Let’s say you’re a developer producing applications. Your livelihood depends on applications sold and you really want to get the best penetration for them.

How much would you pay for:
a) no need to set up a web shopping cart
b) no need to pay for bandwidth and hosting
c) greatly reduced need for marketing
d) reduced need to ‘package’ an app
e) listing on a web store that will be in front of about 7 million customers at launch.

Apple wants thirty percent (though they’ll host your free app for free). For this thirty percent, they’ll approve, list, maintain a reviews database, process payments and send you the income monthly.

Some people think this smacks of greed but I’d counter that it smacks of reality. If you’ve spent a lot of time working in software but not in the retail side then you have probably very little experience of the costs. We are agreed that Apple is a publicly traded corporation and therefore needs to turn a profit. We’re going to have to agree that the App Store will be a hot trick for software distribution.

So let’s look at the competition. Who else hosts software for download like this?

The obvious candidate is Handango.

From Electronista:

Small developers who sell less than $250,000 in gross revenue will see exactly half of their income stripped from each sale — up from 40 percent, Handango reportedly says. More profitable firms will see even more money siphoned away, with all businesses selling between $250,000 and $1 million supplying 60 percent of their revenue and all larger outlets conceding 70 percent. The notice will be made public within a few days and should see the new distribution agreement take effect by March 15th, the alleged source indicates.

Handango makes Apple’s 30% seem like a bargain.

On the other hand, Mobihand gives developers 80%. What do we get for that extra 10%? I’m guessing we get placement on the device itself. Mobihand claims to have the lowest rates in the industry for application hosting.

MobiHand will pay to Content Provider 80% of Net Receipts occurring at www.mobihand.com and 60% of Net Receipts at all other channels.

So, Mobihand will charge you 20-40% of the cost of your software for hosting the sale depending on how and where they bought it.

Even at 30%, Apple’s deal is no strings, no nonsense and is going to have the advantage that every piece of software you see there will work on your iPhone.

And it’s shitloads better than Handango.

At some point last night, Apple’s development servers fell over and died. These servers can hold 40 000+ concurrent download streams but there were so many people downloading the new iPhone SDK that the whole server became unresponsive. After several hours of trying, I finally got a connection at 11 pm and left the SDK and iTunes videos to download overnight, which they did. At the same time, I watched the video of the introduction of the SDK and demos from AOL, Saleforce and EA. As it drew to a close, so did my eyes.

• This morning I installed the SDK and started to read what teh internets was saying about the day before. There are guys from Apple on Twitter providing links and snippets of info to help people get started. And of course, teh internets have spoken.

  Jason at 37signals sounds off on his vision for the iPhone.

  “What we saw today was the beginning of two-decades of mobile domination by Apple. What Microsoft and Windows was to the desktop, Apple and Touch will be to mobile.”

  Steve Job’s Fortune interview (which I covered here yesterday) talks about how bad it feels to not be able to capture market share even though you might have a much better product. The iPod shows that it’s possible to capture a market by crafting a good product. Apple’s history has been full of examples of how to lose a market in the past so it’s nice to see them taking the lead for once.

• TUAW reports that iPlayer is actually working for the iPhone. Content is limited but I’d encourage everyone with an iPhone to give it a go.
  

  “A limited selection of shows from the iPlayer have been made available to UK residents on their iPhones. … At the moment only the BBC-produced ‘Whistleblower’ documentary seems to be working from the iPlayer website, with content being streamed-only via the iPhone’s built-in QuickTime player “

• Apple has posted the video of the SDK Roadmap here so if you have a spare hour or so, give it a go.
• From the iPhone Human Interface Guidelines
  

  Only one iPhone application can run at a time, and third-party applications never run in the background. This means that when users switch to another application, answer the phone, or check their email, the application they were using quits.

  This is a serious consideration when you’re managing things like editing documents or wanting to save progress in a game. There has to be some continuation - do you ‘journal’ progress? Are there spare cycles in the CPU to do a quick save every second?

• We had a bit of an emergency meeting in the wee small hours this morning over IM regarding the futures of our software development efforts and we’re going to publish that news in a few days.

According to Macrumors, the iPhone SDK will be announced on March 6th.

“Please join us to learn about the iPhone software roadmap, including the iPhone SDK and some exciting new enterprise features,” Apple said in an invitation sent to reporters.

Are we to assume Apple has licensed ActiveSync?

Are we going to see a demo of SAP’s iPhone client?

What about Sling? iChat? iPlayer? Over-the-air Calendar syncing? Push email? PDF Reader? File Manager? Skype?

Okay, tonight I sent out a document to a few friends. 1.6 MB sent out to my email server. Whoosh. Some of my friends have very limited mailboxes from their ISP. Some only 30 MB, some as high as 50 MB. Very few are unlimited. I used to be worried about emailing out attachments because no-one likes waiting for attachments to download.

But the message I sent didn’t just go to my email server. The email was sent, but the attachment was sent to my file server. This meant the document didn’t actually leave my network. In it’s place, there was a URL to my file server. The 1.6 MB didn’t go anywhere near my mail server and it only left the file server when the recipients clicked on the URL. As the file server was on my LAN, the transfer was quick and seamless.

For me, my file server is public so the files were sent out of my network eventually. If you’re part of an internal team and would never send attachments externally, then this would mean you could more easily secure your files as they never leave the network!

Anyway. I’m now addicted to Rickshaw.

Rickshaw began life as an idea to help some of Mac-Sys’s customers who were in need of a method of sending large attachments. Sadly the local broadband and email providers put hard limits on the amount you can send in a single email. This made life very difficult for some. The original name of the app was going to be “UnfURL” which, as you can tell, is incredibly unwieldy and would only really reach out to geeks like me. And what the heck would the icon be like?

Yes, this is a solution built to resolve a problem. How to send email attachments without clogging up email servers.

The consensus wasn't to go live with the new site straight away after all but to create a better impression on the public by waiting on the final design and within no time at all Jordan had worked his graphical magic and delivered the goods.

I was supplied with a .psd mockup and got busy with Photoshop. I hadn't used this app in a while and it took some time to relearn how to use it but I managed to cut things up and proceeded to get stuck into the CSS.

Again I had to revisit some skills I hadn’t used since I started my current day job and when I looked at my first iteration in Internet Explorer I nearly cried.

Areas of difficulty I had were mainly concerned with how different browsers implement the box model and I also had to jump through some hoops to get opacity working but the end result is a consistent look across Firefox 2.0.x on Windows & Mac, Safari 3.0.x on Mac and IE 6.0.x on Windows. I haven't had a chance to test it with IE 7 but I imagine it is as broken as it's younger sibling

I've already been working on the release process so there's just a few minor tweaks to go and the new site will be available in production.

Pop on over to eirepreneur:

Gareth Coen and colleague Diane Roberts were inspired by the Enterprise Ireland bash during Paddy’s Valley to offer a similar event here in Ireland. Gareth, based in Silicon Valley, and Diane, based in Dublin, recently started a consultancy firm with the goal of helping bridge the gap between Valley and Irish tech start-ups.

If you want to know more, and save money, read on.

I remain sceptical about this approach, still likening it to trying to make Ireland into Hollywood by shipping a couple of casting agents over here but if you’re in charge of a tech startup and you’re running the kind of tech that would benefit greatly from a step onto the first rung of the ladder then you should register immediately using the secret code provided and enjoy.

Wil Shipley is planning to start something new.

Golden Braeburn is an attempt by Wil to change the way that Mac ISVs (Independent Software Vendors) work. In essence, you get screwed by shopping cart hosting companies, you get screwed by merchant account holders, you get screwed by card processing companies, you get screwed when you try to build your own shopping cart and trying to keep current.

In essence, you get screwed.

So, Golden Braeburn is about unscrewing you.

Cool. Let’s see what happens.

[I so have to create a company with an breed of Apple in the name. I’m such a fanboy.]

NiMUG are having another meeting!.

They’re also looking for some Professional Mac users who might want to show off a demo of what they do with their Macs. Or why they use the tools they do.

Anyone fancy a few minutes of free advertising?

Jens Alfke’s latest blog post rambles about a couple of things but finishes on something that I really empathised with:

Apple engineer: …and the layout needs to take into account ligatures and contextual forms, where adjacent letters change glyphs depending on neighboring characters, or even merge into a single glyph.

Sun engineer: C’mon, is this important? How many people need advanced typographic features like that, anyway?

Apple engineer: [after a pause] Well, there are over 900 million of them in India alone, and another 200 million or so in the Arabic world.

Sometimes it feels like I’ve been bashing my head off a brick wall for, well, years. Motivating people to not do ‘half-a-job’ is actually hard.

Yesterday I almost had a stand up argument with a guy in my team in $BIG_COMPANY on the definition of ‘complete documentation’. I want documentation that can be read and understood by novices and managers. He wants it to be opaque enough so that you require understanding in order to work with it. In the end we sat down and he demonstrated it to me and I tried it. Within about 5 minutes we hit the first stumbling block in his documentation. He asked if I had the database interfaces set up. I replied “The what, the who and the where?”. So we need to add a piece about database interfaces. Then we needed to add another piece about how to log into the server. Then how to run an update. Then how to publish the updates. Then how to check the updates have been completed. In all, the additional bits were more than twice the original document and spawned two more wiki pages. In the end he agreed with me, the documentation was half done but the journey was a lot harder than it should have been.

Writing technical documentation is not an art. Writing it for non-technical users in order to help them learn is not an art. It just requires removing assumptions.

When building my second office in Mac-Sys, we had a square room to modify and the original assumption was to put a single wall, parallel to one of the other walls, in. By questioning the assumptions (that a single wall, parallel to another wall was the only way to go) we put in a ’shaped’ wall which provided us with nearly 50% more wall space in a room where wall space was a premium (for shelving, storage, desks, etc).

If you’re in a job you don’t like and your choices are (or seem to be)
a. leave
b. suffer
Then you really should be looking for c.. I can’t tell you what c. is for you but when I was in Nortel it was as a simple as bringing in a laptop to work with me and increasing my productivity (and reducing my frustration with Windows NT). There may be ways you can change your work day in order to improve your work life. Would working part time from home make a difference? Would time-shifting your work day by an hour help? (I much prefer working from 07:30-16:00 as it removes a LOT of traffic from my commute).

Remove your assumptions and consider new ways.

There is always a c.

I’m preparing to push my code for the new Infurious site into production so we can start selling our first application, Rickshaw.

The site’s not too pretty but It Works and our freshly recruited designer Jordan has some interesting ideas for the next iteration. All the important stuff is present: people can download Rickshaw, purchase a license and the license details will be generated and mailed out to them. I’ve just had a dry run of this scenario and it all looks good.

Thankfully Aidan has been at hand and steered me away from over-engineering the project and ending up with just a mess of unfinished code

Doing this and holding down a 9 to 5 I’ve found difficult and the progress has been painfully slow but it will all be worth it.

Watch this space!