February 2012
2 posts
3 tags
Run 5k and Run 10k apparel now available
We’ve designed t-shirts and tank tops with the Run 5k and Run 10k logos, now available at the Felt Tip Spreadshirt Store! Check out the t-shirts and tank tops in white or brown with a stylish gold logo.
Introducing Sound Studio 4 tutorials
The first Sound Studio 4 tutorial on how to record Skype conversations is now available on the Felt Tip website. We’ll be working on more tutorials and posting them as we go. Each tutorial will describe equipment needed, give step-by-step instructions with screenshots, and explain relevant tools and filters available in Sound Studio.
December 2011
3 posts
About your audio cues for Run 5k and Run 10k in...
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...
Run 5k is now available on the App Store
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.
Run 10k app is now available on the App Store
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...
November 2011
1 post
About Couch to 5k and 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...
September 2011
1 post
Affordances and a Book about the Atari 2600
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...
August 2011
2 posts
How to Find a Developer for Your Startup
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...
Hire Local
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...
June 2011
3 posts
The week after WWDC
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...
WWDC wrapup
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....
May 2011
1 post
April 2011
6 posts
Response to Marco's removal of Instapaper Free
I recently noticed that Marco Arment no longer hosts his blog on Tumblr. So I can’t reblog his latest post easily, where Marco said:
Why Instapaper Free is taking an extended vacation
Last fall, I conducted an experiment: I quietly removed Instapaper Free from the App Store1 for three days, leaving only the full, $4.99 Instapaper app. Not only did sales increase incrementally, but nobody...
Books on Software
This is a list of books that every software project manager should read. Generally the ones that should be read first are at the top of the list.
On software projects:
The Mythical Man-Month by Frederick Brooks. One of my first books on software projects, it describes many concepts that often show up in the writings of the best software project managers, such as the mythical man-month, the...
Sound Studio 4.1.1 is out
Sound Studio 4.1.1 is now available. Download version 4.1.1.
"I know you've heard it a thousand times before....
baileygenine:
-Ray Bradbury
Sound Studio 4 User Manual →
I’ve updated the User Manual for Sound Studio 4.1.
March 2011
10 posts
“Since Google’s business is advertising, shifting industries away from paying...”
– Kyle Baxter (via marco)
Insidious.
No, ingenious. I meant “ingenious”.
What did I say?
(via incorrigiblerobot)
Slow Company Hiring
My philosophy on hiring is that you should hire someone because they’re a good person and a good fit for your company, rather than hiring just because you need to fill a seat. This means taking the time to find people who are good at what they do and are hungry to learn new things, rather than finding out that your project is slipping behind and you need more engineers, testers, writers,...
WWDC 2011 →
June 6-11. I’ll be there.
App Store Reviews
I must admit to downloading and reading App Store reviews, but it’s because most of the reviews are about how much they love my apps.
AppleScript 'no'
For some reason, AppleScript commands in Sound Studio on Snow Leopard no longer accepts ‘no’ as a boolean value, but it still accepts ‘yes’. What does work is ‘true’ and ‘false’ so I’m changing the AppleScript dictionary for Sound Studio to use that instead. Why do I get the feeling that AppleScript is a neglected piece of technology at Apple?
Slow Company
There’s the Fast Company magazine*. There’s the Slow Food movement. Let’s start a Slow Company movement. The idea is to take ideas such as the lean startup and organic growth and apply it to the companies we run. It’s not going to be a runaway success, but you have a better chance of actually making a dent in the world with your app and making people’s lives better...
Months ago, right after Steve Jobs announced the Mac App Store, I actually had the chance to give Apple some suggestions for how to implement trial periods for apps in the App Store. Someone from Apple asked me to give some feedback. I was busy working on Sound Studio so I didn’t have much time to think about the problem, and the things I could think of off the top of my head were either...
On Counting Calories
Though I’ve made an app that does calorie counting, today I think counting calories alone is not enough. It matters whether those calories are coming from carbohydrates, fat, or protein. And contrary to popular belief, eating fat does not make you fat. Eating sugars and starches (which are easily converted to sugars) will make you fat. And you need to eat protein to build muscle.
The whole...
WatchMarathon Man on Vimeo.
February 2011
4 posts
rands tumbles: Friday Management Therapy →
rands:
At a recent workshop, I walked the group through an exercise where we listed the characteristics of a bad manager.
Here’s the list. I’m wondering what’s missing.
“They don’t know what I’m doing”
“What the hell does he do all day?”
Absent
Asking the impossible
Authoritarian
Bad listeners
…
I’d add: being more lenient with certain people than others, inconsistently...
January 2011
15 posts
Sound Studio 4.1 now available
This update adds support for the FLAC lossless audio compression format, and has other improvements and bug fixes. See the release notes for details. It’s available both on the Mac App Store and on the felttip.com web site, both for $59.99.
If you bought the app through the Mac App Store, just open the App Store to download the update. If you downloaded it from felttip.com, use the...
Installer/Xcode stupidity
In Xcode, the way you create a package to submit to the Mac App Store is by using Build & Archive. This creates an app archive deep inside your user directory. Then you open the Organizer and Share that build to save an Installer package (pkg).
Now, if you want to install and test the app, you run the Installer package. The problem is, the installer doesn’t ask you where to save the...
Sound Studio was rejected again because of a permissions error with the files in the app bundle. The reviewer got a “unsigned app” error when trying to launch the app, and I verified that the problem only happens if you open the Installer package and install it on another computer. The source of the problem was that many resource files in my project had their permissions set to be...
Sound Studio now $59.99 on both stores
I’ve dropped the price of Sound Studio 4 in my web store (on FastSpring) to $59.99 USD, the same as the Mac App Store price, which is now permanently $59.99. If you bought a license at the full price of $79.99 and aren’t happy that the price is now lower, email us for a $20 USD refund (or the approximate equivalent in your local currency). Send the refund request to ss@felttip.com.
...
Sound Studio 4 is now a $30 upgrade for all customers who purchased a v.3 license. I’ve taken down the free upgrade to v.4 for people who bought it after a certain date because that was just a limited-time offer, which was supposed to be just the month just before v.4 came out. Also, only a handful of people took me up on the free upgrade offer.
Enthusiasts love fiddling with things. They love things with lots of options and settings and being able to configure everything to their liking, or even just to try a different setup even if it’s impractical. Just having the ability to spend hours twiddling with preferences and themes makes them happy.
Enthusiasts also tend to write articles and blog and tweet about what they love. When...
Sound Studio 4.0.4 update rejected and resubmitted
Yesterday I got an email from Apple’s App Review team that my update to Sound Studio version 4.0.4 was rejected because the app exited with status 173. This is what it should do when it can’t find a valid MAS Receipt (Mac App Store Receipt).
What puzzled me was that the exact same code passed App Store review when I submitted version 4.0.0, and when I tested it on my computer, it...
Developer Documentation Unclear On CFBundleIdentifier Uniqueness
Developer documentation is unclear as to the uniqueness of the CFBundleIdentifier when used both on and outside the Mac App Store.
The Bundle Identifier, or CFBundleIdentifier, has little developer documentation available as to what is meant by “unique.” For example, if you have a trial version of your app and another...
Title: Mac App Store causes customer confusion with trial versions. Product: App Store Version/Build Number: Version 1.0 (54) Is It Reproducible?: Always Classification: UI/Usability
Problem Details
Summary: Mac App Store causes customer confusion when the customer views an app in the Mac App Store app that has the same bundle identifier and version as an app that exists on the...
Bundle ID resolution
After talking to my friends at Apple, the advice I got is to use the same bundle ID both on and outside the Mac App Store, and to file Radar bug reports about the problems with doing so. This is a change from the consensus I found yesterday, but it’s unofficially from an official source, so I’m considering it gospel.
Separately, I see that some developers decided to go exclusively...
The Bundle ID dilemma
Update: the official word is to use the same bundle ID. See here.
If you use the same bundle ID for both the MAS (Mac App Store) and non-MAS versions of your app, you have one set of issues to deal with. If the same or newer version of the app exists on the computer, the customer can’t buy the MAS version, nor can they rate or review the app, even if they bought it outside the MAS.
If...
Mac App Store versions
Update: the official word is to use the same bundle ID. See here.
I did a little more research and it turns out that if the version number for the Mac App Store is newer than any version number of any apps with the same bundle ID, the App Store will let you buy and update it. So all I have to do is submit a new version of Sound Studio to the MAS, and people will be able to buy it.
And for the...
Mac App Store & Bundle IDs
Update: the official word is to use the same bundle ID. See here.
So the problem is that if you already have a copy of Sound Studio, anywhere on your computer, and you open the Mac App Store, you can’t buy it in the App Store because it thinks it’s already installed. Which it is, in a sense, because the Mac App Store version and all the other versions of Sound Studio use the same...
December 2010
6 posts
PowerPC and Tiger support
Some people buying the Indie Mac Gift Pack have asked about using an older version of Sound Studio with their systems. Sound Studio 4 requires 10.5+ and an Intel CPU. Those people are running PowerPC or Tiger.
I have to draw the line somewhere. It’s a question of how old of a system I have time to support. For every system I say I support, I have to test on it and fix bugs and otherwise...
So you want to hire an iOS developer...
Many people ask me if I can develop their idea for an iPhone or iPad app, or if I can recommend someone. Usually I’m too busy to do anything about it, but I did write something that I think will be helpful for someone with an “idea”:
Generally, a good iOS developer’s hourly rate starts around $200/hr
and can go up to $1,000/hr for the very best, and the better the...