This is great -- I hate having compiler/runtime advances in Mac OS X always tied to the latest platform release. It can take years before your customer base upgrades, leaving you unable to leverage what I'd consider basic language features -- like fast enumeration, or now, closures.
The subject matter is interesting, but what I find most interesting is a blog performing real, 'hard-hitting' local journalism, of genuine interest to a very specific social subgroup.
Keep money per answer out of this. It's amazing what happens when you keep a site like SO working on social norms and avoiding market norms.
Other than money, how do you prevent an expert-exodus as expert users are deluged with simpleton questions? Amidst a deluge of bad questions, there's little value to remain active, as your own questions can rarely be answered, and users aren't providing interesting questions.
Something else is needed to provide a substitute for that value.
Alternatively, you must prevent the exodus by filtering the kinds of interactions/questions that occur. Mailing lists, for instance, have a barrier to entry to serve as a first-pass filter (the subscription), and then a community to enforce community norms.
On the other hand, Stack Overflow is racing to the bottom, so to speak, on the quality of questions and the people answering them.
Either way, money is what would entice me to answer questions on the web. Currently I do it for free on IRC, but only because standing community helps ensure that the quality of questions is reasonable on the channels I frequent.
How much money would make it worth your time? If your expertise is too high / too esoteric for the StackOverflow community, then you should command high prices in the marketplace.
$5-$15 per answer would be reasonable given the limited time involvement.
It's doubtful to me that you could appeal to expert users to exchange time for money when it is better leveraged by consulting and entrepreneurship.
I seem to have enough free time to blow a fair portion of it commenting on Hacker News.
Until I clicked on the link, I was excited, as the comments on monetization lead me think they might be providing a marketplace for me to provide for-fee answers to users.
Unfortunately, this is not the case.
As it is, I don't bother to use StackOverflow. My questions would be too esoteric for the audience/format, and nearly all of the questions I see are boring, easily answerable with a search of the documentation. The questions would be less boring if I were paid to answer them, and then I'd be more likely to find a few gems to answer, too.
If this fable didn't hint at that, what was its point?
That convincing management regardless of your productive output is what matters at the end of the day? Perhaps at some organizations, but it's not a particularly accurate, nuanced world view.
I doubt this story would be conveyed in reverse -- the stereotypical "rockstar hacker" produces vast reams of code that will fail catastrophically, but comes out ahead by, upon 'completion', immediately pushing responsibility for the disastrously buggy code to the "stodgy" enterprise engineers who get called in to maintain the project. The "rockstar" moves on to the next project, where he'll repeat this performance, and the stodgy developers get poor performance reviews.
No, because an "anecdote", by definition, is not statistically relevant.
"Enterprise teams" are not, inherently, profoundly stupid in their practice of software engineering, and not all "hackers" inherently produce worthwhile, quality code.
This completely fabricated fable of software engineering is a simple straw man argument, and I've flagged it accordingly.
I'm sorry but are you kidding here? You think a web developer who already has experience in all the tools used to create a web app is going to spend the equivalent amount of time learning a completely new languange, platform, developer tools et al AND THEN using them to program an app. I'm sorry but that's really a ridiculous thing to say.
As a software developer, Objective-C is just another imperative C-derived language (a pure superset of C, actually), with Smalltalk-decedent OO features. It's not (or shouldn't be) an alien experience.
My comment assumed a baseline software developer proficiency. If simple high-level webapp development is all you've ever done, then of course -- writing an Objective-C application will be more difficult. Perhaps that's a good reason to write one.
As for the rest of your argument,AT&T's Edge connection downloads at around 25KB. So a 1K page (which you claim causes an "unpleasant wait") would download in 1/25th of a second even on a slow connection.
In addition to failing to account for additional resources (the page won't be 1K in total), you forgot to account for latency (there's quite a bit).
As for the rest, my point still stands. Everything you spoke of requires a cracked iPhone which the great majority of people don't have anyway.
Nothing I've mentioned requires a jailbroken phone for any purpose.
It's actually not that good a point. Using JQuery you can get a web app as low as 1k so slow connection isn't that big a problem.
1k is still a pretty unpleasant wait when you're looking for 'instant', and unfortunately, if I exit Safari to use another app (which I often will), Safari will very likely need to reload that page.
Web apps can integrate into most of the iPhone's features like contacts (notable exceptions being location and camera).
Web applications can't integrate with the address book, actually.
The other stuff he mentions like p2p, mDNS, etc... are very specialized applications that to the best of my knowledge only work on unlocked iPhones (I could be wrong though I know bit torrent has been banned from the app store)
The P2P I was referring to is WiFi/Bluetooth zero-configuration phone-to-phone 'networking', for magically connecting applications on two or more phones. It's pretty neat.
A web app is never going to work for edge case style applications but for the majority of web sites it's probably a good idea just to spend a day customizing their site for an iPhone (I've become fond of iWebkit: http://iwebkit.net/) rather than buying a mac, learning objective-c, etc...
I really don't think they should be considered 'edge cases'. There are so many ways that the user experience is better via integration opportunities, speed, and native look and feel, that I don't think anyone should consider a mobile webapp to be a viable replacement.
Webapps are a reasonable substitute assuming nothing else is available and you can't afford to produce a proper application, but I'm not convinced that you'll spend more time and money producing a native app than you'd spend producing an equivalently high-quality webapp alternative.
As an iPhone user, I strongly prefer native applications. They can integrate with the built-in technologies (address book, location, P2P, MDNS, etc), and they don't simply stop working for 30 minutes while I ride the subway.
I'm familiar with game development. I make games for the iPhone in my spare time and I make more money than I ever have in my life, and my apps aren't even popular compared to things like Ocarina or Tweetie or Pocket God.
I'm truly, genuinely surprised, as most indie game developers I know have been lucky to recoup their costs, and fewer have seen any sustained revenue to speak of. Some got lucky, most have not.
What games do you develop, if you don't mind shedding the mask of anonymity? (I understand if not, I'm anonymous here because it allows me to actually speak freely).
At this date in time, I am the model for an iPhone business. A single guy making indie games. It might morph into something different in the future. I imagine there will be a separate path for business applications. Perhaps $30 CRM apps will be sellable in a bundle with enterprise software to large companies. But I don't think end users will ever pay $30 for iPhone apps except for very niche cases. Most people view their phone as an entertainment device, apps are on the same level as ringtones. The market may correct itself by flushing out all the players who can't make a profit on a $1.99 game, but it's not going to correct itself by suddenly having mostly $30 apps on the app store.
Maybe you're right, but I hope not. I'd be curious how you can afford rent on $1.99 game sales, what sort of revenue "more money than I ever have in my life" means, and whether you've seen more than one of your released applications succeed.
If you really care, use a real standards-comformant address parser, most languages have at least one -- Java does. Otherwise you're just wasting your time, and the time of any users you hose with your amateur-hour validation.
I seriously doubt that will happen. People have stopped buying $30 software for their computer, why would they buy it for their phone?
Do you have statistics on that? My wife just bought Balsamiq for her computer without blinking, and that was $79.
Anecdotally, I know quite a few indie and larger commercial developers paying their salary and more on $30+ desktop software. I know that Balsamiq sure isn't hurting.
It's primarily the webset that can afford to subsidize free product on the back of VC.
The iPhone is a platform for cheap apps, mostly entertainment related and games.
Games (even small ones) take a surprising amount of resources to create, from art assets to developer time. Unless your game is a lucky iPhone hit, you just can't cover development costs.
If you want to make a go at an iPhone business, you optimize around that fact. You don't try to drag your existing business model to the iPhone and hope that the market drastically changes.
If your existing business model is "pay the rent", much less "cover payroll", then yes, you're quite right -- you can't drag your existing business model to the iPhone.
We do bespoke development for iPhone customers. They lose money, we make payroll, and we wait for the market to mature. Until it does, the iPhone is a total wash, and don't be surprised when the smaller shops that can't eat the loss start dropping out. It's a gold rush.
$1.99 is less than the cost of a movie rental, but movies have massive leverage across an incredibly large market. This idea that software should only cost $1.99 is remarkably poisonous, but fortunately, the market will correct that.
If that's the case, then the market is unsustainable. Players will fail, causing scarcity, raising the value of applications, and conditioning users to expect to pay more.
Given that conforming with the standard is effectively free, do you have any other justification for your non-conformal position of "I'd say 64 is enough. Anything above is just weird"?
Willfully and capriciously ignoring standard requirements that you think are "weird" results in non-conformal implementations that confound users and other developers attempting to interoperate with your systems. I'm genuinely surprised to be writing a paragraph defending standards conformance -- I'd have thought that this position was basic common sense among software developers.