business - Mike Cohen

Links for 2011-04-28

April 28, 2011 by Mike Cohen

Links for 2011-04-28:

Angry Birds | MetaFilter –
inessential.com: Design + code –
Some holoalphabetisms – in Japanese –
Early portable (?) synthesis: the Hammond Solovox | MetaFilter –
don’t talk yourself out of marketing [Aaron Griffith, [a Weblog by Aaron Griffith]] –
ShareKit : Drop-in Share Features for all iOS Apps –
Amazon’s $23,698,655.93 book about flies –
Why Instapaper Free is taking an extended vacation – Marco.org – Marco gives some very good reasons for NOT having a free version of your app:

Only people who buy the paid app — and therefore have no problem paying $5 for an app — can post reviews for it. That filters out a lot of the sorts of customers who will leave unreasonable, incomprehensible, or inflammatory reviews. (It also filters out many people likely to need a lot of support.)

I don’t need every customer. I’m primarily in the business of selling a product for money. How much effort do I really want to devote to satisfying people who are unable or extremely unlikely to pay for anything?

Posted by Postilicious

April 14, 2011 by Mike Cohen

Links for 2011-04-05 through 2011-04-14:

Inspirational Roundup! 40 Great Examples of App Site Design | Webdesigntuts+ –
Mobile UI Patterns › Activity Feeds –
Recent / iOS UI Patterns –
52 Ways to Promote Your iPhone App –
If you’re not using these, think again. – Who says the best things in life aren't FREE? The past 23 months of running Kuyi Mobile has been one, if not the most exciting learning experiences of my life. Running a business is never a joke. Over the course of running the business, I came across vari
Call Me Fishmeal.: Success, and Farming vs. Mining – You can either see founding a company as something you’re doing because you want to produce good software, or you can see it as something you do so you can sell your stock and make a killing and move on.
Connick v. Thompson: Clarence Thomas writes one of the cruelest Supreme Court decisions ever. – By Dahlia Lithwick – Slate Magazine –

Posted by Postilicious

March 16, 2011 by Mike Cohen

Links for 2011-03-10 through 2011-03-16:

Custom Controls for iOS and Mac OS X – Cocoa Controls – Collection of open source custom controls
Why I am not worried about Japan’s nuclear reactors. | Morgsatlarge – blogorific. – A good, factual, non-hysterical explanation of exactly how a nuclear power plant works and what happened in Japan. Up front, the situation is serious, but under control. And this text is long! But you will know more about nuclear power plants after reading it than all journalists on this planet put together.
Hausa Party –
Why Angry Birds is so successful and popular: a cognitive teardown of the user experience –
In depth: How Rovio made Angry Birds a winner (and what’s next) (Wired UK) –

Posted by Postilicious

February 15, 2011 by Mike Cohen

Links for 2011-02-10 through 2011-02-15:

Open Sourcing My Genetic Data | The Beautiful, Tormented Machine –
HDR: Pushing photography to the limit — and beyond –
NounProject – The Noun Project collects, organizes and adds to the highly recognizable symbols that form the world's visual language, so we may share them in a fun and meaningful way.
All images are free to share.
WWDC Tips –
How did WordPress win? – Movable Type's licensing fiasco in 2004 angered the community and drove users to WordPress.
Movable Type is not open source. WordPress is.
Movable Type is written in Perl, while WordPress is written in PHP.

Posted by Postilicious

January 16, 2011 by Mike Cohen

Links for 2011-01-16:

Alex Payne — Shortchanging Your Business with User-Hostile Platforms – People seem to hate AIR. Wherever you see AIR apps, there are support forum threads opened by customers begging for a native alternative, and usually a moderator sheepishly explaining that they just don’t “have the time” to do native apps for each platform. You see the same thing for popular services that only offer in-browser Flash apps.
10 Useful Web Application Interface Techniques – Smashing Magazine –
Git – DreamHost – Instructions for setting up Git on DreamHost
what color is YOUR moggie? | MetaFilter –
What have you tried? » Matt Legend Gemmell – If you’re a developer and you’re about to ask another developer a technical question (on a forum, via email, on a chat channel, or in person), you’d better be ready to answer the question “What have you tried?”

Posted by Postilicious

January 6, 2011 by Mike Cohen

Links for 2011-01-06:

Validating App Store Receipts – You can add receipt validation code to your application to prevent unauthorized copies of your application from running. Refer to the license agreement and the review guidelines for specific information about what your application may and may not do to implement copy protection.
Receipt validation requires an understanding of cryptography and a variety of secure coding techniques. It's important that you employ a solution that is unique to your application.

You should perform receipt validation immediately after your application is launched, before displaying any user interface or spawning any child processes. Ideally, this check should happen in main, before NSApplicationMain is called. For additional security, you may repeat this check periodically while your application is running.
FriendDA — Slightly more than a hearty handshake –
Simplenote, JustNotes and TextExpander, Note Creation Bliss! –
Clarus History –
Dogcow Lore –

Posted by Postilicious