Humblog

Buscouver Numbers after 1 month

Thu, 10 May 2012 17:25:00 -0400

The numbers for my iPhone app Buscouver, and some discussion about business models for locally focused apps.

Costs:

My own time: about $15K worth if I were billing it.
Upfront costs of around ~$1000 for design work.

Income:

So far, just over a month: $410

My reddit post got me to #2 in the Canada navigation charts. For one glorious day I made $100.

Feedback has been positive. The latest update (with Apple right now) addresses all the good suggestions.

The 99c model doesn’t work for local apps.

Vancouver is the transitiest place in Canada, but there are still only about 130,000 people / day who use it*. How many of them have iPhones? Maybe half at most.

The 99c model works for apps that appeal to a big percentage of iOS users. It will never be sustainable for local apps. This is why they generally all suck. There are a few alternatives to the 99c model:

Make it free, make it great and have it be a wonderful portfolio piece to drive people to your consultancy.

My buddies in Dublin at Tapadoo are doing this right with “My Dublin Bus”. I have no interest in consultancy at the moment so this doesn’t work for me.
Make a more general app (or a series of basically-the-same apps) that cover lots of cities.

This is a good idea in principle, but there are drawbacks. There’s no standard API for live bus data, so although you get to re-use your UI, you’ll be integrating and maintaining each bus service separately. You could just use standard GTFS schedule data but then live data apps will smoke you.

One of the things I had fun with was making the trolley busses in my app look like they really do in Vancouver. If you do this with a generalised app, you’re losing your only efficiency — but I admit it’s probably not important once your UI is great.

Finally, multi-city functionality is not really a feature for your users, only for you.

I’ve seen a bunch of people try this way:
- The Transit App (looks great, not out yet)
- “Go Vancouver” is an example of a really ugly app thats been repurposed for a bunch of cities.
Charge more than 99c.

The established price of an app is “99c but really it should be free.” I’d love to scream about people being cheap, respect for quality, and the price of a cup of coffee but this is fundamental to how the app store is built. Apps add value to the iPhone, so Apple has always encouraged cheap/free apps. But… this is how I want it to work so I’m going to try it.

Once V1.2 comes out, I’ll be bumping the price to $3. I anticipate reviews calling me greedy in the same sentence that they wonder why I don’t do an Android version.

Conclusion

If this app can make around a minimum of $5K per year it’ll be worth my while. I’d love, for example, to justify the time to integrate Siri if Apple opens it up to developers. Nice things cost money.

—

* Very rough estimation based on this super boring report — let me know if you have better figures. I’m @Padraig on Twitter.

Reporting on Irish people abroad.

Wed, 16 Nov 2011 10:05:35 -0500

I’m leaving in December. To be sure, I’m not the typecast can’t-get-a-job refugee we keep hearing about. I’m starting to wonder if many actually are.

I make a living and I’m generally very happy and satisfied with my life.

With that shameful admission out of the way, I will now complain about the media for a while. If your coping strategy is to ignore Irish media, fair play; I suggest you blast into a full on bout of ignoring this too.

This new Irish Times section Generation Emigration is typical of the hard-core misery porn that passes for reporting on the Irish abroad. They load each story into photoshop and apply the “Grim Negativity” filter. (Don’t have that filter? Use sepia, add a burned edges frame. Swap images of food for soggy famine cabbage.)

Take this flaming turd of an example:

The headline: Talking to your wife only through a computer is hard.

The story: Guy gets a great job in Australia. Wife stays because she’s got a great job here.

It sums it up perfectly. A story about two people working hard, making sacrifices so they can have a better life later. Great! But… the Irish Times slaps on the grimness filter of course and ends up with that headline. Either of them could quit and be with the other, but they wouldn’t be as rich then. Shitballs. I feel so bad, I think I might puke into my Trocaire box.

To be clear, I respect the decision they made, it’s the casting of it as a mournful tale that is dishonest and infuriating. He will be home in less than a year and they’ll be more then all right.

We beleaguered emigrant souls are more or less middle class, grew up with some self-belief, plenty of ambition, and a well developed sense that we want to have nice things.

We’re going because it’ll be fun and because we can do things there that we can’t here.

We might have gone even if the boom was still on. Just like the other 500+ Irish people per week did, back when we didn’t fit the narrative.

I’m happy that I get to do this and I don’t want your fake media pity.

"There is a difference between questioning policy and questioning motives. […] no one should..."

Thu, 27 Jan 2011 13:29:16 -0500

“There is a difference between questioning policy and questioning motives. […] no one should poison the public square by attacking the patriotism of opponents, or by assailing proponents as more interested in the cause of politics than in the merits of their cause. I reject this, as should we all.”

- Ted Kennedy, September 27, 2002

One Out Of The Top Drawer: When will the App Store hit ten billion downloads?

Tue, 18 Jan 2011 12:16:45 -0500

One Out Of The Top Drawer: When will the App Store hit ten billion downloads?:

topdrawerapps:

So it’s no secret that the App Store is about to reach ten billion downloads.

But when?

Pádraig got in touch with me on Friday evening to let me know he’d found a way to process the data behind Apple’s app counter to determine when we might reasonably expect the milestone to be reached…

Be Careful What You Wish For

Fri, 03 Dec 2010 10:25:00 -0500

There’s been plenty of talk lately about ‘Cutting The Fat’ in the Dáil. It’s a line item on Fintan O’Toole’s petition. Martin Naughton’s argument that the Dáil should be 1/2 the size gets a front page article in the Irish Times.

Aside from the symbolic cost saving from downsizing the Dáil what effects would a smaller Dáil have? Would the composition be changed significantly?

Consider the results of the 2007 election. Those candidates elected to the first and second seats wouldn’t have been affected but if we can tally up which parties took the final seat in each constituency we can get a good sense of how the overall composition would be changed by decreasing the total number of TDs.

If we took one seat off each constituency the Dáil would be 26% smaller. However, the impact would fall disproportionately across the parties. Sinn Féin would have lost 75% of its seats. Independents -60%, Green Party -50%, FG -27%, FF -21%, LAB -20%. The 2 PDs wouldn’t have been affected but 2007 was an exceptional year for the PDs.

Perhaps even more interesting is the list of individuals who wouldn’t have been elected. In a 2007 Dáil with one TD fewer per constituency there’d have been no John Gormley, Ciaran Cuffe, Beverly Flynn, Jackie Healy Ray, Finian McGrath or Joan Burton.

Another outcome is that FF would have had 50% of the seats in the Dáil: Enough to form a majority Government with no Green Party, Independents or PDs.

In an actual reduction of Dáil members the decrease in seats would be distributed more equally among constituencies. However, these figures do show that smaller parties tend to get elected to the marginal seats.

Based on this, it looks as though a smaller Dáil would concentrate power in the big parties at the expense of the smaller ones. It will be interesting to see how this analysis applies to the next election.

iPhone 4.0 Predictions

Thu, 08 Apr 2010 06:34:00 -0400

Here are my predictions and analysis of the rumours before the OS 4.0 event later on today.

Notifications

The notification system badly needs a UI overhaul. This is one area where we can all agree that Android and Pre do it better.

Springboard

This is the trademark look and feel for the iPhone OS line of products, so Apple shouldn’t change it much, but there are some limitations that should be addressed. It doesn’t scale well with lots of apps.

Sync

Most iPhone owners I know don’t connect their iPhones to their computers regularly. They buy music on their iPhones, use their iPhone calendar and don’t care about backups till it’s too late. There’s no reason not to make this just work. Extra points for making it easy for 3rd party apps like 1Password to keep in sync with each other.

Printing

Conspicuously absent from the iPad is any decent way to print. Along with the syncing issue above, this means that owning an iPad also means owning one of those old fashioned ‘Macs’ or ‘PCs’. Main problem is availability of the drivers (will every manufacturer recompile them for ARM or will the OS use some clever emulation?) — delivery is easy: same way Snow Leopard does it. Download as required.

Multitasking

There has always been multitasking, so at it’s simplest, ‘adding’ it is a mere app store policy change. The current policy exists for a reason however: to maintain the quality of the experience. A background app free-for-all would kill performance, wear down your battery and potentially run up your data bill. That’s out of the question. If multitasking is introduced at all, it’s a safe bet that it will be much more limited than what you’re used to.

Apple could choose to place strict limits on the resources available to background apps. (EG: Max: 5MB of RAM & only the owner’s chosen 4 dock apps can run in the background) But what happens when the app exceeds the limits? Does the OS kill it? That’ll piss off the marathon runner who’s been monitoring his speed with a background GPS app. “Piece of shit iPhone!” he’ll say.

I don’t think there’ll be 3rd party multitasking, at least nothing like the way we understand it now. I do have a guess at a related compromise that we might see instead though.

Background Tasks

Severely policed tasks with no UI that run for a few seconds and deal only with data. These could be

Queued
Most of the time that your phone’s in your pocket, it’s conserving power: the display is off, WIFI is off, it’s not communicating with the internet, etc. It wakes up occasionally to check e-mail. What if you could register to have some code executed when the phone is awake and the internet connection is available anyway? The marginal cost of a few extra kb is low. The bottleneck in most of the apps I use regularly is pulling the tweets, facebook updates, rss feeds, etc. If one argument for background apps is ‘faster start-up’, this feature would help. It also keeps the OS in charge — when the battery’s low it might choose not to execute these tasks.
Scheduled
As above, but on the app’s own schedule. A way to register for some code to be executed (or at least an internally generated ‘push’ notification) at a precise time.

Dashboard for iPad

There’s no place for a full screen Clock, Stocks or Weather app on the iPad. I’m not the first to suggest this, but mark me down as a Yes for Dashboard on iPad.

Well those are my predictions … I’m looking forward to following the event and then quietly deleting this blog post when I’m shown to be embarrassingly wrong!

Neven Mrgan's tumbl: Please Don't

Wed, 17 Feb 2010 17:44:04 -0500

Neven Mrgan's tumbl: Please Don't:

Martin Pittenauer doesn’t like Please Rob Me, a website which gathers tweets from people who are not at home at the time of tweeting; the point is ostensibly raising awareness about the dangers of location broadcasting. Their premise is that sharing this information will get you robbed. Martin:
…

Notes from Installing an SSD on a Mac Pro

Wed, 17 Feb 2010 06:23:00 -0500

Inspired by this, I ordered an Intel X-25M 160GB SSD hard drive for my Mac Pro.

Some notes:

I followed this guide.
The drive comes with a 3.5” plate, but I didn’t realise this and bought a separate one too.
I did my best to fit it into one of my 2 spare SATA hard drive enclosures in my Mac Pro, but the 3.5” plates situate the SSD connectors in the centre instead of to the left like the other drives. You could probably make it work if you had a really short male-female SATA and power cable. 2009 Mac Pros are apparently better wired for this (Mine is an Early 2008 model)
I ended up leaving the drive loose in the spare optical drive enclosure. There are no moving parts in an SSD, so I’ll get away with it, but I may buy a 5 1/2” plate for it at some point.
I used Carbon Copy Cloner to copy everything but my /Users folder over to the SSD.
I opened System Preferences, Accounts, right-clicked on my username and chose advanced options. This allowed me to tell the OS to use /Volumes/Macintosh HD/Users for user data.
I had a problem with iTunes authorisations — apparently these are stored in /Users/shared. Creating that folder on the SSD allowed me to re-authorise my iTunes. There’s probably a better way, but this works.
My Snow Leopard, /Developer and /Applications folders altogether occupy almost 40GB in total. It’s nice to have a bit of spare fast storage, (I’m thinking: Aperture library, Xcode projects) but I could have spent 1/2 the money and still got all the benefits from the smaller 80GB drive. Lesson learned.
It starts up from cold in about 35 seconds so I’m actually going to start shutting it down at night.
Finder is snappy: big folders like /Applications load and scroll instantly.
Applications like Mail, iTunes and Safari take one ‘bounce’ to open and gloriously, it’s way quieter than before.

The worlds are colliding

Sun, 31 Jan 2010 06:04:46 -0500

mrgan:

Epic knowledge dropped by stevenf tonight:

In the New World, computers are task-centric. We are reading email, browsing the web, playing a game, but not all at once. Applications are sandboxed, then moats dug around the sandboxes, and then barbed wire placed around the moats. As a direct result, New World computers do not need virus scanners, their batteries last longer, and they rarely crash, but their users have lost a degree of freedom. New World computers have unprecedented ease of use, and benefit from decades of research into human-computer interaction. They are immediately understandable, fast, stable, and laser-focused on the 80% of the famous 80/20 rule.

Is the New World better than the Old World? Nothing’s ever simply black or white.

(Read the whole thing, please. Done? Cool.)

Here’s one metric I’ve been using: think of the person for whom the iPad will be the first computer they use. They will come to it with no expectation of cameras, multitasking, Flash, or storage size. Now wait a few years (months?) and give them a desktop computer. They have to interact with it using these weird things on the desk which aren’t even where the content is. Like, you look here but you click here - crazy! You have to move “windows” around. And check out all those buttons. What, nothing happens when I tap and hold on this?

Now you tell me if that person, the person the future is made of, will leave their iPad because the PC has more gigahertz.

€200 for Haiti. Lots of other #xcake folks, like Redwind and...

Wed, 27 Jan 2010 07:01:00 -0500

€200 for Haiti. Lots of other #xcake folks, like Redwind and Tapadoo have stepped up too.

Post your donation receipts and let me know (@padraig) I’ll link you up too.

Updates:

Redwind donated €400!
Jelly SMS Industries has thrown in €200!
Vinny Coyne has donated €200!
Philip Kirwan’s donation of €200 :)
Dermot Daly’s got in on the action for another €200

Resolved!

Wed, 27 Jan 2010 05:14:00 -0500

I have removed my previous post. I would like to clarify a few points and explain how Philip and I solved this.

The potential long-term impact on Philip’s reputation of my posting that entry is serious. He took a shortcut that he shouldn’t have taken, but it’s not exactly the crime of the century. He has admitted his mistake and we’ve come to an agreement on how to make up for it. (I’m excited about what we came up with actually, but more about that at the end.) We both agree that it would be disproportionate to leave the post up, now that he’s done everything he can to make up for it.

I want to admit that I could have done more to figure this out with Philip privately before going public with it. I had every right to post that entry, but frankly a bit more patience might have wrapped it up a lot quicker and with a lot less stress for both of us. I’ll know better next time.

It’s simple. If you find yourself in this situation, send your nemesis a draft of the article a few hours before posting it. If you’re right and they’re smart enough to know it, you’ll achieve everything you would have, but without the hoopla. If they don’t react to that, you can throw everything at them with a clear conscience.

Dublin Bus Maps will remain on the App Store. It’s a good app, and there’s no point in punishing customers. I have asked Apple to ignore my request to have his app removed. Philip will update the schema within the next few weeks and I’m happy that with that.

Ok, here’s the exciting part: Philip has agreed to donate his most profitable month’s earnings from Dublin Bus Maps to Concern’s Haiti project. The app has only been around for 3 months, so this is more than 1/3 of his earnings — a better percentage than I would have got for licensing the database.

This all blew way out of proportion, so to show that there are no hard feelings and to acknowledge that there are better things to worry about than arguing over a database of bus timetables, I’m going to match his amount with my own donation. We’ll be posting the receipts later on today.

Thanks for working this out with me, Philip. Looking forward to that pint.

The Mobile Edition of the Irish Times

Fri, 04 Dec 2009 07:27:00 -0500

The Irish Times launched a scaled down mobile edition of the newspaper today at m.irishtimes.com. Here are my thoughts on it.

“Device Neutral”

From the blog post announcement:

“We’ve decided to launch a device-neutral site which will render well on iPhones, BlackBerries, Nokias and everything else.”

It won’t render well on iPhones. It will render like the 1998 WAP-era site that it is.

They want to support the greatest number of devices to maximise potential readership. Sounds reasonable, but it’s the wrong approach because it assumes that Nokia owners [1] use the mobile web just because their device is physically capable of it. They’ve thrown away modern tools and techniques to support the lowest common denominator.

But the lowest common denominator can’t even find the browser on their phone or even tell you if it has one. The response to this should be: “Why then, are we making a website for people who don’t even know if their phone has a web browser?” Instead, this is the Irish Times’ solution:

“If you don’t know how to get to your phone’s browser, or you’re having trouble, you can text and you’ll receive a reply with a link. Send a text containing the word NEWS to 51500. Then click on the link in the reply”

It would be better to use modern tools and focus on improving the experience for real readers, instead of hobbling yourself to cater for theoretical ones.

Content

Most of the content from the website is not available through this interface. It’s not possible to list all stories from today’s Irish times, just “breaking news”, some highlights and “most read”.

Mobile sites should simplify the interface not the content.

Interestingly, normal articles work if you take a normal irishtimes.com URL and change the “www.” to “m.”. There’s just no natural way to navigate to them — this issue could easily be resolved.

[1] I”m saying “Nokia”, but I mean any phone without a modern standards compliant browser.

Snow Leopard Upgrade

Wed, 19 Aug 2009 11:26:00 -0400

I recently upgraded my Mac Book Air to Snow Leopard. As advertised, there’s not a huge amount in the way of new features, mainly it delivers the snappy.

Anyway, I ran into a few to-be-expected hitches along the way, and thought I’d share the resolutions.

It includes PHP 5.3. If you’re using the current production version of Code Igniter, you’re in trouble here — the cutting edge version (which will eventually become 1.7.2) in SVN seems to work so far, but I’m not exactly over the moon about using development code in production.
If you’re using Virtual Hosts with Apache, your httpd-vhosts.conf file is reset to normal defaults, so you’ll need to fix that.
I installed MySQL a few months ago by following Dan Benjamin’s excellent guide. As promised, it still works, but I had to play with my php.ini to get Code Igniter to connect to it. Specifically, I had to copy php.ini.default to php.ini, and blank out the ‘mysql.default_socket = some/crap/thats/wrong’; line
Expression Engine works fine as long as you’re using the latest 1.6.8 release.

Christmas Future

Tue, 16 Dec 2008 12:54:42 -0500

At our wedding last October, Emily and I suggested to all of our guests that they should consider making donations through christmasfuture.org in lieu of a traditional wedding gift. This resulted in about $3000 being lodged in our Christmas Future account which we then distributed among a number of projects, such as these:

Here are some of the reasons why we chose these guys.

The projects selected by Christmas Future are focused towards the achievement of specific goals. It’s not just about their hearts being in the right place.
They are small charities with very modest budgetary requirements, so your donation could easily make up a sizeable proportion of the funding for a specific project. These projects are things that would not happen without you.
You haven’t heard of most of the organisations doing the work, because they have prioritised nobler aims than the branding of their organisations.

Christmas Future is running a campaign right now called ‘TweetmasFuture’. If you haven’t yet finished your Christmas shopping check it out.

Weird Dock bug…

Mon, 10 Nov 2008 13:16:42 -0500

Weird Dock bug…

Trying to forward an attachment in Mail. 65Kb is too much for...

Fri, 15 Aug 2008 10:10:56 -0400

Trying to forward an attachment in Mail. 65Kb is too much for my outbox apparently.

Noticed a hidden detail on a certain friend’s site…

Tue, 05 Aug 2008 09:20:21 -0400

Noticed a hidden detail on a certain friend’s site…

The Missing iPhone Games

Sun, 13 Jul 2008 16:25:00 -0400

The iTunes App Store became available last Thursday with the release of iTunes 7.7

When iPhone developers upload their apps to the store they choose from a range of price bands and countries in which to sell their applications. I can’t think of too many reasons why developers would want to limit their number of potential customers, but there may be some valid considerations, such as:

Ensuring that you meet the various legal and taxation requirements in the numerous countries that you will sell to.
Doing a ‘staged release’ by opening it up in a small market initially as a kind of test market before launching worldwide
The availability and relevance of geographically specific data / services. Eg: there would not be much point selling to Americans an application that shows cinema times for Dublin.
If an application has not yet been localised, it may be better to wait until that is done than to force an English version on everyone.

So it makes sense that not every app would be available in every store. For the most part however, developers can be expected to maximise their audience: there are no direct costs in making the apps available to everyone.

Why, then, are there 33-34 pages of apps (with ~21 to a page) in most of the 64 regions covered by iTunes, but only 24 pages in the stores for Brazil, China, Costa Rica, Ireland, Korea, Qatar and South Africa? The ‘Games’ section is particularly bare, with only one or two applications listed on the entire page and a barren space where Super Monkey Ball ought to be.

I emailed Pangea Software to ask why Enigmo was not available to me in the Irish store. Brian Greenstone replied promptly: “There is currently something wrong with the Ireland store because almost none of the games are showing up. You should be able to see like 150 of them, but last time I looked there were just a handful there. Apple knew about this on Thursday, so I’m not sure what’s taking them so long to fix it.” I also asked the developer of Tap Tap Revenge why its game was not available, and got another quick response, this time from Bart Decrem saying: “This is out of our control. We have requested for the app to be available in all AppStores worldwide. Sorry.”

In the case of these two games at least, it was not the developers who chose to limit the availability of their games in these countries. It’s hard to believe that it’s just a software fuck up that Apple will get around to fixing soon. It’s been like this for a few days now and countries like Brazil and China are big markets.

Why else could this be? Two possibilities come to mind, though I’m sure that there are plenty more that I haven’t thought of.

Censorship - Perhaps these 7 countries have some requirement for all games to be rated by a government censor. This makes sense because it seems mainly to be games that are missing. The Irish censorship rules are pretty similar to the UK rules, though, so I guess it’s not a perfect explanation, but it’s possible that the process is just taking a while longer. This would mean that the games will eventually come to the store once they’ve been rated.
Some Kind Of Fucked Up Shit with the Phone Companies - It’s possible that it is caused by the phone companies. Maybe they have some previous contracts that they can’t get easily get out of or maybe they want a cut for games downloaded over their network. This seems pretty unlikely to me - why would O2 in Ireland be so different from O2 in the UK? On the other hand though - Irish O2 doesn’t provide visual voicemail while UK O2 does, so the two countries’ O2 services are probably not tightly linked.

I doubt that this is anything but a temporary situation. The advertisements on the Irish iTunes store for Apps show the Super Monkey Ball icon and the ‘Games’ section looks pretty stupid with the blank spaces. If no games were coming Apple would surely remove that section at least. Here’s hoping that it gets sorted out soon.

(No comments but you can email me.)

Update: Games are now available. There are age ratings on them, but I’m not sure if these are the reason for the delay. Still: Yay!

So it’s 2 weeks AFTER the vote happened and I’m...

Wed, 25 Jun 2008 06:54:00 -0400

So it’s 2 weeks AFTER the vote happened and I’m seeing ads like this on Facebook. Are they getting ready for “Lisbon: Round II” or are they just morons who haven’t turned off their ads?

Tour of our new place

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 12:06:56 -0400

Tour of our new place