Speculative Developers

Between the day job and visiting Macworld, I’ve spent a lot of time with application developers over the last several months. I think because I’m a Mac user, I have an idealistic impression of software developers. They are artists. They sweat the details. They work long days making beautiful things for my Mac, iPad, and iPhone that make it possible for me to get the things done that need getting done.

For the software I truly love and use all the time, I still believe this is true. From the smallest one-man shop, like Marco Arment’s Instapaper, to the larger developers, like The Omni Group, there are indeed developers out there who fit this idyllic view.

My revelation the last few months is the large number of developers who don’t work this way. In particular, I’ve bumped into several iOS developers with a different view of software development. I call them “speculative developers”. I always knew speculative developers existed but witnessing them work first hand is something else entirely. They barf out as many apps as possible in the shortest time possible in hopes that they strike gold in the App Store lottery. They run a never ending treadmill with little thought about the user experience except (sometimes) making sure their apps don’t crash. Some of these “developers” don’t know a lick of programming code. Instead, they are fountain of ideas with a group of somewhat ambivalent programmers on speed dial in India, Russia, and other far away places.

I “get” their business plan. There are a lot of apps on the App Store. It’s really hard to get noticed. They think the more apps they submit, the more likely they are to find lightning in a bottle. They are, however, completely wrong. Their chance of hitting it big with two (or twenty) crappy apps instead of one good one is about the same as their chance of retiring with their lotto winnings. Infinitesimally small.

If you want to develop apps, take your time and make something awesome. Make it fast. Make it beautiful. Make something you’re proud of. Don’t make 60 crappy apps: Make one really good one.

Read & Trust (me)

I’m pleased to announce that I, generally, and MacSparky.com, specifically, is a member of the Read & Trust consortium of writers and websites. When asked to join and I realized I already follow just about everyone at Read & Trust, joining was a no-brainer. In addition to discovering some great writers at Read & Trust, you can also sign up for their newsletter where members write about things important to them. I’m looking forward to contributing and thank the gang at Read & Trust for inviting me to the party.

Mattebox for iPhone

I seem to change camera apps on my iPhone with the same frequency as my socks but I’m really digging Mattebox by Ben Syverson. It has some real nice controls and feels like a traditional camera when you use it. One of my favoribe bits is the virtual shutter slider. When you touch it, Mattebox locks the focus and exposure. You can then compose your shot with focus and exposure locked It acts just like a half-press on a dedicated camera. You then pull down the virtual lever to fire off a shot. Ben did a video explaining the app.

To My Old Master…

Slavery wasn’t that long ago. I recently talked to a friend whose great-grandfather was a slave. This letter from a former slave to his former master brings the whole mess into focus for me. Former slave Jourdan Anderson’s closing line cinched it for me.

Say howdy to George Carter, and thank him for taking the pistol from you when you were shooting at me.

Kottke has an update that shows Mr. Anderson lived into the 20th century and along with his wife, Mandy, had many children.

Text Expander and OmniFocus

Sven Fechner recently screencasted how he goes about using TextExpander with OmniFocus. Sven has an interesting workflow where he uses a task’s note section to track projects. I do something similar inside nvALT, not in OmniFocus. I do, however, use TextExpander all the time for repetitive phrases in OmniFocus. Since Sven threw down with a video, so did I. You can also download my favorite OmniFocus TextExpander Snippets below.

Download the Snippets

TextExpander + OmniFocus from David Sparks on Vimeo.

Since OmniFocus for iPad doesn’t support TextExpander Touch, you’ve got to use Apple’s own iOS shortcut tools. This is where it gets wonky. For reasons beyond me, the snippet cannot start with a period (.), so I start them with an “x”. Moreover, you can’t simply insert the cursor at the beginning of some text and expand. There must be a leading space. So, when adding a snippet before existing text you have to place the cursor, then advance a space, then place the cursor again back a space (there is no key to move the cursor backward), and then fire off the snippet. Tedious.