My Writings. My Thoughts.
I’m OK, You’re OK: It’s cool to be an early iPad adopter
// March 11th, 2010 // No Comments » // Mac OS // Mac OS
Filed under: iPad
I’m not sure there’s a polite way to put this, so with all due respect to Smart Money, let me say: Well, of course.
According to the writeup, waiting a few months before buying your iPad “could cut your bill substantially.” Author Kelli B. Grant quotes Rob Enderle, who points out out that early technology is issued with premium pricing and is often “riddled with glitches.” While those might be valid reasons to wait, there’s not much evidence for Enderle’s assertion that “the first iPhone owners were pretty unhappy.” Aside from the price drop, first-gen iPhone buyers (like me and Mike S.) have been pretty darn happy.
The early adopter tax, along with any associated tech risks, has not escaped the notice of most tech enthusiasts. In the end, it’s not much of a factor. We don’t buy early because it’s a good deal. We don’t buy early because it’s fiscally sound. We buy early because the technology is cool and we simply cannot or do not want to wait for our preciousssssss to finally come home with us.
We are the People Who Stand In Line.
In my case, this is an hereditary condition. I blame my father, who would bring home the latest gadgets to an adoring family. We’d gather around the latest technology, glowing in its radiance, having an utter blast using toys that no one had ever heard of, let alone bought. We were the first family on the block (and possibly in the state) to have a microwave, a fax machine (the size, may I point out, of a small car), a personal computer, or a hand-held programmable calculator.
It wasn’t just cool. It was awesome.
Thank you Dad, for being an early adopter. Thank you for showing me the way of the technology geek. Thank you for teaching me that you have to live life in the moment — because if you don’t seize today and play with it, tomorrow will never come.
Sure, something better and cheaper is always going to come along some day. Sure, the bugs will work their way out and the prices will work their way down. But if you don’t hop aboard the adoption train, you’re never going to get to Techsville.
Me? I’m going to buy a first-day ticket and have my fun from the get-go.
TUAWI’m OK, You’re OK: It’s cool to be an early iPad adopter originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 11 Mar 2010 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
GDC 2010: Backflip Studios’ year in the App Store
// March 11th, 2010 // No Comments » // Apps, Mac OS // Apps, Mac OS
Filed under: Gaming, Software, Developer, App Store
First, he talked about what Backflip did right last year. He said that he’d hired a talented team to work on his applications, and that the company had focused on distribution, which they’d “leveraged heavily” — the more people playing their games, the better. They’d kept production cycles short, kicking out apps in no more than 12 weeks, and he said they’d made the good decision to “design for the medium” and the audience, making shorter, casual games that took advantage of the iPhone’s hardware and touchscreen.
He also talked a bit about the balance he ran between “house ads” (using ads in their free apps to try and create paid app sales) and outside ads — during the months of December and January of this year, he pointed out how he’d balanced house ads to try and take advantage of the “holiday jump” in sales. As you can see in the slide below, even though he had to take a hit in actual ad sales, he saw a huge boost in App Store sales by using his free app to encourage sales of the paid app Ragdoll Blaster. Farrior said this was important: as an App Store developer, you have to leverage everything you can, not just depend on sales numbers for revenue.
He showed another interesting slide as well about “download catalysts” — specific events in the life of his app that encouraged major boosts or drops in downloads and sales. Apple’s “What We’re Playing” section in iTunes gave a big boost to app sales (which is something we’ve heard echoed from many developers here at the show), but the biggest boost actually came from when he used the free app to advertise the lite version of his paid app — the spot marked as “RDB Lite House Ads in Paper Toss” below. Users downloaded the free app, saw that there was another free app to download, picked it up, and liked it enough to buy the paid version. Again, he made it clear that even if you’ve got a paid app on the App Store, using “free impressions” in a free app can encourage sales.
One more thing to note from the chart below: the app’s price drop did almost nothing. Farrior again echoed something else we’ve heard: price on the App Store doesn’t necessarily matter as much for sales as most developers think it does. The main factors seem to be quality and promotion — if people know about your app and like it, they’ll buy it almost independent of price.
One more thing to note from the chart below: the app’s price drop did almost nothing. Farrior again echoed something else we’ve heard: price on the App Store doesn’t necessarily matter as much for sales as most developers think it does. The main factors seem to be quality and promotion — if people know about your app and like it, they’ll buy it almost independent of price.
Farrior also went over what went wrong in the past year. His company had a lot of problems with Harbor Havoc 3D, a paid app that they intended to be a “deeper, better version of Flight Control.” Unfortunately, development ran a little long on the game, they missed some key features (there was no saving of the game’s state when you kicked back out to the homescreen — “I don’t know how we missed that,” Farrior admitted), and by the time it finally came to market (after an Apple rejection that wasted some press coverage they got), it got lost in the mix of line drawing games.
Additionally, Harbor Havoc actually suffered from the lite version release: Farrior said the lite version cut sales of the paid version in half. He says they’re still working on figuring that one out — there are a few levels in the paid game, and he mentioned possibly “picking the wrong one” for the lite version. But at any rate, Harbor Havoc, he said, shows that you “can’t make an OK game and count on impressions” to pick up the slack. Before you even start thinking about splitting up revenue streams, the product has to support it.
For the future of Backflip, Farrior says he wants to grow the company — this year, they hope to release five to ten free apps per quarter “to keep the pipe wide and the impressions high.” They also want to test out in-app purchases, from adding extra content for players to possibly a model where they offer “a 99 cent buyout” to completely remove ads from their apps. He’s also interested in turn-based gaming — he says that Zynga and other companies have experimented with that form elsewhere, but that they’re not quite there on the iPhone, and there’s room for someone else to be. And he’s also interested in licensed content — even a simple game that would otherwise be anonymous can benefit from having a name or brand attached to it.
The panel was a very frank look at what Backflip Studios has done on the iPhone in the past year. Farrior mentioned that one of the things that drew him and his company to the platform was that he’d seen people who’d never played games before (his mom and sister) looking for game experiences on the platform. Clearly, their success is a result of providing exactly those experiences for customers.
Additionally, Harbor Havoc actually suffered from the lite version release: Farrior said the lite version cut sales of the paid version in half. He says they’re still working on figuring that one out — there are a few levels in the paid game, and he mentioned possibly “picking the wrong one” for the lite version. But at any rate, Harbor Havoc, he said, shows that you “can’t make an OK game and count on impressions” to pick up the slack. Before you even start thinking about splitting up revenue streams, the product has to support it.
For the future of Backflip, Farrior says he wants to grow the company — this year, they hope to release five to ten free apps per quarter “to keep the pipe wide and the impressions high.” They also want to test out in-app purchases, from adding extra content for players to possibly a model where they offer “a 99 cent buyout” to completely remove ads from their apps. He’s also interested in turn-based gaming — he says that Zynga and other companies have experimented with that form elsewhere, but that they’re not quite there on the iPhone, and there’s room for someone else to be. And he’s also interested in licensed content — even a simple game that would otherwise be anonymous can benefit from having a name or brand attached to it.
The panel was a very frank look at what Backflip Studios has done on the iPhone in the past year. Farrior mentioned that one of the things that drew him and his company to the platform was that he’d seen people who’d never played games before (his mom and sister) looking for game experiences on the platform. Clearly, their success is a result of providing exactly those experiences for customers.
TUAWGDC 2010: Backflip Studios’ year in the App Store originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 11 Mar 2010 14:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
More suggestions of multitasking in iPhone OS 4.0
// March 11th, 2010 // No Comments » // Apps, Mac OS // Apps, Mac OS
Filed under: OS, Software, Developer, iPhone
Developers have found further evidence of multitasking support for 3rd party iPhone apps in the latest beta (3.2 beta 4) of the iPhone SDK, and suggest that it will become a reality this summer.9to5 Mac reports on a new line found deep within the latest iPhone SDK. Specifically, SpringBoard.js has a reference to a “multitasking dialog box” that did not appear in version 3.1.3 of the SDK; it seems that it’s new to version 3.2. Of course, there’s no assurance that this refers to 3rd party support for multitasking, but it is new.
Additionally, Appleinsider’s souces with “proven track records” state that Apple has developed “a full-on solution” for 3rd-party multitasking which will be a part of iPhone OS 4.0. No specifics were given on how it will be pulled off or how it will address the two main concerns: battery life and security.
Let’s assume that Apple’s plan addresses the security issue, but battery life still presents a problem, one that was supposedly addressed by Push Notifications. Apple’s remote notification service allows applications to offload polling processes to web servers. By keeping the update algorithms working off the device, the iPhone’s battery is spared. Certainly the iPhone itself must take on the task of keeping all of those apps up and running.
It should also be noted that iPhone OS does not use a paged memory model. That means, multi-tasking applications must compete for the same memory space, making it more likely that apps will receive memory warnings and even crash when they use too much memory. That’s not an issue in the one-app-at-a-time space, but a real problem with multitasking
Of course, the iPhone OS is already fully capable of multitasking. In order for non-Apple apps to participate, Apple must lift the current restrictions within the OS. That’s something the company won’t do until the iPhone engineers have devised the best and safest method. As for iPhone OS 4.0, Appleinsider notes that it’s got “a ways to go.” Hopefully we’ll have an answer in July.
TUAWMore suggestions of multitasking in iPhone OS 4.0 originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 11 Mar 2010 14:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.