Marc Charbonneau’s Blog

Steven Frank, of Panic co-founder fame, is taking a stand against the iPhone.

When the app store first opened, there were some questionable decisions, and like most everyone, I was willing to forgive Apple a few transgressions as they were navigating new, exciting (and rocky) territory. Historically, Apple has made bad decisions, but they’ve generally corrected them. (The $100 refunds for original launch-day iPhone purchasers after the price dropped come to mind.) The boat may turn slowly, but nothing before has ever suggested to me that Apple are actively malicious.

But after an entire year of continuous bad decisions that are hostile to developers and consumers alike, we’ve moved on from “working out the kinks” to good old-fashioned getting fucked.

Every week it seems like there’s more and more developer backlash about App Store policies and the viability of making a living as an independent iPhone developer. I don’t blame them; right now the App Store is not a platform I would want to commit to. At the same time though, I’m not about to give up my own plans for the iPhone. Most of the apps I have in mind are companion apps to desktop Macintosh applications I’ve been working on over the past year or two. While I might make money on the iPhone apps alone, I don’t see them as a way to make rent as much as I see them as a way to augment and improve the work I’m already doing on the Mac. And I think most Cocoa developers will agree with me when I say that OS X is still a pretty sweet platform to write software for.

Runner’s Log uses a license file for registration, instead of a typical 20 digit serial number. With a license file, instead of sending users a code they type or paste into your application, you send them a file that contains the serial number along with any other registration information. Usually this is just a plain text file, although it doesn’t have to be.

Lately I’ve been thinking about the advantages and disadvantages of one method versus another. Here are the major points I came up with.

Advantages

• When done correctly, license files can be easier than typing in a serial number. Just drag the file onto your app, or double click it. On the other hand, if you only require one field for your license key, and handle copy/paste correctly, serial numbers are not that much harder.
• You can include whatever information you want in you license files. You don’t want to force the user to type in their name, email address, transaction number, but there’s no reason not to include these when you generate the license. It’s good to make sure to associate a license with a real life name or email address, to discourage casual piracy.
• License files (should be) very secure. I’m not saying you can beat software piracy, don’t believe anyone who tells you you can. What you can do, is prevent someone from creating a serial number generator for your app. Unlike shared keys or cracked copies, which you can fight by releasing updates and blacklists, a serial number generator can be especially damaging. As far as I know, using OpenSSL it’s possible to create a licensing scheme that can not be beat by serial generators.

Disadvantages

• License files don’t always fit with other company’s distribution models. Right now I’m talking with a company about localizing and selling Runner’s Log in Japan, both online and in a boxed software bundle with other applications. Although I’m sure I’ll work it out somehow, they assume applications use a serial number which can be sent via email or printed out. I would guess that some of the other promotional bundles, like MacZot or Mac Heist, work the same way.
• License files can go against the way users expect applications to work, or interfere with the way they store license codes for future use. I haven’t had any specific complaints, but it’s possible some people might be annoyed.
• It takes a little more work to implement license files. You need to associate the .applicense extension with your application, implement methods for loading external files, and make sure your online store can correctly send attachments in the registration email. In my case, I also ran into some unicode text encoding bugs I had to rush to fix. None of these require big investments in time; what I’m getting at is that the little things add up, and I don’t know any developers who wished they had more on their plate right before shipping 1.0.

No matter which method you use, there’s room to make your application stand out if you put in enough effort. I remember seeing a mock-up of a license file that was actually a generated .gif or .png image. The image looked like a key card, complete with the user’s information and the license key shown as a barcode (the actual license data could be stored in embedded metadata or headers for your application to read). If you use license codes, instead of random numbers and letters you could use a series of four or five letter english words.

For the most part, license files have worked well for Runner’s Log. However, there has been a small amount of overhead that I would have rather avoided. I’m going to keep this in mind for future projects; hopefully this will help new developers who might be in the same position I was.

Fundware is just one announcement from United Lemur, a company founded recently by engineer Mike Lee. The idea is for new software companies to start out with a small (but high quality) offering, such as an iPhone App. Visitors to Fundware decide to purchase the application not just on its own merit, but also on the potential of the company itself. If successful, the revenue from Fundware will give the new company capital they need to get off the ground and start producing great full-sized applications.

Most “indie” Macintosh software companies (including mine!) are started with free time and a savings account, not investment venture capital or loans. This seems like a great way to help out developers who have great ideas, but lack the time or money to implement them.

The first featured application is Puzzllotto, United Lemur’s own initial iPhone offering. Apart from being the driving force behind some great applications, Mike Lee has some lofty goals for United Lemur and how it will impact the Mac software development community— I hope he’s successful.

I know it’s old, but last week I finally got around to watching Cabel Sasser’s C4[1] presentation.

Earlier this year I gave a talk (my first public presentation ever, actually!) at Johnny Rentzsch’s intimate and engaging C4[1] conference in Chicago. Despite nervousness, it was really great fun. We had just recently finished Coda, and with one hour to fill and a lot of Coda-related things still swirling around my mind, I pretty much just started talking. What followed was a whole lot of hyper-warp thoughts about all things Panic.

The presentation is great; lots of insight into the visual design process at Panic, and some of the challenges of developing Coda.

One of the more interesting parts was at the very end of the audience questions, where Cabel talks about the differences between developing a “big” application (Coda) and working on several tiny ones. Apparently the small applications each had enough feature requests and bugs that they took nearly as many resources and time as creating a larger application, only the smaller price tag meant only a fraction of the profits.