On Apple suing HTC
Apple, like many corporations in the US, files for patents, including many software patents. I’ve never faulted them for filing the patents. In the US. when one big corporation sues another big corporation claiming they are infringing on one of their patents, it’s typical to fire back with similar claims and eventually work out a settlement.
I think most corporations view patents as missiles. They line them up, outside the perimeter of the company for all to see and through a blow horn they yell, “Do not fuck with us or we will use these to level your house.”
Despite what the typical layman thinks, this is the real world of the US patent system. (Sad I know.)
So Apple lives in this world. They have their stockpile of missiles but have never been aggressive with them. They have only used them as a response to an attack, until yesterday.
Yesterday, Apple filed suit against HTC for a collection of patents, most related to the iPhone and touch gestures.
In my opinion, this is pretty craptastic. In an open letter Wil Shipley shares similar thoughts:
Enforcing patents is wrong. You’ve famously taken and built on ideas from your competitors, as have I, as we should, as great artists do. Why is what HTC has done worse? Whether an idea was patented doesn’t change the morality of copying it, it only changes the ability to sue.
But when you sue someone for doing something you do yourself, you become one of the bad guys.
I remember back when Steve introduced the iPhone during Macworld 2007. Even on day one he talked about patents and lawsuits:
“We’ve been innovating like crazy for the last few years on this [iPhone] and we have filed for over 200 patents for all the inventions in iPhone [pause] and we intent to protect them. (Keynote speech, 1:30)
Cue audience applause and a huge sick feeling in my stomach (even back then).
A NY Times article posted today addresses the question as to “why did Apple sue HTC and not Google?” They write:
Jonathan Zittrain (professor at Harvard Law School) believes Apple is simply going after a less powerful company first, one with much smaller pockets than Google.
“It clearly involves some form of litigation strategy of picking off the weaker members of the herd first,” Mr Zittrain said. “They can always add Google to the suit later on.”
To say I’m disappointed and troubled by Apple’s actions is an understatement. At heart I think there are two ways to deal with competition.
One, you embrace your competitors. You learn from their mistakes as they learn from yours. You strive to do better, which makes them strive to do better and the improvements become cyclical. In the end, the consumer has a better product because of the process.
Two, you do everything in your power to make sure the consumer has no other choice than to buy your product or service.
With Apple’s original posturing about iPhone patents and now the first aggressive action with them I fear Apple is changing the way is deals with competition.
Related: John Gruber, This Apple-HTC Patent Thing
Posted on: March 3, 2010 – 1:16 PM | Comments (0)
ProfitTrain Product Blog
With the release of ProfitTrain I wanted to do more blogging about the product. I also want to keep this blog focused on the trials and tribulations of running an indie software company. Thus a new product blog was born:
Ride the ProfitTrain.com
Ride the ProfitTrain is a product blog and will include tips, tricks, screencasts and anything else I suspect the users of ProfitTrain want to see. If you are interested, please check it out and subscribe.
Posted on: March 2, 2010 – 3:10 PM | Comments (0)
ProfitTrain 2.0 Released
Yesterday I officially released ProfitTrain — the successor to Billable.
ProfitTrain is an application for Mac OS X that helps freelancers and small businesses keep track of what they are doing for clients and create invoices for services rendered. Additionally ProfitTrain will help you keep track of invoice payments as well as business expenses.
ProfitTrain (Download) requires 10.5 or greater. New licenses are $49.95 and Billable upgrades are $24.95. Please use the online store to purchase.
It’s going to be an exciting week. I want to thank all the people who have sent congratulatory tweets and blog posts. This type of word of mouth marketing really means a lot to small indie developers like myself. Thanks again!
Posted on: March 2, 2010 – 3:04 PM | Comments (0)
Lost emails from the store.
Update 5:57 PM (EST) Email should be working better now. But as always free free to contact me directly if you need help.
I’m not going to go into the technical side of it (for now) but I just wanted to quickly let people know that if they request a serial lookup or make a purchase using store.clickablebliss.com there is a fair chance the email receipt will not go through.
Other than the broken emails the store is working fine, feel free to buy our software. We would just ask that you take an extra minute to capture the web receipt in case the email copy does not make it to you.
If you do miss an email from the store and need help please contact me mike@clickablebliss.com and I will look up any serial or forward you any receipt you may need.
Why is email broken?
This has nothing to do with me accept for the unfortunate luck to be using an IP Address in the same range of another address that was flagged as spamming. My server provider Slicehost promises me they are working with the Spamhaus (the gatekeeper) to get the issue resolved asap.
Posted on: February 28, 2010 – 8:55 PM | Comments (0)
It’s beat up on Core Data week!
If you follow other Cocoa/indie blogs, you probably noticed some posts recently about people that are dropping or avoiding Core Data. I wasn’t planing on jumping in but guess what, ProfitTrain dropped Core Data too!
Brent has performance reasons, but my own reasons are more inline with Manton in that moving forward with my 2.0 I wanted to know more and be more responsible for that layer of the system.
Some backstory. When I started working on Billable I was targeting 10.4 which had just introduced Core Data. At the time I was building my first “real” Cocoa app and wanted to take advantage of anything that I could to make my life easier. Things like Core Data looked delicious.
Early development went well and after the 1.0 release I continued to expand and strengthen the foundation of my app. It was around this point where I started to feel like I was too dependent on black magic. I seemed to spend a lot of time trying to figure out what Core Data was doing and how it worked in order to get performance gains or integrate it with other technologies like AppleScript.
When I started work on ProfitTrain it was the perfect opportunity to re-evaluate all the code that had gone into Billable. Additionally, while there is no iPhone companion to ProfitTrain today, nor is there any formal syncing support; these are two major issues that I think many data-capture apps like ProfitTrain will face in the future. I feel like if I am ever to overcome these challenges I need to have a firm grasp and understanding of my persistence layer.
At the end of the day, I don’t think the benefits of Core Data outweigh the learning curve and the inevitable quirks, such as clunky migrations, you need to deal with. If Core Data brought more to the table like free AppleScript access and/or syncing tools I might have a change of heart. However for me, and the needs of my app as of today, I feel more empowered using SQLite directly through FMDB.
Update February 28, 2010 — Nice to see Core Data still has some love out there. Collin Donnell shares some reasons why he enjoys using Core Date for his iPhone apps.
Posted on: February 27, 2010 – 9:44 PM | Comments (0)
Mac Indie Marketing
I suspect it’s very easy for most indie Mac developers to be ‘heads-down coders’ who don’t think too much about marketing. The cruel reality however: building that great app is only the beginning. If you are going to grow a successful company you need to market yourself and your app. The following is a collection of some helpful resources.
One classic resource is Adam Engst’s Hacking the Press series. Adam has been giving variants of this talk since the MacHack days and a more recent dissertation was given (and captured) at C4.
At that same C4 we also got to watch Wil Shipley do a talk called Monster Marketing. In it Wil talks about hype, polish, buying google ads and more.
If you are looking for a more regular supply of marketing wisdom you must subscribe to Dan Wood’s Mac Indie Marketing blog. It’s been running for a few months now and it has a lot of great advice and interviews. I highly recommend subscribing and catching up.
And then there is your blog. You do have a blog don’t you? What?!?! You haven’t posted in months! What the hell man, get it together.
Seriously though, I think a big part of marketing you and your app is putting it all out there. Sharing your experiences; your wins and your loses. Be real. Be honest. Twitter is fine, but I think spending some extra time crafting your thoughts into meaningful blog posts, that will last for years to come, is worth your time.
Posted on: February 26, 2010 – 12:09 AM | Comments (0)
Evaluating disk use with OmniDiskSweeper
Recently I was pondering what life might be like on a Macbook Pro with a 128 GB solid state hard drive and wanted a way to get a bird’s eye view of how I use my current hard drive on my Mac Pro. OmniDiskSweeper is built just for this kind of thing.
Basically you start it up and give it a few minutes to process your disk. It will then show you a column view that lets you traverse the folder structure, sorting by the size of enclosed folder. Simple but very cool. OmniDiskSweeper is a free utility from the Omni Group.
If you want a more visual representation you could also check out Disk Inventory X (also free). It will group up file size by file type and show you a graphical treemap.
Posted on: February 24, 2010 – 1:37 PM | Comments (0)
Ars coverage of the latest App Store censorship
Ars coverage of the latest App Store censorship nails it, with some good references on the back store as well.
There are two much simpler ways for Apple to address apps that contain explicit or otherwise objectionable material that should satisfy every party involved, including Apple, developers, children, parents, and other App Store users. Apple could improve the Parental Controls and its associated ratings to classify any apps that might cross the line to a specific category, such as “adult.” Then allow those apps to be filtered from browsing and search results. Parents can limit what their kids might see, and those that object to such apps can simply be none the wiser to their existence.
Alternately, Apple could allow users to load apps from any source, as Google allows on Android. The App Store then becomes a place for those that prefer a curated, vetted source for apps, and users that don’t mind walking on the wild side can look elsewhere. Parental Controls could even have an option to prevent “side-loading” third-party apps.
Personally I pray for the open deployment option at some point. That in my opinion is the root cause of a lot of this trouble and would go a huge way to alleviating many of the issues and hesitations I have about writing software for the iPhone/iPad OS.
Posted on: February 23, 2010 – 3:33 PM | Comments (0)
Macworld TV
Today Macworld has started publishing a selection of the featured presentations of Macworld 2010 on Macworld TV. I enjoyed Gruber’s Top 10 a lot and hope to catch up with the others soon.
In other news you can register for a free Macworld 2011 expo pass for next few weeks so if you thing you might go, sign up today and save a few bucks.
Posted on: February 23, 2010 – 1:07 PM | Comments (0)
Can WebKit avoid breaking block element while printing?
I’m in a fairly unique position in that I use WebKit to generate PDFs[1]. For the most part it works great but one area it has disappointed is when the resulting PDF is more than 1 page. There just doesn’t seem to be that much control in WebKit’s rendering of HTML and CSS to suggest when a page should break.
For example at the bottom of my default invoice design I have the business and client contact info. For most invoices everything fits on one page but if there are a lot of line items the address will be pushed on to the second page.
It would be great if I could find a way to tell WebKit that it should avoid breaking these DIVs when it prints. In fact I think such a thing is present in the CSS spec and if it worked it might look something like:
div.contact_info
{
page-break-inside: avoid;
}
Perhaps I’m doing something wrong, or maybe Safari just doesn’t implement this CSS attribute yet. If anyone out there has any suggestions or can forward this to someone who might I’d be very thankful.
[1]: The invoice (with the help of MGTemplateEngine) comes up with an HTML representation. That HTML is put into an off-screen WebView; which is then handed off to the print system; which generates a PDF; which is then stored in the ProfitTrain database.
Update: Here is a WebKit bug report that discusses the issue. (Thanks @chucker.)
Update 2: And my own formal bug report request for implementation.
Posted on: February 21, 2010 – 3:33 PM | Comments (0)
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