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The market was highly profitable when it was small supply / big demand and you had good odds that Apple would hand you tons of visibility. Now it's big supply with a terrible signal to noise ratio.

To succeed, it seems that you now either need a mountain of luck, or a killer marketing engine and a fair amount of luck. Mathematically, it seems unattractive compared to other ways of applying the same time and skills unless you have something you're obsessed with building and want to produce irrespective of the outcome probabilities.

E.g. a $1.99 app pays at $1.393, so you need to move 34893.75 paid copies in order to clear a $50,000 gross. For SaaS and the same target, you only need 208.33 customers at $20/mo. The capture difficulty is not identical between cases - but if you have good marketing and are assuming serendipity on either side, it's quite feasible to hit 208 customers. Furthermore, it's often easier to grow once you get there, and it's quite possible to charge at much more than $20/mo/customer.

Mobile apps are great, but not a "for profit" activity for me. I'm all for doing them for fun or ad hoc, and if that takes off - great. But it seems to be a very difficult business model compared to applying similar resources elsewhere.
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Whatever actions you take they should aim to regain traction. My point is - the car's response is non-linear in such circumstances and linear responses don't help.
You can find on youtube videos of drifting cars. You can see there how complex your response (steering + throttle + braking) should be with respect to the car's state on the road.

If the plane stalls it goes down. Ponting it upwards to not go down will make it stalling even worse. You didn't have any speed to begin with and now the angle of attack is reducing its speed even more.

(Don't assume de-clutching works if you did not test it in a safe env)
I think both Google and Apple made the right design choices at the start. They just made different ones is because they had different business goals.

Google wanted Android to be ubiquitous and free to quickly evolve into whatever it needed to be to be in order to capture territory in the mobile device world. That means supporting a wide range of devices, technologies and, most importantly, partners (both hardware, software, carriers, etc.). So Android was designed for flexibility and has extension points everywhere (input frameworks, sharing, alternative browsers, launchers and so on). Google gave up performance along many dimensions in order to maximize Android's adaptability.

Apple is very different. They have a vision and want to build that vision as precisely as they can because that is what has driven their success. That means Apple doesn't want hardware partners. And even at the software level, thsat means they are very careful about who and what they allow into their user experience.

You can see this in how they built new features for iOS 5: Apple added a split keyboard for the iPad rather than adding support for alternative keyboards. They bought Siri rather than exposing relevant extension points. Apple baked Twitter into iOS 5 as a one-off, rather than riffing off of Android's sharing (as they did with notifications). And so on. These are all business decisions, not technical ones (as Cydia often proves). Instead, iOS's technical architecture flows from Apple's goals in the same way Android's flows from Google's.
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This is awesome. Please HN, give us more hacks like this instead of yet another "X in Pure CSS3/WebGL".
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Nice design! Can I ask where you got that header background image from?
$7.50 is just the straight minimum wage, regardless of industry (varies from state to state). Hospitality workers in the US earn less than that (think I heard one say it was about $2.50).

US Dept of Labour says federal min wage is $7.25:
http://www.dol.gov/dol/topic/wages/minimumwage.htm
I don't believe OP is saying right the same thing three times. He's saying that quite often, one has to write something that is almost the same as this other thing, and later yet another thing that is almost the same.

The first time you write it, just make it work. It works or it doesn't work. Chances are, yes, there's only going to be one of it. So making it "as right as you can" I assume means "it works". "Its reusable" however, is not necessary.

As soon as a "ball of mud" is being created, that is your moment to refactor. If you aren't doing that, then that is your choice. It is not possible to argue that taking an action which causes "development pace to slow way down" is a situation where refactoring would cause a deadline to be missed. Not refactoring will cause the deadline, and many more, to be missed.

I'm in agreement with OP and nupark on the rule of 3.
Not really. OnLive is the future for gaming not games in a browser....

Edit: Hmm a question, does the game use your hardware? Or is it rendered elsewhere?
Replying to provide follow-up detail: I dug into the executables and it looks like it uses OpenTK for rendering and FMod to sound, instead of using a port of XNA. Both are freely available, so that's a pretty simple path to doing a similar port for other XNA games. Neat.
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The only major problem I see here is the app store itself. Discoverability is a huge problem... It is the one that I am most shocked that Apple has done nothing about. I routinely have trouble finding apps that have been released, and it is easy to get lost in the crowd. My company has released a few apps (we contract for other guys) and it is almost pure luck which ones end up picking up steam (certainly not our best work).

I don't know the android market well... it seems to be better, but only on the margins. I am surprised that noone has come up with a better way.
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This post basically amounts to: "There is no problem with graphics on android, it was designed to work this way because of the open nature of android, and other excuses"

Well, the design is broken then. Clearly, it is possible to achieve a smooth UI as demonstrated by iOS and have a solid and stable system. This post is actually worse than saying "we can't fix it" -- it's denying a problem exists in the first place, because "hey, we do it just like iOS." Except it doesn't work like iOS.

I recently went back to iPhone because I got so frustrated with Android's jerky UI on my 1-year-old phone (Galaxy S). I went back to a iPhone 3GS that runs iOS 5 faster than the Android ran Froyo (which, btw, I had to jump through 30 different hoops just to upgrade from 2.1). The takeaway is this: Android lost a customer because of slow, laggy UI, and I'm sure I'm not the only one.
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Thanks for the info, I'll update the blog post so.
It may just be the (in my opinion at least) bad typefaces Android ships with, but you're the first person I've heard say that Android's text rendering is as good as iOS's... Perhaps it's also that most of the Android devices I've used have had worse displays than my iPhone's as well, but I've not found Androids text to look that good...
I won't say it's been easy, but it is not unreasonable to support the same application from 10.3.9 through 10.7. Anything much older though is very difficult; many APIs in the OS only became sufficient in 10.3, and it wasn't until 10.3.9 that Apple made the compiler's C library a shared object (which was of huge importance for forward-compatibility).

There are side effects to supporting PowerPC however.

To run a modern app on a PowerPC machine you need a Universal binary. And the binary is often the biggest part, meaning half the app's bloat comes from data that modern Macs don't even need. What's worse, 10.3.9 and earlier don't actually support Universal binaries so unless you require 10.4+ you will also need to include a PowerPC-only binary. At that point, roughly 2/3 of your app's disk bloat is entirely because of PowerPC support. In these days of App Store updates and other downloads, it's becoming a little harder to justify adding extra megabytes to an app that won't benefit most people.

The developer tools are also now falling behind. SDKs have been disappearing slowly over the years anyway, but now you can't even build with the 10.3.9 SDK unless you use the Xcode 3.x environment; no Xcode 4. You're also using GCC, so you can't take advantage of LLVM and some other nifty new things. This definitely starts to cause some headaches.

So basically, for the next year or so PowerPC has some life left, but beyond that it will probably be impossible for an app to support both modern Macs and PowerPC Macs without extraordinary effort.
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Is it just me or does anyone who seriously thinks any app that resembles "photoshop, but on your phone" is going to be successful really have a strange perspective on what people use their phones for?
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I was so confused thinking to myself "Where's the next dot?!?!"
Maybe flashblock isn't good enough, but when combined with noscript, it didn't let anything on that page slip through.
Topically enough, I just found out[1] the importance of the themes point. A wordpress theme that had been installed on my wife's blog (not even the one she was actually using) included a file for thumbnail generation[2] which had a security hole found in it in August.

I just noticed that my second link goes to the same website as this article. :)

[1]: http://davidlynch.org/blog/2011/12/vulnerable/

[2]: http://markmaunder.com/2011/08/01/zero-day-vulnerability-in-...
As someone who spends a significant amount of time reverse engineering how iOS works, that is incorrect. Currently, the iOS keyboard is managed by the app itself (and I agree: this was likely chosen originally for performance). However, iOS does not expose any APIs that would break by moving this out of process, and in fact, many parts of the UI while inside an app are rendered and displayed out of process, by a separate application (in this case, the window manager, "SpringBoard"): the "Notification Center" is one, but also the "multitasking tray" and the little overlays you get when you change the volume.

The reason that the keyboard is required to be implemented "from the system up" is that Apple idea of an "App Store" is fundamentally opposed to the idea, not because of any technological restriction. Apple only sells "apps" with "icons" (by choice), but this gives them one fundamental advantage: all apps are identical, and completely self-contained. I don't agree with that — I use a jailbroken iPhone, for one. But I definitely do see the value for users who don't know what the idea of "an alternate keyboard" would even mean.

(On a jailbroken iPhone, I could likely move the keyboard out of process with a week of work; Apple could surely do it even faster. They just don't have any need to: there is no possible situation where, to them, the "flexibility" of alternate input methods is superior to the mental simplicity of just selling an "app" with an "icon".)
It would have been awesome seeing this being created.. Did he start out with a large version? Did he refactor the whole thing a lot? What functional compromises did he have to make and which were the most creative ways of drastically shortening it? No matter how useful or not it is for others, its an amazing feat, I'm sure his brain got working.., well done!
If this is true then they must be only location testing new Kindle subscribers.
I purchased my first-gen Kindle a few years ago and have been purchasing US books without a problem since registering a US address soon afterwards.
There is an option under "Manage your kindle" -> Country Settings where you can select your country. Mine is currently set to US and I dont have a US credit card or IP proxy etc.
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> the reason why developers are shackled to Objective C is to make sure processes finish in human time, and this is fundamentally a performance bottleneck in mobile hardware.

This is completely false. You can get good performance with high level languages like lisp. It doesn't have to look like C to be fast and to be possible to optimize it well.

The whole "writing low level code is faster" mentality is WRONG for 99% of apps.

The software game industry is wrong too.

Abstraction is a good thing, not a bad thing. Abstraction helps us write better code, and can help improve performance. Abstraction is not something to sacrifice for performance; in general sacrificing abstraction hurts performance because the bottlenecks are things like humans understanding what's going on, being able to write good algorithms which is harder with lower level code, and how long it takes them (so how much time is left over to analyze and fix code bottlenecks).

Low level languages waste time while making things harder on programmers. And they do this to no particular benefit.

None of this is to say that Objective C is terrible. It's certainly a lot better than C or C++. It has some good abstraction capabilities. But there is absolutely no reason we couldn't use a higher level language on mobile devices and get better performance for less developer time.

(The biggest real obstacles are things like the unpopularity of lisp -- it would, sadly and irrationally, mean less iOS devs and hurt Apple -- and the lack of high quality programmers who understand these things available to hire to make it.)
iOS has multiple processes on the system using hardware acceleration at the same time, and always has. A few examples are the system-rendered status bar at the top of the screen, or the "Notification Center" that you pull down from the top, or even the little volume adjustment popups. All of those are hardware accelerated and rendered out-of-process in the system UI manager ("SpringBoard"), not inside the app.

Both of those have smooth scrolling and animations, at the same time, overlayed on top of each other. I don't think there's anything here in iOS that shows the lack of "multiple GL contexts"; and I definitely don't think that is a significant contributor to making anything slower.
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I mostly agree, but take it from voice of experience, having web application available does not magically lead to two hundred people giving you their CCs and sticking around for a year. You have to roll up your sleeves and market. This is often much, much harder than making the actual application.

(I think the App Store gets a lot of ink because people have this notion that Apple does the marketing for devs like you. Which is true, in approximately the same sense that the MBA does marketing for basketball players like Shaq.)
Be sure to take a look again with a phone running Android 4.0 when those are more available: the new "Roboto" typeface is pretty good on more hi-res secreens, especially compared to the "Droid Sans" they were using before.
> But it won’t run on anything less than an iPhone 3GS.

This is a general problem with mobile given how fast the hardware is moving along. And given that the 3GS is what, ~2.5 year old hardware? I don't think that it's crazy that an app won't run on anything less (I do think it's crazy that Apple still sells the 3GS). And I think consumers also kind of expect that if they do have older (pre 3GS) hardware, things are going to be slow. Also, despite the overall evilness of American cell carriers, it is kind of helpful to us mobile developers that they do their best to enforce a 2 year upgrade cycle with hardware.
I'm surprised that the first nine comments didn't mention the easter egg in the lower right hand corner.
On iOS, all standard rendering is done in a single context by the Core Animation window server which lives in SpringBoard. Only when an app adds an OpenGL ES layer to the view hierarchy does a separate context need to be created. When that happens, the render graph is split into subgraphs that are rendered to surfaces and displayed as overlays (with SpringBoard rendering all the standard layers and the app rendering the OpenGL layer)
So let me understand, you think that, say, the laptops pictured here:

http://www.google.com.au/search?q=samsung+laptop&tbm=isc...

are faithful copies of these ones:

http://www.google.com.au/search?q=macbook+pro&tbm=isch

I just don't see how you can remotely draw this conclusion.
For whatever reason, it's good to know for the future. That is, it's probably a good thing to remember when future legislation (like today's new SOPA) comes up. I totally agree that the whole industry-written legislation Thing is lame.
Getting 10 questions right may not be statistically more significant than just answering randomly. I would calculate this myself, but I'm going to bed, however, just eyeballing it makes me think this is quite possible.
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What about design the success of which makes it obvious only in retrospect?
I thought that was precisely what IP was there to protect. If the design becomes successful but is still not obvious to competitors, would IP be needed to protect it?

For the record I don't support IP.
How is Objective-C a lot better than C++?

What do you mean by "the software game industry is wrong too"?
As others have mentioned, one line feeding small cache lines is probably closer to reality, for the reasons that you mention -- buffering so that the cashier is always occupied.

The main goal is to prevent a single "price check" from jamming an entire line of people -- keep the queues at each station as small as possible so that most customers can route around the blockage.
Looks like the app is just a bookmark for a site that does user-agent sniffing and locks everyone who isn't using Chrome out. Is everyone okay with this now?

I'm a little concerned for the Web if this is the way things are heading.
Thank you so much for bring this to my attention. I have now changed it to LeagueGothicRegular.

I apologize for any harm I may have caused with the previous font. Please let me know if you are having trouble viewing the font.
"For a generation of coders accustomed to limitless managed memory, high-level programming abstractions, and thousands of deeply functional opensource libraries, mobile is a step back to the Byzantine world of Commodore 64s."

This made me chuckle. Maybe if you define "generation" as "this year's college output" then you might be right, but if we're talking "generation" as in the past lifetime of software development then it's nowhere close.

Only in the last 5-10 years have we seen the rise of the well put together framework.

Also, I have no experience with iOS, but the Android framework is pretty damn nice from the perspective of somebody who actually lived through the C64 days!
Looks like the Lean Startup philosophy doesn't work for hardware.. ;)
This may be true for mass-market apps, but we have had a lot of success selling high quality, useful, niche-market apps priced $5 and up. The App Store makes it insanely easy for people to buy something that seems useful to them, whereas they would at least think twice before paying for a webapp subscription.
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If your product is that good , Apple does your free promotion on its sites,partners sites and Apple ad network sites for free, App store is just as beneficial to small players as large. You just have to create something remarkable and worthwhile to catch there attention.
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Oh I thought his mistake was "moving to stripe" and this post about about how he was going to correct that.
An anecdote:
I was fortunate to attend a primary school in Australia where the headmaster was very keen on helping both the low end and the high end students. The main work for the gifted students had almost zero budgetry requirements; it was a weekly class with assorted thought provoking questions and projects led by one of the existing staff members.

Obviously there was a time cost involved in having someone do that instead of other duties, but that would not have shown up as extra budget.
Magically, no. But given the same marketing resources behind either, the SaaS case seems to be more reliably attainable. Or stand-alone software. Or contract work.

For SaaS, it's also important to model things like trial conversions, turnover, etc. which don't appear in a single-sale case. There are a lot of differences. But the odds still seem better there.

And of course I am completely overlooking the "what about ads" question, mainly because you need a ton of installs before that starts being a significant amount of money. Better than not, helps feed conversions, but doesn't change the equation for me.
> Unlike Facebook connect, however, there is a specific plan to move this process off Mozilla's servers and onto your browser and your web frameworks.

Hm, how would this work? I mean right now I already have account in Mozilla BrowserID service and if I want to log in I just need to allow or discard login window. But in case if somebody else has hosted it, I'll have to register again, right? Then how is it better than just regular login and password?
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The article merely says that to make progress in a field, your best bet is to become an expert in it first.
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