Marketing Tips for Indie Developers

Dan Wood offers some advice: part 1, part 2.

Evil Is as Evil Does

Jens Alfke, regarding the Eucalyptus rejection:

Maybe you think “evil” is too strong or melodramatic or exaggerated a word for this. Then feel free to substitute something that has fewer loaded connotations to you—“unethical” or “anticompetitive” or whatever. But if you’re one of those who, like me, has applied the “e” word to the past actions of Microsoft, or to groups that try to ban books from libraries, then I think there’s really no option but to use the same blunt language here and now.

Secondly, Alfke makes a good point in the first comment that there can be a big difference between what users think is in the SDK and the reality of what’s allowed.

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25 Best Programmer Comics

Mostly xkcd and Dilbert.

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Sad Mac

Tim Bray:

In the old days, I would have been happily running on the new machine by now, cheerily blogging about my shiny new Mac. As it is, it looks to me like Apple, not to put too fine a point on it, removed a killer feature from a flagship product. This doesn’t feel like a good idea.

I don’t really care that much about FireWire in particular, but with no eSATA and no USB target disk mode, something seems to be missing.

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Top 10 Programming Fonts

Dan Benjamin:

Inconsolata is my favorite monospaced font, and it’s free. Shortly after discovering it, it quickly supplanted Deja Vu Sans Mono as my go-to programming font. I use it everywhere, from Terminal windows to code editors. It has a certain sublime style that’s unique without being over the top, and it looks fantastic at both large and small sizes.

He has some nice samples of syntax-highlighted code. I’ve long preferred ProFont 9, without anti-aliasing. However, I’ve not been able to get it (or ProFontX) to work properly in Cocoa applications, so I’m currently using Monaco.

Benjamin’s top three are all pretty good. Deja Vu Sans Mono is nice except for the zeroes. Inconsolata looks great at larger sizes, but at smaller sizes it has a little too much personality and funny equals signs. If I were going to use an anti-aliased font, I’d probably choose Consolas or Monaco.

Font Font Smoothing Programming

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Drivetrain

Apple has rejected Drivetrain, an iPhone app that controls Transmission. Steven Frank:

Turns out it’s not even because it requires a companion desktop app, which was previously used as grounds for rejection (despite the existence of Apple’s own “Remote”), but because “this category of applications” is frequently used for infringing copyright.

Of course, being a remote control, Drivetrain doesn’t itself transmit any possibly infringing content. Neven Mrgan says:

Here’s another application frequently used for infringing copyright: iPod.

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BBEdit 9.2

BBEdit 9.2 is a nice update:

It eliminates the need for my New Terminal for Window and New Disk Browser for Window scripts.
It’s much better about remembering and autosaving application state.
The bbedit --maketags command is much easier than invoking ctags directly.
The syntax highlighter now recognizes numbers.
The Open Recent menu now remembers folders and groups recent files by type.
Disk browsers can now browse tarballs.

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Knowing Is Half the Battle

John Siracusa:

At its root, my gift was not the ability to draw what I saw. Rather, it was the ability to look at what I had drawn thus far and understand what was wrong with it.

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The PSD File Format

Adobe’s John Nack responds to a code-comment rant by Dag Ågren:

Here’s what I think people want to know: Is Photoshop’s PSD format a goofy, antiquated piece of crap, and by extension is Photoshop slow, clumsy, and/or outdated?…No.

On the contrary, I think that’s simply the question that Nack wanted to answer. Ågren’s points seem to be legitimate, if indelicately expressed and not intended for wide distribution. Nack essentially concedes them, then tries to suggest that someone wanting to read existing PSD files should care about Adobe’s FXG file format. The takeaway: Adobe has no sense of humor and would rather attack the messenger than accept criticism gracefully.

Update (2009-05-06): Gus Mueller makes some good points in the comments.

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FaceSpan 5 Development Suspended

Mark Alldritt:

My reasons for suspending FaceSpan development are many. Chief among them are that I keep missing every deadline I have set for myself. I am now over 2 years into this project and I cannot clearly see how to wrap development up so that I have a product to sell. I also am feeling that in the time it has taken me to do this work, the world has moved on and AppleScript-based UIs are not going to be relevant in the marketplace.

This is a shame because FaceSpan seemed much more approachable than AppleScript Studio, but it does seem like a challenging product to sell. Hopefully, this will leave Alldritt more time to work on his other products.

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iFlash Touch: Rejected

David McGavern:

On Friday, May 1st, I called Apple Developer Technical Support to find out what was going on with the review process, and to see if my earlier comments had been received. They then told me the shocking news that writing an iPhone app that requires a desktop “companion” app was prohibited.

Update (2009-05-07): The person in DTS who told him this was wrong.

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ATPM 15.05

The May issue of ATPM is out:

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Archive for May 2009