voiced by these developers are still valid.

For me there’s a few things I’ve seen in my small amount of time in the store. One being the inability to respond to negative ratings. I’ve got some that say “Doesn’t work” or “its garbage” but nobody sent a support request. Developers need a way to respond and put these “reviews” where they belong.

– Brandon Steili, developer of gCalWall

An area which needs looking at is the review system on iTunes — it would be great to have more control over this, to stop people posting 1 star reviews + a bad word. Objective reviews are great, but not silly stuff. Also — there needs to be a feedback loop for the publishers/developers to respond to individual reviews (where an update has been posted which fixes a particular issue.)

– Chris Byatte, director of Chillingo

It’s great that Apple gives people a way to provide a star rating for applications, but users should be able to do this for any application at any time; not just for the ones they’re deleting. Why? Well, this approach clearly skews the ratings low. (Users delete the applications they dislike and not the ones they like.) Apple needs to provide a way for users rate an application they like without deleting it or writing a review for it.

– Adam Talcott of Atomic Powered, developer of Napkin Genius

There’s a lack of standardization among reviews and ratings. A 5 Star Farting app isn’t actually better than a 4 star RPG that offers hours of combat, items, quests and amazing 3D graphics. Not enough people look into what a game offers. It needs to be accepted that not all games are equal, so maybe it’s time to rethink how you the consumer are rating a game.

– Bruce Morrison, producer at Freeverse

Join us next time?

If you are an iPhone developer with experience of the App Store and would like to participate by sharing some opinions in future App Store Roundtables, please get in touch via our contact form.

Welcome to the first App Store Roundtable. The iPhone and the App Store are always hot news, and for good reason. It’s a fantastic marketplace for developers, and there’s always something exciting happening somewhere for the press to report on. But sometimes the issues faced by everyday developers working on the platform get left in the dust.

The goal of this column is to give the development community a regular outlet — and to give the rest of the world a window into our lives. We’ve recruited an army of iPhone app developers willing to share their thoughts and opinions on the state of the App Store. The participants range from part-time hobbyists and one-man band independent developers, to big developers and publishers with dozens of titles under their belt. We hope you’ll enjoy hearing from them all.

To get things started, we talked about the App Store’s initial “gold rush.” Many developers brought up the fact that a few high-profile success stories have created the impression of easy money on the iPhone. This is driving more and more apps, making it increasingly hard to stand out, but relatively little is known about how to create a sustainable business in the App Store.

The word circling the media is that the iPhone is still a place where a developer of a flatulence app can earn an instant six- to seven-figure income. In development circles, though, we all know the glory days are over. You can’t just release crap and score mint anymore. In fact, it’s tough even to release something good and get noticed. The shear volume of apps available for iPhone in such a short time is unreal.

– Mike Kasprzak, developer of Smiles

We keep hearing the gold-rush stories, and the overnight success of fart or wobbling apps, or whatever the craze is that week. What I’d like to see discussed is the viability of having a sustainable business by writing games (or apps) independently and selling them through the App Store. Is that going to be possible, or are we doomed to the results of the shareware PC market? Do we need to cast our nets further (Android, web, desktop), or can developers carve a niche in the App Store and make a (good) living out of it?

– Noel Llopis of Snappy Touch, developer of Flower Garden

iTunes is to the music industry what the App Store is to iPhone software. If you’re not a Top 20 musician, you do not expect people to learn of you via iTunes, so why would we expect it to work for Apps? The issue at hand is what the proper venues are for advertising your App to your target market and the best bang for the buck for small developers and startups to enter the more traditional advertising space to get the mass market to know about their products.

– Trent Shumay of Finger Food Studios

Not to sound all “doom and gloom,” but inventory of the App Store is rapidly growing, and individual apps’ chances of exposure are diminishing. It’s getting harder and harder to climb into the “Top XX” lists. Apple doesn’t seem to be making any significant moves towards making developers’ lives any easier as far as the “marketing” aspect goes — they can only feature so many apps, after all.

– Peter Bakhyryev of Byteclub, developer of Scramboni

Join us next time?

If you are an iPhone developer with experience of the App Store and would like to participate by sharing some opinions in future App Store Roundtables, please get in touch via our contact form.

With all the big announcements from Apple’s iPhone briefing yesterday, the web has been abuzz with talk about the impact this will have on the iPhone. I managed to corner a few iPhone developers that have paid releases out in the app store now to get their first reaction to the news.

Smule

The team at Smule, the people who brought us Ocarina, Sonic Lighter, and Zephyr, were featured in the briefing with Apple yesterday. They demoed a new app that will take advantage of the peer-to-peer API’s in the iPhone 3.0 SDK.

Yeah, we offered a sneak peak of our new product, Leaf Trombone: World Stage, the first massive multi-player social music game (that’s a mouthful sir). We demonstrated a duet over their new Peer-to-peer API. In effect, this allows to devices to discover and pair, regardless of wifi/cell, etc. The discovery capability is quite neat. And the bandwidth is pretty darn good.

Ge and David performed “Phantom of the Opera” as a duet over bluetooth on two iPhones, which everyone can now enjoy by streaming the presentation. Of course, we haven’t seen all the magic that has become possible with the iPhone 3.0 SDK.

We have held back some of the more significant components of the leaf trombone for when we launch the product…

Iconfactory

Craig Hockenberry is a principal at Iconfactory, the collective of creative minds that brought us App Store favorites Twitterific and Frenzic. When asked about his reaction to today’s announcements, Craig was most impressed by the forward momentum of the iPhone platform.

“The thing that’s most positive in my mind is that today showed us how serious Apple is about this platform. They are not resting on their laurels: this release includes major enhancements for users and developers alike. “

Gedeon Maheux, another princiapl at Iconfactory, expressed his excitement and concerns about the new SDK.

We’re very excited about the potential opportunities that 3.0 represents, but there are also the possibility of pitfalls such as creating “content-free” apps that need paid upgrades to really deliver.

When asked about other changes, Craig felt that it was going to take some time to see how the App Store in-app payment mechanism would affect their current and future products. When pushed for further reaction, no single feature seemed to elicit enough excitement to bring out the CHOCKLOCK today, but expect some ALL CAPS tweets once developer.apple.com is back up and Craig can get his fleshy palms on the 3.0 SDK.

GroceryIQ

Jason Boehle is the co-founder of Free State Labs and one of the developers behind GroceryIQ. The company has since been acquired by Coupons, Inc. and development continues on the next version of the GroceryIQ app which will include syncing shopping lists between phones.

The most significant new feature announced today for Grocery iQ is push notifications. For example, you can know when your significant other adds an item to your shopping list. We are working on phone-to-phone sync right now, and push notifications will make that feature more useful.

While Jason is relieved that cut, copy and paste and MMS have finally found their way to the iPhone, like many others, he was most impressed with the bright future for the platform.

The 3.0 software is hugely important for the iPhone platform, as it shows Apple is continuing to innovate and blur the boundaries between phone and computer. iPhone developers should be very excited, as Apple is allowing more access to the hardware and software inside the device, and is providing us with much better ways to monetize our apps over time.

Marketcircle

Alykhan Jetha (better known as AJ) is the CEO of Marketcircle, the Mac business software company. They are working to bring their Daylite productivity management solution to the iPhone with the imminent release of Daylite Touch. Marketcircle is keen on the push notification service for Daylite Touch.

I also think that cut & paste and Spotlight will make the iPhone or iPod even more productive for a lot of people. We are looking forward to see how apps like ours can participate in Spotlight as well as how the whole thing works.

Still, there were some disappointments too.

I was hoping for background processes, or even periodic background processes, but no luck with that. I think that for a lot of apps, being able to run in the background every 30 minutes (or X hours) when the user is not using the device as opposed to always running would significantly reduce the battery problem. These things wouldn’t have to run for long. For example our typical sync takes less than 20 seconds.

Double Encore

Dan Burcaw, CEO of iPhone development consultancy Double Encore, was one of the early movers in the iPhone market and led the team behind the Brightkite iPhone app. Dan was also on hand for Apple’s announcements and was still riding the Apple high after he left 1 Infinite Loop and spoke with me on the way to the airport.

This definitely keeps the ball rolling. It was going to be hard for competitors to catch the iPhone and the App Store anyways, but I think Apple said, “We need to be flexible so we can keep this snowball rolling.” Everyone I talked to, my peers, other companies, are saying, “this thing just got better in a lot of ways.” Sure, Apple addressed the specific things that people wanted to change, but this is a really solid, broad release.

Since Dan was in the briefing, I was curious about the announcement that got the most attention from those present.

<laughing> You know, the Apple people kept asking that question too. I’m not sure, but as soon as the video goes up, look for this… When the ESPN app gets a push notification, the alert sound is the ESPN jingle. Da-da-da. That was cool. iPhone 3.0 gives people new ways to extend their brand. The new business models are going to allow companies to extend their brand to the iPhone in a big way too. All these changes to the SDK will bring the big boys into the game that had been sitting on the sidelines, now that they can use their branding in a bigger, richer way.

If you haven’t thought about building an iPhone app, you might want to look into it. This thing is going to be a runaway train by the time 3.0 hits.

A Runaway Train

The strong consensus among all the developers that I spoke with is that the 3.0 announcements have renewed their confidence in the iPhone platform. With 30 million devices out there (iPhone and iPod touch) and the momentum of the app store, existing developers are probably more excited about the iPhone than ever. If I could share one insight, it would be to keep an eye on what happens with the new accessory communication options. I heard several rumblings that this opens up a whole new round of innovation for the iPhone.

While no one picked any one single software feature, API, or Core service as the Next Big Thing, everyone was thrilled with the breadth and depth of the changes to the SDK. A theme developed that these developers felt like the wide range of features announced today made a strong statement about Apple’s commitment to the future of the iPhone platform. A future that, frankly, I’m pretty excited to watch unfold as well.

Admittedly, not everyone needs a Mac-based application to manage pictures taken by a microscope. If you’re a scientist, though, you probably won’t find an app that’s as useful and well-designed as Macnification. More than just an image organizer, this app lets users edit and analyze pictures from digital microscopes, attach important metadata , and even create time-lapse movies.

Apple must also think Macnification a pretty nifty app since it presented its developers Peter Schols and Dennis Lorson with a design award at Apple’s Worldwide Developer’s Conference this summer for Best Mac OS X Leopard User Experience.

As part of a series of posts that take a look at this year’s WWDC winners, I caught up with Schols to find out how to design a good user experience, and what it takes to be a good Mac citizen. Here’s what he had to say.

TAB: What gave you the idea to create Macnification? How long was the development process?

PS: My background is in biology and bioinformatics. While working in the lab to obtain my PhD, I made intensive use of electron microscopy. However, once the images were acquired from the electron microscope, I had to rely on a plethora of applications to manage them. I organized images in the Finder or in iPhoto, adjusted them with Photoshop, analyzed them with ImageJ and added scale bars with yet another application. Having to use half a dozen applications makes things very complex and error prone. In addition, most of these applications are designed for general purpose imaging: most of them are not able to deal with microscope metadata, for example. Therefore, I always dreamed of having one, easy-to-use application for this entire workflow. That’s how Macnification was born.

Development started in November 2006. Due to many new technologies in 10.5 that could benefit an image management application, we immediately opted to make Macnification Leopard-only. However, Leopard was still very much under development in the fall of 2006, so the initial development did not progress as well as we would have expected. It was only after we received the Leopard developer preview at WWDC 2007 that we could progress faster. We finally released Macnification 1.0 on May 6 2008, after 18 months of development.

TAB: How did winning the Best User Experience award benefit the Macnification project?

PS: The impact of an Apple Design Award cannot be overestimated. Needless to say, it has a positive impact on sales, which nearly doubled after the ADA announcement. Furthermore, it really makes the product stand out, especially in a niche that is not really known for excellent UI design. Most importantly though, it was a major recognition for Dennis and myself after 18 months of hard work.

TAB: Tell me a little about what goes into designing a good user experience when developing an app.

PS: We have put a lot of effort into planning this application: the first months of development were spent almost exclusively on planning the application’s mission statement, the main workflow and the application’s key features. Especially for a project this size, it’s really important to know exactly what you are going to develop, who you are going to develop for, how it will be used and what your users need.

Crafting a mission statement for the app, as John Geleynse emphasizes in his WWDC user experience presentations, is one of the best ways to make sure you do not overload the application with useless features or features that are not focused on the task at hand. Of course we had an advantage there: due to my experience with electron microscopy, it was much easier to know what users really need.

Once the mission statement has been established, we start thinking about the core user experience. What are the metaphors the user is familiar with when trying to accomplish tasks? How can we use the metaphors in the interface to make the application as easy-to-use as possible? Once the core UI is done, we start adding relevant but secondary features and we try to give them a place in the core UI in a way that makes them seem like natural extensions of the core UI.

Needless to say, this is an iterative process: sometimes you find that it’s very hard to add additional features without making the UI too bloated. That’s probably because the core UI is not well designed or because the metaphors being used are not in sync with the user’s mental model.

TAB: What was the biggest thing you learned by attending WWDC?

PS: I have been attending for the past 7 years and Dennis has attended for the past 2 years. The presentations are very interesting, not only for the technical details but also because they paint a much clearer picture of where Apple is heading than you would get from visiting apple.com or reading Mac news sites. If there is one thing you should know as a Mac developer, it’s probably where Apple is going. For example, by attending WWDC, we knew that Leopard would have extensive support for image handling through ImageKit. Being able to use this new technology long before it is being shipped in the final OS is a major advantage.

The possibility to interact with Apple engineers and user experience specialists is probably the most important reason to attend WWDC. In 2007, we had a UI-review of Macnification at WWDC. This review helped us tremendously in making some final UI decisions and in solving a couple of UI problems we kept thinking about. In addition, it’s a great way to check whether you are still on the right track UI wise.

In terms of code, we had similar experiences. We worked very closely with the ImageKit team to make the best use of this technology. It was a mutual process: the ImageKit team was glad to see their framework being used in a scientific project and by using ImageKit we could help it improve while receiving some extra tips and tricks to improve Macnification itself.

TAB: What would you tell someone who hopes to one day win a design award at WWDC?

PS: I already mentioned some key points, like the importance of crafting a mission statement, talking to users and trying to find out what they need, trying to follow their mental model and creating a simple core UI. All this is very important, but at the same time your application won’t win a design award if it’s not a good Mac OS X citizen. Your application must feel right at home on Mac OS X in terms of visual appearance, interaction and technology integration. It’s important to integrate with other applications and with the OS. For example, Macnification uses Core Animation, ImageKit, PDFKit, Quick Look, Objective-C 2.0, Time Machine, QTKit, Core Data, Spotlight and Core Image. It works well with Numbers and Mail and it has support for multiple processor cores.

Your application should do things that are new to the platform or that really help to push the envelope. With Macnification, for example, we are releasing the first scientific imaging application to offer non-destructive image editing, taking advantage of Core Image. We even use Core Image to provide scientists with the fastest EFI implementation on any platform. Additionally, we use Core Animation, not just to show some nifty animation effects, but also to make navigating huge image stacks much more intuitive. The take-away point here is that you should not just integrate technologies for the sake of integration, but make sure they offer a real advantage for your users.

Finally, you should get in touch with WWDR at Apple for a user interface review. It can massively improve your application.

TAB: Obviously Manification is tied to microscopic not camera images, but do you plan to release an iPhone App at any point that would allow users to access some of the functionality of the main app?

PS: It’s something we think about. This currently isn’t a high priority for our users, but it’s definitely something we keep in mind going forward.

TAB: Is there anything else you’d like to add?

PS: Most Mac news sites only publish a list of Apple Design Award winners. As there is so much more to winning an ADA, it has been great to be able to share our experience! We would like to thank the Apple Blog for giving us that opportunity!

When French student Axel Peju wanted to use his Mac to track his finances and manage a budget, he couldn’t find an application to meet his needs, so he created his own. He developed Squirrel, a personal finance program for the Mac (and soon, the iPhone). It’s full of features to help you save and spend your money wisely, and won a design award at Apple’s Worldwide Developer’s Conference this summer for Best Student App. 

As part of a series of posts that take a look at the where the 2008 WWDC winners are now, I caught up with Perju recently to ask him what it was like to receive the award, how he ended up at the conference, and what the future holds for the Squirrel project. Here’s what he had to say.

TAB: Tell me a little bit about yourself and how you came up with the idea to create Squirrel.

AP: I’m a student air traffic controller in France, and I’m developing Squirrel in my spare time — and I have quite a lot of time ;). Squirrel’s development started two years ago, when I started to care about my finances. I needed an accounting application for my Mac and I found that existing solutions were too complex, too expensive, or they didn’t look like real Mac applications. So, I looked at Apple’s documentation for development on the Mac and I started coding what would later become Squirrel.

I quickly decided to release the application, first for free and then for a low price. My idea was to get enough feedback from Squirrel’s users, be able to earn some money to buy a new Mac (I was coding on a 1.6 GHz Powerbook), and, if possible, to buy a ticket for the WWDC. When Leopard was released, I was very excited about its new technologies and I quickly realized I could make amazing things with Core Animation. A few months later, I submitted Squirrel to the Apple Design Awards.

TAB: How did winning Best Student Product benefit you as well as your project?

AP: It was a real achievement to see Squirrel win the Apple Design Awards, and in the same time it just opened new horizons to its development. Lots of users have sent me their reports, feedbacks, and requests, so I’ve been able to fine tune existing features and work on new ones. I’ve got tons of projects for Squirrel and other apps, and now I also have all I need to make it.

TAB: When do you expect to release 1.0?

AP: There are still some features to be implemented before Squirrel can be considered as a complete personal finance application, even if it is fully usable now. It includes MobileMe syncing, a better importer with smart import rules, an export feature, and additional localizations. I think Squirrel 1.0 should be ready by this summer.

TAB: Why do you prefer developing for the Mac over Windows or Linux?

AP: Actually I’ve never developed on any other platforms than the Mac, and that’s maybe why the Mac is such a great platform. Anyone can download Xcode and start developing. There are a tons of technologies that just make coding very easy. Squirrel relies on Core Data to manage its data and Core Animation to animate graphs and charts. Apple offers a very good set of development tools so you just need inspiration and motivation to get something working. I think the Mac delivers the best user experience for both users and developers, and that’s why we love coding on this platform.

TAB: How did you end up attending WWDC? What was the biggest thing you learned there?

AP: Apple phoned me one week before the WWDC to know if I would come [but since] I couldn’t afford the trip, they just invited me! That week was a great moment, with so many sessions I couldn’t choose which one to go to. The most exciting thing I learned about was Snow Leopard and its new set of technologies that will make our macs very powerful computers. Many developers are very excited about using multiple cores more effectively and GPUs. The iPhone is also very interesting and I’m really happy we can now develop on it as well.

TAB: Any plans for an iPhone App?

AP: Yes, and it will come very soon! I’ve been working on it since this summer and I think that will allow Squirrel to really make the difference. The idea is to have all your transactions in your pocket, add new ones on the fly when you have a minute or two, then sync with your Mac over the Wi-Fi network. It will also feature the same history graph and you’ll be able to check your budgets before making a new purchase. I will hopefully have something ready to show at the Macworld expo!

12seconds.tv is a boot-strapped startup that has been a labor of love for the three founders, Sol Lipman, Jacob Knobel, and David Beach. A host of other characters have helped along the way, influenced by promises of burritos, but the small group hasn’t taken any outside money.

The project was conceived in January, launched in July, and now has an iPhone app ready just in time for the holidays. They got some attention from a write-up on TechCrunch in July and have built a loyal and passionate community of over 10,000 users.

I had a chance to talk briefly with Sol Lipman the other day about the launch of 12seconds for the iPhone and ask about the path they took to get to this moment. It’s clear that 12seconds.tv was built with a lot of passion from both the founders, their friends and colleagues that helped out, and the growing community of users.

TAB: Why did you pick video?

Sol: Video is a great medium. There’s something about seeing someone and hearing someone… You can say something on Twitter, but one thing I’ve noticed about 12 seconds… seeing your dirty closet, seeing your kid on your lap… I feel like I know you. Video is the type of medium where you just get more human cues and that helps you get more involved in their story.

TAB: Why 12 seconds?

Sol: It’s just the right amount.

TAB: OK. So why an iPhone app?

Sol: We all have iPhones ourselves and we wanted to be able to bring 12seconds.tv to our own phones. We were capable of jailbreaking our own phones to use Qik or flixwagon, but our friends didn’t want to have to jailbreak their iPhone to get 12seconds running. We thought, “We have to do this.”

TAB: Those other apps require jailbreaking because the iPhone SDK doesn’t allow video recording, right?

Sol: Yeah. The mass market doesn’t want to jailbreak their iPhone and we wanted to appeal to a bigger audience. It just makes sense, short-form video lends itself to the iPhone. We just had to find a way to do it. We believe in the quality of the app store, we believe in Apple. And we can reach more people this way. It’s an obvious choice.

TAB: So how did you reach the idea of 3 pictures?

Sol: This was something that we thought would work. We started on the app, but we hadn’t talked to Apple about it yet. You know, It was a big risk for us to take with limited resources and devote so much time and energy to a project that might get denied by Apple. Our biggest worry was that Apple would reject it. It does output video at the end of the day. But they were great to work with. Apple Q&A’d the hell out of our app, and it was a great experience overall.

TAB: Did Apple ask you to make any changes?

Sol: Well, there was one piece that ties into 12seconds.tv that wasn’t turned on at the web site. They found that and asked to make sure that everything was working on the web site. They really looked through the whole app to make sure everything worked, but they were OK with the core idea.

TAB: So let’s change gears here and let me ask you about the company. How did 12seconds.tv come together?

Sol: We came together in January, February and then launched in late July. There’s been other people in to help, but the three key founders are Jacob [Knobel], David Beach, and myself. This is a pure passion company. I always like to say that we’re more of a co-op than a corporation. We haven’t taken any VC money to date. We all have other jobs that help pay the bills and keep the lights on.

TAB: And how have you seen your product being adopted in that time? You have people using other devices now to get video?

Sol: It’s all about this amazing community. We really have a great group of core users that are passionate about the 12seconds.tv community. They help welcome new members, answer questions. It’s really been amazing. The cool thing is that while the largest percentage [of videos] come from web cams, a surprising number come from mobile devices. We have well over 10,000 members and 100’s of videos uploaded every day. And we really want that to continue to grow. We’ve been spending more time looking at conversation and have some ideas there.

TAB: Anything surprised you in these last 5-6 months since you launched?

Sol: The community and how people have responded has been great. It surprises you what people do that you didn’t anticipate. I think we have a different type, a different category of video on our site. Here’s a good example, the Roger Smith Hotel puts their daily lunch special on 12seconds.tv. Every day they do that. We didn’t anticipate someone doing that, but it’s cool. What we think we do well, is we want people to be able to share moments.

I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Richard Haddock, President of the Haddock Corporation, an Apple reseller that has been in the Mac business seriously since there have been Macs.

I first found Haddock a couple of years ago when, in a panic over accidentally wiping out my hard drive in some kind of strange Linux experiment, I needed OS X installed and couldn’t find my install disks. Not only that, but loading Linux had rewritten the boot record of the disk and wiped out how the Mac looked at it, resetting it from GUID, which the Mac installer requires, to MBR. 

Long story short, I couldn’t load OS X back on my MacBook. So, I called around town and was pointed at Haddock. I dropped by and explained my problem, and the staff booted my MacBook into target disk mode and mounted it on another Mac, and then fixed the disk with Disk Utility. I was very, very grateful for their help, I almost thought I had ruined my Mac! Haddock earned a customer that day with their honest help and technical expertise.

TAB: The Haddock Corporation has a long history with Apple. Can you tell me a little about what impressed you the most about your first Macintosh?

Richard Haddock: When I was shown the first Macintosh 128k, I was programming on an IBM 5110, which used BASIC, and I had to constantly work on the screen layout for my programs. When I saw it I knew that this new graphical interface was the future of computing, so I immediately signed up to be an Apple Reseller. We’ve been an Apple Reseller since 1984. During the time that Dr. Amelio was the CEO I became friends with him and asked him to set up the Apple Specialist program, which would reward and help dealers who mostly sold Apple products. He asked me to help him design this program with the help of Paddy Wong and a few others. I think it’s one of the longest running dealer programs at Apple. I’m very proud of that.

TAB: Apple went through some tough times in the 90’s, did Haddock also hit some rough spots with them?

Haddock: Fortunately we were able to hang on while Apple got things going again. It was a slow-down, but we were able to make it through.

TAB: What can you tell me about your involvement with the education market?

Haddock: We’ve been involved in the education market for nearly 30 years, selling into 11 states. In the past we sold Apple products to these schools, but Apple has since taken those education sales inhouse. We currently sell the Promethean interactive whiteboard to schools in 8 states in the midwest.

TAB: How has the opening of Apple’s chain of retail stores affected Haddock?

Haddock: I think that overall Apple stores have helped the Macintosh business. It has taken some business from us, but overall our Apple sales are up every year.

TAB: How do you use a Mac to run your business?

Haddock: We use Macintosh exclusively in our business, from ordering to research to our accounting.

TAB: Are there any “Must Have” applications that you use on a daily basis?

Haddock: Right now I have the following applications open, which is fairly normal for me:

Mail, iCal, Address Book, Safari, iTunes, Preview, Firefox, Calculator, Filemaker, Excel, OmniFocus and Google Earth. OmniFocus is an excellent program which I use constantly and actually syncs my to do list with my iPhone.

TAB: Haddock started out as Wichita Software, are you still involved in software development?

Haddock: We do some in-house software development on Filemaker, but no longer develop software for others. We sold off our Petroleum Accountant program to a company in New Zealand who still supports it.

TAB: What do you think about Apple’s focus on consumer technology with the iPod, iPhone, and Apple TV?

Haddock: Apple is playing to their strengths and making great consumer products. Everyone who I know owns any of these products really likes them and uses them daily. I know these products will only continue to only get better and lead the market in innovation. I think we’ll see many more breakthrough consumer products.

TAB: What do you see as the future of Apple, and Haddock Corporation’s relationship with Apple?

Haddock: We’ve had an excellent relationship with Apple over the years. In fact, I served on Apple’s Reseller Advisory Board for 10 years. They have an excellent strategy, and a great management team. I know that we’ll continue to do business with them for years and years. We continue to look for ways to expand and support Apple products for our customers.

I also was able to get some insight into the retail and repair side of the Mac market. Speaking with the technicians at the store, the topic naturally went to the new MacBooks. It seems that they are not nearly as excited about them as the average consumer is; they expect them to be much more difficult to service.

My many thanks to Richard for taking the time to answer my questions. Here, in Des Moines, we are a long ways away from Cupertino, but you never know when you might have a little piece of Apple history right in your backyard.

App Cubby is an Application Development shop out of San Marcos, Texas, that jumped into the fray of iPhone programming back in March of this year. Focusing their attentions squarely on the iPhone-toting worker on the run. Their first offering, Trip Cubby, easily handles expensible mileage, and the already announced Cash Cubby will handle full expense reports. They’ve already begun work on a 2.0 version of the former, while juggling the latter along with a new project as well.

Approaching their products from the user’s point of view helps App Cubby to rely on carefully crafted features and clean interfaces to provide maximum functionality and ease of use to anyone interested in their applications. While many developers are pushing the bleeding edge, often using gimmicky features, the Cubby apps are straightforward and seem to be fully thought-out by the time they come to market.

Trip Cubby (iTunes link) captures all of the mileage information you could need in order to be reimbursed for any travel you may incur. While the entry screen may appear to be lengthy at first glance, most fields are optional and up to you to fill out. Better yet, Trip Cubby is kind enough to remember the useful stuff for you (like last odometer setting, date/time, and even frequent trips you take), making entry even quicker the more you use it. The app even allows you to keep track of whether the reimbursement has been reconciled or not. Add a very tweakable search feature, and the ability to email the results in .csv format and you’re talking about a real winner of an iPhone application. Oh, and version 2 is supposed to let you track mileage using the 3G’s built-in GPS. Slick, eh?

At a regular price of $9.99 (through the end of September – that’s today folks! – you can nab it for a bargain price of $4.99), Trip Cubby tends to ride the edge of the ‘higher’ priced apps available for the iPhone (everything relative of course, many apps seem to reside in the $.99 – $1.99 price range). I asked lead man David Barnard about their pricing decisions, seeing how lower prices generally bring more buyers. Proud of his team’s work, David described Trip Cubby as a “premium product.” He goes on to say:

“I’d rather provide an incredible product and attentive support to people who see value in a polished iPhone app, instead of growing market share on price alone.”

An honorable and well thought-out plan from someone who clearly believes in their product.

Cash Cubby has already been revealed on the developer’s website to be to expense reporting what Trip Cubby is to mileage tracking. As it turns out, Cash Cubby is temporarily on the back burner to make time for Gas Cubby, a forthcoming catch-all for your auto maintenance records. I currently use some MPG-tracking iPhone app (they’re all named the same, so who knows which it is), and it works well enough. But based on my experiences thus far with Trip Cubby, and my new insights to the App Cubby ‘Mission’, I’m hopeful for the upcoming release.

The opportunity for developers to get any old program out on the App Store and make a few quick bucks is surely an enticing one. But the guys at App Cubby are happy to toil on one thing at a time, making sure they’ve thought it all out before moving forward. David explains the difference he feels that App Cubby is capable of, being comprised of a team rather than a singular coder:

“Had either of us [Jon Johnson, being the "Master of Code"] attempted to code Trip Cubby on our own, it wouldn’t be anywhere near as functional and polished as it is today. Had I not contracted with several designers, the icon, website, and UI would be no where near as beautiful as they are today. I’m thrilled to be selling a product that meets my own high standards for what an iPhone app should be. But, I’m even more thrilled that others seem to use and love Trip Cubby as much as I do!”

As a paying customer, I very much appreciate such a methodology, and feel these guys will reap the rewards in the long run rather than making a few quick sales and petering out.

If you’re in need of an easy way to keep tabs on mileage, head on over to App Cubby’s website for a thorough demo (screencast) of its features. (A nice option to have before plunking down your hard earned cash, if you ask me.) If you like what you see, grab Trip Cubby at the bargain price of $4.99 until October 1st.

Thanks to David for taking the time to answer my questions – best of luck to you and your team!

Writer’s note: I am not affiliated with App Cubby, nor do I benefit from a profile of their company. Such coverage will hopefully be a new and regular appearance on The Apple Blog.

With more and more web applications being built by Mac-addicted developers, I thought I’d have a chat with Stephen Caudill over at FatJam. Stephen not only codes his creations on Apple hardware but also relies on it to serve up the applications to the public.

Travis Vocino for The Apple Blog: Hey there Stephen! To me, it feels like the Mac, and specifically the MacBook Pro, is the web developer’s absolute choice when it comes to deploying an environment suited to the work. It definitely hasn’t always been that way though, as you know. What about you? What’s your history with developing for the web on Apple hardware?

Stephen Caudill for FatJam: In August of 2004, I started looking at the programming language Ruby, in response to the philosophy of “developer joy” that Ruby on Rails’ creator, David Heinemeier Hansson was extolling. At the time I was working in Big Java and really just hated it… the job, the tools, the verbosity of the language were all a millstone around my neck and I wanted this golden path that David was describing.

In and amongst the various doctrines of Ruby on Rails was this devout love of the Mac computer that I kept being inundated with. Around the same time Paul Graham penned an essay in which he observed that all the smart hackers he knew were migrating to OSX… That was apparently all the coercion I needed, as I soon found myself exploring a first gen Mac Mini. In retrospect, I guess I was drinking the Koolaid, but it was good Koolaid after the sour taste Windows left in my mouth.

TV: Absolutely. In fact, these days sometimes it’s hard to find a Windows laptop at a developer’s conference — especially the more current spaces like Ruby. So, you’re really hot for Ruby these days?

SC: Definitely. It’s been revolutionary to my entire thought process, let alone my habits as a programmer. A forthcoming project I’m working on, FatJam, is a significantly large Ruby on Rails application.

TV: Can you tell me a little about FatJam?

SC: FatJam is a service that helps musicians meet and collaborate over the internet. We’ve been explained as “Match.com for musicians” and that’s pretty accurate, but only one facet of the application. To elaborate on that bit though; we use data that the user supplies about themselves, objective analysis of their usage habits on the site and automated analysis of finished music they upload to suggest other artists in the community that they’re likely to be compatible with. From there we make it very easy to form bands (the conceptual hub of our interpersonal collaboration), collaborate over distance and promote and distribute your music. We’ve just entered our limited public beta and are due to launch the full service in September.

TV: Another key point I think web developers love about Mac is the shared love for open-source software. How has using OSS technology like the Ruby on Rails framework helped you and your team build a large-scale project like FatJam?

SC: We’ve gotten a lot of benefit from Open Source technologies like Ruby, Ruby on Rails and a plethora of client libraries. Honestly, it would have taken us much longer to develop FatJam if we weren’t standing on the shoulders of these Open Source communities. As a company, we are firm believers in Open Source and we’re making a concerted effort to give something back. We’re starting out by releasing an internal library we use for versioning database records: Acts As Revisable. We’re going to continue to release other extractions from our endeavors as OSS software on github, so keep your eyes on our account.

TV: OK, let’s talk Apple nerdery. What’s your (and perhaps your developers’) setups like as far as software and hardware? How do you utilize them in your day-to-day workflow?

SC: We’re all running MacBook Pro’s as our development machines. Rich Cavanaugh (our senior architect) and I both use TextMate and Terminal.app for our primary development. Our other developer, Rogelio Samour is a recent Mac convert though and a big linux guy, so his primary development is done in Vim and iTerm.

On my rig, apps that run all day every day for me are: Textmate, Terminal, Things (LOVE this app), several Fluid.app instances (for CampFire, GitHub and LightHouse) and Twitteriffic, in addition to the usual suspects… iTunes, iChat, Mail (with all its warts) and Safari. Notable occasional use apps are Changes.app, Pixelmator (screw you Adobe), NetNewsWire, Skitch, Interarchy and of course FireFox (still the best game in town for debugging JavaScript).

As far as workflow goes, we work in a distributed fashion (I’m in North Florida, Rich is in South Florida and Rogelio is in Northwest Arkansas), so Leopard’s screen sharing capabilities have become vital for us. Using Screen Sharing, we can do pair programming and collaborative debug sessions. It’s almost as good as being in the same room. I also coordinate on a daily basis with my partners in Miami and Greece and consultants in California and less frequently with our board members, most of whom are in New York and London… keeping up with these guys makes my iPhone pretty crucial. Now, admittedly, I could be doing the same stuff on a CrackBerry, but I’d be doing it in much less style and without the super-convenient integration features that the iPhone has with my Mac life.

TV: You definitely deliver on Apple nerdery. I love getting to know how people work, what they’re using and how they use it. It speaks a lot to the real-world usefulness of an application when you can experience what someone has built using it. What about the other side — the infrastructure that actually runs and serves up FatJam?

SC: We’re running brand new 8 core Leopard servers with 16GB of RAM apiece. Our staging environment is on a single PPC Xserve running Leopard.

TV: How does using Apple hardware for server infrastructure compare to what most people are used to — generally greybox servers or Dell PowerEdge type stuff? Is the workflow different? Is the deployment easier, more difficult?

SC: Coming from a Java/Sun server background, it honestly feels pretty familiar, albeit minus some warts (and some configurability). I would guess that people who are used to running virtualized Dell PowerEdge’s would have a bit of an adjustment to make. Speaking of which, that’s one thing Apple’s server platform is screaming for: virtualization. It’ll be interesting to see how Parallels Server performs when they’re out of beta… we’ll certainly be looking closely at it.

Deploying to Apple hardware has some specific challenges, but I don’t think they’re any more difficult to deal with than a large scale deployment on any other platform. One thing I’ll give some kudos to the Leopard Server devs for is the great support that Rails enjoys in it’s server environment… mongrel_rails_persist is a super simple utility with a familiar (to a Rails dev) interface that gracefully hooks into and leverages two of my favorite Apple technologies: Launchd and Bonjour. Starting up a Rails app via mongrel_rails_persist automatically creates a launchctl instance for the app and advertises it’s presence over Bonjour, which is in turn integrated into the Apache Web Server interface in Server Admin. It’s all very slick. Beyond the simple elegance of tools like mongrel_rails_persist, it’s just a sound and performant all-around platform for running Ruby based applications from.

Workflow is really why we’re on Mac on the server though, the rest of it is icing. Specifically, we have the ability to access Apple-specific technologies for server side processes. I’m sure you can imagine the benefits that we reap from having a platform exposes sophisticated audio processing systems like QTKit and CoreAudioKit to our server side application.

TV: Plus, just looking at a rack of Xserves should make anyone giddy. In addition to server technology, I dig checking out these fabulous audio production setups that incorporate both Xserves and usually Mac Pros. Being involved with that space, do you think Macs lead the market in audio production? What tools do you or FatJam users utilize on the product end before the work gets to the site?

SC: My personal experience has been that Macs have dominated professional audio production for some time now. More generally though, it seems that many savvy users these days are gravitating toward macs because of their current level of sophistication, and this is true of much of the new breed of digital musicians I know as well. Don’t get me wrong though, I still know a ton of really talented musicians that happen to use Windows.

The jury is still out as to what tools are going to be prevalent amongst our users. We encourage people to use what they know and we’ll be actively looking at what they do use, so expect more concrete observations on that later. My gut feeling is that we’re going to attract an audience that’s disproportionately Mac-based — say 35% of our overall user base. Platform will affect tool choice to some extent, but I think we’ll see representations of all the usual suspects: Pro Tools, Logic, Acid, Fruity Loops, Reason, Digital Performer, Ableton Live, etc, etc.

My setup is currently oriented around using Reason for beat production and Pro Tools for recording analog sources (though I’m actively trying to move away from Pro Tools). I’ve been starting to tinker with Ableton Live and I love it so far… it’s a really fun, creativity-oriented interface for doing the discovery phase of production in. I’m also looking forward to devoting some time to learning Max/MSP post-beta, which is in a personal sweet spot for me at the intersection of programming and music.

TV: You mentioned that you expect Windows users, of course, but do you consider Apple-specific user apps (like iPhone apps, Dashboard widgets, straight for the desktop) to be crucial to the success of emerging sites like FatJam. I happen to think they’re quickly becoming an integral part. I actually attribute a lot of the success of Twitter to be tied to the early availability of Twitterific. What do you have currently in the works, already deployed or on the to-do list?

SC: With so much of what we consider important available over ever-present networks, it’s silly not to expose that data for consumption, in my opinion. Ubiquity of data is a goal all developers should be working toward these days, or else they’re going to miss the boat. Keeping that in mind, Apple provides some really sweet, fun-to-build-for platforms for getting at and exposing data to users, so it’s a no-brainer for us to get on board with it.

We’re currently putting the finishing touches on native Mac and Windows client apps that pair with the web service suite. We’ve got a couple of widgets in the works for Dashboard as well as Vista and Google Gadgets. As an iPhone user, I tend to think that any application that doesn’t have an iPhone interface is incomplete… so that’s definitely in the works too.

TV: Excellent stuff, Stephen. Endless thanks for sharing your Mac-addiction with me and our readers. We’ll be on the lookout for much more Apple-enabled goodness to come from you in the near future, including the launch of FatJam and your open-source contributions. Good luck!

Today I’m talking to a longtime friend of mine and my favorite hipster tech girl, Sara Robertson. I asked Sara to share some of her day-to-day Mac experiences at Warner Bros. Records, the workflow for her personal projects and in the greater entertainment industry.

Travis Vocino for The Apple Blog: Hello there Sara. We’ve been friends forever. So naturally, I know what you do because we probably have a constant iChat window open at all times. For the other people, though, can you tell us a bit about what you do over at WBR? What kind of environment is it as far as the pace of technology?

Sara Robertson for Warner Bros. Records: I’m currently managing the web production of our artist sites, most of which are on the Drupal platform. We have around 90 active sites, and probably 20 more currently in active development. It’s an extremely fast paced world, with fluid and flexible technology being the cornerstone of our ability to get anything done. Ours is the only major record label with a dedicated tech department, and our whole department runs Apple technology. In addition to WBR, I work full time on my pet project Melodramatic.com, and participate in any number of contract and freelance Internet projects.

TV: I’m always surprised when I hear about the lack of true technology departments in larger companies. It’s definitely the case though, and I don’t think a lot of people realize just how true that is.

So, what’s your current setup and what was your first move into the wonderful world of using Apple hardware full time?

SR: I run a Macbook Pro, upgraded from my Powerbook (and first Mac machine) about a year ago. I have a 23 inch Apple monitor so I run a dual-screen setup at work. I switched to Mac in 2005 when I went to work for an entertainment industry dotcom, and they were an all-Mac shop. The other developers teased me for my attachment to Windows, and I was pretty much peer pressured into switching.

Making the switch was difficult, but made easier by the “Switch 101″ documentation that Apple provides to converted ex-Windows users. It provides tutorials and walkthrus on how to convert your old Workflow to the new one, and it made my transition so much easier.

The argument that convinced me to make the switch to Mac, was the “Unix subsystem” included with Mac OSX. To an active web developer, that means a custom compiled Apache, PHP, database, and everything else you could run on a real server, right here on my primary machine! An environment I could only dream of on a Windows platform. Of course I started by custom compiling my own software, but then found that there is plenty of support for Mac software already bundled together to run perfectly.

In addition to my Macbook and my Powerbook, I’ve got an iPhone and iPod (with NikePlus!), Airport Express, and we just setup a new AppleTV at work that I’m really looking forward to playing with. As Travis once told me, “Life is so much easier once you’re 100% Apple technology.”

TV: Honestly, you wouldn’t generally associated the Switch 101 tutorials as something that would be used by higher-end developers like yourself. That’s really not the case though and they should probably be a tool to put in the arsenal when trying to convert some diehard PC users.

What about inside the MacBook Pro? What are your daily application that you live with and facilitate a smooth workflow for your professional and personal projects? Is there anything you just couldn’t live without?

SR: Apps I keep open all day long: MAMP Pro, svnX, BBEdit, Safari & Firefox, a billion Terminal windows, Skype, Transmit, Entourage, Adium. Sometimes I pop open my VMWare to do some Internet Explorer testing.

MAMP Pro is the greatest thing of my web developer life. It quickly replaced my attachment to Apache, and enables me to run hundreds of virtual hosts locally, all pointing at different codebases. I couldn’t live without my MAMP Pro, and I highly recommend the Pro version over the free one because of the amazing virtual host support that it includes. SVN is also a pleasure to work with on a Mac system. I had to upgrade the default version that ships with the OS, and svnX the GUI interface is lacking in some functionality, but thankfully full svn command line functionality is available because of the unix subsystem.

It took me quite a while to decide on the core applications that I liked the most, and I experimented with many of them before settling on what I run. Some of the apps are lacking, I always have to boot out of Adium and into iChat for screensharing and video conf support, I always have to go back to the command line for additional SVN functionality, and I occasionally have to manually edit conf files for my MAMP Pro, but I am happy to do those things since the tradeoff to working on Windows was infinitely more painful.

TV: I would say your setup is probably mirrored by a lot of developers, including myself (Except I use Textmate, couldn’t get into BBEdit).

What about the enterprise level though — what’s the landscape like at WBR? Do you find it difficult to “interface” with the PC scourge?

SR: WBR is a Windows company, our mail is run on Exchange servers, our security and authentication is managed through Windows NT. We had to fight the good fight to convince them to support our Mac preference, but in general companies are okay with letting developers have whatever technology they require in order to get their jobs done. The biggest issue we faced was the requirement that we all convert to using Entourage for our mail so that we could interface with the Exchange servers. And I still can’t figure out how to get my Exchange mail to work on my iPhone, and I still hate Entourage. Interestingly, even though Windows is the company wide standard, we still fill our lobby with iMacs and pretty Mac monitors. I think it’s just more stylish and impressive than a bunch of Windows boxes to greet our guests.

TV: Have you noticed most companies in the entertainment industry are pretty much Apple on the front (more for a certain associated panache) even though they have lingering Windows-based infrastructure in the back?

SR: I’ve worked at a few different entertainment companies in Hollywood, and what I’ve noticed is that artists and developers agree that Mac technology is the best for what we do, and it’s the “in between” people who are still stuck on Windows… HR, Accounting, Front Desk, and other jobs that don’t require heavy use of technology are perfectly happy to run on Windows, and can’t imagine the benefits of a Mac. People in the film industry would laugh at the idea of editing on a Windows box.

I recently had the pleasure of participating in an independent feature film titled “Speakeasy” (pictured: right), and the director was a very un-tech-savvy individual, but he knew his way around his Macbook, Final Cut Pro, and raved about the ease of connecting video peripherals to Apple technology. I really love that idea, that the interface is so easy to use that people with no technical skills are comfortable in it, but the underlying software is so enterprise-level that seriously technical people are also comfortable working in it. Of course, my dad still threatened to disown me when I made the switch, but we’re working out our differences. I think I just need to send him his very own Macbook and he’ll finally accept my life choices.

TV: What about the personal passion projects of Sara? A lot of times we sort of adopt the technology and apps of the more corporate world in order to mesh well with their workflow. Is your development workflow the same for your more personal projects, like Melodramatic.com, as it is for Warner Bros. Records? For example, using SVN or project collaboration, etc.

SR: My implementation of MAMP Pro, svnX, Transmit, and Terminal, has made it extremely simple for me to switch development from WBR to Melodramatic.com to whatever else I’m working on, without feeling too disjointed. Even though Melo runs an entirely different code architecture and database, developing for it feels exactly the same as developing for WBR projects.

I think that’s what I enjoy the most, the elegant and flexible suite of developer applications provide a unified interface to whatever projects I’m working on, whether they’re in PHP, HTML, SQL, Python, Ruby, it all feels the same, and so there is no down time when switching from one project to the next. And being able to fluidly switch what I’m working on is a huge requirement when managing 90+ sites.

TV: I couldn’t agree more. Once you can get your tech workflow to sing and you do that early round of testing every little Mac app out there, it really makes everything just a tiny bit more enjoyable to work on.

Well Sara, it’s always a pleasure. Thanks for providing us with a little window into you and your technology environment. Of course, I’m sure the Mac community will rest a little easier tonight knowing some of their favorite recording artists are safe in your capable hands.

Following up on part 1 of my interview with the creative minds behind AppleGeeks.com, here’s what Ananth Panagariya had to say about his role in writing AppleGeeks.

TAB: I’m not sure which one of you came up with the idea, but where did the idea of AppleGeeks come from?

Ananth: Hawk’s older brother Mohammad had the domain lying around, and we’d been talking about starting a comic strip on the web. Hawk and I are both Apple fans, but for me it’s a preference and a fondness – for him, it’s a passion (maybe an obsession, hahaha).

TAB: Where do you get your material for each comic?

Ananth: Real life, often times. Sometimes it’s internet news, especially Apple news. At other times, it’s just stuff that comes out my imagination. Doing Applegeeks can be a fluid process – there’s times when Hawk will suggest ideas and I’ll suggest layouts.

TAB: Can you walk us through your creative process to write a comic?

Ananth: I’ll come to Hawk with an idea and we’ll toss it back and forth. Then I’ll write it out and we’ll go over it again. Often times we’ll get new ideas as we go back and forth. Sometimes Hawk will contribute a punchline – sometimes I’ll contribute a new approach to panel layout or describe a particular visual that has a certain desired impact.

TAB: Are you at all surprised at the number of readers you have now?

Ananth: Hah, of course. It was certainly a huge shock when we had our first big rise in readership, but even now, when we think it’s leveled off, we’ll get thrown for a loop. We’re still scratching our heads at it.

TAB: How long do you see yourself writing AppleGeeks? Is there going to be a time when you just get too busy?

Ananth: Hahahaha. Ahahahahahahahaha. Haaaahahahahahaha … sorry about that. It’s just that we’re always busy. If being busy were going to stop me, it would have stopped me a long time ago.

TAB: Which character is your “favorite” and why?

Ananth: It used to be Jayce, then it was Gina, but I think lately it’s been Eve. Her character is a lot of fun to explore, and since she has such a child-like disposition, she has a way of altering the dynamic between characters that works out in interesting ways.

TAB: I have to ask… are you picking up an iPhone?

Ananth: Not right off the bat – I’ll probably wait for the second version to come out. By then, most of the bugs will be worked out.

Anyone who is into Mac shareware applications has heard of MacUpdate, for the uninitiated, it’s basically a giant catalog of every Mac app, getting updated by-the-minute with new software updates. I recently had a chance to virtually sit down with Joel Mueller, the founder and head honcho of MacUpdate, for some questions about his site.

TAB: I’ve always seen MacUpdate as the underdog to the “big bad” VersionTracker. For one, I hate their bloat and all the Windows software cluttering up the site. What’s the competition like these days between you guys?

Joel: Depends on who you ask. Answers that people give to questions like these are often more representative of the person answering the question, than a proper representation of how things actually are. ;)

VersionTracker has a strong crew of people working for them and they do very well for themselves. I personally really enjoy communicating ideas with different members of their team during events like Macworld Expo. Both parties are often very encouraging to each other.

On occasion, issues in the shareware world arise (like spyware, unethical development behaviors, fake user reviews). When this happens, some of the great people behind both organizations connect to think of the best way to deal with the situation and better serve the community. Making decisions together about those types of issues helps keep good things uniform and protects users from issues that they might not even be aware of. It’s a good thing.

In terms of competition, one of the best games to play is to go to archive.org, a site that attempts to archive website changes throughout time. Enter both site URLs and compare the progression through time. It’s worth a few good laughs.

TAB: I noticed a while ago a call for experts in valuation. Are you guys planning on selling MacUpdate soon?

Joel: Way back in business school, and through various mentors, people have asked if MacUpdate has an exit plan strategy. And honestly it never has — we build a site for different motives and purposes. Exit plans were never a concern, and I personally was challenged to understand their importance (tell that to the YouTube crew ;).

But I really enjoy learning. I don’t live in Silicon Valley where the bubble grows, so naturally I’m not accustomed to the cultures of take overs, selling out or venture capital first hand. But I really enjoy learning. Years ago I can remember going to 8 different banks and asking questions about the processes and recommendations of getting a mortgage to buy a home. At the time, I couldn’t even afford a shack-of-a-house mortgage. But the focus wasn’t on me buying the home, but on learning all the information I could from different sources.

By sending out feelers for business appraisers, I was hoping to learn more about web-based company valuations and current conditions for negotiating. When I read sites like TechCrunch, it amazes me how much venture capital funding is being acquired and how many online communities are being sold with high price tags. I compare some of these site’s community and traffic to MacUpdate and I’m amazed. So naturally, I want to learn more about how all of that Silicon Valley amazement works.

TAB: Among other things, I’ve noticed a recent push for your daily promo service. Did MacZot’s success have anything to do with that decision?

Joel: There were a lot of influences, and a lot of questions asked to developers. MacUpdate wanted to know where to place its energy. There were two directions we were considering more: (1) Product reviews with style, or (2) software sales for developers. We even went as far as to send our requests to hire writers who could go above and beyond the a bland, normal review. We wanted inside stuff. We wanted quotes from developers about what they thought rocked. We wanted to be able to tell our users hints about what was coming in the next major upgrade. It was going to be entertaining, to say the least.

But the more we talked with developers, the more it became apparent that a strong motivation for getting their products reviewed was so that they would reach more sales. So naturally we thought, “why not cut to the chase and go after the deeper goal,” so that’s exactly what we did with the daily MacUpdate Promo.

There were a lot of factors and influences that made this happen. I’m grateful for all of them and how they played part in supporting the launch and continued improvement of MU Promo.

TAB: So is there anything new planned for MU Promo? I’ve snagged a few neat apps on there already, anything really awesome coming up that you could “leak” for our readers perhaps?

Joel: A bundle is coming. A big one.

A few weeks ago, MacUpdate received an email from Steve Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple. We emailed him about an upcoming MacUpdate Promo bundle, and he wrote back saying that the bundle was “incredible” and that he used many of the titles himself. I was in awe when I saw the name “Steve Wozniak” in my email inbox. How cool is it that he is excited about the upcoming MacUpdate Promo bundle?

TAB: A bundle sale. Ah, like the ones MacHeist and MacZot have done in the past?

Joel: The funny thing is that Zot and Heist guys all helped out with the MacUpdate booth a couple of years ago, on the floor of the Macworld Expo. It’s amazing to see them all branch out and create strong, new footholds in Mac shareware promotions. It’s an exciting time for Mac shareware right now. Passionate, skilled people are connecting with each other through awesome, free communication tools. I hear stories from Nate, the point man for MUPromo, about the great conversations he has with devs…often leading him to talk about sports or the iPhone or family. When you utilize communication technologies with the smartest computer minds, it’s a blast to communicate waves of new ideas and then see them materialize.

TAB: So when does this start?

Joel: Monday, July 9, 2007. For 9-days. Join me and a bunch of the crew that helped put this bundle together, on the 9th just past midnight, in IRC chat as we unveil each of the programs in the bundle, one-by-one. It’s going to be a lot of fun!

TAB: The 9th. Have you been following the MacHeist controversy at all? Something about someone stealing their bundle sale idea…

Joel: I’ve been pretty buried in last minute development and polishing so everything is smooth for the launch.

TAB: Thanks for your time Joel, and good luck with your upcoming projects.

I know you should never start a blog post with a cliche, but the first time I saw an AppleGeeks comic it was love at first sight. Any comic with clever satires, lovable characters, and amazing artwork is bound to turn some heads. But a comic with an Apple theme? Now that’s any Apple fanboy’s (or fangirl’s) dream.

If you have no idea what I’m talking about, I’ll give you a second to check out the latest comic over at AppleGeeks.com. No really, go check it out… I’ll wait.

Being such a big fan of the comic, and fascinated with the huge fanclub that has grown around it, I sent an email over to the creators of AppleGeeks – Mohammad F. Haque, a.k.a. “Hawk”, and Ananth Panagariya. They graciously agreed to answer a few questions about the comic, the writing process, and their love of macs.

First up is Hawk, the man with the digital pen:

TAB: It sounds simple, buy why AppleGeeks? Why not another Batman or Spiderman comic?

Hawk: My brother had the domain lying around and I’m a huge Apple fan. I started off with an Apple computer and fell in love with it ever since. So we thought it would be fun to create something around that. I also share the same birthday as Steve Jobs, so maybe it was destiny?

TAB: Can you walk us through how you create a typical AppleGeek comic?

Hawk: After I get the final script from Ananth, I will draw it on paper. I would use a ruler and create layout and draw in all the scenes. After I finish drawing the computer, depending on my mood and if I have time, I will ink the comic with micron pens. Once the inking is done, I will scan it and color the comic in Adobe Photoshop. That’s pretty much how I work.

TAB: What’s your mac set-up?

Hawk: I have a Mac Pro, 17″ Macbook Pro and Dual G4 PowerMac. I also have a 21″ Cintiq which is connected to my Mac Pro. The Cintiq is a wacom monitor tablet, which allows me to draw right on the monitor.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/hawkstudios/248551446/ (old setup) http://www.flickr.com/photos/hawkstudios/341109112/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/hawkstudios/510755630/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/hawkstudios/431754993/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/hawkstudios/356417632/

TAB: How have the forums and the AppleGeeks community influenced what you do?

Hawk: The forum allows us to talk to our fans which motivates us to keep going forward.

TAB: What’s the “next big thing” for AppleGeeks? Published comics? Bigger online store?

Hawk: The “next big thing” would be publishing a book…or books. But of course we need the time to do that.

TAB: How did you and Ananth meet? What are the biggest challenges to working together on a single project like this?

Hawk: Ananth and I met during my second year in college (University of Maryland). We took the same art class and became good friends. The biggest challenge would be finding the time to actually sit down, talk about it and actually do it. Ananth and I are very busy people.

TAB: I have to ask… are you picking up an iPhone?

Hawk: I would love to have one. Oh man I really would love one…but I’m stuck with Verizon. I’m still waiting to hear from Apple to give me one though. ;)