software | Stupid Foot

Pricing an iPhone app: Don’t sell your software short.

Nov 302008

I was doing some research trying to decide how to price and promote the app I’m building for the iPhone and I came across this article. It points out the really obvious fact that if you are trying to do iPhone development full time then you need to charge enough for your app so that you can actually live on what money you do make.

It also points out that the current pricing structure of the app store is flawed. The article states that most if not all apps should be bumped up $10.00 in price, $0.99 apps becoming $9.99, $4.99 becoming $14.99. This is a very valid point, how can anyone expect to live on $0.70 a copy of their software? Don’t say they will make it up in volume because that is much harder than one would think.

I now need to sit down and figure out how much I should charge and make sure that I would actually be able to make money with what I’m planning.

Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X (Third Edition)

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Oct 242008

I’ve had my macbook sense sometime around June of 2007. It’s was the first Mac that I’ve had that I actually used on a daily basis, before the macbook I had a G4 Cube I picked up off eBay to play with PPC OpenBSD so that doesn’t really count.

I can honestly say that I love my macbook. It is hands down the best computer I’ve ever owned. The only thing that I wish was different was the graphics chipset. I would love, I mean love to be able to play WoW and have it not run like crap.

In the year and change that I’ve had my macbook I’ve been ever more interested in learning to code for Mac OS. Now that the iPhone App Store is up and running and the SDK has had its NDA lifted I figured that I might as well try to cash in on the App Store Gold Mine.

I know Python, Perl PHP and bits and pieces of a few other languages but I have not touched C or C++ sense my 10th grade C++ course. I figured that it couldn’t be to hard to spin my Python knowledge of objects into C objects and decided that I should just dive right in.

I didn’t want to go it alone though. I spent a day or so looking on Amazon for Objective-C books and reading reviews. I finally decided on Cocoa(R) Programming for Mac(R) OS X (3rd Edition). I’ve had the book for a few days now and am really enjoying it.

New Linux Kernel Naming Scheme?

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Oct 182008

Skimming digg this morning I found a story discussing a visioning change to the Linux Kernel. Historically odd numbers were development versions and even numbers were stable. The 2.6 Kernel series has been out for five years now.

Greg KH posted a new naming scheme YEAR.NUMBER.MINOR_RELEASE. To me this seems silly. Referring to the kernel as 2.6.22 sounds better. 2.6 is a known stable version. I can see it being very confusing to people to call the kernel 2008-10 or 2008.2.1.

Photoswap for the iPhone by Padadaz: Simple and Addictive

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Oct 132008

My wife, brother and I have been playing with Photoswap by Padadaz for a few days now and it is now one of the most used applications on my iPhone.

You take a picture and send it out. It is received by one and only one person. If they find it interesting they can directly reply to you with a picture of their own. Thats it.

I’ve personally had a ‘conversation’ last for over two hours, sending pictures of random toys in my office and getting random toys in return.