Ramble

Since deciding to turn part time hobby development for myself into a part time hobby that produces stuff others might actually buy, I’ve been looking through my list of ideas and trying to figure out some sort of progression through them. This involves evaluating which ideas are practical for me to pursue (I’ve got some pretty out-there items in my list which I think would be awesome that I just don’t have the time or expertise to attempt at this point) and which might actually be appealing to others. ...

Sleep wake on laptops is terrible. But why is it terrible? We’ve had close to a decade of smart phones, and on every phone and tablet I’ve owned, sleep and wake have been great: you push the button, the device wakes up and is responsive. In that decade of smart phones, every laptop I’ve had (both Apple and otherwise) has had some aspect of sleep/wake be unsatisfactory. My Apple laptops have been by far the best of the bunch, but even they tend to be fairly unresponsive waking from sleep, with keyboard input being glitchy in the first few seconds after the display wakes (i.e. when I’m trying to type in a password). ...

There was a fair bit of chatter in the blogs that I follow today that Smile’s TextExpander is changing from an upgrade pricing model to a subscription model (details at their pricing page). It’s an interesting decision, which I guess probably works out well for them since everyone that I see writing or talking about TextExpander seem to be daily users. I say interesting, since it brings to my mind a question of conflicting values: the perceived value to the customer against the value to the developer. To generalize, I think upgrade pricing for software lets it become more valuable to the customer over time as they can amortize their initial investment while retaining the original functionality. From a developer’s perspective (especially if they are active in maintaining software for platform updates, bugs etc) their software gets less value over time as their time investment increases with no additional return per customer. ...

A story over at the CloudFlare blog states that it estimates 94% of Tor requests could be classed as “malicious”, in that it involves automated systems scraping email addresses for spam, testing for vulnerabilities etc. There’s some really interesting stuff they’re doing when it comes to trying to preserve the anonymous nature of Tor for their protected sites, but still restrict access for bad actors, as well as possible directions this type of struggle might go towards.

So at Apple’s (final) Town Hall event they announced CareKit, which looks pretty interesting, although details are kinda scarce beyond their press kit so far, with release being “Spring 2016” so I guess sometime before WWDC. After making Repeat thinking about meds, it’s kind of funny to see Apple bring out a framework aimed at that sort of thing. Particularly since I was having a shower thought the other day about making an app around tracking wound recovery, logging spots-that-might-not-be-spots and so on. Glad that it was only a recent thought and only half-considered, seeing as that seems to be one of the card functions which is going to be released as part of CareKit. ...

This morning my 1.1 update for Repeat got approved on the store, which brings some basic improvements to interaction with tasks, a much nicer visual for repeat history as a calendar view, rather than as a simple list of events, the ratings system I wrote about in a previous post, and a Today Widget containing upcoming alarms along with an indication of how close they are. Since I’m still learning my way around the iOS frameworks it’s been an interesting experience, particularly with respect to the way that Core Data works. When I first started looking at using Core Data, and coming from having done stuff with SQLite and MySQL in the past, it seemed pretty terrible in terms of the overhead of code compared to what you actually wanted to do with it (OK, it actually still seems pretty terrible in that respect). ...

Some of the quality Role Playing Games in the Explore section of the iOS App Store. So today whilst having a coffee and waiting to pick my wife up I casually opened the iOS App Store and had a look at the Explore tab to check out the Role Playing Games section. It usually takes a few times a year to reinforce the fact that Explore is completely useless for both the “New” apps as well as the top lists, particularly in any of the games categories. ...

Pond Scum Texture X (CC-BY 2.0) (Note that this is from the perspective of a consumer. It’s probably also far more rambly than it needs to be.) Discovery One of the common problems of app delivery stores is discovery. Particularly in today’s mobile app stores, the sheer volume means that discovery tends toward to drift towards the “scumbag” end of the scale very quickly in much the same manner as SEO does with web page ranking algorithms. ...

Back in 2014 (and earlier) there was a kerfuffle about the practice of apps being in your face with requests for reviews: Wil Shipley @ The Loop John Gruber and suggesting one star reviews as a response Marco Arment suggesting that a popup request for review should go away entirely Todd Zarwell on being somewhat better behaved and showing a popup dialog only on new versions, and after a certain number of launches I was thinking about this while noodling around with a couple of improvements for Repeat, which has an unobtrusive rating link in the about screen. Whilst wanting to be well behaved, at the same time I think about the number of times I’ve rated apps by using a link in the about screen. I try to rate apps I like fairly regularly since I’m aware the reviews go away when new versions appear on the store, but even so I just don’t think about it when using apps. ...

Becky Hansmeyer posted a couple of items recently on app pricing (and a followup) which I thought fit in with my thoughts on pricing pretty closely. She also goes into some stuff I didn’t know (but I guess makes sense in retrospect) about the non-restorable nature of repeatable IAPs, meaning if you use a tip jar method for unlocking content, if you install the app at a later date, you would need to pay again to regain the benefits. ...