Let’s try to keep the culture of paying for software healthy

October 25, 2013
by Riccardo Mori
Briefly

Lately I’ve encountered an increasing number of people belonging to the “Paid apps are dead” school of thought. I don’t know whether the model of paid apps, especially with regard to the mobile environment, is dead or not. I have always supported it, because paying for software has always felt natural and obvious to me. I remember in the Mac vs PC days how differently software was perceived among Windows users and Mac users. If you’ll allow me a certain degree of generalisation (I know there are exceptions in both camps), Mac users usually gave more value to third-party software for their Macs and were more willing to pay for it[1], while a lot of Windows users shared the culture of, er, ‘obtaining’ software for their PCs.

Today — in general, but especially with mobile platforms — the so-called ‘race to the bottom’ has undeniably hurt the market. What’s worse is that it’s negatively affecting the perception people have for the software that is supposed to enrich their experience with smartphones and tablets and extend the capabilities of such devices. More and more frequently, apps are considered like nothing more than widgets with little value. People spend a handsome amount on premium hardware, but somehow a $5 app is regarded as ‘expensive’. Developers who dare charge an additional $2, $3, $4 for a paid upgrade are vocally criticised for being ‘greedy’, when people really have no idea about the work, the investment and the expenses behind software development. They (begrudgingly) paid $5 in 2011 and expect free updates in 2013 and beyond. This utter disrespect for other people’s work is simply appalling (as a freelance translator and a struggling writer, I understand this all too well) and goes beyond the inherent miserliness.

To keep the culture of paying for software healthy, I believe that those who write software reviews as part of their jobs should refrain from being judgemental about price, whether directly or implicitly. Unless they’re reviewing a particularly bad piece of software whose price point is disproportionately high compared to the quality and features provided, price should be treated simply as a piece of information. Be informative, be detailed, be as objective as possible in your review (or clearly indicate that certain remarks and considerations are indeed subjective and related to your personal tastes) — this is what counts. If you’re especially excited about the app you’re reviewing, by all means be infectious in your enthusiasm. People will understand if a piece of software is a bargain for what it offers, or if it’s little more than a hack that should probably be avoided regardless of what it costs. You give them information, let them be opinionated.

I’m writing this because sometimes I fear that all this (empty) talk of “Paid apps are dead” and “freemium models” and so on and so forth might end up being a self-fulfilling prophecy. And let’s avoid headlines like Tweetbot 3 for iPhone gets a fresh new design, but at a price (it’s an otherwise nice and overall positive review, why put that “but at a price” in the headline? It sounds off and unfair… It almost sounds like a warning to prospective customers, as if to say “You may like the app’s new design, but boy is it going to cost you.”)

There are enough cheapskates as it is, let’s don’t fuel their sense of entitlement even more.

 

 

  • 1. If you’re too young to have paid for software back in the 1990s, let me tell you: it was on average way more expensive than what you find today in the various App Stores. ↩

 

Revolutionising prices and names

October 24, 2013
by Riccardo Mori
Tech Life

The Apple event on October 22 was very enjoyable. After Steve Jobs’s passing and the executive restructuring under Tim Cook, keynote after keynote I’ve seen a noticeable improvement in stage presence and confidence on the part of all the executives involved. Phil Schiller has always been the slickest of the bunch, and in the post-Jobs era he’s become even more playful and bolder during his presentations, cracking jokes with fearlessness and nonchalance. Federighi has come a long way since his nervous demo of Lion’s main features in the Back to the Mac event, three years ago. And even Cook’s delivery sounds a bit more confident, losing some of his “I have this speech memorised and I’m trying really hard to remember each word of it” way of addressing the audience. The October 22 keynote was a nice display of genuine confidence on Apple’s part.

The event, as the invite’s tag line suggested, had a lot to cover, and everything Apple introduced is great news. In this article I only want to get a couple of minor peeves out of my system. Bear with me if these observations may sound a little pedantic.

How to complicate a simple naming scheme

Let’s get back to the iPod for a moment. Since its introduction in 2001, the iPod has developed into a whole family of products, with different form factors and model lines. Yet the naming scheme has always been rather consistent: the main iPod model was always called “iPod”. Each iteration was officially identified with the ‘generation’ attribute (e.g. third-generation iPod, fourth-generation iPod, or even “iPod 3G”, “iPod 4G” etc.), and any ‘modifier’ appended to the iPod name was to clearly indicate another line of product, a different form factor: iPod mini, iPod nano, iPod shuffle[1]. The ‘generation’ attribute was then passed to each line of product, and even a diverse family such as the iPod nano, with dramatic changes in shape from one generation to another, has retained the name “iPod nano” for seven generations. 

Now let’s take Macs. From 2008 to 2011 there were three different models in the laptop line: the MacBook, the MacBook Pro and the MacBook Air. Three different designations that were necessary and made sense because those were three laptop models with very distinguishing features. The Pro was more powerful, with more ports and better materials than a regular polycarbonate MacBook. The MacBook Air was smaller, thinner, lighter than a MacBook Pro and a regular MacBook, and so on.

By now, you can imagine where I’m going with this: the iPad naming disaster.

I get the enthusiasm for creating that feat of engineering that is the new iPad Air, but calling the fifth-generation iPad with yet another name is starting to sound ridiculous. So far, each iteration of iPads has basically had a unique designation:

  • The first iPad was just “iPad”.
  • The second iPad was called “iPad 2”.
  • The third iPad was called “The new iPad” and then the “iPad with Retina display”.
  • The fourth iPad was called “iPad with Retina display” since its introduction.
  • The fifth iPad is the “iPad Air”.

    •  

    The addition of “Air” to the name iPad is more enthusiastic and impulsive than anything else. It is a clear reference to the MacBook Air, yet there is no other iPad with that screen size to differentiate it from. They still sell the iPad 2, you’ll rightly object. But to differentiate the new, fifth-generation iPad from the iPad 2 was enough to still call it “iPad with Retina display”. Evidently, at Apple they thought that the lightness and thinness of the new iPad deserved to be a more important distinguishing element than the Retina display, so now we have two regular size iPads — the iPad 2 and the iPad Air — and one who didn’t know better could actually wonder Where’s the regular iPad? or Where’s the iPad Pro? For a brief moment, when Schiller introduced the iPad Air, I was convinced they would expand the iPad family to include a third model, or that they would keep the fourth-generation Retina iPad as the ‘regular’ iPad, then the iPad Air and finally the iPad mini. 

    I know, it’s semantics and I’m being pedantic here (I warned you) — I’m really curious to know how the future sixth-generation iPad will be called: “the new iPad Air”? “The iPad Air 2”? Wouldn’t things have been simpler by sticking to a classic “n-generation iPad” designation?

    Price puzzles

    “Today we’re going to revolutionise pricing,” announced Federighi in his wrap-up on OS X Mavericks, and I confess he made my day when he said that Mavericks was going to be free. Not because I didn’t want to spend the $20 I guessed Mavericks would cost, but because it’s a bold move in general, especially in combination with the choice of offering the new ‘Productivity and Creativity apps’ (the iLife and iWork suites, for OS X and iOS) for free to new customers[2].

    But when wrapping up the new iPad family and announcing the various prices, I couldn’t help thinking What’s wrong with this picture?

    #alttext#

    Schiller said that Apple is keeping the old iPad 2 around to have an entry-level regular-size iPad for those looking to access the experience of a 9.7″ iPad through an affordable, non-Retina model. But that $399 price point feels wrong to me compared to the $499 of the new iPad Air in the exact same way the $549 price point of the iPhone 5C feels wrong compared to the $649 of the iPhone 5S.

    If you examine that array of prices, every other iPad looks like a better deal than the $399 iPad 2. 

    1. For the same price you get an iPad mini Retina with the latest technologies inside. The screen size is smaller, but the Retina display gives much more density and clarity to whatever it’s displayed. And the mini is smaller and lighter.

    2. If you’re willing to spend $399 for an old iPad, you can certainly see that adding $100 to your investment and going for the iPad Air is the more sensible and ‘forward thinking’ option.

    3. If you’re really on a budget, I believe the $299 non-Retina iPad mini is still a better choice than the $399 iPad 2. It has better cameras and video recording capabilities, it has the newer Bluetooth 4.0 technology (the iPad 2 still has Bluetooth 2.1), it has the new Lightning adapter, and it features Siri (the iPad 2 does not). 

    I think that a better price point for the iPad 2 would have been $329. $399 is simply too close to the $499 of the new iPad Air.

     

     

    • 1. One possible exception may be the iPod photo, which was available along with the regular iPod from late 2004 to spring 2005, and had the same form factor; the main difference was it being the first iPod with a colour screen. ↩
    • 2. For more detailed information, you can see for example this article from Macstories. ↩

     

    Old iOS devices and the newfound backward compatibility

    October 22, 2013
    by Riccardo Mori
    Software

    older version

    As iOS progressed, update after update, app developers have rightly kept up, and minimum system requirements have been gradually obsoleting older generations of iOS devices. The process has been a bit painful for those users who haven’t been upgrading to a new iPhone every time a new model was introduced. I myself, after purchasing an iPhone 3G in 2008, have held on to that model until the iPhone 4 came out, therefore skipping the 3GS entirely. 

    In the past, an annoying phenomenon that happened to me more than once was the ‘update with no return’: I would update an iOS app from iTunes, iTunes would update the app on the iPhone 3G during sync, and then I would find out that the update required at least iOS 4.3 to work (the iPhone 3G didn’t go past iOS 4.2.1). Result: I was left with an app no longer working, without the possibility to go back because the App Store kept only the most updated version of its apps. The only option was to stop updating (especially in iTunes) or keep around the older .ipa files to sync back to the iPhone in case of accidental, fatal updates.

    But with the recent change Apple introduced in the App Store, which allows older app versions to be downloaded , things have really, surprisingly improved. At first, I just thought that this change worked only for relatively recent app and iOS versions (say, if you needed an iOS 5.x‑compatible version of an app to use on your original iPad), but it turns out this works even for much older versions — if, of course, an app has been around long enough to exist under iOS 3 and 4. 

    For instance, earlier today I discovered I still can tweet from the old iPhone 3G. In this particular case, what actually surprised me was that, evidently, Twitter has made even old versions of its official client compatible with their new APIs.

    Twitter on iOS 4.2.1

    After making this discovery, I tried looking for other useful apps I’ve discovered post-iOS 5, and I was able to download a few of them and see them work under iOS 4.2.1 on my iPhone 3G. (I was particularly glad to be able to use Scotty, which is a great app for wirelessly transferring photos and videos from an iOS device to your Mac or to another iOS device.)

    I really appreciate this move by Apple, because thanks to this newfound backward compatibility, iOS devices as old as the iPhone 3G or 2nd-generation iPod touch can extend their usefulness and capabilities, and they feel a little less obsolete than before.

    My problem with (a lot of) podcasts

    October 17, 2013
    by Riccardo Mori
    Briefly

    I have often tried to write something about how difficult it is for me to keep track of most tech-oriented podcasts. There’s a great plenty of choice already, and sometimes it feels there’s a brand new interesting podcast every week. Such staggering amount of podcasts (even considering just the Technology category) ends up affecting their quality — or hiding it, in certain cases. Practically all the authors / writers / bloggers I follow either host a podcast or appear in other podcasts produced within their circle of friends, colleagues or acquaintances. I can’t even keep up with all the episodes of the few favourites I’ve subscribed to.

    The podcast is a particular format, and it’s so much more than a recorded radio programme. It’s something that requires my full attention, and when I decide to listen to a podcast episode, for me it’s rather hard to do anything else. That’s why I need to find the right listening conditions, the right time and the right space for it. 

    And Nick Heer, in his post What is Podcasting?, really nails the problem down (emphasis mine):

    I appreciate the craft that Hurley and others bring to the space. But a time commitment of two hours per podcast per week is arguably a lot, and I often don’t get the sense that podcasters respect listeners’ time. I will sit through an album from start to finish, and it will take about an hour; a podcast can be twice that length, and if it’s unedited conversational rambling, I will struggle to finish the episode. It’s simply not worth that amount of time.

    Quite so.

    By the way, Nick Heer’s blog, Pixel Envy is a very recent discovery for me, and what a discovery. After reading a few articles and bits of commentary, I quickly added it to the feeds I read every day, and you should too. I think it’s really good.

    “Are operations like Flipboard scams against publishers?”

    October 14, 2013
    by Riccardo Mori
    Handpicked

    I followed the link to this article the other day via John Gruber. John Marshall, editor & publisher of Talking Points Memo, has written a piece on the TPM Editor’s Blog called Are operations like Flipboard scams against publishers? My first reaction after reading it was to simply point out that it could be another good candidate for Betteridge’s Law of Headlines. Anyway, the gist of the article is this: TPM’s publisher has decided to remove Talking Points Memo from a series of aggregator sites, such as Flipboard and Google Currents, and the piece serves as further explanation of the reasons behind this decision. 

    Marshall writes:

    That said, I do think these services, as they currently exist are bad for publishers. We give them the entirety of our product — news stories, updates, posts, what-have-you — in exchange for a notional thing called exposure, brand awareness, blah blah blah and in theory or at some point in the future a cut of the ad revenues these services bring in for selling ads on their platforms. The problem is there are no ad revenues that go to the publishers. Where they exist they are literally trivial. The real payoff is supposed to be reach, letting new potential readers know we’re out there. In theory, that’s particularly important for small publishers like TPM who don’t have big budgets for promotional campaigns.

    […]

    But say you find TPM on Flipboard, decide it’s great and add it to your viewing routine on Flipboard. Probably you just keep reading us on Flipboard. Clearly you like Flipboard or you wouldn’t be using it. So why would you start visiting TPM? You likely won’t. That may be great for you. It’s definitely great for Flipboard. But is it great for us? Not really. It boosts my ego, I guess. And more people may know about us. But where and how does that turn into our ability to convert that ‘audience’ into a revenue stream that allows us to create our product? I don’t think it does. Or it does in so in such a trivial and unquantifiable way as to be meaningless.

    What I don’t understand is why point the finger at Flipboard specifically. Marshall’s objection could also be raised against all RSS feed reader applications. I don’t know you, but usually when I discover a great website and I’d like to stay up-to-date with it, I add it to my feed reader and keep following it there. Some of the websites and weblogs I follow via RSS don’t truncate their feeds, so 99% of the time I don’t visit them directly, it’s just easier and less time-consuming to follow them in my feed reader. If, on the other hand, they display truncated feeds (like Macworld), then I go to the site to read a full article, either through the feed reader’s built-in browser, or by opening the article’s page in a tab in one of the browsers I regularly use.

    At the end of the day, I consider Flipboard to be just a very cool feed reader which assembles the feeds in a magazine-like layout to facilitate browsing. My customised Flipboard is largely made of feeds I’ve manually added, plus some general default feeds of automatically aggregated content (the Technology, Design, and Photography sections). The articles aggregated by Flipboard and displayed therein behave exactly like feed items: in many instances I can read a whole article without leaving Flipboard, but some sources don’t display the whole article: Cool Hunting, for example, shows just the first paragraph and a Continue reading… link — that forces you to visit the site via Flipboard’s built-in browser, which counts like a regular visit. I also visit a site directly when Flipboard does a poor job at reformatting that site’s contents (sometimes it happens with image-heavy articles and pieces containing slideshows).

    I understand Marshall’s concerns and point of view, but I think that singling out Flipboard is a bit unfair. The same question raised by Gruber in his commentary (“In some ways isn’t Flipboard just a magazine that doesn’t pay for the content it displays?”) could be applied to any feed reader application and news aggregator. I know, one could say that the difference between something like Flipboard and a classic RSS reader is that Flipboard, by serving you a series of automatically aggregated feeds from sources you didn’t even know, induces you to just read those feeds inside Flipboard, avoiding the direct visit to the source. While with a traditional RSS reader, you decide which sources to aggregate and follow. There is no ‘intermediary with reading suggestions’ offering you a series of feeds on a silver platter[1]. The end result isn’t much different in both cases: fewer people visit the sources directly.

    Is removing Talking Points Memo from Flipboard, Google Currents and other aggregators an effective strategy to gain back some readers and increase the number of direct visits? I don’t know. I discovered TPM exactly through Flipboard, and now that its contents don’t appear in Flipboard anymore I have added TPM to my feed readers — and since TPM serves truncated feeds, I’ll visit the site when I’m interested in reading an article in full. But I wonder how many people actually pay attention to the sources when they skim through all the articles Flipboard automatically aggregates in some of its sections. I guess that some haven’t even realised TPM is no longer appearing there, and probably won’t bother. They’ll just keep reading whatever content shows up. 

    Perhaps an acceptable tradeoff would have been to appear in Flipboard (and other similar aggregators) like Cool Hunting does: with truncated articles forcing people to open a browser window to visit TPM’s site and read the pieces in full. This way TPM would have maintained its Flipboard exposure and gained some more direct visits. Just an idea.

     

     

    • 1. Though I remember that RSS feed readers like NetNewsWire and Vienna used to come with a bunch of pre-configured feeds in their default configuration. So does Pulp and probably other feed readers (I only cited the examples I know firsthand). ↩