Okay, so I have just set live the new theme I have been putting together.
It’s very beta at the moment, and is bound to have all sorts of issues, so please bear with me while I sort them out.
Oh, and it probably won’t work at all in IE6 for now (call that an educated guess). I’ll sort it out when I have some time.
From the reCAPTCHA website:
“reCAPTCHA improves the process of digitizing books by sending words that cannot be read by computers to the Web in the form of CAPTCHAs for humans to decipher.”
I have seen and used this ‘brand’ of CAPTCHAs many times – but I had no idea that they were using them as a form of human OCR. Incredible.
Like pretty much every iPhone 2.0 user, I have spent a bit of time recently browsing through the app store. Whilst I’m not entirely comfortable with some aspects of it’s distribution model, overall I’ve got to say it’s a pretty sweet way to find and download applications.
If I’m unsure about an app, I’ll check out the reviews. Any commenting system like this always has a small proportion of idiots on there, but for the most part I’ve found the reviews helpful (although generally the total star rating is less useful than the individual comments). However there is one type of comment that really annoys me, and I have seen it a countless number of times in the reviews of some of the simpler, cheaper applications on the app store:
“This app should be free.”
Excuse me? Should be free? Why is that exactly?
Any developer who puts their time into building an application, for whatever platform, is entitled to seek some renumeration for that effort. If they price their application too high, they won’t sell much. If they price it too low they may not make the profit they desire. But that is for the market to decide, and their success at the price they choose will essentially be dictated by the relative quality and usefulness of their application. No-one should feel guilty for charging the price of a can of coke for an app, even an incredibly simple one. They have to pay to get accepted into the developer program and their programs listed on the app store, remember.
It is absolutely NOT the place of someone who has never written a line of code in their life to criticize a developer for charging a small fee for their application. Even a simple one takes time to code, test, submit to the app store and maintain. But some people just don’t get this.
Why is this type of comment so prevalent on the app store but completely absent from online shops like Amazon? Because there has been a precedent set on the app store whereby some applications, even fairly complex ones, have been distributed for free. But the fact that one developer has decided to give the fruits of his labours away should have no bearing on another developer’s pricing. In fact often the free apps are a way of selling the other ‘paid’ applications that the developer offers for the desktop platform, so they may even increase the developers revenue in the long run.
So no, this application should not be free. If you think otherwise then maybe you should think about how much your time is worth, and when you last gave some of that time to producing something to give away to others. Not recently, I’ll wager.
Okay, so the blog is back, replacing the one page stand-in I had put up because I didn’t feel I could continue with the blog anymore. Flip-flopping like a fish out of water, I know, but i didn’t realise how much I would miss not having some place I could scribble down my thoughts.
So I’m going to be writing the odd post, maybe a review or two of a few things that I have been trying out, and hopefully I will be cross-posting a few articles that I have written recently on my employer’s blog. It’s going to be all pretty relaxed, and I’m not going to get worked up if I don’t find time to put anything up for a couple of weeks or so – basically I’m saying don’t expect anything too regular.
As you have probably noticed, it’s a plain-jane vanilla Wordpress install at the moment (using the Dropshadow theme from Brian Gardner), as I wanted to get it back up asap. The design is pretty much done however, and just needs me to find some time to html/css it up and to put together the custom bits and pieces that I want on here. Should be done before too long if I don’t decide that I want to throw it all away and start again.
I might eventually migrate over some of the content from the old blog – but to be honest I am not that bothered, the little that was there was all feeling pretty stale to me;. I kinda feel like starting afresh with a nice clean slate anyway. If you have come here looking for something in particular, let me know and I will drag it back out.
The main feed URLs has also changed, and I’m intending to put together a separate feed of ‘eleswhere’ links, collated either via my delicious.com account or possibly using NetNewsWire’s ‘clippings’ feature. I’m not sure yet, so I’ll post the relevant URL(s) in due course.
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