Wired Up And Fired Up

I can absolutely concur with him when he says, "What I was selling before the promotion was exactly the same as afterwards." Even on the day of the promotion I received about the same amount of sales that I'd expect on any normal, rainy, Autumn day.

Like Steve I received a hike in the number of feature requests, bug reports and questions. Although not so many that I couldn't keep up through the day, but then Relaunch is an order of magnitude simpler than KIT, so I guess that the scope of the questions I had to answer was somewhat smaller. I also didn't shift 1,500 copies of my app, although I was pretty pleased with the number of sales it did get.

And I suppose that brings me onto the economics of the whole thing. Relaunch is $5 (MacZot price was a little under $4) and John Gruber says on Daring Fireball -

"$10 is not enough money to charge for professional quality software. If you, the developer, don’t think it’s worth ten bucks, you really should just release it as freeware."

The weird thing about this comment is that I've been having this conversation with myself for a while. My company is, for the most part, funded by my consulting work and Relaunch was an experiment (originally priced at $10). It quickly became $5 because initially I received some whining and negative feedback on VersionTracker about the price. At the time, by cutting the price, I felt like I was doing everyone a favor (including me) and my logic was something like, 'Well, if ten people are prepared to pay $10 for it, I bet a hundred will pay $5'. Was I wrong? Probably.

It never occurred to me that it wasn't 'worth' $10, it just seemed like a good idea to make it, you know, cheaper. You always assume (or at least I do) that when you see shops with big SALE notices in the window and hordes of people queuing to get in that they must be raking it in, when in reality they're probably closing down. Can you tell that I wasn't an economics student?

I mentioned that Relaunch was an experiment. I actually wrote it to scratch an itch I had with software update rebooting the computer whilst working on another app (coming soon...) The whole launching Snapshots of apps part came later, then the reopening documents came a bit after that. So I guess it's grown a lot over the past couple of months and during that time I've also been working on internationalized versions and new features. I'd never released a shareware app before (just freeware bits and pieces such as noodleboard and Ninjar ) so I wanted to see how it worked and I don't think I've ever had a complaint with regards to the quality of the software (quite the opposite in fact). So far I've learned about marketing shareware, setting up payments, software updates, roughly what level of support is required and when, how much bandwidth you need and so much more...

And, despite my relative naiveté and the pricing faux-pas it does sell reasonably well.

However, in terms of a learning experience for me it's been awesome...

p.s. from next, say, Wednesday it's going to be $89.99 a copy. Send your complaints to Daring Fireball, I'm using the Gruber Theory of Software Pricing in lieu of having any clue what I'm doing :)

You know those Wikipedia warnings that get in the way of a good rant? Well, Cracked.com have a bunch of more accurate wikipedia warnings.
Some of them are quite funny...

A neat Relaunch trick was pointed out to me recently by a user on MacZot. Essentially, if you use Relaunch on more than one Mac say, one in the office and one at home, you can store your snapshots and documents on a USB key and carry on your work when you get home.

The basic idea being, if you're working late on a project you can save your documents to your USB key, take a Relaunch Snapshot and save that to your key. Unplug the key and shutdown your office mac. Go home. Insert they key and launch everything back up where you left off. Assuming of course, that you have all the applications you were using in the office at home as well (Relaunch isn't about you getting free copies of Photoshop from your boss :).

It's a neat trick and one that I never actually thought of. Thanks MK, whoever you are!

In a move that's either crazy or inspired MySociety and the government have launched an online petitions service.

I've no idea what the outcome of this will be, or indeed if anyone at Whitehall will even take notice, but there's certainly some worthy causes.

Here's a few I've signed, there are probably more that I should - let's hope that they have some effect, eh?

Scrap ID Cards
Stop using the threat of terror to pass laws that are illeberal and ineffective
Create an exception to copyright law to allow for private copies of personal use, format shifting etc.

I broke my Motorola Razr a while back, I'm not sure what happened to it exactly but it was probably related to my habit of leaving it in my back pocket and sitting on it. Still, I never really got on with the UI, it was pretty clunky for what looked like a phone from the future and I needed a change. I have drawers full of old mobile phones and have been using a Nokia 6600 as my backup, but it's big and old and scratched and a bit broken from my dropping it a few times.

So it's down to Phones For You Are Us and see what I can get for free. "I can't really justify spending money on mobiles when they give them away for free," I explained to the (now) somewhat crestfallen sales man. So he left me with five or six plastic models of phones to play with in the hope that I'd get bored and wander off. I didn't. I already had it in mind that I was probably going to get another Nokia and my price limit of free precluded most of the fancy ones. However, I liked the 6233 and after an hour of waiting for T-Mobile to give me the OK walked out of the shop with a new phone.


A Nokia 6233, yesterday.

"And is it any good?", I hear you ask. "Yeh, s'alright", I reply. It's got pretty much everything I've ever wanted from a phone, except...

It doesn't sync with iSync (yet). This has happened to me before (I'm always on the bleeding edge of free phones, it would seem) and anyway it's not normally a big deal as there's usually a work-around. After a bit of googling I found http://web.mac.com/the_reamer/iWeb/S60/iSync.html with instructions on syncing your Nokia 6233 with iSync. It's FREE, works perfectly, is made in the UK and it comes with a nice icon of the phone that will be more than adequate until Apple adds the required support in themselves.

The site also had Nokia themes which you can buy to make you phone look like a mac. Given that the iSync plugin was free I figured I'd buy one and here it is (sorry it's a bit blurred but I couldn't get the autofocus to do it's thing on the phones screen...)



OSXy themes for Nokia 6233, E61, N80, N73 and N93 are available here http://web.mac.com/the_reamer/iWeb/S60/Buy.html

Relaunch adds TextMate support. I know a few people have asked for this and it's nice to be able to do things that people ask for.

So, Relaunch 1.3.5 is an incremental update that adds support for TextMate. Enjoy!

When it's two words taken out of context by Amazon to spin a fairly negative book review into a positive '...very useful.'