If you have iOS 5 and no longer hear your audio cues when your screen is locked, there’s an easy fix for this.  

iOS 5 is treating things a little differently in terms of notifications, which include audio cues in our Run apps. To get your audio cues working again, you need to make sure Run 5k (or 10k) is listed in the Notifications Center on your phone. Go into your Settings app on your device and go to Notifications. Scroll down and tap on the app. Then, turn on Notification Center, choose an alert style, and turn everything else on (Sound, Badge App Icon, Lock Screen). Your audio cues should work just as they did before.  Now back to running!

Our Run 5k is now available for iOS. It has an all new, original 8-week workout program that is different from the old Couch to 5k app. I’m releasing it as an update to the old app, so it’s a free update from the App Store. I had to change the name and remove the old workouts due to copyright and trademark issues. We will continue to support and update our existing apps as usual.

We’re relaunching our Couch to 10k app as Run 10k, and it’s available in the App Store today! It has the same 13-week interval training program where you alternate between running and walking, and all of the features of the old app. We’ve changed the name to avoid any trademark confusion with the Couch-to-5k program. It’s a free update for people who have already bought Couch to 10k.

We have decided to take down our Couch to 5k and Couch to 10k apps from the App Store due to a trademark dispute.

On Friday, November 11, we received a cease & desist letter from the Active Networks, the trademark holders of “Couch to 5k.” In order to avoid legal action, we have decided to remove our apps, references from our web sites, and and our Twitter accounts related to the trademark. 

We also will remove the ability to download previous versions of the app from iCloud, for legal reasons. We will continue to provide customer support for our Couch to 5k and Couch to 10k apps, but they will no longer be available for sale on the App Store or to be restored via iCloud.

We regret having to do this, but this seems to be the best way to avoid legal action, and we see this as a chance to work on new apps. We plan to keep updating our other apps, and hope to bring more great apps in the future.

Something which the book Racing the Beam, which is about the 2600, got me thinking about was affordances of the kind where a platform’s hardware features end up enabling new types of applications or games that, even though they existed before using expensive or bulky hardware, are now cheap enough and small enough that the typical consumer can use them.

In design, one talks about affordances as the things you can do with an object and how that guides you to do the correct thing. In hardware, it’s similar, except that it’s more about allowing the programmer to do things a certain way. A programmer with an idea but hardware which doesn’t give the right affordances will have an uphill battle ahead of them.

The Atari 2600 allowed for video games to be cheaply duplicated, distributed, and sold, using a cartridge that contained a ROM, instead of having to sell an entire unit for each game. Video games and electronic games existed before the 2600, but sales didn’t get big until the 2600 came along.

The way the hardware was designed gave affordances for certain types of games. Its lack fo a frame buffer, many individual sprites, and other features, which made it look primitive compared to other game consoles which came out in the same era, ended up allowing creative programmers to do things with it that would have seemed impossible when the 2600 first came out. While this made it difficult to do a faithful port of the arcade game Pac-Man to the 2600, it allowed for some great original 2600 games such as Pitfall.

The book is part of a series on platforms. Someone once told me that platforms don’t matter anymore. They must have been a Java programmer. It turns out that platforms matter a lot in terms of what affordances and constraints it has.

When I look back at the affordances of the platforms I’ve programmed on, and look at what new products and platforms came out during that time, one thing has struck me as being true. It’s that when a certain type of hardware becomes cheap enough or small enough, you can create new apps or games which take advantage of that hardware and sell well. It creates a new market.

With Sound Studio, it came out when hard disk prices were low enough and capacities high enough to record an entire album’s worth of music uncompressed. Then with MP3 compression, you could store dozens of albums on your hard disk. Then the hard disks were small enough at that capacity and price to make the iPod feasible as a mass market device.

Sound Studio wasn’t the first computer-based waveform editor. SoundEdit existed long before, but that was before all Macs had built-in audio inputs that digitized CD-quality audio. ProTools also existed, but it only came bundled with their audio hardware. And after you’ve recorded a couple hundred megabytes of audio and filled up your hard disk, you couldn’t do anything else with your computer, back when having a 80 or 120 MB hard disk was considered the norm.

The iPod wasn’t the first hard-disk based MP3 player. I’ve seen the MP3 players based on 2.5-inch hard drives which required heavy batteries to keep it running long enough to play an album and had lots of buttons and a text-based LCD display. I think people focus on the aesthetic design and usability design of the iPod too much when they analyze its success. Its design is one of the factors of its success, but it would have been just another expensive Apple product if Apple did not also jump into the market just when hard disks which had enough capacity, had low enough power usage, were small enough, and were most importantly cheap enough to make the original iPod what it was.

Another product which took advantage of the increasing storage and decreasing price of such storage on computers was the EyeTV. If you didn’t have a huge hard disk, where were you going to store the GBs of video data? Like the TiVo, it required a lot of hard disk space, which was becoming cheap enough that it just came with your computer. Unlike the TiVo, it wasn’t a separate device running Linux that had to be on all the time.

And then when you look at iPhone games, the most successful games took advantage of the touch screen’s affordances of direct manipulation. The games which required the use of a directional-pad controller or joystick, emulated on screen of course, and especially games ported from other systems which came with such input devices, generally don’t do so well. Angry Birds, Cut the Rope, Flight Control and even Words With Friends: all these games work with the affordances that the touch screen gives, instead of trying to shoehorn a D-pad onto the experience.

My Couch to 5k app wasn’t the first one of its type, but it took advantage of the iPhone’s portability and small size. The same app running even on a 11” MacBook Air doesn’t make any sense, because you wouldn’t bring your MBA out on your jogging or running path or to the gym. Note that I wasn’t thinking about this when I was making the app. I just was trying to make a better-designed version of an app that already was in the App Store that looked like someone’s first iPhone app.

When the size, power consumption, and cost of a technology gets down to a certain point, all sorts of new applications become feasible to the mass market. The thing is, news sites rarely analyze the industry this way, but are instead driven by the PR that companies put out. The process by which components become better is a gradual one, and pretty boring compared with the dramas at AOL or Yahoo or Google or Apple.

But if you understand how things work, you can be one step ahead of the people who only follow the news, since they’ll always be chasing after stories from other people who have already done their thing.

I’m going to be on a SXSW 2012 Interactive panel, How to Find a Developer for Your Startup organized by Jon Lazar, along with Michael Gaines and Orian Marx. We’ll be talking about finding and hiring developers, and it’ll be interesting because I’ve been on both sides of the fence, as both a developer and a manager.

Description: Brilliant ideas come every day for new startups. Once the idea has been formed, someone needs to create the applications and websites to make it a reality. Meet some startup based developers and see what inspires them to join up and create the next generation of software.

Questions Answered:

• What does it take to find the right developers for your startup?
• hould you build an in-house team or hire a freelancer?
• Should you work with US based developers or outsource overseas?
• What do developers look for when joining a startup?
• What kind of developers will an equity stake in your idea bring in?

Vote now! (Or later if the Panel Picker is slow.)

Here’s something that I wish someone had told me when I started hiring employees: Hire local. There’s a lot of things that are different when you go from a one-person company with occasional contractors to a company with employees. Managing them is going to be a lot easier since you can talk to your employee in person and get things done a lot more quickly than playing email tag or trying to coordinate your schedules to meet over iChat, not to mention issues if they’re in another time zone.

Managing people is at its core about communication. While some things like sending out notices can be done through email, and IM works pretty well for updating people through the day, there’s a lot that works best in person. You should be having a weekly one-on-one meeting with each employee, and that works best face-to-face. There’s also giving feedback on work they’ve done, discussing goals and performance, and working out plans and schedules for the future.

I used to prefer communicating virtually, and still do most of the time, because we can have flexible hours and work from anywhere. But there’s still some things that work better in person. I’m still working out a good schedule, but typically once or twice a week is what I find good for in person meetings, if possible.

There’s also a ton of labor laws, insurance, and taxes you have to handle, and if your employee is in another state, it just makes everything twice as hard. This is where I highly recommend using a payroll processing company such as Paychex or ADP. They know this stuff and can point out areas to watch out for, and they’ll do a ton of work such as calculating payroll taxes and filing returns. Even if you think you can do those taxes yourself, the risk of making an error or not keeping up with the changes in the tax codes makes outsourcing this task worth spending about $80 per month.

If you have an employee in another state, you have to comply with that state’s laws on unemployment insurance, disability insurance, workers comp, payroll taxes, and any other laws they decide apply to you as an employer. You have to file taxes in both your home state and the employee’s home state. And also make sure you’re not withholding too much or too little.

If you’ve never had employees before, everything is going to be much easier if you can regularly meet and talk to your employees in person. Not only is the employee having to learn new things and get up to speed, you as a manager have to learn many new things, about not only yourself and about the employee, but also about managing people. When you’re not there in person, it’s too easy for things which need to be addressed to go unnoticed. Even both you and the employee are stellar workers, who can get things done on their own, lack of communication can result in lots of wasted effort because the two of you end up going in different directions.

So hire local people, work with them in person, especially when you’re starting out, have weekly one-on-ones, and keep the lines of communication open.

This week, after coming back from WWDC, is shaping up to be the week where I change everything I do because of WWDC. Both Brian and I came away from the sessions and talking to people inspired to do new things. All the little things we thought were important no longer are. It’s not only all the new features and APIs announced that’s inspiring this change, but also hearing from other developers about what they’re working on. I feel a lot more connected with them now.

WWDC is the one time a year that that happens. There are other conferences, but none are as big and focused on Apple platforms as this one, so this is where I feel like we’re all united and synchronized with each other.

It’s a bit hard to capture this fleeting feeling and all the ideas we’ve been generating last week. I’m scrubbing our issue tracker databases to put a bunch of things that aren’t important anymore on hold, while writing down new specifications and issues to turn these ideas into concrete “next steps.”

I’m also keeping in touch via iChat with people I met at WWDC more than before, which is easier for me since in person, I’m not able to think of witty or relevant things to say or ask, but with iChat I can just ask them when I think of them hours later.

Ultimately, though, all these new ideas and the new direction means several weeks of heads-down work which we do individually, without distractions and without too many new ideas. I like this contrast since I do like making things, getting into a flow state, and that feeling of being productive where you can just crank things out.

This was the best WWDC yet, but not because of the sold-out crowd, the long lines, or the dry sandwiches. Rather, it’s the one week out of the year where I get to be in a college-like setting, going to classes during the day and drinking all night, hanging out with people I like. This year I spent more time in labs or in the lobby areas talking to other developers and Apple engineers. Eventually I’ll probably end up skipping all the sessions and hanging out with people, since you can watch the session videos later, but all the people who flew in and all the Apple engineers are only going to be there for a week.

I went to two labs, the QTKit one and the Audio Lab, and because they’re both Mac labs, I had an engineer all to myself for an entire hour in each lab, which was great because I didn’t have a very specific question, but I could tell them about the general problems I had, and what I thought would be a good solution, and they could tell me I was barking up the wrong tree and go into detail about alternative solutions, while going over all the little things that might go wrong.

The sessions were also great, because there were many new features in iOS 5 and Lion. Previous years, many of the sessions were repeats of last year’s or very basic introductory material. With the dark, warm rooms and a boring presenter, I was at risk of falling asleep.

I’m about to board my flight from SFO to NYC so I’ll have to end this here, but this was an amazing get together, with the mood of the people, the content, and all the impromptu stuff that happened making it all great.