Kishyr Ramdial

entropy thoughts

Filed under: apple

How do you compete with free?

But iTunes did succeed. Apple's relentless emphasis on simple, attractive user interfaces, backed by Jobs' steely negotiating power in dealing with music studios, produced a streamlined, curated service with which you could download and transfer music with a minimum of fuss. And we did — even though it cost us money and our purchases were bogged down with DRM that constrained what we could do with them.

It turns out that there is something that can compete with free: easy. Napster, Gnutella and BitTorrent never attained the user-friendliness that Apple products have, and nobody vets the content on file-sharing networks, so while the number of files on offer is enormous, the files are rotten with ads, porn, spyware and other garbage. When Jobs offered us the easy way out, we took it. Freedom is overrated, apparently — at least where digital media are concerned.

via time.com

I remember the first time I bought an iTunes track, back in 2007. It was so effortless that ever since that day, every song I downloaded was bought and delivered through iTunes.

The App Store rocks and here's why

The Apple iPhone App Store has always been a big talking point. It's either because of something great, like hitting a major milestone in the amount of apps available in the store; or something not so great, like an app being rejected, and more recently, because major high profile iPhone developers quitting the developer scene completely. 

While those developers' words and actions may have some merit, there a single point that everyone seems to forget: it's a store. Just like any other store. Software developers (or anyone really) can't just create a product, go to a store, and leave it on the shelf and expect a profit share with the store. Whenever you have to sell your product in a regular store, the store has to approve of the product first. How is the App Store any different?

Another argument one could have is that why then won't Apple allow applications to be sold or installed from other stores? Just like how we have multiple stores in real life. Apple only cares about one thing here: the user's experience. The App Store is a single repository of all apps available for it. From a user's point of view, this can't get any easier. When a user needs to purchase and install an app, all they have to do is search for it in one location. And it's not like they're running a monopoly with the App Store - Apple does not dictate the price - the developer/publishers of the app do.

Before the App Store, a mobile marketplace did not exist. Yes. Any store that may have existed prior to the App Store failed miserably - and I'm measuring that purely by user experience. Previous online stores for Symbian and Windows Mobile devices are a good example of this failure.

As a developer of iPhone apps, do I think the approval process is flawed? In some cases, sure. I wouldn't mind (really wouldn't mind) a shorter approval time for my apps. But overall I'm incredibly grateful there's this amazing platform that allows me to sell my apps so easily. And if you follow the store's guidelines, you can too.

MY MAGIC MOUSE ARRIVED! UNBOXING!

Even the packaging is so damn cool! I've been using this mouse for an hour now and I gotta say... man, it's just so awesome. I've never used a more perfect mouse. It's like it's floating on air -- frictionless movement. And don't get me started on the scrolling... magical indeed.
Although, I am going to miss my Mighty Mouse's side-trigger buttons which I mapped to display Spaces. Hopefully a software update will allow more multi-touch actions (like pinch and zoom etc).

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