Sunday, December 2, 2012

Dash 1.7.2

Dash is an excellent viewer for Mac OS X developer documentation (via Matt Gemmell). The searching and browsing features are great, and it’s nice to have the reference information in an application separate from Xcode.

It’s well worth the $9.99 price in the Mac App Store, but strangely the actual app is free and there’s an In-App Purchase for the “Full version”:

Dash is not free, you will have to purchase Dash using an In-App purchase. Dash is free to download so that you can test Dash out as much as you want, in order to determine if it’s the right tool for you.

If you haven’t purchased, it adds a delay and nag screen when you try to search. I’ve not seen other demo/trial apps in the Mac App Store, probably because the guidelines clearly say:

2.6 Apps that are “beta,” “demo,” “trial,” or “test” versions will be rejected

6 Comments RSS · Twitter

What's also strange is that initially, there was no nag screen, and after updating, at some point, the delay and nag screen were added. I really really don't mind paying for it, but I thought that was a bit misguided.

I did not even realize they were in fact running afoul of the guidelines. It will be interesting (maybe not quite the right word) to see what happens if Apple catches them.

To clarify: initial versions of the app were free and fully functional. The in-app purchase was added later (instead of going from free to paid).

@charles Yes, that’s interesting. I guess if they had gone from free to paid they wouldn’t have been able to charge the people who had already downloaded it.

[...] It’s kind of like an open-source, iOS version of Dash. [...]

[…] can’t believe that Apple is still allowing this free trial with an In-App Purchase to disable the nag […]

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