Bugherd experienced a brief outage early Friday morning AEST which apparently was unrelated to the fact that they’d been mentioned in the morning’s US tech press including TechCrunch, GigaOm, VentureBeat, ReadWriteWeb and AllThingsD.

Some of the coverage on the investment announcement

It wasn’t news to me exactly, since there’s been talks with the 500Startups team since Alan and Matt pitched in the 500Startups Mountain View office with the Startmate crew back in April, but it was great to be able to talk about the deal finally, and especially gratifying to be mentioned alongside some other really promising startups.

Alan and Matt will be over in Mountain View in July and August, for demo days with the 500startups team and other meetings. But Bugherd’s not attending for the full incubator program because it’s further along in its journey towards hugeness.

500Startups’ decision to invest means they’re excited in the potential of the product and the company, particularly when it comes to delivering a service all early-stage web startups need: a great issue tracking tool. Interested enough that being on the other side of the Pacific isn’t too far away, even. Hope we can get Dave McClure and Christine Tsai out here soon to visit and meet some of the other great people in the startup community here.

I’ll keep track of any further coverage of the announcement at http://bit.ly/500startupsinvestsinbugherd

Try Bugherd now if you need the world’s simplest bug and issue tracker. I have it on good authority the free beta period is about to close, but beta users will get a big discount when pricing is announced in the near future.

That said, this bright new world comes at a cost. I’m now paying $60 a month for 60GB of data on a DSL2 connection and about $40 a month in iPhone data charges, of which a significant chunk is accessing cloud resources. But that’s just the beginning — I’m now paying about $2,000 a year in SAAS software subscriptions!

Back in the bad old pre-SAAS days, I paid about $600 for a copy of Microsoft Office. Granted, it was buggy as hell, I couldn’t access my files from another machine, and it didn’t do any of the collaborative, CRM or media functions that some of my cloud apps will do. And I should also note that a big chunk of my business is made possible by Google Apps, which I get for free even though I am apparently the only person in the world who doesn’t click on sponsored listings in search results.

Still, thank goodness the cost of cloud storage and processing is coming down so fast, because the cost of subscribing to the software is more significant than I realised. I’m not complaining, mind, I’m just thinking twice about ordering that shiny new iPad+3G because I think I just spent the money on the cloud.

I’ve seen iCal do some stupid things before but this about takes the cake. What’s worse is I don’t know what I did to deserve this or what I need to do to get my hourly reminders back. For Pete’s sake.

Hey, Apple? When you’ve finished buffing your floor-to-ceiling mirrors to a flawless shine so you can bathe in the glory of the iPad, do you think you could possibly spare a couple of developers to knock some of the rough edges off iCal’s unholy seething mass?

The greater risk is that the industry may turn away from Apple if groupthink decides that Apple’s strategy is flawed. We’ve seen it before.

Could Google's Android Market really overtake Apple's iTunes Store?

“Instant publishing” versus “approval process” is an old battle in online publishing, arising from the classic ‘cathedral and bazaar‘ dilemma. The ‘cathedral’ is a marketplace ‘curated’ by expert specialists to ensure quality, conformity and fraud-free experiences. The ‘bazaar’ is a marketplace where ‘caveat emptor’ is the only rule, and consumer-driven social media tools are the way users avoid bad experiences, bad software and bad people.

Bazaars naturally grow wider and faster. Cathedrals are naturally less prone to the risk of law suits and prosecutions. Both good things to have. But if you can’t easily choose both, which do you choose?

It’s extremely hard to design curation process that scales to the massive growth and depth of the world’s online creativity with its cultures, subcultures, languages, niches and special interests. If you don’t curate, the threat of getting your ass sued or prosecuted by customers, competitors, regulatory authorities and whole geographies can be enough to scare investors away before you even get started.

It takes more than building and then opening the floodgates to make a successful bazaar. You need location, momentum, viralocity and an engaged customer community that’s prepared to do some of your curation via social media tools. If you don’t open a bazaar, you risk being overtaken by a larger, more dynamic community of users.

Can you do both? Usually, no. It’s easy to end up with twice the cost of curation and half the benefit of the bazaar. You can see what that looks like on Nokia’s Ovi platform. Epic fail.

Cathedrals are sooo uncool

In many publishing settings, a cathedral-based system is best, but cathedrals are sooo uncool, and being uncool can cost you industry sentiment, which can cost you… well, everything in business. I learned this valuable lesson while working at Yahoo! a decade ago.

See, at the beginning, Yahoo!’s founders felt that new submissions to our directory should be reviewed by a team of highly-trained and skillful curators (who we called Yahoo! Surfers.) They would ensure not just that they were good enough to help our users find what they wanted but also that we were able to list them in the correct spot in the Yahoo! directory. One of the earliest hires at Yahoo! was Srinija Srinivasan, an expert ontologist, to guide our curation strategy. She was (still is, maybe) a Dewey Decimal Rockstar and her team of web surfers were some of the best available, all specialist subject experts, information theoreticians and librarians.

The Yahoo! directory was great quality content. You were really hard-pressed to find a bad website or a poorly placed listing in our directory. And of course, very early on, we knew our model was never going to scale to the growth and scope of the interweb — it could never include every website that was submitted to our surfers. To cover the rest — to have one foot in the bazaar — we worked with Inktomi, AltaVista and a tiny startup called Google to provide search engine results to cover the rest of the web.

Unfortunately, as the Long Tail became the coolest idea in the industry, it seemed like Yahoo! was outsourcing its Long Tail solution to Google. That was a concern to the industry and it began turning the market as a whole against Yahoo! as the best way to find stuff on the web. Now, the number of search results mattered more than the nature of the search results. While Yahoo!’s solution was still helpful, it wasn’t the coolest thing in town, Google was. Users, advertisers and the new SEO optimisation flocked to Google. Everything Yahoo! attempted to claw back that leading perception now felt like catch-up, and it attracted derision and disbelief — sometimes because it was merited, but often just because it was something from Yahoo!.

Uhoh, iTunes Store is a cathedral, Google is a bazaar

Undoubtedly, iTunes Store is one of the biggest, uncoolest cathedrals in technology. Whether you’re publishing music, TV, movies, podcasts or apps for the iPhone and iPod Touch, every piece of content must be reviewed and approved by somebody at Apple.

Like all classic cathedrals, Apple keeps all information on its approval processes and procedures very close to its chest. There is very little information from the company about how the approval process works, how long it takes, and what happens if your content gets rejected.

There are many good reasons for this: it’s valuable proprietary information, it is probably evolving rapidly and subject to change, and in many cases there is probably a large element of grey area to deal with — editorial calls need to be made unhindered by complex rules and regulations.

There are many bad reasons for this too — it doesn’t just fail to scale with the growth of the web, but it encourages industry speculation in the form of tweets, blog posts, conference sessions and industry gossip. All that backchannel discussion is negative, and in our hyper-connected online community, it can easily gain enough momentum to become an unstoppable meme that makes the hop from industry to consumer communities, like the one I saw crush Yahoo! as a search destination.

Meanwhile, Google’s Android marketplace is much more like a classic bazaar. It’s easier for developers to get apps out on the Android market, but that doesn’t necessarily help them market, merchandise or build a relationship with new customers. Frankly, Google sucks at both curating and marketing, if its Android,  OpenSocial and iGoogle marketplaces are anything to go by. They are all designed for developers first and foremost, with very little thought given to how to create an engaging ‘retail’ experience for consumers.

Do consumers actually want a bazaar for their phone?

Thing is, consumers and app publishers are not a single community — they actually have very different needs from an app marketplace. I don’t think the frustration Joe Developer feels with mysterious app approval processes should make the jump to Joe iPhone Owner.

Most consumers really don’t want a bazaar when it comes to apps right now, especially on mobile phones. An iPhone or an Android phone brings your essential personal information closely together with entertainment, sure, but none of us wants to install anything that might be a security risk or that might impair our ability to make a quick and simple phone call.

Mobile phones have limited screen real estate and input methods that make it harder to browse, evaluate and personalise large volumes of apps. Even when new apps only cost a dollar, most consumer iPhone owners I’ve observed tend to choose one app per category and stick with it if it’s well-designed and well-supported. They would rather have the best app recommended to them by an expert editor than have the choice of 100 apps in one category they need to evaluate and decide on themselves.

xkcd: oh yes, there's an app for that!

Can Apple have a foot in the bazaar too?

Sure, Apple could do a better job of implementing ratings, user reviews and ‘genius’ recommendations to help users recommend the best apps in cluttered categories.

It would really help Apple if it made the review processes for all content sold in the iTunes Store less opaque and unpredictable. There has to be a reasonable middle ground between Apple’s usual default of extreme privacy and giving away trade secrets. Publishers should be able to login to a dashboard of some kind, something that could show a timeline of the stages of the approval process, the average waiting time, the number of apps ahead and behind, all your apps, and flags for any outstanding issues.

Apple’s relevant people should be prepped and allowed to speak about this whole set of issues, to industry conferences, trade publications and in blogs and online documentation. Can you name your favourite ‘iTunes Store Industry Evangelist’? Or even an ‘iTunes Store Publishing Genius’? That’s a terrible omission.

Once an app is on iTunes Store, Apple could really do a better job of providing marketing data on consumer interaction with the app in terms of views, clicks, purchases, as well as anonymised data from apps in the same category to use as a benchmark.

It would also really help if Apple worked on extending its lead on helping developers and publishers market and merchandise their content on iTunes Store. There’s currently no advertising space on iTunes Store — everything is either algorithmically determined or chosen by an iTunes Store editor. Why not lock out some space for publishers to pay to market their apps?

Apple also does nothing to help you market your app outside iTunes Store aside from allowing you to copy and paste the url of the app and the publisher in iTunes Store. Why not provide an RSS or Atom feed of positive reviews and star ratings? Make it easier to create a video of the app in play? Make it easier for app developers to contact customers who’ve bought an app previously?

Industry: you are not a good use-case

If you take just one thing from this lengthy article, take this: we in the industry are not typical consumers. I, for instance, have purchased 139 iPhone apps! That’s extreme, but none of us is the mainstream Joe Consumer by the very fact that we work in the industry and we invest much more in this than Joe Consumer. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that what’s best for the iPhone app developer community is also best for the iPhone consumer community. Think before you lobby for bazaar over cathedral.

More good reading on this topic:

• Ars Technica: respected developers fleeing iTunes Store
• Manton Reece: The only two fixes for iTunes Store
• Fred Wilson: The power of instant approval

Apple Mail image attachment is bad UX

Two things I don’t love about Apple Mail:

1. It embeds images in the content of the email instead of making it an attachment, leading to calls from Outlook-using friends who don’t know how to get the image out of the email so they can use it. It would be great as an option, but I’d like to be able to choose ‘attachment’ instead of ‘embed’ as the default.
2. Worse is the location and relevant prominence of the little drop-down menu that resizes the images you add to your emails.

Friends, relatives and colleagues have used Apple Mail for years and never noticed this tiny, critical item, assuming they had no say in image resizing. I’ve just got off the phone with one friend who’s had four attempts at sending me a few 2Mb images, unable to figure out why they arrive in my inbox as 350Kb.

It only appears after you insert an image, which makes sense, but that makes it most unlikely to ever be spotted.

I’m no UX designer but I think this should appear either in the image attachment dialogue box itself or up in the toolbar area.

What do you think, am I wrong? Can you design a better solution?

Never mind. Over the years I’ve developed a number of coping strategies to disguise my terrible memory. I would love to have the time and the money to use a full Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system, but I don’t (and I can’t quite remember why) but here’s a handy tip: if you’re a Mac user, you may not have to go much further than Apple’s own free Address Book product.

In Address Book you can create as many custom fields as you want (see the screen dump below) and then use those fields to build searches. I use the ‘met you at’ field below to quickly find all the people I met at a particular event or in a particular online medium, such as Twitter. And you can use the Notes field at the bottom to keep a record of your calls, emails and meetings with that person.

It’s not a fully-fledged CRM application, but it’s free. Give it a try.

Sorry, but I'm with someone new, and it's better (photo by Michael Sarver)

Microsoft’s Internet Explorer IE 8 showing up now is like an unfaithful ex-partner showing up a long time after you’ve found someone better looking and less likely to break your heart.

Wrote this post after Amnesia Razorfish asked me to write about IE8, for Microsoft’s http://microsoft.com.au/ie8debate. You can find other opinion-leaders and read their leading opinions there (warning: many are not as funny as mine). I’m impressed Amnesia Razorfish and Microsoft were up for constructive criticism since IE8 is such an important product. Evidence Microsoft is learning to listen and ready to begin changing. You can contribute your opinion on http://microsoft.com.au/ie8debate or just twitter with the hashtag #ie8debate

There was a time (though it seems like centuries ago now) that Internet Explorer had me by the heart-strings. It was the mid-nineties, I was but a young stripling then, and all I could think about was the beauty and the power of the internet. I was a producer with a small internet business called Yahoo! that hoped to make some money selling ads on web pages when people went searching for stuff (as if!) and Internet Explorer was one of two browsers that most consumers used to access what many people still called “the world wide web.”

Back then Internet Explorer (IE) had a small but rapidly growing slice of the market and I was in love with her promise of fast times, with her sexy interface. (Can an interface be “sexy”? Can I get a “hell yeah” from the geeks in the audience?) In those days, compared to Netscape Navigator, Internet Explorer was attractive; alluring, even. IE was great for me, great for Yahoo! and great for our customers. She made me look good, and she was going to help me make money — who can ask for more from a girlfriend?

Then the relationship began to go bad.

IE started to get carried away with the power she had over me. She wanted more money to keep Yahoo! search as an option for IE users searching the web. She wanted me to adopt new technologies like ActiveX that weren’t compatible with Navigator. By now, Navigator was just another browser I was just friends with, but that wasn’t enough for IE — she wanted me all to herself.

Then she started to hang around with a bad crowd, and developed a crack habit. Spyware and malware and all manner of nasty types started exploiting security vulnerabilities I hadn’t noticed when we first started dating. She had a problem, and although she kept releasing updates to address each vulnerability, there seemed to be a new crack in her armour almost every week.

At first I thought it was just a phase she’d grow out of. Slowly the crack habit began affecting the time we spent together — I’d have to download and install a big new patch before I began browsing the web, and it was costing me money and time in bandwidth (which was expensive and slow back then) just to maintain our relationship.

Even then, I probably would have stayed with her if it weren’t for two of her friends: MSN and Windows.

There’s a common observation in single guy relationship theory: the more beautiful the woman, the more likely she is to have a needy, unattractive best friend. The unattractive best friend (who my mate Tony calls “the bonus monster”) doesn’t like you, and will always be around just when you really want to be alone and romantic. She will undermine you, and if you’re not careful, she’ll manage to shut you out altogether.

IE’s bonus monster was MSN, this overweight, insecure, unattractive consumer web portal that kinda-sorta-wanted-to-be-AOL-and-Yahoo!-put-together. At first I didn’t believe MSN was a threat to my relationship with IE because nobody who knew how to change their default homepage really wanted to use it. But soon IE started to insist that we think of MSN’s feelings on every decision we were making; including MSN in everything we did together, even insisting I use MSN if I was going to do something online. Ick.

Then there was IE’s fat, clumsy and often aggressive big bully brother, Windows. At lot has changed since Windows got in trouble with the law and lost, but back then, Windows was a pretty scary guy to deal with. There was a tiny core at the centre of Windows — a brainstem that remained almost literally unchanged since the Jurassic equivalent of consumer computing evolution — and on top of that, all manner of computing services had been stacked, sometimes carefully, sometimes haphazardly. Sometimes the stack would fall over several times a day.

(Once I taught myself to juggle during a two week period of hell when Windows would crash my laptop hourly and then take 5-10 minutes to recover itself when I rebooted.)

Microsoft, IE’s dad, decided about mid-way through our relationship that it would be a good idea for IE to spend more time with Windows, and began insisting that they hang out together in what became an uncomfortable, unnatural way. It seemed like the more successful IE became, the more determined Microsoft became to make IE take care of her bully brother. Sometimes it was like Windows and IE were just one person; they started sharing a plate, started hugging a little too closely, began finishing each other’s sentences. It was wrong on so many levels. It was incest. And yet, when the courts finally sought to intervene, for a while Microsoft tried to say it was no longer possible for Windows to exist without IE. That was so weird it was embarrassing.

I’d been through a lot all this time, putting up with the constant downtimes, updates and workarounds I needed just to stay in this relationship, but I still had eyes only for IE. At least, until poor bloated, dependency-addled IE could no longer keep up with advances in HTML itself. And I bought an iPod.

See, for the past decade my employer had chosen the operating system I used at work, and while my shiny new iPod worked OK with my Windows laptop at work, I was blown away by the ease-of-use and clean simplicity of my iPod. I’d used Macs before in the past (I’d been a Mac evangelist and Editor of Australian Macworld magazine before there really was an Internet) and I began to wonder if perhaps the great times I was having with my iPod would be the same if I tried using Mac’s OS X instead of Windows.

When I left Yahoo! to go do my own thing, I bought a Mac. On my Mac there was IE, but not the IE 6.x I was used to, just something slow and clunky labelled IE 5.x. Not very much like the IE 5.x I’d used on Windows before. There was also Safari, another browser from Apple, which was basic and short on some features I’d miss a bit, but it was much faster than IE, and it was really stable.

There was also this new girl: Firefox. Somehow while I’d been focused on just getting by in my tumultuous relationship with IE, the un-sexy, clunky Navigator I’d known in the ’90s had dramatically changed. After a near-death experience and a long time in rehab she had gone into a kind of group therapy called Open Source and come out transformed. She was now everything I might want, and as my needs changed, the open source community ensured that she not only changed with my needs but often anticipated my needs before they changed. She was light, she was fast, she was flexible, and I could dress her up with themes to suit any occasion.

She was even OK that I was still good friends with Safari and wanted to stay that way. I’d found the girl of my dreams.

So a few years went by. Then just the other day, Firefox and Safari and were are at the coffee shop, working and talking via Twitter and Skype and Jabber with our friends, and you’d never guess who walked in. Internet Explorer 8. Looking cleaner, less seedy, and for a change, not joined at the hip to her scary brother Windows and her ugly best friend, MSN. I hardly recognised her.

So I asked Firefox and Safari if they’d excuse me, and I moved to another table to talk with IE 8 for a while. And every thing I learned just made me certain I’d made the right decision in leaving her.

She made it clear that she wanted me back, but I don’t think she even really knows what I want anymore. Yes, she has has some new features but I’m not overwhelmed by them, in fact, I’m not even whelmed. They’re very similar to stuff I already get with Firefox and Safari. Yes, IE 8 is now less befuddled with crud than before and more able to support the advanced scripting web services like to do these days, but that’s something I’d expect of any modern girl.

We went through a lot together, IE8 and I. I know it hurt both of us, not just me. But it takes a long time for those scars to heal. It takes a lot of upside for me to give her a second chance. I can’t see that upside in her right now.

And I’m a Mac guy now. Is there an IE8 for Mac guys? Ah, no. In fact, there isn’t even that terrible IE 5.x for Mac users anymore.

Sorry IE, but you’re the unfaithful ex-girfriend, and I’m in a better place now.

When I first started as a web producer, everybody I knew worked with only Netscape Navigator and IE in mind and they did it only from PCs. Now, in my consulting gig at Pollenizer.com Our team are nearly all Mac-based and we work mainly in Firefox and Safari (when we’re not testing for browser-compatibility). Times have changed for me. How have they changed for you?

Face recognition technology is not that new — it’s been around in various shapes and forms for decades — but the processing power and memory available in a personal computer in recent years has allowed face recognition to filter in from the mainframes in the Pentagon to the Mac on your desk.

A couple of years ago I got quite excited by the work Tara Hunt was doing for Riya.com, which originally used recognition algorithms to build collections of people and words in a big aggregated database of photos. Since then Riya’s switched to recognition-powered shopping search, which I find less cool (but I guess it’s more likely to pay the bills). And there’s more…

Last year, Google added face recognition technology to both Picasa and Google image search but still, it wasn’t really exciting me. Why? Because these solutions, for the most part, address image recognition on photos stored in the cloud, not on my desktop (Riya tried to recognise desktop images with a standalone client but it was glacially slow and a terrible experience on the Mac.)

All the photos I care about recognising face in aren’t on the cloud, they’re still mostly on my Mac, and because I’m a Mac user, they’re mostly in iPhoto. Nail facial recognition in iPhoto and you’ve got me at hello. Which is what Apple have done with the release of iLife ’09, including a new version of iPhoto.

Not all facial recognition algorithms were created equal, and I’m pleased to report that my early experiences suggest the algorithm in this new iPhoto is a corker and a rip-snorter (that means “good” if you’re not Australian.) As you can see in this video, it not only recognises hundreds of photos of my seven year-old son after only three training images, it even recognises his face over the past six years, right back to a photos of him barely a year old and younger. Think about how much a face changes in the first seven years of life!

When technology comes close to magic, it still has the power to inspire and delight me. Well done iPhoto team!

Me at WebJam, fiddling with my iPhone when I should be paying attention

So far I haven’t written much about iPhone apps, considering they’ve changed my life, and all. They help me get more productive, stay organised, record thoughts, check directions, split bills, mock Blackberry users and fill in the many interstitial moments of nothingness in my day that I should really spend focusing on remaining in the present, observing my ahamkara… rather than fiddling with my iPhone. Ah well.  

Today all that changes (iPhone apps continue to change my life, but today I write about some of them.)

I’m promped to get recommending because Kate over at The Zeitgeists has a good short list of iPhone apps she finds helpful and fun, but like many Web 2.0 dreamers, she has an aversion to paying for things, even good things. So while she’s got some good apps on her list, she’s really missing some of the cream of the crop.

So, after the click, here’s some iPhone app recommendations from me:

Banner – display a big scrolling LED message across a crowded bar (such as, “Ahem, excuse me, but I couldn’t help notice you have an iPhone too…”)

Bejeweled 2 – best mix of interstitial casual gaming payoff, high quality graphics and sound, and strategy if you have longer than 2mins to play.

Bloom – awesometastic! Never have to buy another Brian Eno album ever again!

Comic Touch – enLOLify those craptastic low-res, misty, poorly exposed iPhone camera images in two shakes and a drag.

Face Melter – take a photo of your face, drag to ‘melt’ areas of the image, then click the ‘animate’ button to see it all move. Will convince any <10 kid that their mum/dad must trash the Blackberry and buy an iPhone.

Flick Fishing – casting the line by flicking the iphone is even funnier than waving your iphone around like a light saber and playing a two player game across wifi is hilarious after a couple of drinks.

Fring – if you simply must remain connected to everybody, via everything, all the time, this is the app.

Midomi – like Shazam, only even more accurate. Also lets you say some lyrics rather than sing, or even just type in a snippet of lyric. Not as pretty lookin’ but works great.

Smule Ocarina – infreakingcredible. play a woodwind instrument by blowing into the mic. and click on the social tab to listen to other people’s tunes in a cool Google Earth-like globe animation.

Oz Weather – the best weather app for .au and $0.00001 from every copy sold goes directly to a company in which i am negotiating to become a minority shareholder.

Pano – up yours SonyEricsson! Now I can take panoramic shots on my iphone. Misty, poorly exposed, and low-res panoramic shots, but panoramic all the same!

Remember The Milk – if there’s only one paid app you buy, this should be it. Actually, the app is free, but you need to subscribe to the online task management service that goes with it for it to work. Once you’re done, you can mark that task as complete.

Later, I was talking to some friends who had a mind to start an iPhone App development business – would I like to be a part of it? Well, yes! Though the volatility of any new market can be a challenging place to start a business.

Weren’t they worried about planning for their business before the economics of iPhone apps was really clear? Beyond the obvious risk of not yet knowing how long it takes to build apps, how do you know what to charge and what your revenues are going to be? What the hot categories will be? How best to market your apps?

Their response was the right one: we don’t know, but the opportunities are as big as the risks – if we happen across a successful formula we could have a great business. I think that’s a great attitude and I hope to tell you more about this new Aussie iPhone App developer when the time is right.

Meantime, the volatility of a virgin App economy (“apponomy”?) trying to establish itself is becoming clear. Average prices for apps started way up, and now developers are concerned that prices for some apps have been cut in half, others have gone from paid to free. I think Marco Arment, the lead developer at Tumblr and developer of the iPhone App Instapaper, has it right when he predicts that app pricing should turn out to be fairly inelastic – that it shouldn’t matter whether you’re charging $2 or $10, the challenge is in getting someone to pay at all.

The problem with inelastic pricing is that it comes with significant momentum, both up and down. If consumers come to an Appstore and the average price for apps is $0.00, that makes it very difficult to charge even $2.00. If Apple had a problem with apponomics and decided to institute, say, a compulsory $2.00 charge for apps, that would set the expectation that apps are not free, and consumers would then be more likely to pay $5-$10 because of the perception that “apps are not free.”

The challenge for Marco and other developers trying to make a living doing this is: for most app developers, this is not a living, it is not even a main focus of work. Never mind the hobbyist developers doing it for fun, it’s the big businesses using Appstore as a marketing vehicle for their main desktop software that can really hurt your business. They don’t need iPhone customers, but they do need their desktop customers to have access to their software on their iPhone – those are two different things. A big software company that doesn’t really care about iPhone app revenues can really hurt your business if they’re in the same space.

Marco also talks about whether or not to make the iPhone version of Instapaper his main business and not developing any subsequent apps. His first app has been very successful: is he best to build on that success by developing more apps, or by improving the app he’s already built? Many would say to keep one foot in each camp, but Marco calls it right when he makes his decision: you double the complexity of your business and how it is affected by the volatility in the apponomy if you keep a foot in each camp.

The apponomy will settle down as it grows, though Apple may need to assist it in doing so – using the same email marketing it uses to promote music that will be popular on iTunes Store, featuring app developers on Apple.com and by supporting good developers with pricing breaks, free training and access to advice from the App platform development team. Whatever actions Apple takes, it needs to be fast, but subtle. Lots of small, incremental changes please – if they wear their hobnail boots as Apple sometimes does, it will only start the apponomy oscillating more wildly.

Meanwhile, this is a gold rush. Is there really gold in them thar hills, or is it just iron pyrite? There’s only so much you can learn from the greenhorns running out of the supply store with shovels and wheelbarrows. Sooner or later you have to buy your own shovel and go see for yourself… Marco, where’s the store?…

I don’t know what this error message means when I sync my iPhone with my contacts and addressbook on my Mac, but know i don’t need it right now.

I especially don’t need to go fishing through Apple discussion forums and enthusiast groups, trying to separate wild guesses from knowledgeable advice, trying several different things until one thing works.

And I especially don’t need to accidentally delete, duplicate or triplicate all my events and contacts as a side-effect of trying to fix the problem.

Oh, woe is me! But an unsynced iPhone is like a Motorolla Razr with a nicer interface – it cannot remain so for long.

Is "awesomenicity" a real word? It is now – now that I have a 16Gb iPhone and I can fit all my contacts, all my calendar, all the music I need, a selection of my best photos… and a MOVIE i rented from iTunes Store in ONE CLICK!

There’s only two people on this earth who could make me take the train to work instead of driving a car: AL Gore (obviously) and Steve Jobs – coz watching movies on an iPhone? I feel like missing my stop!

Uploaded with plasq‘s Skitch

Where’s the little drag panel bottom right so i can inject some readability into this thing? And how come if the date is in the late evening, the ‘Save’ and ‘Edit’ buttons are obscured by my dock? And for that matter, why is there an Edit button at all? Why can’t I just click on the fields to edit them?

Nat over at Decisive Flow has broken the silence at last; MYOB (Mind Your Own Business) is easily the worst example of design in a popular software product available in Australia. It had to be said, and I’m sure I’m one of millions of small business owners who mutters several expletives every time they launch the product.

MYOB doesn’t let me ‘mind’ my own business at all, it actually makes me shy away from the financial management of my business. There’s nothing I hate doing more than using MYOB – I’d willingly stand in a customer service queue at the Department of Small Business for three hours rather than spend an hour using MYOB – and I’d almost certainly be more satisfied with what I’d achieved in that time!

Unfortunately there’s little to no incentive for MYOB to improve their product. Only one competitor in the small business accounting software market, QuickBooks, and – incredible but true – it’s actually harder to use and as marginally functional as MYOB. And accounting software is one of the few market segments in the software industry to remain local and parochial – you can’t develop a new accounting software package in Australia and then easily export it overseas. Accounting and tax practices vary so much from country to country that localisation costs are huge. Even the big, hairy gorilla, Microsoft, has half-implemented a poor localisation of Microsoft Money for the Australian market, presumably because the costs of doing it properly are too great for such a small market.

Finally, MYOB must earn significant revenue from selling hard-to-use software – many MYOB owners I know have reluctantly signed up for one of MYOB’s expensive premium telephone support subscriptions. Two MYOB owners I know have learned enough about the product over sufficient time that they’ve started clawing back that investment by offering their services trouble-shooting other friend’s MYOB problems on an hourly rate.

Even though my own business is tiny, I’ve taken to using a book keeper once a month to do it all for me – she’s my firewall between my business and MYOB. It means I never have to launch MYOB again. But there it sits on my hard disk anyway – a 107Mb fat lump of lard – so that my book keeper can send me the updated data file every month. If she gets hit by a bus I need to have it on file to take to the next book keeper. I don’t even get to forget that I own the software, because every month I get some junk mail in my PO Box from MYOB, reminding me to pay an exorbitant fee to upgrade the software, or induce me to cross-grade to a related product, or even invite me to pay through the nose to attend further training courses. All this while it’s such a bad product I pay someone else to use it for me.

Technorati Tags: MYOB, bad software, accounting

Technorati Tags: MYOB, bad software, accounting

Technorati Tags: MYOB, bad software, accounting