Yearly Archives: 2013

powerOne Calculators for All Android Devices, Kindle Now Available

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I’m proud to announce that powerOne calculator are now available for all Android smartphones and tablets, including Kindle Fire. Details and links to purchase are here. I’d like to personally thank all of our beta customers who helped make this a better product. I’d also like to thank Samsung for making it possible!

If you are not aware, powerOne is an extremely powerful and flexible calculator. The calculator itself includes everything from basic math to fractions, feet-inches, matrix math, complex numbers, programmers math, matrices and more. Many of the calculations are split into templates, designed like mini-spreadsheets. There is a collection of over 400 available to download or create your own. Categories include finance, mathematics, scientific, business, investing, real estate, construction and others.

Buy today from Google Play or Amazon Appstore!

10 Thoughts On Converting Apps To iOS 7

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While away I gave a lot of thought to iOS 7 and what I should do as a developer. Here are a few thoughts:

  1. Upgrading an old app to iOS 7 only is very problematic from a customer’s perspective. If the customer chooses not to upgrade he/she can never recover the app if they need to reinstall. There is no way to fix any lingering bugs for that old customer. Maybe the latter isn’t a problem as you are moving on but the former is a major problem. I have a hard time telling a customer I’m moving on and they can never recover our product if they have a device issue.
  2. There are lots of devices that won’t support iOS 7. All but the most recent iPod touch (fifth generation) won’t support it. Furthermore the fourth generation was still on sale a month ago. The first iPad, a number of which are still around, and all iPhone’s not named 4, 4s, or 5 won’t support it.
  3. Furthermore I would bet a number of customers won’t upgrade initially. The change from iOS 6 to iOS 7 is pretty extreme. Many may wait to see the reaction.
  4. I like the idea of developing a new app that is iOS 7 only. It is a wonderful chance to streamline the code, fix any problems, remove feature bloat or fix the business model.
  5. Charging for the new app, if the old one was a one-time purchase, is hard here. I did this once and got killed for it, albeit temporarily. This is a major change, though, so maybe customers will be more understanding.
  6. In addition those old purchases don’t go away like they used to. You can remove them from the store but the customer can still recover them. This changed a year or two ago, which was a smart change.
  7. I’ve been very vocal that one-time purchases don’t work well. Others believe the same. The prices are too low and the revenues too small to support customers long-term, and productivity apps need long legs. I’m contemplating a business model change at the same time we consider iOS 7 only apps.
  8. The timeline is tight. It may not feel that way but if Apple maintains old schedules we are looking at an early October release. That’s only three months away and the summer months go fast. Apple is releasing betas quickly and things are going to change and break and get fixed and we are going to have to keep up with all of that. Not to mention other projects were started and need to be completed.
  9. It may be necessary to contemplate a MVP app, a minimal viable product, that gets your foot in the door with some key features but doesn’t try to include everything from the previous release. This may mean keeping both the old and new products in the store until the features can be added. Of course this means maintaining two apps, one designed specifically for iOS 7 and one from the earlier generation that works on iOS 7.
  10. One thing is very clear though: apps not designed specifically for iOS 7 are going to look awkward and out of place. iOS 7 is a tremendous opportunity to re-think everything that came before.

I know I’m excited to dig into the code… once I can get a few of these other projects out of the way. Oh boy, that clock sure is ticking.

Kenai Peninsula, Alaska

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I’m back from Alaska. Actually, I was back a week and a half ago but was bogged down in trying to get some projects done plus had some family in town. Since the mobile world has been so quiet lately there wasn’t anything urgent. I have a lot of thoughts written down on various topics that I will share over the next week or two, but for now I thought you’d enjoy some photos I took while in Seward and the Kenai Peninsula.

This is my third trip to Alaska, along with my wife, but first for my girls. They are finally old enough (7 and 5) to remember these trips so we hope to start doing them regularly. We flew into Anchorage and drove the 2.5 hours to Seward. We stayed in a place with a kitchen, saving us on food costs, and traveled around the area, including a voyage out on the Gulf of Alaska. I took all of these photos with the iPhone 5 I had in my pocket. Not bad for a point-and-shoot.

I live in the Northwest. We’ve seen mountains here but nothing like Alaska. These aren’t big mountains by Alaska standards where, on the mainland, peaks of 16,000 feet are left off the maps, but they are everywhere. If you ever get the chance to go I highly recommend it.

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Alaska Bound

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When I turned 30 my wife and I went to Alaska to celebrate (actually our second trip there as our first was our honeymoon). We had an amazing time and said when she turned 30 three years later we’d go back. Well, life got in the way. Two kids, a new house, a very different Infinity Softworks and nine years later, we are finally going back. On my way out the door I thought I’d share a number of extremely thought-provoking articles for you to read. This should be enough to tide you over until I return.

Fred Wilson and Mark Suster wrote some great strategy articles over the past couple of weeks. I recommend reading them in order. We have:

Derek Sivers wrote a post on the rules, or rather, the fact that there are no rules called No Rules In This Game. After all if the rules matter none of us would start companies.

Speaking of start-ups, Steve Blank wrote a post called Fund Raising Is A Means Not An End. Too many companies think fund raising is the event. It’s not. The product, the market, the job to be done, those things matter. Fund raising is just a way to get there.

Speaking of product, here is something we’ve all done: prioritized feature lists. Ken Norton writes why they are poison in Babe Ruth and Feature Lists. Ken includes a wonderful example from his days running Google Apps. (via Om Malik)

George Will had a thought-provoking article on the American Dream and the role of education called America’s Broken Bootstraps. In short, it won’t be good enough to have a college degree. In the future, my kids will need the right college degree.

Finally, I’ll link you to two excellent business stories, one on the destruction of Kodak and another on a rising Twilio. I highly recommend both of these, too:

See you when I get back!

Software, The Art Form

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Cory Doctorow as the guest on one of my all-time favorite podcasts, The New Disruptors, said the following:

Don’t quit your day job is advice you should keep even after quitting your day job. The odds are not with you maintaining a career through your whole life. There’s a recurring narrative where someone finds a pop star who was once in the top 10 and they are now working in an office as an insurance underwriter or something. And they go, “Oh my God, how is that possible? You were annointed!” Well that’s not the exception, right. That’s the norm, right. Most people who had careers in the arts where they were at the top of the field ended up just having anonymous lives for the rest of their lives after their stars peaked and after they faded away.

And that’s the people who reached the top of it. The people who reached near the top, ya know I’m in the 99th percentile, the people who got to the 99&5/9th percentile, those people too often finish their lives as university professors or as Vegas performers or fellowships or something but not living in the industry, not continuing to publish. This is the reality of the arts. This is not a new reality of the arts; it’s an ongoing reality of the arts.

When I was in college, the Computer Science program was apart of the math department. Computer Science, like mathematics, is consistent and stable. Computer Science, the academic study, was. In 1996 they were still teaching Pascal even though Pascal wasn’t used much in industry at all.

But once I graduated I realized that Computer Science, the real world form, was anything but stable and consistent. If anything, being a practitioner of Computer Science, wanting to learn and expand on my art, was about as unstable as it gets. At least if I wanted to practice the craft of writing I could use paper or a word processor or a typewriter, all of which can still be found today. Or, alternatively, I could be a Russian writer or French writer. Once I learned the language it was mine to wield how I wished for the rest of my life.

When I graduated from college, though, I chose to hone my craft in Computer Science at the hands of Palm OS. You know the value of being one of the world’s foremost experts on Palm OS code today? Nothing. The skill is worthless.

And that was one of my thoughts last week as Apple introduced an amazing array of new iOS and OS X capabilities, that’s what I thought about reviewing the plethora of announcements at Google I/O just a few weeks ago, and that’s what I think about every time I write JavaScript.

As much as us developers like to think of ourselves as scientists, we are in fact artists. Our craft is being able to take an archaic, confusing language that most people couldn’t understand if they wanted to and turn it into products, into apps, that come alive in our customer’s hands.

Our medium is code, but unlike mediums used in other art forms, ours are constantly evolving and changing, becoming more important and obsolete, more complicated and easier to use, all at the same time.