Archive for November 20, 2014

Thursday, November 20, 2014

MPW’s About Box

John-Michael Bond:

The animation shows the imaginary building blocks of a 3 1/2" floppy disc flying together one-by-one from out of a box. When the pieces have finishing compiling an airbrush machine comes and paints the surface of the disc.

It’s a wonderful piece of animation, lovingly put together and hidden in a menu most users would never see. If you weren’t around for the original Mac OS, or just weren’t programing during those days, here’s your chance to see it.

Alas, the YouTube account has been terminated, but there is still a static screenshot.

Update (2014-11-21): @chucker found another copy of the video.

PCalc Piracy

Filip Truta interviews James Thomson:

You recently said on Twitter (I quote), “according to my stats, around 70% of the copies of PCalc on iOS are pirated.” That’s a staggering number! Especially for a calculator app. Why do you think this is happening? Could it be the $9.99 price tag?

It’s certainly higher than I thought it would be, but it’s certainly not unusual. I’ve heard of people who develop games who are seeing more like a 90% piracy rate! I think there are newer ways to pirate apps that don’t necessarily require a jailbroken phone, and there will always be people who don’t want to pay for things. PCalc has had a lot of positive publicity over the last few months, and I think that’s probably contributing to it getting pirated as well. I don’t think it’s down to the price though – people still pirate 99c apps.

But the other thing is, a 70% piracy rate doesn’t necessarily mean that I’m losing 70% of my sales. Most of those people wouldn’t have bought a copy in the first place, so while it still bothers me on an idealogical level, I am not too worried yet. But, if that number continues to rise over time, then I think it indicates a cause for concern.

With iOS so locked down, you’d think this would be a problem Apple could solve for non-jailbroken phones.

You Can Now Deregister iMessage

Apple (via Josh Centers):

You may need to turn off iMessage if you are now using a non-Apple phone and can’t get SMS or text messages someone sends you from an iPhone.

Finally.

Update (2014-11-21): Jason Marr notes that deregistering does not fix the problem if people reply to old iMessage threads.