State of the Meat 2011 Edition
I’ve come to the conclusion that relying on Apple for any sort of syncing solution or general hosting of your data is probably a bad idea.…Well, the solution I’ve come up with is to ignore syncing and instead redesign VoodooPad’s document file format so that it can survive a 3rd party syncing app changing things behind it’s back when VoodooPad is running. And I’m so much happier for it now, and I think my customers will be too.
Some new OS features can be adopted almost for free if the framework is a good fit for your app. iCloud isn’t this way, not if you want a good user experience. It pushes a lot of work onto the app. And some apps may need to be completely redesigned, shoehorned into the iCloud model. Then there are the non-engineering issues of it being tied to the App Store and whether Apple is really committed this time. So I think Mueller’s approach makes a lot of sense, although it’s more practical for certain types of data than others.
Historically for Flying Meat (and most indie Mac companies) the majority of revenue comes in through upgrades and new releases. The App Store doesn’t provide this path, so you have to publish a brand new app to have people pay for your work. Recently Adobe took this route with the Elements 8 to 9 upgrade and as far as I can tell, people didn’t freak out too much.
The old version is gone from the Mac App Store. I’m surprised more people didn’t freak out. Is it still available for those who already purchased? Today I accidentally clicked the invisible “x” button for an app in my Purchases list, and I seemingly would have lost the app if I hadn’t been able to search for it in the store and “buy” it again.
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@finsprings reports that on the Accounts page of the Mac App Store app there’s a link to recover “Hidden Purchases.” I’m not sure whether the old version of Photoshop appears there, but the app I had x’d did.
[...] (thanks Michael) [...]
[...] this situation is not unique to Adobe. It is just one of the higher profile companies that is working around Apple’s lack of support for multiple versions of a [...]
That "x" button needs to go away. I've had customers click that thinking they were uninstalling Acorn from their Mac, so they could try and reinstall it (random trouble shooting on their part). That x needs to die a fiery death.