I develop iOS apps, I also hold the indie developer scene upto high moral standards. By extension iOS developers get given the benefit of the doubt from me, they are interested in making fun, beautiful interesting applications. Sweet. However as it is said, unless you paid for it, you are being sold. Never is it more true than in the startup crazy VC funded world.

Companies that are building "eyes orientated" products that rely on hundreds of thousands of users downloading the app and using it are after your data. In iOS, location data requires user permissions, Contacts and Music libraries don't. Guess what these apps upload as soon as you open it. They are after your data, all of it they can get their grubby little mitts on.

I was recently working on a contract for and application that wanted Contacts, Music and Data all uploaded to their servers. Move location, they want a notification. Take a dump, they would have wanted a notification. The ammount of data they wanted to be uploaded was excessive and outrageous, I felt dirtier with every line of code I wrote. Oh yes it is their privacy policy that they are taking all this information, and their excuse is analytics an anyway everyone else is doing it...

Reality

Most of these startups however are struggling to ship their own code or they are out there hunting more money. They don't have the time to run big data queries on this data. Now us in the know, us geeks and nerds get all uppity and throw our toys out the pram when this sort of thing comes to light, and rightly so. Consider thi though. how is asking for this information going to change anything though? I bet 99% of the population simply says ok to permission notifications, or accepts default user options when they install the app. So suddenly we're in the same situation anyway.

Solution

There really isn't a solution is there, so many apps even an independent audit of all the apps would take years. Apple to remove the Contacts API? It's not really like Apple to ever remove an API is it?

Writing is hard I’ve said it before and it still remains that writing something decent isn’t an easy task.

It isn’t the tools I use, it isn’t that I have nothing to say. For some reason I’m still failing to write consistently. Failing to write on a regular basis means failing to improve, which isn’t what I want to be doing.

So much of what I want to say already has decent commentry on it. Go somewhere else to read something wise and clever. I feel as if most the time when I sit down to write all I’m doing is adding agreement to the current trending topic. I’d like to write something more original than that.

Writing requires concentration and original thought. These require sleep, this time last week I was setting up for a 4 day trade show. I’m still haggard from it, nothing I write at the moment is any good.

I wish however I could turn up everyday and make some new writings.

I don’t think there is quite the perfect feed reader available. I’m currently using Shaun Inmans Fever which is a great product with some amazing features for finding trending topics. However...

With the current furore about the new changes to Google Reader I spent some time thinking about the feed reader I would build in an ideal situation…

• HTML5 Local storage for offline use
• Decent mobile navigation
• Silent Socialising (a la Instapaper)
• Like This - Try This Feature
• Unbias This Article
• Feed to SMS
• Integrates well with Instapaper and Pinboard
• An API that is documented and supported

HTML5 Local Storage + Mobile Client

This is a pretty obvious one, the site needs to work on my iPod Touch and desktop. It also needs to work when I’m offline so I can read on highly lossy connections like public WiFi or train rides. Some of this is negated by the Instapaper integration, but not everyone has an Instapaper account do they?

Silent Socialising

The ability to mark items as public, and to provide the option to subscribe to other peoples public feeds. I would use this to replace the linked items on this site with a public feed of RSS items. There is also a separate option to favourite an item. Not always are favourite items public and vice versa. Google Reader, Instapaper, Pinboard have all proved the quiet social networks work on the web, you can't build a platform out of them, but you can enhance your product.  

Like This? - Try This

Using some one of the many types of content classification it should be possible to classify either feeds or individual articles. Interesting and similar content that isn’t in the current set of RSS feeds can be presented to users.

Unbias This Article

If articles are classified into some type of topic grouping, it should be possible to apply sentiment analysis to article groupings. If you’re reading a news article and would like a different opinion you get presented with a selection of articles that have an opposing sentiment on the same topic.

Feed to SMS

As soon as a feed item is detected email or better SMS me the link. Great for anyone that needs instant notification of job postings, breaking news etc.

An API

Google reader has no official API. Shocking to consider that so many desktop and mobile feed readers rely on Google reader as their cloud sync agent. My dream feed reader obviously would provide a beautiful, well documented API for independent developers to use.

There isn’t anything here that is particularly ground breaking or advancing the field of RSS reading. It is simply a set of technologies that I feel could provide a great experience.

Classification of articles is not perfect, but there are ways and means of getting some fairly decent results from computers. It would be a great way for people to find interesting and relevant articles to read without having to subscribe to yet more feeds. In my small amount of non-scientific RSS reader behaviour studies the people who are serious about reading feeds and staying up-to date are willing to invest in that ability. They are the pro RSS users that need heavy weight tools to manage and control the flood of really simple syndication.

In a back of an envelope calculation I think a working prototype could be cobbled together in 2 weeks and take a lifetime to perfect.

There is lots of mysticism when it comes to SEO, lots of tricks and unless you are well versed in the dark arts how do you tell the good from the bad? Here is my honest and straight guide to doing SEO.

I am no SEO expert, it’s an industry that more often than not leaves me feeling dirty, cheap and used every time I encounter it. Half the practitioners are nothing better than Snake Oil salesmen, in short SEO is a dirty word in my book. Yet I still do SEO work for my clients. Why?

SEO is essentially the following 5 points.

1. Content, something original and useful
2. Titles
3. Meta Description
4. Share it
5. Use Google Products to get the data into the belly of the beast

For most people these are the final things they need to address though. THE most important thing about SEO is making your website accessible to users. Stop seeing your website as a gateway to fame or riches and start asking yourself, why would I visit this site, why would I ever want to come back? When you start answering those questions honestly you are able to start ensuring Google and the other search engines want to send you traffic.

For the vast majority of websites, not mortgage or holidays, these SEO tips will have a dramatic increase in the SEO performance of your site. Yes you could build an inter connecting network of blogs that funnel PageRank onto your landing pages. However, that will be useless if you’ve not covered these points first. These are the basics.

Content, Something original and useful

This is the corner-stone of your site, why it exists. It might be about the designs of early 20th century bike chainrings, or it might be selling website designs. Either way, you need something interesting and original on your site. You can’t get away with copying all the other sites, paraphrasing their content and writing salacious headlines. That traffic is pointless unless you’re trying to rip off advertisers. It’s the type of traffic that sticks around only as long as it takes them to realise you’ve done nothing new.

Creating your own content isn’t the easiest or quickest way to riches and fame, sorry, but it is great for the internet. The internet is still craving more content, people want more interesting, thoughtful, insightful content than you could ever produce.

Titles

Page and article titles are some of the most important content you can write. If you look at the title bar for on your browser you’ll notice the page is titled, “How To Do Search Engine Optimisation Honestly”. This article has the headline “Honest SEO”. The page title (in the browser window) contains the idea that is central to this post, and as such, it’s keywords. The search engines will use this to try and match what users search for. The articles title is supposed to be a bit simpler as its intended mainly for users, however it still has the central idea as a H1 tag to reinforces “honest” and “SEO”.

Meta Description

The meta description is the second most important element to SEO. This is the summary of the page, and at 160 characters is fairly short. This shows up as the text below the link in search results. Once again if you’ll need to get all the keywords for the page in here, but it need to be in whole sentences as the computers are smart these days. If some one searches for a phrase that is in the description, you stand to do fairly well.

Share it.

The best content or ideas take on a life of their own. In the geek world we have Hacker News do well on there and you’ll find people linking to you from all over the internet, people will still be visiting the article for months. Essentially the more an item is shared the more important it appears to the search engines, you might need to give it a helping hand and start it off.

RSS feeds are a great way of tech savvy visitors keeping in touch with everything that you publish on the site. Tweeting and sharing on other social media will expose it to a wider audience. No amount of pushing will make a boring blog post popular though, let it occur naturally.

Use Google products to get the data into the belly of the beast

Google provide a plethora of products the enable you to get data straight into their systems. Feedburner will process your RSS feeds, sanitising them and providing you stats on how many readers and what content is popular. Google Webmasters gives you information on your search engine results, in return for submitting a sitemap. The sitemap enables the google robots to find all the pages on your site. Google provide a whole list of products that you can use to get your content into Google quickly and efficiently.

That list will get you quite some way.

As a dyed in the wool iOS developer, I’m tempted by the Windows 7 mobile environment. When did Microsoft start actually doing things right?

I’m sitting on the train home from a Nokia / Microsoft love fest developer outreach day. I honestly don’t know what to call it. I was invited by Nokia to attend an introduction to Windows 7 in London, co-hosted with Microsoft. As an iOS developer with some limited Android experience, these are my initial thoughts. I’ve not yet got a device to play with so this is all from the presentation and a quick read on the internet. My overall impression is that Windows 7 Phone Mobile Edition is the bastard child of iOS and Android, with some wayward Microsoft genetic engineering thrown into the mix. It doesn’t sound that enticing, but to my surprise it works. If you have already got experience of Windows phone development my apologies for mistakes, misunderstandings and the basic nature of the post.

As more and more Apple apps are released with faux leather and other abominable designs, it is refreshing to see the big bad Seattle software house push clean, uniform, user-centric design is a refreshing surprise. The user orientation of the platform is pushed right through to what we as developers have access to.

Finally, Microsoft have realised that less is more on the mobile with a very iOS like strictness on access to data and no multitasking. (iOS back in the pre-version 3 days anyone?) The fast application switching makes the user experience a little more palatable enabling applications to resume state in most cases. Although, I want to get my hands on a device to try a few UI edge cases that weren’t covered in todays intro.

Some nice things that did impress on the platform were the system asynchronous internet access queue. Basically you can add up-to five documents to be downloaded by the system in a FIFO queue. No matter what your applications state is the operating system downloads them and puts them inside your isolated store (application bundle to us iOS developers). I could have done with a similar service on the iPhone for some previous projects.

The developer program itself is a little bit quirky. There are limits on the number of devices that can be linked to a developers account, only three devices for the basic account and that seems like a very small number. Apparently this is to avoid side loading apps with out using their marketplace. This doesn’t cause a problem for beta testing, however, as you can upload a private beta test to the market place, and up to 100 beta testers who get emailed a link to a 90 day download of your app for testing. That blows the current iOS beta process out of the water even with the fantastic TestFlight. The limit on devices will become somewhat frustrating, but my impression is that Microsoft will bend the rules for you if you ask nicely. After all, they are anxious for developers to buy into this.

As a developer, you have a limit of 100 free apps and unlimited paid for apps, which should go someway to limiting the amount of trash that gets put into the store. Paid apps can have a free trial period which is great to see, and it is up to the developer to cripple the app by whatever criteria you want.

The marketplace has an approval process that, like Apple, involves people reviewing the applications. We were given told that responses from the testers are very detailed for rejections and can include recommended improvements for the next release even if the app is approved. So the testers can’t be that busy, or Steve Balmer really is serious about Developers, Developers, Developers¹.

The major roadblock to selling on the Marketplace is the insistence for developers to have a US tax code to avoid being taxed in the US for purchases. Personally I’m not the biggest fan of paperwork, let alone tax forms, and having to deal with them in another country with their own bureaucratic culture does not seem appealing. Apparently, though, it’s all very easy to complete. Next is pay-outs, the minimum pay-out is $200 and I suspect due to the myopic nature of the tax setup, we’ll get paid in dollars so have to take a £15 - £20 hit on every payment in bank charges. I think I’ll try to pay for my next Windows license in Tögrögs.

Another neat feature is the integration of your app into Bing search results. Madness, and more useful if they had a meaningful market share. By including some magic sauce in the application manifest you can appear ready to download in related Bing searches even if they are not looking for an app. I’m completely unsure how this works, as it was thrown in as an aside into the final presentation segment, but it looks promising.

The three limitations to adoption are; the perceived ‘goodness’ of the platform for users. Microsoft don’t have the greatest reputation, how many times have you heard the word Vista next to an expletive? Secondly the entire ecosystem, Zune and marketplace do cover Music and Apps, how extensively I’m not sure, but I’ll bet they aren’t as complete as iTunes. Thirdly the phones aren’t anything special they look like stock Android phones. HTC (only UK windows 7 phone manufacturer) is not the best at design. Nokia could steal a march on all the other hardware guys if they have a really nice phone.

All in all I’ve some away from the day impressed with Metro as a user interface, impressed with the direction that Windows is taking with the mobile platform. It is obviously in its infancy and I suspect it will become more open as the platform matures, but it’s nice to see a Microsoft platform that isn’t trying to be all things to all men. I got a phone a free developer license and some free advertising, so yes I’ll be building at least one Windows 7 app.

1 Who the hell let him do that? Seriously what were the PR department smoking? Did they have too much of the Koolaid, because surely that isn’t normal behaviour in anyones books? Full show-reel of his maddest moments.

News of Steve Jobs' death broke almost 24 hours ago. I've been trying hard to write something meaningful, something intelligent. I can't. 

There is a Dr Seuss quote that 37Signals posted today, simply “Don’t be sad because it’s over. Smile because it happened.”

I felt compelled to rewatch the 2005 Stanford Speech and reconsider how I'm going to go about trying to make a ding in the universe to.  

 

Inspired by Kreci’s developer earning reports I’ve decided to start publishing my own, from the start.

I don’t believe in the term passive income, but rather a long term repayment for initial effort, time and expertise. Fine it doesn’t quite roll off the tongue like the term passive income nor it as seductive, sorry.

I currently consult on web and iPhone development and although provides an adequate income I’d like to move into a more “product focused” life style. I’d like to build a lifestyle business that provides the majority of my income. What I won’t include in this is any income from consulting or non-product work.

This is the first month of actively seeking out products to build and improve. At the moment, I have a few small apps, but as you’ll see the income is insignificant. I’m in the process of throwing everything at the wall, seeing what sticks and is profitable, and working with that. Eventually I’d like the majority of my income not to come from an hourly or project based fee. In the near future, I’d like my hosting costs and developer program subscriptions to be paid for by products, so I’ll be looking for about £125 per month.

Every product that I build I plan on having a 3 year existence. Year one after launch needs to cover at least the development and design cost, years 2 and 3 are then profit. My time for internal projects is priced at the bargain-basement minimum cost of living for just me.

The Earners

iAds $47.98 from WiFi Mac Address my only iPhone app with adverts at the moment, this has been it’s biggest month ever in revenue. WiFi Mac Address was built in a day and has had very little or no work invested in it.

AdMob has raked in the princely sum of $1.62, great. eCPM for my Android app is $0.15. I think I’ll update the app once more and see what impact that has before making the decision to turn it into abandon ware.

This blog has a few affiliate ads hand picked by me and they have generated $2.18 I don’t really expect this site to earn any money but won’t complain if it does.

The biggest earner was TrackTime with $49.90 however; I don’t expect that to continue earning any money as it has moved to another developer. It was too much work to maintain an old code base of that size, and I’d like to concentrate on developing new products.

Finally, SiteAuditHQ made a total of $7 through one sale. Site Audit HQ is a content analysis tool that I built over a weekend to test an idea for a fully featured product. It’s a very manual process as automating the whole thing would have taken too much time. This will probably pivot or get scrapped over the next few months.

That gives me a grand total of $107.98 or about £69.11 before the horrific Paypal exchange rate. Seeing as I have to start somewhere, I’m not overly disappointed as I’m about £55 short of my first milestone. However, I expect to lose the TrackTime income soon so need to compensate for that.

The Dead Weight

bikecoffeebike.com is a recommendation blog that launched on the 29th of September targeted at the UK cycling market. A blatant copy of Shawn Blanc’s awesome Tools and Toys I hope he isn’t offended. It will generate income through affiliate links and shouldn’t take more than 1-2 hours a week to maintain. Total time invested in it so far has been about 8 hours.

Secret project number 1 has been taking up most evening and weekends. It’s a paid for iOS app that will probably sell in the £2.99 - £6.99 range ($5 - $10USD) As expected this is going to need quite a high level of polish and finish to sell in that range. Oh and needs to launch before christmas.

October and Beyond

During October I need to revive my Android app, as it hasn’t been touched since January 2011 when I added AdMob to the application. I also really need to think about the future of SiteAuditHQ which needs a facelift at the very least, but it will probably be easier to bin it.

Ideally I’d like to be working on as few code bases as possible with a preference to paid for apps over free with advertising. I very much doubt that I’ll get this right first time, but if bikecoffeebike.com and the Secret Project were to provide most of my future product based income, I’d be very happy. At the moment all I can say is it’s easy to build a $50 a month app, but I couldn't build and maintain hundreds.