I surprised myself last week by working up yet another new version of x2y. I thought it would be a few months before I had a chance to finish up the optimizations and polishing I wanted to do for 1.5. But another project required me to do some research into animation in UIKit, and thus I couldn’t resist bringing some of that fun into x2y as well.

A short while ago, Foster from Mysterious Trousers wrote a nice piece about the “visceral” elements of some apps. The little unnecessary but delightful things that speak to our gut when using software.

I believe when properly done, a visceral app actually causes your body to release endorphins.

(via mysterioustrousers.com.)

Reading his article, I couldn’t help but think of all the examples of this in the apps that I love most. And I immediately thought that perhaps this was something missing in x2y. Sure, the app looks good and functions perfectly, but could it do a better job of “surprise and delight”? Always.

I had actually thought of adding one particular animation early on in the development of x2y, but I thought it would be way too hard and complicated for someone relatively new to Objective-C to implement. When the swap values button is tapped, I thought it would be cool to have the values actually slide over to their new positions, rather than just immediately change in place. That movement from left to right, right to left, would not only look cool but also serve to make clearer to the user exactly what was happening. Much like the “Genie Effect” in OS X with minimized windows, the motion would actually convey meaning, not just be a cool whiz bang effect. Later, I thought when tapping the double and half buttons it would be cool if the numbers “flexed” a bit, growing slightly and then coming back down for doubling, and shrinking slightly and then growing back up for halving. Reinforcing to the user which values had changed.

x2y animations on the iPhone from Joe Cieplinski on Vimeo.

I thought for sure all of this would be a major undertaking, but UIKit makes this far simpler than you’d expect. And so after a lot of experimentation and fine-tuning to get everything just right, I had managed in a day or two to get all the animations going just the way I wanted. I even added a fun animation for when you add a new Common Aspect, which is particularly nice on the iPad.

x2y animations on the iPad from Joe Cieplinski on Vimeo.

Once I had these cool animations on my iPhone and iPad, I couldn’t wait to get them into the shipping app. I found myself just tapping on the swap button for fun, rather than because I wanted to actually swap the values. It was speaking to my gut, which was a good harbinger of how my customers might react. So I hunkered down and did all the optimizations I wanted to do. I managed to shrink the overall file size of the app back down to under 6MB, and I tightened up some of my code after analyzing it a bit.

The result: an earlier than expected maintenance release, with a few added extra surprises. Not bad for a few weeks’ work.

Hope you enjoy the more “visceral” x2y. I know I do.

While following the conversation about Status Board yesterday, I saw a tweet that made my jaw drop.

@viticci It just doesn’t seem right morally, even if they say it’s built for “professionals”.

— Jack Amick (@jackamick) April 10, 2013

I don’t mean to single this guy out, or anything. But do I really need to explain why this is downright ludicrous?

There is only one circumstance under which a price can be “immoral.” That is if the good being sold is both 1) Absolutely necessary for survival and 2) only available from one source.

As cool as Panic’s new Status Board app is, you can’t argue that you’d die without it. And though there’s no other app quite like it at the moment, many companies could theoretically build something similar and charge far less.

Thus, morality has no place in this discussion. Panic can charge whatever people are willing to pay.

You can call the price expensive, though most companies with the budget for a spare iPad and an HDTV to broadcast team stats wouldn’t agree. You can certainly say that you’re not willing to pay it. But immoral?

The sad part is that this guy is no fringe thinker. He’s close to the norm. Which is why it’s so important for companies like Panic who have a long-standing reputation for quality to stand behind their product and put an end to the senseless race to 99-cents.

The party is long over, folks. Independent developers are watching: You can make an app, charge $10 for it, have additional In-App Purchases that cost even more money, and be quite successful. People will call you immoral. Countless others will complain.

But at the end of the day, you’ve got a decent chance of ending up here:

Or you can keep chasing that 99-cents and see where that gets you.

My first corporate gig was doctoring PowerPoint slides for Investor Relations executives. They’d send me their .ppt files full of bolded, underlined, and horrifically colored monstrosities, and it was my job to turn it all into something presentable. The first part of that process involved stripping out all the terrible formatting they couldn’t resist putting in[1].

I understood their desire to play around with the controls, but the bottom line was that they were making both of our jobs harder. They were spending hours playing with font colors that should have been spent calculating figures. And I was spending hours removing those font colors. I would explain to them, “Just give me text on blank white slides, and I’ll do the rest,” but they never listened. At times it was faster to retype all their text and charts from scratch.

My theory: Business school was teaching just enough PowerPoint to be dangerous. Understandably, advanced PowerPoint techniques and graphic design skills were not part of the curriculum, as there are more vital topics on which to focus in Business school. But just introducing students to the kinds of things you could do in PowerPoint without showing them how to do it well was problematic. They’d be better off teaching students to write out presentations on legal pads and let the graphics department handle all the computer stuff. Or else, if you only have a few hours to show them PowerPoint, teach them how to use Master Slides and Styles, and how to hide the manual formatting tools lest you be tempted to use them.

Fast forward to several years later, and I’m talking to indie devs about how they go about pricing their apps. Time and time again, I hear “supply and demand” and “what the market will bear,” and I can’t help but think that maybe Computer Science schools are teaching just enough business to be dangerous.

It’s so tempting to think that software prices are sinking to oblivion because people aren’t willing to pay for software anymore, but that’s simply not true. Sometimes I feel like I’m talking to the wall trying to convince nice people that making our apps 99 cents or free isn’t going to make us rich. That’s it’s basically throwing money away.

And then along comes Michael Jurewitz with his economics degree and considerable clout in the Apple developer community. I can’t tell you how happy I was just knowing this 5-part series had been written, let alone the joy I felt while reading it. Here was someone with real experience, and most importantly, empirical data[2] to back up what I’ve been trying to tell my fellow indie devs for a while now.

My theory going into this analysis is that the phenomenon of falling prices, as much as we would like to attribute this to the market around us, has largely been a self-inflicted wound.

(via jury.me)

If you’re interested in the economics of app development at all (and if you’re an indie dev, you are required to be interested) you should take the time and read all five parts of his piece. It’s very enlightening.

Of course there are some apps that should be only 99-cents. Of course In App purchase and freemium aren’t always bad things. But the most important lesson to take away from Jurewitz is that apps are not all created equal. That there’s a sweet spot price where revenue is maximized for any app, and that number is different for every app. And the decisions we make about which apps to build should be at least in part influenced by a careful analysis of future earnings potential.

I can’t claim to be a business genius. My degrees are in Secondary Education and English. But I know enough to know I should get my advice on business matters from business experts, not other developers who know as little as I do. You need to break out of the echo chamber of other devs commiserating with each other and listen to people who have actually made a decent living at this thing.

I find that indie developers tend to be 1) generally very nice people, 2) extremely smart 3) hard working problem solvers. Laziness is not a trait you often find in this group. And so I would encourage developers, the next time they’re tempted to spend a free few hours toying around with that new API, or learning another language (both good pursuits, by the way), to try to find themselves a good econ 101 book or enroll in a business class or two. I know I will.

As Jurewitz points out in his piece, we’re in this thing to make money, whether we want to believe that or not. The top goal may be to just keep making great products, but you can’t do that without sufficient revenue.

1. I suppose when your job is to play with numbers all day, you’re really starved to show some artistic creativity occasionally. If the company had paid for these guys to take a figure drawing class on company time, just to let them scratch that itch, I think it would have been a good investment.  ↩
2. The charts Jury presents in his series are, by his own admission, only based on a small sample of data. But it’s real data, and it’s the kind of data any one of us can collect and analyze for ourselves. The more we start doing this and sharing our findings with the community, the better off we’ll all be.  ↩

I know the trend lately is to suggest that Apple is not moving fast enough. That it should be releasing brand-new groundbreaking products every year or two. That iOS needs a complete design overhaul so it won’t be so “boring.” Where’s the Apple TV? Where’s the iWatch? And so on.

Down with Skeuomorphism! Flat Design FTW!

Forget all that. What Apple really needs to do is slow the hell down.

The Mac was released in 1984. The iPod in 2001. The iPhone in 2007. The iPad in 2010. Sure, the revolutionary new products are coming faster now than they used to, but is that a good thing?[1]

Apple has introduced some incredibly cool technology over the past several years that hasn’t come close to reaching its potential. FaceTime, Passbook, iBooks Author, iCloud—just to name a few—were all so promising when they were introduced. But most of them have failed to be completely successful, not because they aren’t great ideas, but because Apple isn’t doing a whole lot to either improve or evangelize them.

If the pattern used to be “release, then iterate, iterate, iterate,” it seems like Apple is not giving itself enough time for the “iterate” part of that process. It’s being pressured to move on to the next thing. And that leaves us with a lot of half-baked products and a ton of unrealized potential.

Let’s take a look at some of these in more detail.

FaceTime

The first time you use FaceTime to talk to your family members from across the globe is a pretty magical experience. We’ve all seen the commercials and gotten teary-eyed. Anyone who has used FaceTime can see the value in making free long-distance video calls, right? But what’s holding FaceTime back from wider adoption?

When Jobs introduced FaceTime, he said that it would eventually be an open standard, that anyone could use the same technology and thus it wouldn’t matter if your kids or wife or whoever also had an iPhone or iPad. You could call people on Android, Windows, etc. What happened to that? Did the standard get rejected? Did Apple ever bother submitting it?

And why is FaceTime still a one-on-one conversation? I can do a video iChat with three people over AIM, for crying out loud. And I can’t share my screen during a FaceTime call, either. The Mac app hasn’t been updated since it was in beta, really. And the carriers are only now opening up and letting us use it over our cellular data plans. Considering how long FaceTime has been around, it’s stunningly similar to what it was at launch.

Update: Rene Ritchie from iMore has informed me that Apple is in the midst of a lawsuit involving FaceTime, and that may have had a strong effect on Apple’s ability to improve the technology, and to open source it. That certainly would explain the lack of progress there. Thanks for the tip!

Passbook

The four times I’ve used Passbook were some of the most delightful retail experiences I’ve had. Who wouldn’t love the idea of never having to worry about losing paper tickets or waiting in line at Will Call again? Every time I buy tickets to a movie, concert, or comedy show, I scan the confirmation email, hoping to see a Passbook link. And more often than not, I’m left disappointed.

I’d be using Passbook a lot more, except few companies seem to be adopting it. This one is a real head scratcher, as from what I can tell the technology isn’t difficult to implement. It appears as if Apple actually got the hard part right, but no one at Apple is selling it enough. I know that Passbook is relatively new, but is anyone out there pushing companies to try it? Does Apple even have Evangelists anymore?

It would help if Apple Retail at least adopted Passbook for Apple Gift Cards and in-store pickups. Talk about eating your own dogfood.

Update 2: @hmk on App.net pointed out that last November, Apple did start allowing online Apple Gift Cards to be transferred into Passbook. The physical cards you buy in Apple Stores and other retail locations are still not transferrable, however.

iBooks Author

Phil Schiller said Apple wanted to reinvent the textbook with iBooks Author. And what have we gotten since? Is Apple taking this book revolution seriously anymore? Maybe it is, but it’s hard to tell when Apple has been basically silent about it ever since, minus one update that didn’t address most authors’ needs.

Maybe footnotes would be a good start.

iCloud

Lots of stories lately about how Apple is blowing it with iCloud, so I don’t need to belabor the point here. Everyone seems to agree that contact, calendar, and preference syncing is mostly okay, though not perfect. But the real issue is more complex data sync, which is both broken and next to impossible to implement.

iCloud needs developer adoption, and right now the top developers are telling everyone to stay away from it. This is a huge problem for Apple. I know the tendency for Apple is to think of users first, then Apple, then the devs, but this is one case where putting the dev first is actually going to help Apple and the users more. If Core Data sync is truly unfixable, replace it with something better under the hood. Keep calling it iCloud, because no one outside the developer community will know you changed anything. They’ll just be happy it started working.

Conclusion

Behind every one of these products is a brilliant idea. This is not a Ping situation, where Apple saw it had made a mistake and quickly cut it loose. Every one of these and many more could easily become world-changing, competition-killing features with the right amount of polish and some proselytizing. But Apple can’t do that if it starts to adopt a more Google-like “throw it all up against the wall and see what sticks” attitude. This would be harmful not only to the users who get burnt as their favorite new technologies die on the vine, but also to Apple itself as people start to lose their faith that everything new Apple does is golden. It’s also destructive to the talent within Apple who come up with these things. You can’t retain talented people if you abandon the projects they work so hard to deliver.

When the iPhone was first released, and it didn’t have cut, copy, and paste, I wasn’t worried. I wasn’t worried there were no third-party apps. I knew that would all happen eventually. I want to be just as sure about Apple’s newer products.

Even on the hardware side, we’re just scratching the surface of iPad adoption. There are far more people who don’t own a tablet than who do. It’s clear that tablets are destined to become the primary computing device for most people; but not if Apple is already putting all its attention on wrist computers and not addressing the shortcomings that make the iPad impractical for average users’ needs. The current iPads are awesome, but they’re not done. There’s plenty more to improve.

If Apple took the year and worked on half of its existing prodcuts rather than trying to introduce new ones, they’d be doing themselves and us a much bigger favor. If they spent the year fixing the unbelievably sloppy bugs that still exist in iOS and Mountain Lion (I’m talking boneheadedly simple things like drag and drop on the Mac), rather than bringing five new half-baked apps like Podcasts to the platform, our phones and our laptops would be better at surprising and delighting us.[2]

I’ve loved jabbing Adobe for its many flaws over the years, but when they took a step back with Photoshop CS6 and spent the majority of the release fixing all the teeny little annoyances we were complaining about for decades rather than peppering it with a thousand useless new features, you could feel the collective joy from the user base. We were thrilled that Adobe was finally fixing most of the broken stuff. Apple would be wise to take some time to do something similar with iOS and OS X. All those little irritations add up, and every new product you introduce that doesn’t get more love later is yet another breeding ground for discontent.

Maybe that’s not sexy enough to gather all the right headlines. Maybe new features in iWork for the first time in seveal years won’t keep Wall Street or the idiot analysts happy. Maybe the competition is too fierce to afford the time to slow down and get some perspective rather than plowing forward at breakneck speed. (I seriously doubt it.) But all this rushing, all this spreading of resources too thin is starting to show. Allowing pressure from others to set the pace of innovation at Apple would be a very costly mistake.

1. Personally, I think the iPad was released a few years earlier than it should have been. Jobs wasn’t going to be around much longer, so it made sense that he wanted to see it out in the real world before he passed, but the more I use my iPad mini, the more convinced I am that the mini would have been what Apple released as the first iPad if it had waited a few more years to refine the product to its usual standards.  ↩
2. The release of the new and improved Podcasts app actually gave me hope. Most of the press only cared about the killing of skeuomorphism, but the more significant UI changes and new features in Podcasts demonstrated that Apple knew exactly what was wrong with the app and how best to fix it. If Podcasts is an indication of where iOS is going in general, then I’m not worried. Let’s hope we’ll see more of this sort of methodical polish in the near future.  ↩

When I released x2y 1.0 last year there were only two major features it didn’t have that really bothered me. The first was full iPad support, which I managed to add in version 1.2. The second was the ability to customize your Common Aspects list. That is being added today in version 1.4.

Michael Simmons says you should “plan your 2.0 but ship your 1.0.” And that’s pretty much what I did. While the last thing I wanted for x2y was for it to be one of those “my first app” apps, something coddled together by a newbie just as an experiement while learning Objective-C for the first time, the reality is that x2y was my first app. It was put together by someone who was learning Objective-C for the first time. If I wanted to ship it, I needed to make hard decisions and leave out the things I either didn’t yet know how to do or that would be too much work to get done in a reasonable time frame. As long as I went back and added those things I envisioned in later versions, I knew that the app would fulfill its promise of being best in class at what it does. I had no intentions of abandoning my first app at 1.0.

Adding iPad support would have been possible in 1.0, but not the way I wanted to do it. Adding the ability to add, remove, and reorder, the Common Aspects would likewise have been something possible for me to do in 1.0, but I’m glad I waited. Between 1.0 and 1.4, I implemented a lot of back-end changes that made storing that custom list easier and more stable.[1] (Lesson: sometimes a feature, even an important one, is best left out of the app until it can be implemeneted properly.)

At this point, I’m comfortable claiming that I’ve spent more time working on an aspect ratio calculator for iOS than anyone else on earth. And I hope it shows. Along the way, I’ve learned a lot and made myself more valuable to my cohorts at Bombing Brain. I’ve also become a better designer, more sympathetic to the needs of the developers with whom I collaborate. Add to that the customers who have found the app as useful as I do, and I think overall, the project has been a great success.

This is not to say that I’m all finished with x2y, though. There are other things I will certainly add to it. And I think the next update will take a step back and try to optimize some more. But with version 1.4, x2y has finally become the app I originally envisioned. And that makes me very happy, indeed.

1. Special thanks to Tim Cochrane, god of code and all around nice guy, who helped me out with understanding how tableview editing works in iOS. He certainly gave me a push in the right direction when I started implementing this feature.  ↩