Stuff I’ve Bought

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I seem to be buying a lot of technology products lately. Here’s what I’ve bought and why:

  • iPad (retina, 3rd generation)
  • Samsung Galaxy SII
  • Samsung Galaxy Tab 10″
  • Nexus 7
  • Roku 2 XD
  • Kindle Paperwhite
  • Apple iPod touch 32GB (5th generation)

The problem with being a programmer is that I am constantly buying devices. The two Samsung devices and the Nexus were specifically to test our new Android version of powerOne, for instance. For Android this “buying devices to test on” thing is a never ending battle. There are way more devices then I could possibly own. For the most part, these three devices sit on a shelf. I pick them up periodically to play around, although the Galaxy SII also serves as the old Infinity Softworks phone line. Of these three, the Nexus 7 is probably my favorite. If I didn’t have so much of my world already geared to work seamlessly with iOS, I could see using this more often at least as a reading device for blogs and basic web browsing. It’s too small to use for note-taking or any sort of long form typing, though, which is the other thing I do with my iPad.

Speaking of iPad, yes the iPad was a long ago purchase, way back in April when it came out. Of all the devices I’ve received so far it is my favorite. I use it hourly and generally is the first thing I grab in the morning and the last thing to get tucked away at night. The display is amazing. I recently had to do some testing on the second generation iPad. I forgot how much better the retina display is. I like smartphones but the technology I’ve waited my whole life for is definitely the iPad.

Roku is a device like Apple TV. I hooked it up to the television and it lets me watch movies, tv shows and stuff like that, streamed rather than live television. There’s a lot of crossover functionality with the Apple TV, which is the one I use most the time as it streams my personal content as well as has Netflix and MLB.tv. I probably wouldn’t have bought a Roku again but we added Amazon Prime after we canceled cable and needed some method to watch its content. Apple TV does not offer an Amazon Prime app yet. I’m still hopeful Apple will open that device for development soon.

The two recent purchases, neither of which I’ve received yet, is the Kindle and iPod. As mentioned before we need devices to test on. Apple and Google give us simulators, replicas of these devices that run on a Mac or PC, but they aren’t exactly the same. Speed is different, there can be differences in how the UI handles, and it is really hard to get the feel for how a device reacts to a finger press without the device itself. We usually try to collect one of each generation of Apple hardware. We have iPhone 3Gs, 4 and 4s, iPod touch 4th and 5th generation, and iPad 1, 2, and 3. The 5th generation iPod lets us test for the taller 4″ screen.

Probably the device I am most excited about getting is the Kindle Paperwhite. While owning a Kindle has allowed me to read more fiction than I have in years, I found the current model, Kindle Touch, a little too dark compared to paper and don’t like to carry and attach a light. At the same time, I don’t like using my iPad for reading at night since the light glows in my face and keeps me awake. The Paperwhite is supposed to fix this as it is not backlight but has lighting all the same. For $120 I’ll find out.

Conspicuously missing is the iPhone 5. I have concerns about my personal use of this device. For one, I want my phone to be smaller, not larger, and I have some concerns about the iPhone 5’s taller screen. I think I’d like to see one before buying. Now this would have been a moot point if I qualified for a discount right now, but for some reason we don’t until December. For $200 I would buy one sight unseen; for $600 I can wait.

The Creative Process Graph

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Great post on the Creative Process by Owen Goss of Streaming Colour Studio:

I’ve spent a lot of time vacilating between “No one else will like this” and “It’s awesome!” He goes on to say the following:

However, in being surrounded with only positive comments from others, it can lead us to feel like everyone else is succeeding all the time, while we struggle away wondering why it’s not as easy for us.

The reality is that it isn’t easy for anyone.

Misunderstanding Freemium

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Gartner reported today that there will likely be 46 billion app downloads, 89% of which are free (via TechCrunch). The trends are clear, and I don’t think there is any turning back.

David Barnard, founder of AppCubby software development house, is seeing the same thing: “The future of sustainable app development is to give away as much value as possible and empower those who receive more value to pay more for it.” It is an excellent article and well worth a read. He even includes an interesting graph that I haven’t seen before. The chart, inspired by Evernote, was created by the founder of Pocket:

In short, if you create more value over time for your customers then you can charge money over time for that created value. Things that decrease in value over time, like food (left), should have a one-time cost.  Items that maintain value over time (center) or increase value over time (right) have the potential of being repeat revenue opportunities for the company creating them. In the second, content must be changing. In the third, content must be growing or value must be improving. David Barnard and Pocket CEO Nate Weiner see a freemium only future.

Freemium — the combination of a free product with paid premium features — is a term invented by Fred Wilson in 2006 but the concept has been around a long time. The term ‘freemium’ is also a problem.

Why a problem? Because it is misinterpreted. There is more than one way to implement a freemium model. One way — the way most technologists think of freemium these days — is to release a totally free app, one that functions free forever, and then sell premium features on top of it. This is exactly what Evernote, DropBox and a few other companies do successfully. It is, however, a very hard road to be successful with and there are very few large successes. Another possibility is to offer a free product with time-limited use. Many web services, like 37signals, have now switched to time-limited models. Of course this model has been around forever in software. We used to call them trials. A third model is to give away functionally limited products and charge for more features. Infinity Softworks has always done function-limited free products, whether that free product was available in an App Store or bundled with a device. Again, this model has been around since the dawn of software. We used to call them Lite versions.

I don’t think I’d advise a company to develop a paid app today. Instead, I’d focus them on finding a freemium model (or another model altogether) that works. The key is remembering that there is more than one way to implement a freemium model, and any of these might work better than any others.

Stuffing Sausages and The Evolution of Products

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The problem with working on something new, that is big, and evolves over time is that the inventors are watching the sausage get made.

Most projects evolve over time. I go out and show the ideas off to someone, a great designer lends a hand and influences the direction, a book makes me think twice about an idea, or a new product shows a better way to do something. This is all normal. So are the rat holes I wander down for a week or two, the misdirections, and the questioning. Always the questioning.

The biggest problem is that every person who sees the new idea has a mental picture of that idea at a certain time in space. The next time that person gets an update, he inevitably carries the previous mental picture with him, and his feedback and impressions are partly built off that. But it isn’t just outsiders who do this. As the inventor, I do too. It is hard to evolve the story when I know the history and carry all the baggage, when I’ve watched the sausage get made. I, too, still present the product the way it was discussed two months ago, not what it has evolved into.

I have to be constantly vigilant, fighting my intuition to study the history, and instead focus on the product in front of me. Because what we have today is so much more interesting than what we had even two weeks ago.