You Guys Are Millionaires Right?

shiftyjelly:

Let’s not even get into the long debates you get into with people about whether they should buy your $1.99 app. People will spend hours researching a $2 purchase, browsing reviews, emailing the developer, checking online forums. Then they will go to a coffee shop they’ve never been before and buy a $4 coffee.

For me, it’s not that I’m unwilling to spend $2 on an app, but that I have a kind of psychological block against paying for an app that, statistically speaking, I will probably never use. My guess is that 50% of the apps I purchase only get launched once; I immediately saw that they didn’t meet my needs in some way. Probably only 10% make it past the first month. And this is after I’ve spent some time trying to make semi-informed purchases. It would probably be a more efficient use of my time to research less and buy-and-throw-away an even higher percentage of apps.

I don’t buy coffee, but I imagine the thought process there is that you’re guaranteed a warm, caffeinated beverage. It may not be great, but it will be serviceable. With an app, it’s likely that you’ll have no use for what you just purchased.

On the Mac side, most apps have trials, and I’m quick to spend $20–50 because I can see right away that the app does what I want.

Deleting Dave Winer’s FaceBook Account

Dave Winer deleted his FaceBook account, and it seems to be gone, but now there’s a page with his name and information from his Wikipedia page. It seems that you have to maintain your own profile just to prevent fake spammy ones from cropping up.

The Sketchbook of Susan Kare

Steve Silberman:

Inspired by the collaborative intelligence of her fellow software designers, Kare stayed on at Apple to craft the navigational elements for Mac’s GUI. Because an application for designing icons on screen hadn’t been coded yet, she went to the University Art supply store in Palo Alto and picked up a $2.50 sketchbook so she could begin playing around with forms and ideas. In the pages of this sketchbook, which hardly anyone but Kare has seen before now, she created the casual prototypes of a new, radically user-friendly face of computing — each square of graph paper representing a pixel on the screen.

Signed copies of a book called Susan Kare ICONS are available.

Steve Jobs NeXT Videos

Matthew Panzarino collected some links to videos of Steve Jobs from the NeXT era. (My favorite is probably still the one from WWDC 1997.)