Thanks to @iPhoneHelpr for reporting it to us. And thank you to Reuters for entrusting their news texts to DTCoreText.

There are presently two kinds of components on the store, Open Source and Closed Source. As always before you can use our Open Source stuff you find on GitHub for free as long as you attribute their origin to us. You can pay for us to waive the attribution requirement for each component.

You Get Options!

If you like to remain anonymous then there is a new option to opt out being mentioned in our PR materials.

The license for our Open Source components is generally the way how people can sponsor these components and insure that we stay committed to them. The fixed price and the new Marketing Exception options serve to make the decision easier for people what amounts they should be sending our way.

Bonus: you always get a nice invoice for your accounting department.

For commercial Closed Source components we have the Extended License option. The normal license allows you to use the component in apps published by a single entity. For a small extra fee you can use the component in all the apps you are working on.

The text of our commercial licensing terms is available here. We also have a fully fledged legally watertight contract license available for a higher price should you need such a thing, for example if you are US-based startup wanting to have all your ducks in a row for the big exit or IPO.

Many Components Discontinued, Many Reduced in Price

The current stock of the Parts Store has been reduced to 10 commercial and 5 open source parts. We dropped the following components due to them being out dated or people not purchasing them in quite a while.

Reduced

• DTNotePadViewController, reduced from 75 to 25 Euros
• DTBannerManager, reduced from 100 to 25 Euros
• DTClusterMaker, reduced from 100 to 25 Euros
• DTCalendarView, reduced from 250 to 50 Euros
• DTPinLockController, reduced from 200 to 100 Euros
• DTAboutViewController, reduced from 200 to 50 Euros
• DTChartView, reduced from 200 to 50 Euros

Discontinued

• DTPurchaseButton
• DTCustomSwitch
• DTLEDNumberView
• DTMenuController
• DTAugmentedRealityController
• DTSplashExtender
• DTVideoEncoder
• DTMeasureStrip

If you have a special requirement that could use one of the discontinued components please contact us by email. We still have their source code and we can either get to a special arrangement with you or – the smaller ones – merge some into DTFoundation.

The primary goal of this cleanup is to lessen the barrier for most developers to purchase a license to our products. Less parts descriptions to maintain, easier to find. A more prominent position for our crown jewel DTRichTextEditor.

We have also restructured the internal order fulfillment process so that we can continue to work on code while a dedicated person takes care of your needs.

The secondary goal is to increase our revenue from component sales and thus have more time available for working on them. WWDC is coming and we need to fund the trip for two people now. Therefore we already say many thanks for your esteemed business as it is an essential ingredient for us to be able to do what we love. At this point I’d like to remind you that I’m also available for contract projects.

Let’s say you have an app that makes call to a URL that you don’t control. For example one of your corporate clients has his own web API and they don’t want to spend a couple of hundred dollars for a “proper” certificate. Still they want to have their web API traffic be encrypted with HTTPS.

So the first time you encounter this certificate you evaluate the SecTrustRef and get the information that it is a recoverable trust problem. So you show this alert. The demo app that comes with this component demonstrates how.

Cancel would cancel the web request. Continue would ignore the trust problem. Details shows details. There is a dialog in-between the alert and the following one, but that should be easy to do.

This is an actual certificate and the display of the already implemented sections is identical with the original Apple certificate viewer. This screenshot is also from the Demo, it shows the display of my own *.cocoanetics.com wildcard certificate.

Also of interest is the bottom of this table view which shows the certificate details.

And of course this also works in landscape.

My first goal is to have the display to match exactly Apple’s original. Once we have achieved this we can start to make it better.

There are many problems with Apple’s solution, including:

• German localization of the field names is generally too long so that you can only see some values if you rotate to landscape
• The rotation is not animated but it jumps, clearly this is very old code
• Apple’s certificate viewer doesn’t even support 4″ displays
• All the values that show an angle bracket are actually plain NSData descriptions.
• I found that the public key data value is actually not the true public key but it is a still encoded ASN.1 sequence of the actual key data and the exponent. This also – unnecessarily – contains the ASN.1 tag part. Very sloppy.
• It is no public API that you could use.

All of this adds to some great potential for DTCertificateViewer which is why I chose to pursue it. If you have a use case for it then please don’t hesitate to get in touch with me.

If you come to CeBIT please pop by ELO’s booth at hall 3, F30 to give the app a whirl. Doing so you can do us a favor if you keep mentioning how much you like the slick UI.

Nevertheless it is nice to go back over the past year in reviews to pick out the ones that transport the best emotions. There are many people who use app reviews as a sounding board for themselves and write things there that they never would say to a developer in person. Thus it is permissible to pick out the few reviews that give us the best feeling and ignore the rest.

I like communicate with users of our apps directly and because of this I am encouraging them to get in touch by e-mail. We can only fix issues that we know about. As the past year has shown there bugs are fact of the business. And we can only fix those that we know about. Don’t ever feel tempted to submit a bug report via an app review or offer extortion: “if you add feature x, I’ll give you the fifth star”.

Today is a day as good as any to take a quick shower in some praise.

SpeakerClock

SpeakerClock made by me as a tribute to TED. But what good is a tribute when the “tributed one” never learns about it? So I contacted TED via their website I received the most amazing testimonial, ever. Accompanied by a photo.

So cool! We’re all playing with your app in the TED office. Here’s
TED’s June Cohen and Chris Anderson.

If you didn’t know, Chris Anderson is the curator of the TED Conference and June Cohen the Executive Producer of TED Media.

With SpeakerClock I wanted to create a totally different UI than what you would expect from an universal iOS app. Taking a page out of Apple’s book I wanted to make it look like a digital LED clock with fixed UI elements.

The idea is to basically have all actions be achievable by gestures. Swipe left and right to set the time. Swipe with more than 1 finger to change the time faster. Tap to start. Tap to stop. Double-Tap to reset to start time. Long press on a preset button, the yellow or red lights to set the time for this.

And that’s all in the instructions, but apparently some people would rather complain about features they think are missing than to read the instructions. Oh well…

The next review on the app store was the reason why I put together this article in the first place:

Besides Linguan (see below) this is the app that garners the most favorable reactions. This will definitely be the next app to get a few new features. For one thing a few people request an overtime function where the timer would count upwards after reaching zero. Also I would like to implement a remote-control mode where you would be able to control the timer on one device from another one over WiFi.

GeoCorder

I made GeoCorder as a tool to record GPX tracks, like you would view as paths on Google Earth or geo-tag DSLR pictures with. Then I had a client who wanted to have a tracker app, which I made. But since I didn’t want to maintain two apps that are both using Core Location I merged the Tracking features into the main app.

There are two versions of GeoCorder on the app store, both identical in features with the only difference that one has an ad. People generally seem to like what the app evolved to be, but I am a bit uncertain how I could really take it to the next level.

GeoCorder could probably benefit from background launching via significant location changing. This would restart the recording as soon as you move away from your current location. Please let me know in the comments of by email if you have an idea how to make this a useful feature.

iWoman

This is by far the oldest of all apps presented here, it was my second app I ever submitted to the app store. Originally it was a project to learn iOS development by mimicking an app that existed even before there was an app store. I also made it for the practical reason to have an app that would convince my wife that having an iPhone is a good idea. She remains to this day my customer #1, in general, but also for iWoman in specific.

There is a big market of apps that are competing for this area of female menstrual cycle tracking. Honestly I don’t care much about my competitors because there is little use to me to be competitive about my hobbies.

Translation: “This is a good use for my poor memory”

iWoman seems to be mostly bought in countries outside of the mainstream as we can see from this recent ranking chart. Being Number 1 in Azerbaijan or Guatemala feels almost as good as getting 5-star reviews.

At the 2012 WWDC I showed iWoman to on of the coveted Apple designers who praised it as a great app, but also had some harsh UI criticism about things that he would change. iWoman is one of the apps that I still need to adapt for the taller screen of the iPhone 5. When I do that I could also make the wheel view an alternate view you access by rotating the device as the Apple designer suggested. And I would like to be able to free up some vertical space by eliminating the separate list view. Adding a new cycle could also be done from the calendar or even the wheel.

Also I still have this idea that it might be a greet app for male partners of female users of iWoman to be able to confidentially know about certain parameters of their partner’s cycle. When are the mood swings? When are the days to have sex and when better not? (depending on whether the couple tries to conceive or prevent it)

iWoman is near to my heart (literally and figuratively) but I need better feedback and ideas how to improve it. High rankings in “off the beaten track” countries are nice for the ego but I could really do with some more inspiration…

Summertime

The idea for this app came to me when I saw that Apple had built all information needed for it into NSTimeZone. This gives you a database of all time zones around the globe and whether or not they obey daylight savings time. I figured that there must be a use case for people who want to be able to know on a whim when the next DST switch will be.

I simply cannot remember this ever. I modeled the app after the weather app with identical navigation and you should feel right at home when adding additional locations than the automatic current location time zone info card. Fun fact: this works even if the user has disabled Core Location because it uses the current time zone information instead.

Currently you have an option to email a picture of how the clock is set and you can activate a local push notification to remind you a few hours before the change, at the switch time or on the morning after. Or so the ideas was, unfortunately I had left some test code in place which disabled the notifications every time a user tried to set it. This was only fixed in the most recent update.

It turns out that the market for this kind of reference app is quite small. Just because you think it might be a nice idea to have something like this does not mean that there is an actual need for it.

But as I stated above, since this app – like all others – is a glorified hobby I still like to hear about what emotions (preferably positive ones) people derive from using it.

Linguan

Translation: “Need locate your App / Application, this is a cruel handy tool. Both of you make all translation yourself or if you send files to other translation so facilitates enormously. It is noticeable that it is written by some who themselves have needed a really good tool to manage translations.”

Translation: “First, I was wondering whether to get iLocalize or Linguan. iLocalize cannot directly open Xcode projects. For iOS app development Linguan is better. When I use Linguan, is very convenient to edit the strings. You can also directly edit storyboards if you use the latest version of Xcode which supports Base.lproj. I feel that because now you only need the internationalization of strings, compared with the old days, it will become much easier for me.”

Linguan is a partner project together with BytePoets. The big problem there is that since our partner requires payment for work done we can only pay for enhancements of Linguan if it sells well.

Then there is the problem with the Mac app store requiring sandboxing for a while now. Most likely we will have to remove XIB support via calling ibtool because you cannot call out to external tools from sandboxed apps. But that might be less of an issue because of base localization support which again means you are localizing a strings file. Xcode then runs ibtool during the build process to generated the XIBs for the individual languages.

It would be awfully nice of you if you could help spread the word on Linguan so that we can some more momentum going, because there are so many features that we will be able to add then.

Conclusion

We need to better communicate what an app expects of the target user as well as what the target audience can expect from the app. Of course we will give priority to apps that have the most positively vocal users, like Linguan and SpeakerClock when there is a bit of time between project milestones to revisit our hobby apps.

There are quite a few of our components that are begging to be used in app store apps, if only to demonstrate their viability and to have something to point to as an example use case. This makes me think that probably there should be a balance struck between polishing the established and making something new.

Up until now I have to admit that I was only exclusively the only developer who laid hands on our apps, even though our team is growing. It is my hope that by documenting all the “available work” inside our company I can also get my colleagues to help improving our portfolio. Maybe one day app sales will again rival component sales in terms of their share in our company profits.

On open source software I now routinely add a 2-clause BSD license, so it was about time to also get a proper license for my commercial components.

Here’s the license I am going to use from now on. I adapted it from the commercial Development License that Peter Steinberger uses on his PSPDFKit, with a few modifications. Peter only allows use for a single app, our components can be used in all apps published via the licensee’s app store account.

So if you develop apps for yourself then you just need to purchase one license for all your apps. If you develop an app for somebody else then this third party has to obtain a license (or you have to obtain it in their name). You can also purchase an Extended License upgrade that lifts this restriction.

This license also adds permission for me to mention your company on Cocoanetics.com. It also now allows for providing modified versions of the component source code to third parties, provided that those are also holders of a separate license.

If you are an existing license holder for any of our things then it won’t hurt if you get in touch with us and see if your licensing is still ok for your specific use case.

Evaluation License

The following license applies to the free trial versions of the software components.

Copyright (c) 2010-2012, Drobnik KG
All rights reserved.

Redistribution of this software, in either source or binary form is prohibited.

Use of this software is permitted under the following conditions:

* The software is used for evaluation purposes, with a view to purchasing a commercial development license. OR
* The software is used for non-commercial educational purposes. In all cases, the software's object code may not be submitted to Apple's App Store

This software is provided by Drobnik KG "as is" and any express or implied warranties, including, but not limited to, the implied warranties of merchantability and fitness for a particular purpose are disclaimed. In no event shall Drobnik KG be liable for any direct, indirect, incidental, special, exemplary, or consequential damages (including, but not limited to, procurement of substitute goods or services; loss of sue, data or profits; or other business interruption) however caused and on any theory of liability, whether in contract, strict liability, or tort (including negligence or otherwise) arising in any way out of the use of this software, even if advised of the possibility of such damage.

Commercial Development License

The following license applies to software components purchased and paid for in full.

Copyright (c) 2010-2012, Drobnik KG
All rights reserved.

Redistribution and use of this software is permitted in binary form under the following conditions:

* The software must be distributed only as part of a larger original work by the licensee; verbatim redistribution of the software as licensed is prohibited.
* The software may only be distributed as a software application readily executable by end users on designated devices designed by Apple Inc. running the iOS operating system. Redistributing the software in re-linkable "library" form is explicitly prohibited.
* The software's binary object code must be statically linked to the application to form a single binary file.
* No source or header files may be redistributed.
* Neither the names of software components or Drobnik KG, nor the names of contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission.
* The license has not been terminated.
* The licensee has separately licensed the required "iOS SDK" software from Apple Inc.

You agree that with purchasing the software you allow Drobnik KG to list your company and/or company products on the Cocoanetics.com website. If you do not agree to this, an additional fee can be paid to remove this right.

The license is valid exclusively for apps published via the Apple app store account of the licensee. This limitation can be lifted by purchasing an Extended License upgrade for this license.

Redistribution and use of the software is permitted in binary and/or source form under the following conditions:

The recipient has purchased a separate, independent license for the software from Drobnik KG. The redistributed software is governed by that license.
Any modifications to the software by the licensee are to be marked clearly as such.

This software is provided by Drobnik KG "as is" and any express or implied warranties, including, but not limited to, the implied warranties of merchantability and fitness for a particular purpose are disclaimed. In no event shall Drobnik KG be liable for any direct, indirect, incidental, special, exemplary, or consequential damages (including, but not limited to, procurement of substitute goods or services; loss of sue, data or profits; or other business interruption) however caused and on any theory of liability, whether in contract, strict liability, or tort (including negligence or otherwise) arising in any way out of the use of this software, even if advised of the possibility of such damage.

19 months ago I wrote about the various kinds of income an iOS development outfit can have, when I was basically still in the discovery phase. Taking a long hard look at the distribution over those categories should yield some insights as to how to tweak the amount of effort you put into the various items.

The broad categories I was seeing our profits come from were:

• Contracting
• Component Sales
• Royalities
• App Sales
• Ad Sales

But I never carry this through. I don’t like to burn bridges. At least not fully.

The story began like a month ago when a person with an Asian Indian sounding name made an order for my Rich Text Editing component. As I usually do, I asked which company this is for so that I wouldn’t have to charge 20% Value-added Tax. When he told me the name of the company he is working for I was reacting the usual way: I began to see Dollar-signs. Happily I sent them an invoice.

Then the trouble started. First I didn’t hear anything more about the invoice. Then I got some emails that this company was doing a security review of my component and asked for what kind of security evaluations I had done. Bear in mind that they hadn’t even seen the code yet, because I only grant access to my Subversion repository once payment has been made in full.

I do offer a time-limited evaluation version that gets automatically built every night by our Continuous Integration Server. This should allow anybody interested in DTRichTextEditor to make up his mind before making an order. Also, all the display of rich text is based on DTCoreText which is available in Open Source to evaluate to your heart’s content.

Time passed and the due date of the invoice came and went without any word from this guy. My CFO sent me a list of unpaid invoices for the past month with this being on it. So I resent the invoice and asked what their plans are now. I got a response right away which hints that this guy I was dealing with is actually sitting in the country that you’d place the ethnicity of his name in. To put it in clearer terms: either he’s a contractor, an offshored developer or this great company has development offices in this country.

The response I got was like: another guys looked at the evaluation version, but was not happy and there where lots of CSS problems and what not. Then what my plans are and that I should put the invoice “on hold” for a few weeks.

This kind of weird behavior is a form of disrespect for the artist in my humble opinion. If you are interested in procuring some component then please evaluate it before putting in an order for it. If you then find that this component does not fit your needs then you should move on. Please don’t play those stupid bait and switch games with the little guys which are dependent on the sales of their works. You order, you pay. Not you order, you delay, you cancel.

The amount I am charging for components is generally only a fraction of the actual development cost. Think of it like this: To put something together like DTCoreText+DTLoupe+DTRichTextEditor you would have to have somebody work a few months on full time. But I charge only 500 Euros for the whole package, which are like 1-2 days a contractor would charge. I’m all ok when somebody evaluates something I made for utility and concludes it is not for him. But I hate it to be caused extra work having to compose lengthy emails to satisfy outrageous inquiries for free. And even more I hate having to email my accountant that the potential client reconsidered after having made an order and received the invoice.

I don’t sell that many components any more I must admit. My rich text editor is the most sold one, followed by non-attribution license for my Open Source code. Even when the component business was booming, like 1 year ago, I could get by with the manual process I had set up: receive order form, send PDF invoice, receive payment by PayPal or bank transfer, send quick start email.

iOS component celebrities like Peter Steinberger have a different approach: they sell their components via Fastspring because there they get a processing system and the fees are bearable. I didn’t look into this further due to my low sales volume so far. But I have to admit that I am beginning to warm to the promise of somebody else doing the invoicing and fulfillment. Also, only people who actually pay receive an invoice. If somebody will not or can not pay then he’s just a statistic on the dashboard, versus a major emotional problem for me. Maybe I’ll move to Fastspring too next spring. The additional cost probably far outweights the emotional stress.

I cancelled the invoice and vowed to myself to never talk to these guys again. Yet another time I couldn’t bring myself to establishing this public black list.

If anything then this article hopes to achieve that you treat your component vendors with respect for the amount of work that you are getting the benefit of using at a fraction of the actual development cost. Don’t be an arse.

Don’t miss our Black Friday sale. 

SAVE 50% ON EVERY APP!

GeoCorder $2.99 $0.99	Linguan (Mac) $19.99 $9.99
iWoman $3.99 $1.99	Summertime $1.99 $0.99
SpeakerClock $0.99 Free	iFR Cockpit Free

ONE DAY ONLY!

“I’m a lawyer who represents a variety of software companies, and a former developer. One of my clients would like to use your nsnotifications/background thread code in their product. Can they use it under the terms of an open source license, such as the MIT license? If not, is it available as part of the Cocoanetics parts store, or some other license?”

Thanks for asking, Luis! I’m happy to answer this as I am considering your diligent asking as a compliment.

The content of my site carries the Attribution/Non-Commercial/No-Derivatives Creative Common license badge. This covers both my articles as well as contained source code. You can reuse all you read here provided that you attribute it back to my, don’t earn money with my work or create derivative works from my writing.

I chose this restrictive clause generally to chiefly protect my blog posts so people cannot repurpose my output and make money with it. I seldomly blog full source code, usually only to illustrate a technique. So the same restrictions would apply to source code as they do for written text. However it would be ridiculous if I went about policing that everybody who ever got inspired by me would attribute his inspiration to me as his muse.

You can usually find my full source code on GitHub and there it has a different license: BSD. This carries the same Attribution clause as the CC license, but you CAN create commercial apps with it since this is not precluded by the BSD wording. However you have to keep the license intact as well as attribute the code to me either inside the about section of your app or the settings bundle. When used as source code in your own projects you have to leave the source code *license and copyright info* unchanged.

If you make any additions to my source code you are encouraged to send them back upstream for inclusion to the main public repo. This serves 1) the greater good and 2) you don’t end up with a copy that can no longer be updated from the main repo. Ideally you would not do private modifications but rather put these into sub-classes or categories to prevent update headaches in the future.

I offer a non-attribution license for $100 which releases the developer from the attribution requirement. This license is only applicable for my open source components on GitHub. For all my commercial components there are very reasonably priced licenses available. Usually each company using these would buy a license for themselves. Once paid, those commercial licenses allow for commercial use without attribution.

To sum it up, in exchange for use of my code I would either like some form from Attribution or some form of Payment.

Over the past month or so I was negotiating with a US-based company who wanted to retain my services as an expert on Rich Text and HTML parsing. Let me share a problem I had with a certain section in the contract that I was asked to sign, a problem that related to my previously created code and for-pay components.

Even experienced developers might be overly anxious to sign their next big contract to put food on the table without knowing what rights in their works they are signing over by this. This should serve as a gentle reminder: Better to read through the contract, all 19 pages of it, than having to be afraid that you inadvertently giving away your crown jewels.

If I learned one thing from Steve Jobs then it is to not trust contracts that are longer than a single page …

The “boilerplate contract” they sent me contained this section. Emphasis mine.

4B. Pre-Existing Materials. Subject to Section 4.A, Consultant agrees that if, in the course of performing the Services, Consultant incorporates into any Invention or utilizes in the performance of the Services any pre-existing invention, discovery, original works of authorship, development, improvements, trade secret, concept, or other proprietary information or intellectual property right owned by Consultant or in which Consultant has an interest (“Prior Inventions”), (i) Consultant will provide the Company with prior written notice and (ii) the Company is hereby granted a nonexclusive, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, transferable, worldwide license (with the right to grant and authorize sublicenses) to make, have made, use, import, offer for sale, sell, reproduce, distribute, modify, adapt, prepare derivative works of, display, perform, and otherwise exploit such Prior Inventions, without restriction, including, without limitation, as part of or in connection with such Invention, and to practice any method related thereto. Consultant will not incorporate any invention, improvement, development, concept, discovery, work of authorship or other proprietary information owned by any third party into any Invention without Company’s prior written permission.

This wording would have codified a commercial right in my previously written code that is simply not acceptable. If I make use of any prior invention – like a commercial component or even open source code of mine – I grant the Company a broad license to start selling my works by themselves. I can understand that they want to be able to sell the software I am creating for them, but any license to use my “prior art” should be limited to within the works I create for them.

This might not be an issue for most developers who don’t have a portfolio of for-pay components that they are deriving part of the income from. Also the Company mentioned told me that they would “never do such a thing” and that they are “not in the business of doing that”. But why – if you permit my question – does your contract include this wording then?

The proper way to deal with a subject matter expert who brings prior inventions to the table is to insure a free and ongoing license to use of code that the developer chooses to include. This royalty-free license should allow the Company to sell their software to another party without having to check on the developer. I can understand the need for a US-based startup to own the rights to all software which contractors will build for them, so that they can sell their business with no problems to Facebook, say for a Bazillion Dollars. But those rights should be fair to their service providers.

This episode leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I feel like I’m a plumber who is called to fix an urgent plumbing problem, only to be presented with a contract that the caller also wants to have the right to sell my tools and materials. No Go!

The video quality bad, really bad, 360p kind of bad. I was watching it on my iPad 3 where I still sport iOS 5. This is my comfortable consumption device and where would consumption be without a YouTube client. You know, iOS 6 doesn’t have one any more. I am not referring to Mr. Eastwoods remarks when I am calling the experience painful.

YouTube is going to great lengths to prevent people from getting at the h.264 videos they are specifically preparing for iOS devices. Only the YouTube app as well as the MPMoviePlayerController’s that webviews overlay to fake embedded video know how to request the actual video data from Google’s servers. This video stream is then served as a progressive download.

The video was stalling every 3-5 minutes and frantically hacking at the play button would not have made any difference. Only if I moved the slider into the future, waited until the new position was showing and then moving it back to where it had stopped was I able to continue viewing.

There are only two qualities for YouTube videos on iOS at the moment, a “mobile” quality which is used if you don’t have WiFi connectivity and a higher bitrate quality for when you do. The selection is exclusively done via the type of connection. No bandwidth rate adapting seems to be going on as would be expected from streaming video.

Oh THIS is why Apple is killing it!

The Verge reported that the reason for Apple removing their YouTube app as of iOS 6 was caused by their license to the app expiring:

Our license to include the YouTube app in iOS has ended, customers can use YouTube in the Safari browser and Google is working on a new YouTube app to be on the App Store.

But this statement is not entirely truthful. The original YouTube.app was written by Apple themselves, there is no lack of license that would require them to remove the app. Rather the license expires that gave Apple access to the above mentioned special API and video versions that display on iOS devices. Without these YouTube.app simply has nothing that it could display.

It could still get search results via the Google Data APIs, but not videos. Those APIs are geared towards giving web developers an embeddable player, not a directly playable video URL. As I said before, Google keeps a firm grasp of their content.

Apple abhors situations where most of the value inside a stock app comes from reliance of somebody else’s content platform. Google abhors situations where they cannot affix monetize their content as they are doing so at YouTube.com. The situation kind of reminds me of what is going on with Twitter at the moment. By weaning users from third party clients the content owner (Twitter) can make sure that ads are properly delivered. YouTube is doing exactly the same, with ads being overlaid the bottom of suitable videos in a way that the user needs to close them to see all of the video.

Now Apple did an exceptionally smart move by removing YouTube. They no longer have to face the blame for crappy progressive download stalling viewing experiences. They can conveniently point the finger at Google for not taking care of the best streaming experience.

Changes to UIWebView

Essentially the view that was playing a video inside the YouTube.app and one inside Safari where one and the same. iOS detected via the object or video tag that there was a video to be embedded, inquired the appropriate h.264 file URL and then used an MPMoviePlayerController to play that. Apparently Safari will still be able to do that, although I suspect that this is due to YouTube’s now available HTML 5 video.

Over the past year YouTube has been tinkering on their HTML5 embedded player to get in on par with the Flash-based version. On August 7th the documentation about the embeddable player has been last updated to reflect the fact that the IFRAME player is no longer in BETA. In fact I just went to YouTube and clicked on the first video I saw and it turned out to be served as HTML5 video.

This means that Apple can also remove the workaround code they had in place to replace the Flash objects. Now all it needs is to look for the HTML5 <video> tag and play the attached video. And Google will undoubtedly still employ fancy JavaScript to obscure and protect the true source of the h.264 video which they no longer just produce for Apple but for everybody who has a browser capable of playing h.264.

When I vented my anger about the Invisible Obama stalling, Joel Bernstein responded:

@cocoanetics $10 says the @youtube client is basically just a web view.

— Joel Bernstein (@CastIrony) August 31, 2012

I can understand the reasoning, it is the solution that any good engineer would come up with presented the technical landscape. But I have good reason to believe that Apple would never approve such a solution.

Guidelines for YouTube.app v2

There are several reasons to be found in the app store review guidelines that also dictate the “correct” way for Google to make a YouTube client that Apple would approve for the App Store.

The “entry level” of new YouTube accounts is 15 minutes. If you posted good content for a while this is lifted and then you’re able to upload videos only limited by file size, up to 12 hours running time. Suffice it to say that much content is longer then 10 minutes.

9.4 Video streaming content over a cellular network longer than 10 minutes must use HTTP Live Streaming and include a baseline 64 kbps audio-only HTTP Live stream

HTTP Live streaming chops up videos into many little pieces and then has a manifest file that serves as an index for what piece fits where. Also multiple bitrates can be supported at the same time with the player switching between streams depending on available bandwidth. There is an “informal” spec at the IETF website that explains how it is implemented.

This requirement means that YouTube has to implement HTTP live streaming if they want to get their video to mobile devices. It is possible that they would also implement it on their website but that would again open up a pandoras box since everybody who gets their hands on a video’s manifest can get all the pieces and reassemble the best quality version outside of Google’s control.

It is more likely that YouTube will have a separate server for dealing with HTTP live streaming and have the iOS video playing views directly talk to that.

On the theory of “bunch of web views”:

12.3 Apps that are simply web clippings, content aggregators, or a collection of links, may be rejected

This is another hint. Apple does their best to reject apps that are collections of web views. YouTube definitely IS a “content aggregator” or maybe even a “collection of links” (to video pages). If it looks like it could be a browser view then Apple will tell you that you should do it as a mobile web app and not a native one.

I myself once got hit by this rule. The way around it was to add a good offline mode and interactivity that is not possible with only UIWebViews. From this experience I know how serious Apple takes this.

17.1 Apps cannot transmit data about a user without obtaining the user’s prior permission and providing the user with access to information about how and where the data will be used

YouTube is collecting information about their users for purpose of ad targeting. The new app will definitely some privacy settings and a privacy policy.

Finally this relatively new section should prompt Google to go well beyond a set of UIWebViews:

10.6 Apple and our customers place a high value on simple, refined, creative, well thought through interfaces. They take more work but are worth it. Apple sets a high bar. If your user interface is complex or less than very good, it may be rejected

From these facts I am deriving my prediction that the Google-made YouTube player app will have to far exceed what we have seen until now.

Conclusion

Google might try the “easy way out” solution with a bunch of UIWebViews, but it is extremely likely that Apple will look really hard at what they come up with. Any sub-par experience that violates the above mentioned guidelines will not be accepted into the App Store. Even more so because we know that Apple and Google are on competitive terms.

The review guidelines are there fore every developer to measure up against, so Google better pull their act together and finally give as a good HTTP Live Streaming based solution. If Google just took the look of the current YouTube app and reimplemented that with UIWebViews for the players then they can be certain of a rejection.

Here’s their chance of showing us that they are able to provide a better video viewing experience than Apple ever was able to.

Colton launched Pixate as a product that promises to allow you to use a CSS subset to style UIKit controls instead of doing that in code or Interface Builder. People who hear this tend to fall into two categories: “WTF? Keep that non-native HTML crap away from me!” and “Awesome, now I can design my UI in Safari”.

Their promise certainly is a polarizing one. I find it even more fascinating and unsettling what seems to be going on behind the scenes. The latest developments triggered my sense of fairness quite a bit and this prompted me to summarize what I feel deserves to be called a scandal.

Pixate went online with their first campaign on July 20th with a funding goal of $200,000. Ambitious by any standard. They did have to show off some basic functionality working but interest was only lukewarm as evidenced by Kicktraq.

You can see the almost horizontal development, only broken on July 30th when some angel tossed $10,000 into the pot. That might have been the Pixate guys (or a close friend of theirs) in a desperate hope to jump start the stuttering campaign.

Pixate was not the first business that Colton had set his mind to. According to the Appcelerator Development Blog:

Appcelerator is the first corporate sponsor of a worthy new Y combinator backed startup called Pixate. Pixate was recently founded by Paul Colton and Kevin Lindsey. Paul was the founder of Aptana, a company we bought 18 months ago and Kevin was one of the key developers on Aptana as well as Titanium Studio.

This statement was dated August 1st, awfully close the influx of the suspect $10K contribution mentioned above. Could this have been from Y combinator? I think I read somewhere that this is the initial seed fund amount for all the businesses they take under their wings. But apart from this there was no visible uptake of funding at that time which tells us that probably very few people like Appcelerator.

The Death of a Campaign

Besides the lofty goal and the polarizing project one of the main reasons for their failure might have been the fact that the rewards were not very attractive. The $5 level would only get people listed as contributors aka be a donation. At $35 you’d get a T-Shirt and in between access to some BETAs. Then at $40 they promised a Visualizer app (to be created?). If you read on it becomes clear at level $50 that all the BETA access is worth nothing long term because there people would get “early adopter pricing when we ship”.

Let me get this straight: you don’t get anything physical (except a T-Shirt), the BETA access is worthless and the final product is something that sounds like it might be better suited to be an Open Source project.

My opinion of the project is that Colton is desperate to have Pixate become his next big thing. $200k would allow him to be relaxed about money for a year or so with something to spare for additional developers, marketing, etc. It’s a “found a business” project thinly disguised as a digital product. According to Kickstarter’s project guidelines “starting a business does not qualify as a project”.

Colton was smart to circumnavigate the guidelines cliffs and formulate the endeavor as a project with a product as outcome. But does that serve the customers who are willing to jump on his bandwagon?

All of the advance marketing and communication did not help the flat trend of the first project. You might have peeked at the Kicktraq chart, come to the same conclusions as me and then relegated the project to oblivion. Funding was cancelled on August 14th when it was absolutely certain that there was literally no chance in hell that these two lines would ever cross. The total tally was $21,752 from 169 backers.

Apparently Mr. Colton is not one to settle for defeat. Somebody might have taken a hint and conclude that this is the wrong project for the wrong people with the wrong goal … and Kickstarter is the wrong place to get it funded.

What do we do if a campaign fails?

More Marketing!

On the same day the first campaign got cancelled Colton create a new one but with a much lower funding goal. The first campaign had shown that their audience might cough up in the vicinity of $20,000. So in a sudden rush of boldness he set the new campaign’s target to $25,000.

This technique is similar to when you finished a role playing game and start it from the beginning keeping all your weapons and experience. The last update on the first project was only for backers asking them to immediately hop on the the new campaign.

And people worth approximately $18,000 immediately did re-pledge. Together with the existing marketing momentum the second campaign crossed the ridiculous funding threshold 4 days after campaign start with an overall trend towards upwards of $50,000.

Restarting a game from scratch with higher stats than normal players is what gamers usually would call “Cheating”. Setting an extremely easily attainable funding goal communicates: “we’ll take your money in any case, thanks”.

Good kickstarter projects have a believable explanation about what the creator needs the funding for. Colton put this to the very very bottom of the project description right after lenghty viability demonstrations of technology that Pixate had been developing in the meantime since campaign 1.

Building Pixate requires a lot of engineering effort. We’ve already spent a bunch of time getting to this prototype phase and we need your help to see it to completion. We’ll be using the money to get to a minimum viable product that we can ship before the end of the year. We’ll start with the iOS engine first, then the Visualizer then move on to Android. The more we raise, the more we can accelerate the product release schedule.

What he didn’t tell us is that he also started to invest big bucks into advertising. Colton purchased a sponsorship slot on Daring Fireball for the week of August 13th, to the tune of $7,500. This got him mention in John Gruber’s RSS feed as well as a tweet.  What cracks me up is this statement by the honorable Mr. Gruber: “Sounds cool, and they’re really close to their funding goal.” LOL, yeah, with cheating and by sponsoring you with OPM (other people’s money).

Is that “using the money to get to a minimum viable product”? I thought this is called Ad-waste-izing.

Spending a third of the re-pledges Pixate was able to purchase some visible momentum. The casual observer would now see that the project “is winning” and this is making pledges even more likely, adding to the momentum.

Conclusion

Honestly I don’t have any opinion on the technical merits of Pixate.  I have quite a bit of experience with CSS myself because I am supporting most of the text-formatting commands in DTCoreText. And I can tell you from my experience hat it takes quite a bit of work to get the parsing of CSS down, let alone translate the CSS into meaningful styling of UIKit components.

What troubles me is that Pixate is setting a bad example of what kind of project NOT to do on Kickstarter. Also it creates a precedent of how to cheat by resetting your campaign. Good projects that have a natural audience with a few dollars to spend if they feel they can help something get made that they would enjoy.

But if a campaign fails to be accepted of fails even though it was accepted then the creator should take a hint and turn elsewhere. Look at app.net for a successful example of how to fund a business outside of Kickstarter. They didn’t get accepted, so they copied the process and succeeded. Any tech company is able to pull this off on their own website. No need to muck up Kickstarter.

Several catalog clients already have their free iCatalog+ on the App Store, you should definitely check these out.

New functions in the 2.6 version include an expanded interface with tabs to access the catalog library, videos, photo gallery, social media sites and store locator. All iCatalog+ editions support the beautiful Retina display on the new iPad. You can see this new brilliance when viewing catalogs as well as the now much larger catalog covers on the library tab. On high resolutions screens these covers and catalogs really do POP, I argue even more than on glossy paper.

The transition involves transferring the current contents to a new server, transferring the two domain names Cocoapedia.org and Cocoapedia.com as well as the matching Twitter account.

Daniel Salazar, General Manager of GIC, on the future of Cocoapedia:

We plan to keep making it grow. There are lots of information that we as developers  need on the subject, specially, controls and source code you can purchase, like the ones you and others develop and which are a really great time saver on projects.

About Grupo Imaginación Cibernética:

We have 15 years experience in the mobile market. We started a long time ago with windows mobile. We are developing an RSS Reader for iPhone/Android/Blackberry/WP7. We sponsor several events in Mexico using this reader. Events in Mexico for Televisa, Telefonica, Blackberry and now the International Morelia Film Festival 2012 which begins in a few weeks. We also have about 2 or 3 million readers of newspapers in mobile phones using our applications. We publish law reference books in the same mobile platforms and have one of the most successful apps in Canada on this market. We sell this app as a white label app to publishers in Italy, Mexico and Canada. And now we are developing a Twitter monitor service for iPad.

We at Cocoanetics are delighted to have a competent company as GIC take on the responsibility of maintaining Cocoapedia as a research tool for iOS and Mac developers.

There are many businesses based on licensing fonts for use on desktop machines as well as web apps. But just to get a general feeling about this I semi-randomly picked MyFonts.com. They also have a fabulous app called What The Font? on the app store that lets you find fonts by snapping a picture of some text.

The font business has not really cared much about apps so far, but now with a Retina display in the size of an iPad this becomes a viable target market for them, as developers are trying to get an unique look by offering great fonts for apps that you read something with.

If you look at the MyFonts.com website you only find two kinds of licenses:

• Desktop – for a single user
• Web – multiple tiers based on many page views

What’s clearly missing in this list is a license that fits the use case for apps. You need to package the font in the app bundle to use it, but you don’t have something like page views in iOS apps.

So I asked MyFonts about that and they responded:

Yes, that is true; at present, we offer only desktop and web font licenses.

However, we are currently offering app licenses when requested.

App licenses allow fonts to be embedded into any applications including mobile, desktop, and server apps.

Embedding a font into an app allows the font to be used within the app to render any text at any size or orientation. The text may be fixed, variable or may have originated from user input.

The font(s) must be securely embedded into applications so that they can be used solely in conjunction with the application and not extractable or accessible from other applications.

The license price depends only on number of distinct apps and is based on the desktop font price:

each app: 25x / year or 75x for a perpetual license

For distributed apps, an annual license must be renewed while the app continues to be offered for sale.

For server apps, an annual license must be renewed while the app is continues to be available for use.

If an app is made available for multiple platforms, each platform-specific version of the app is considered a separate app.

Flash apps that can be run on any Flash platform count as one app.

I wanted them to further clarify this “securely embedded” part, to which they responded:

We understand that there are limitations to the extent to which you can hide fonts in the iOS environment. We just want to be sure that they are hidden to the greatest extent possible within the environment to avoid undue misuse of the property you have licensed.

So the basic price to license a single font for a single app is 25 times the basic price of the desktop font and you have to pay that every year that this app is on sale. Alternatively if you assume that this app will “live” more than 3 years, then it makes sends to go for the unlimited license which is at 75 times the base price.

They also have discounts if you want to license the font for more than a single font:

• 2 apps: 35x / year (or 105x for a paid-up perpetual license)
• 3-5 apps: 50x / year (or 150x for a paid-up perpetual license)
• 6-10 apps: 75x / year (or 225x for a paid-up perpetual license)
• 11-25 apps: 125x / year (or 375x for a paid-up perpetual license)
• unlimited number of apps: 250x / year (or 750x for a paid-up perpetual license)

Conclusion

Licensing fonts is definitely “de luxe”. On quick browsing I found fonts ranging from $0 to $16.50. Also you have to bear in mind that italic and bold are separate type faces. So you might have to license all 4 combinations for a font.

So that would mean $16.50 x 4 x 25 = $1650 per year.

This kind of expense you would probably only dare if you are pretty certain that you will make it up easily.

BinPress had custom-built an internal microsite for us judges where we could download the source code and fill in a form with our judgements. That allowed me to go into the components I was assigned to and really dig into the implementation details. Sorry, but I need to be wagging my finger here, all of the ones I saw had terrible form, little to no code style, the project setup generally was a mess and documentation non-existent.

But nevertheless a ranking was possible – especially because there where other equally important judging factors besides code quality. And so the shining winners are …

• Third place goes to RadioTunes SDK for iOS which is basically a wrapper for FFmpeg to decode various formats of Internet Radio streams.
• Second place is won by AsyncMVP which I have no idea what it does. Neither do I care because it is for Android.
• First prize was iCarousel which gives us multiple forms of carussels, including cylindrical, flat and “CoverFlow” style carousels.

The grand prize winner combines amazing functionality with exceptional code style. He gets $1500 cash plus $10000 worth of other goodies.

So one way or the other participating in this contest was definitely worth it. For the winners because of the additional business their components are seeing now and the tangible prize money they are raking in. For BinPress because of the publicity and for me as a judge because I got to see code that other developers are selling. And the latter strengthens my own resolve to renew my efforts to write nicer code.

Let me share my notes with you, in case you don’t have an hour to watch the interview in it’s entirety. A transcript is also available.

Before starting Bottle Rocket he ran a successful web business. The day after the first iPhone SDK was announced Carter founded Bottle Rocket.

He always put in some extra work: “Polish the undersides of tables” i.e. made sure a Website also looks great on Mac even though the client might only require Windows.

How Bottle Rocket became Big

They started out with 9 apps simultaneously, he gave one example where they thought the app would be a huge success and it wasn’t and another example vice versa. “If you fill a void you need to make sure your heart is in it.”

There was no seed capital involved, the company grew “organically”. Their first 9 apps were noticed by the media and made them known. “Without the cushion (of seed capital) you don’t get wasteful and make your decisions count.”

As part of their success he mentioned focus: only do mobile apps, learn to say NO if somebody approaches you with some work from your previous area. But you should work with “old business” clients to transition them to somebody who is passionate about your previous area.

There has to be some pressure, some discomfort. If you get a little bit comfortable you become complacent. When you run out of gas, put the throttle down. Don’t get spooked in the first 12 months.

For him it is never “just business”. Business is an extension of yourself of your character.

Bottle Rocket hat a multiple app strategy right from the beginning to “build a shadow” instead of trying a single app and if that fails go with another. This kind of massive approach breeds productivity and consistency. It also allows you to “fail as fast as you can” i.e. learn what the users like and what they don’t. Then you should “own your mistakes” i.e. stand by work that you don’t consider your finest hour but know what you learned from it.

He has noticed that apps that cost more get better ratings, possibility because they attract a different quality of user? You should analyze 1-star reviews to see commonalities to improve in updates.

How to get Big Brands

Bottle Rocket does no RFPs (Request for Proposal) because it goes against their app building methodology. It’s like “putting your worst foot forward”. So they tell clients that they have to respectfully decline because they don’t want to take away time from paying customers.

Instead they show them how they work, their process is published on their website. Their labs page shows the process from paper sketch to finished app.

What to say to these big companies:

• “This is what WE would like to see.”
• “We feel that this is not the best use of your brand.”
• “OUR name is on this to.”
• “We want this to be the best we can do.”

You should go after brands you feel passionate about and make the app personal. “Put your name in all your apps.” probably means that they never do “white label” apps where the user does not know who really made the app.

I’ve been selling component code for many months now and so it somewhat irritates me when Verious comes out of the closet claiming to be the “first market place for mobile app components”. I was about to ignore that until today – on Flipboard – I read another such announcement: Appcelerator unveils – yet another – “open marketplace to unlock mobile innovation”.

Both statements are misleading and – as somebody on Twitter put it – these companies are just trying to cash in with the iOS craze. And there are more. Let me share my thoughts.

I started selling components out of necessity. I had been laid of by Amdocs a month earlier, facing the hard deadline of swimming or drowning two months later. Something had to happen that would allow me to sustain myself. I was dabbling in iOS on the side, now all my income had to come from it.

And strangely enough, the popularity (read: traffic) I had built in my site before let to sufficient sales to surpass my income from apps by a factor or 2 or 3. I was lovin’ it, dealing with developers is much different than receiving “feedback” from users.

Apps are 60% design (or thereabouts) if we believe what Apple says. That also means that by myself I could never hope to make apps that have hit potential. The dozen or so apps I released in my own name are more or less a playground for me to try out techniques and technologies. Whenever I deal with clients who are contracting me to build an app for them I am upfront about me not being a designer. I will only start coding once I see some fleshed out mockups and the artwork can be provided. Of course I could whip something together in Photoshop too, but that would be a waste of people’s money if I am charging my normal contracting rate.

Better do what you are good at. I found that I like to work as part of something bigger and concentrate on small areas that resonate with my expertise. I love to build things that somebody could take and put into his app. If I am paying for the R&D myself, then it will be a component that I am going to sell. If somebody else pays for it, then it is his.

Speaking of payment. The very first component that I built was DTChartView which I developed for an app that has since been threatened to be sued out of the app store. At normal market rates a library like that would be worth like 2 man weeks. You would have to hire somebody for 2 weeks, 5 days a week, 8 hours a day to build that and pay this person around $8000.

But in the example of DTChartView my business sense kicked in. I offered to be charging only a fraction of this ludicrious amount to the developer if I could also sell this component to other clients. We had a deal and my first component was taking shape.

So if you find yourself developing something that has potential as a stand-alone component you could formulate an offer along these lines: “You can either pay me full rate for this component and get exclusivity for it. Or I charge you 10% of the actual development cost and I get to sell it to other clients as well”. Capital on app development is always short, so most clients don’t need to own this part of the code exclusively.

I added a couple more small components and that allowed me this good start I had. Soon afterwards somebody approached me to build DTAboutViewController to have a flexible configurable about screen for his app. Same offer from my side. Same result, about a month later I had another component to sell.

Componetizing your software forces you to compartmentize your classes. No longer can you put model references in your view classes if you plan to reuse your code or make components out of it. And also it trains your business instinct because you start to consider which parts would be worth another developer’s cash.

Actually you can never actually sell your code. If you did that, then somebody else would own the commercial rights to it. Instead you actually sell licenses to incorporating the code into other people’s apps. Because of this there is another big schism between my personal philosophy and those of all these “marketplaces”.

I sell access to projects in my Subversion repository instead of binary builds for this exact reason. Because I am selling licenses, not code, it is ok if buyers see all there is under the hood of my components. This kind of access allows my clients to also reap the benefits of quick corrections without me having to do another formal release. They just SVN UP and they have it. If I am developing something bigger that I don’t want to touch the stable trunk for, then clients also have full access to the BETAs in my branches.

This tightens the feedback loop and I can be more agile in fixing problems and implementing new features. If the features are benefiting the project as a whole then I don’t charge extra. If they are a special case only of interest to one client then he has to pay for their implementation and gets them exclusively. See above.

One thing I hate about these “component marketplaces” that seems to be common practise is that you don’t get this kind of access to the versioning system where the components are being developed. Instead you get binary builds and thus the impression that you are actually buying a finished product. It might be just my personal impression, but I get the feeling that the developer (and shop owner) just wants to get my money but he is neither interested in entertaining my code critique nor contributions.

There is enough FUD as it is, but companies like Verious bank on it stating their DRM system for components as their unique selling proposition. Hey, somebody could rip off your code and sell it as their own! Be afraid, be very afraid. (and pay us because we help you.)

And I don’t think piracy of source code is an actually existing issue. Developers are honarable people by definition because they also don’t want to see piracy gnaw on their profits. In reality I get frequently surprised by people wanting to purchase the appropriate licenses out of their own motivation.

There is a great example in my Open Source project NSAttributedString+HTML. This is free software but comes with an MIT license. You can use it – even commercially – but you have to attribute it to me. In source code this means you have to include the LICENSE file. In apps this means you have to credit me, say in the About section. But I offer a non-attribution license for 75 Euros that makes allows usage without attribution. I actually sold more of these licenses than some other of my components. This tells me that if the price is right developers will prefer to pay it over (ab)using your source code.

I am interested in having a dialog with my clients. Of course I love to take their money too, but I love to hear suggestions and get feedback. Any kind of store system usually gets between you and your developers. It is their business to so so and they charge you dearly for it. Everywhere between 20 and 30 percent of sales.

Being a player in the component arena also means that you get contacted by all the other “marketplaces” hoping to score you as somebody to sell on their platform. Verious I immediately dismissed because of their DRM-philosophy. Another store is not launched yet. And yet another is launched, but is not harmonizing with my personal philosophy as outlined above.

Actually by writing this I might even drive away one of these players who is still actively courting me. But my integrity and your benefit is more important than business.

These are the things I want from a store before I will even begin to consider selling my components there:

• An affiliate system where I also get a share of sales of other people that I send to their store
• I want to be able to keep the descriptions of my components on my own site but only link to the shopping bag system on theirs.
• A software versioning system, Subversion or Git
• An inssue tracker that interfaces with the versioning system.
• Possibly an automated or continuous integration system that automatically builds binary packages of tagged revisions (for users who prefer a file dump)
• A system that allows me to communicate with my developer-clients about my components.
• An account management system that would allow me to elevate specific users to contributor status on certain components so that they can also commit fixes/improvements

If that sounds kind of like GitHub then you are understanding me correctly. GitHub is free for open source software and that is great. Unfortunately their business model is to charge for non-open repositories but they don’t give you a store. If GitHub would realize this then they could wipe out the “component marketplace” competition over night. Psst, nobody tell them.

If a component store wants to be worth a share of your hard-earned profits then they have to automate the above mentioned items for you. Add to that the traffic they might get on their centralized site. You as a developer should only have to worry about your code, all other infrastructure should be provided.

Imagine – if you will – a hobbyist developer who does not have his own SCM. He would sign up with this utopian service, develop his code in the provided git repository, track issues in the attached issue tracker, communicate with his peers and have the invoicing also taken care of. That is the vision that I am after ever since I first wrote about the Ultimate iOS Parts Store.

For lack of a partner that offers all of this I keep doing it myself. I did a quick query of Twitter about what percentage of sales you think would be appropriate of recommending my components. The median response was around 5%, much less than 20-30% that these other stores want as their cut.

I have a deal for you: if somebody mentions that you recommended a component when he purchases it, then you get 5%. If you have a component that I could put in my own store, then I am only taking 10% of sales for creating the PDF invoices by hand.

And if you already have your own sales system in place then there is also another possibility for us to collaborate. Let me add your components to my parts store as well and link to your affiliate system. I’ve been doing that for a month now with SensibleCocoa and we are very pleased with the results. (Disclaimer: I get 10% of sales of SensibleTableview)

We are all in this together. Don’t let somebody who is trying to profit from your success come between you and your developer-clients.

When I gave this talk I ran out of time and felt a bit “incomplete” as there would have been several interesting points towards the ends of my note. But the room was full and judging from the fact that people asked several interested questions (and nobody left) people seemed to be ok with that.

Being a reader of this here blog you now reap the benefit that I translated my presentation structure filled in with some commentary for coherence. And this also contains the entire notes, the “Director’s Cut” if you will.

I’ve been developing on iOS for 3.5 years now, initially next to my full-time employment as system administrator. I was contemplating going part time and extending my iOS activities at the end of 2009, my reasoning being that I would be able to make up the difference in salary with iOS work. But the decision was made for me when my employer informed me that I was to be laid off. My salary was to be continued for 3 months – as seems to be usual – but I could stay at home from the next day.

So in December 2009, 1.5 years ago I went full-time. When you do that you have a choice, either to go general or to become an expert in a field. Feeling really good with the Apple ecosystem (no PCs at our house no more) I decided at that time, that I would focus only on that. This does not mean that my work is one-sided or boring. Within the confines of this Apple garden, I’m doing everything and all that comes to mind: own apps, contracting, consulting, components, tutoring, blogging, networking. Lately I found that I tend to prioritize higher paying activities higher, but I guess that’s just natural.

So much for my history, over the last few years I have sampled quite a diverse number of way how money can be earned with iOS development, and this article aims to give an overview to broaden your horizons and maybe give you some ideas.

Employment

This is the most obvious of all, but when I got started there really where no companies who would hire you. Much has changed since then. Big companies started to realize that iOS development has to be a part of their overall IT strategy since after the iPad 1 actually ended up in CEO’s hands.

I’m not saying that employment cannot be an enjoyable and satisfying experience. Many people are working part-time in tech companies while studying at the university. I’ve met people studying to be a medical doctor who where in charge of iOS development at some mid-sized companies. Getting a regular salary and benefits calms the mind and many people are absolutely satisfied by this.

Another advantages include receiving training on the job and if you leave you take your newfound skills with you. Contrary to other IT professions there aren’t hardly any expensive certifications that the employer might want to get his investment back for when an employees wants to move on. I’m referring to some Microsoft or Cisco certification courses that are usually very expensive. You are learning to program iOS apps for very cheap by working on problems with ever increasing complexity and most of the time by sitting next to a more advanced programmer (“pair programming”).

But even if everything is well and dandy some people just want to change, experience something new. Doesn’t have to mean that the company is bad. Some people are so much flowing over with great ideas that would would never find happiness working only on the projects that their employer hands them. Those guys are better suited for the other modes I am taking on below. Generally the term for employees leaving is “Attrition” and it is normal. I found 2-3 years to be the average duration in IT before somebody lusts for a change, often with a different company.

And you don’t have to feel bad if this describes you. You don’t owe the corporation any more loyalty than you get paid for at the end of the month. Nowadays companies are often described as individuals, but this is misleading. Corporations don’t have feelings that you could hurt by moving on. That’s why you are “human capital” and why your HR department is called “Human Resources” … or jokingly by some “Human Remains”.

Companies have several tools to fight this attrition, I’ve seen most US-based companies employing one or more individuals dedicated entirely to recruiting “new material”. These recruiters are souring forums, networking like crazy and more than every they are turning to GitHub and see who has written some great code. Another tool is to give the employee “buy-in”, essentially making him a part business owner as well. Big companies would do that by giving you stock options. Smaller companies can adjust the shares by allowing an employee to invest some saved up capital in exchange for a few percent of the company. Now it’s an entirely different story. You no longer work for somebody else, but instead work for yourself, at least a bit.

Interest fact: I have yet to see any European company with dedicated Recruiters. And I don’t mean HR. I mean people who for their entire working time are on the lookout for new employees.

Contracting

When i visited the San Francisco last month I found that there are way more open positions for iOS developers than there are developers who would want to be hired fixed staff. And when you cannot hire somebody into your company, what do you do? Right, you hire a contractor.

That’s how I started out myself as well. Initially you are blue-eyed and estimate too few hours and are doing iPhone apps for like 400 Dollars. Initially my own reasoning was: everything that I am making more than my cleaning lady is alright. Boy did I have an out-of-touch philosophy back then.

But you grown and learn, most of all you get smart in how to estimate actual work load and you develop the steadfastness to be able to say: I am not a designer. Ok, I can draw pixels in Photoshop, but you don’t want to pay my full consulting rate for something that I am not an expert in, right?

So besides of the theoretic problem of getting customers, the main disadvantages of contracting are that you are required to perform many activities that are taking away from your pure coding time: you have to manage, yourself and others. With others you have to communicate efficiently. You have to write invoices, because without these you don’t get paid. You have to pay taxes.

I solved the invoices problem like many Mac-people do: I purchased a cheap yet beautiful Mac app: Billings. Now at least the invoicing hurts less because of the ease of use of Billings.

To summarize: contracting teaches you many things, especially being tough and drawing the line

But just like employment it does have a critical flaw: you cannot work more than there are hours in a day. Minus sleeping, other activities, etc. 6-8 hours of highly focussed development work are realistic and physically possible.

Excursion: The Cashflow Quadrant

If you start out as an employee and I ask you “how do you make more with less” you might tell me: be self-employed! But actually self-employment still does not mean that you own a business. You own a job and if you don’t work you don’t make money.

I like to use the Cashflow Quadrant invented by Robert Kiyosaki to explain the difference. Employment (E) and Self-Employment (S) e.g. Contracting are the two items on the left side that you are the limiting factor of. B on the right side means to own a business and I being an investor. Owning a business means owning something that will make money even though you don’t physically work, like owning a company with 5 employees. And being an investor means that you give money to a business owner in exchange for interest or a share of expected profits.

I find that it is generally more enjoyable on the right side of the CQ, so I try to expand on activities that will give me so-called “residual income”. You do something once but continue to receive money from this.

Own Apps

The first obvious item belonging to the B/I side are apps that you wholly own. The many advantage being that you get to keep 100% of proceeds, except for what Apple takes and possibly taxes. The app store provides a great platform to build these mini-businesses on and with an ever growing amount of iOS users (more than 40 million iOS devices at last count) there will always be somebody to find your apps every day.

When I get asked if I already have a “really big” app then I always have to smile. My best selling app makes 30 Euros a day, but that’s not even my own. My own best selling app makes only 10 Euros, half of sales, half of in-app purchases. Generally 5 to 10 Euros per day seem to be the norm.

One way to potentially make up for lack of sales income might be advertising. The networks I myself use are AdMob, iAd and MobFox. Of these I want to especially mention MobFox, a small startup also from Austria, but they pay rates that are rivaling iAd. I wrote a component to combine ads from all these networks, DTBannerManager. This way I get maximum fill rate and the highest overall payout.

Then the guy’s eyes glaze over and with a dreamy voice you hear this: “With 10 Euros per Day I only need to have 10 apps. That’s 100 Euros per day, 3000 Euros per month, enough to live off”. Please stop laughing now. I thought that too. Any many other people do. That’s why we have a fair share of crap on the app store.

Fortunately Apple no longer approves apps that are make like with a cookie cutter. They reserve the right to reject simple apps that don’t provide any user functionality or that are more or less identical to established apps.

It’s still possible of course to make so-called “white label apps”. Those are fully functional apps that are branded by a specific customer. Like there’s a certain company I know that make a newspaper app that several Austrian newspapers have licensed and you would believe that those were made by the newspapers themselves.

Those apps with “limited user functionality” I am referring to are for example those sound board apps where you basically only have a couple of buttons which produce sounds when pressed. Fart apps, essentially.

Another strategy to make more money with an existing app is what Firemint did with Real Racing. There’s a game that you can buy and then there’s Real Racing GTI which is essentially the same game, but paid for by Volkswagen. The player probably does not care, but Volkswagen likes it when the players keep seeing their brand. I am hoping that we will see many more such tie-ins in the future as non-techie companies discover the iOS world as something that their core audience is also present in.

So here’s the bad news: you will NOT get rich with apps, not if you are just by yourself. Those early successes like the Trism game that made hundreds of thousands of dollars right after the start of the app store are a thing of the past.

Also, since apps are a business you have to see them as such. Does it make sense to pay a graphic designer to give an app a facelift that only makes a dollar a day? Probably not. Some apps might have the potential that you can make back such investments. But you have to really carefully choose. Be honest to yourself how much more in sales you can hope for if you make such an investment.

And never never make the mistake of saying “well, that’s my time, that’s free.” If your time really is free then I’d like to hire you off the spot.

I have like a dozen apps on the app store and these make around 1000 Euros per month. Not enough to live off but these have a cash-flow calming effect that I would not want to miss. There are two answers to this dilemma: You can either look for other ways of income. Or you could focus on one idea that it going exceptionally well. None of my ideas so far did the latter, so my decision was to go for multiple streams of income to add up to what I need to live.

Components

For my first component I was approached by Michael Kaye to build a charting class for his app BabyBubbles. I presented him with two options: either he gets the chart exclusively for a couple of thousand Euros. Or I make it into a component that hopefully several developers would buy for a much lesser price. Most of the time you don’t need exclusivity on some features like charts and so you naturally go with the cheaper way.

Most development businesses don’t have any issue with paying several hundred Euros for a component that would have cost much more if they were to develop it in house. They don’t care because their customers are footing the bill anyway. It’s just pass-through fees.

This component, now called DTChartView, was my first on my parts store that I started to sell over a year ago. I am happy to report that they continue to make up a substantial portion of my income. Developers are – in general – great customers, they hardly ever need much hand-holding. They are either smart, or my components are obvious how they are used. Maybe both.

Several component stores are trying to find a foothold in this developer-to-developer market, but they fail to provide many of the features that I expect in the Ultimate Parts Store, another project of mine. Maybe some day there will be such a store where you can sell your components easily and without this overhead that I have:

I need to charge 20% VAT from all private people, EU companies need to provide a VAT registration ID to not pay VAT, companies outside the EU pay no VAT. The reason being that you cannot physically export the software because you don’t actually buy it. You buy a license to access and use code in my subversion repository. And you cannot export that.

So at present I make out invoices for each and every customer personally, again with Billings. So that’s a task I actually like. I accept payment via PayPal or bank transfer and once I have received the payment I send out a quick start e-mail with some instructions how to access the repository and how to get started implementing the component.

Some other companies don’t let you have their source, for reasons of IP protection. One such example is RedLaser. But in my humble opinion I think most developers would want to see what’s inside and I don’t want to have to package binary libraries for every small change I make.

Do I fear piracy of software components? Not in the least. Actually I found that developers are the most honest customers of all. I offer purchase of an “Extended License” for when a developer is making multiple customer projects. And even though I have no way to police this, I have many developers contacting me, wishing to make this payment. Maybe that’s because we feel eye-to-eye and one developer usually does not cheat his peers.

I was also asked about how I’m deciding what to open source and what to sell. If something can be built to be covering most of the necessary features and can be self-contained then it will be a component for sale. For the CoreText component on GitHub the reasoning was this: I alone will never be able to implement all features and variants of HTML. I don’t want people to think that they are entitled to me implementing any and all special case they have. That is why it is Open Source. You need it? You add it!

The added benefit is that nowadays social coding Open Source platforms like GitHub are also one way how you can be discovered. It happened to me, Scribd liked what they saw and now I am doing contract work for them.

Licensing

Similar to white labels but still very interesting is the concept of licensing, sometimes also called “franchising”. I already mentioned this newspaper whitelabel app, but any technology can be licensed, apps or components alike.

One personal example is my iCatalog.framework which I developed in cooperation with International Color Services. I own the property, but ICS and me have a licensing agreement in place that has them pay me 10% of what money they are making selling iCatalog apps.

Originally I was approached as a potential contractor, but I was able to sell them on the idea that they don’t actually want to become a software development company or have the headaches of having to deal with contractors sitting in foreign countries. Instead I own a stake in this business and take care of the development, they take care of managing products based on it and selling it to their clients.

Many different modalities are possible here, from a small share all up to worldwide exclusivity. It’s up to you to agree on terms that you feel happy with. The point is that these royalties are independent of your working time and thus belong to the right side of the previously mentioned Cashflow Quadrant, just like your own apps.

Partnerships

Speaking of apps. It’s better to own 50% of something than 100% of nothing. I have several partnerships in place, some where I only act as publisher and reap 20% of the proceeds. On others I am equal partners with somebody who provided the creative, product spec’ing and marketing. Again, it’s up to you to find a balance between the partners so that both feel that they get more than either of you could have gotten by himself.

One mode that I like quite a bit is a mixture between contracting and partnering. Everybody needs to live, but in one instance I had the following agreement: I would discount my hourly rate to the rock bottom, at that time 30 Euros per hour to develop a Soccer Worldcup betting app. My partner took care of all the non-iOS tasks. I was paid for all the work upfront, at this special rate. Then when the app went on the store my partner would get all the proceeds until he made up the development costs and when this was achieved, we would go on to splitting the profits 50/50. Or put differently, I got an advance on my half of the profits.

With this I had some money to pay the bills, and my partner had limited his business risk to these expenses. A way better mode than if I would develop something not know whether or not this would be hot or not.

At the time of this writing I have a similar partnership in the works where I defined my first product for the Mac app store and my partner BytePoets is developing it. Here the roles are sort of reversed. I don’t know how to program Mac apps, but they do. But I get to spec the app, decide the features and the job of marketing and accounting will fall to me. They received an advance on the profits I am hoping for and once this becomes profitable they will receive 50%.

Businesses and Startups

Big corporations are reaping most of the profits on the app store. The likes of Electronic Arts and Rovio have employees and economies of scales that we can never rival. Also in addition to their own properties such large companies often act as publisher. That means some smaller company has entered into a deal with them whereby the big brand name is stamped onto the app, sort of a seal of quality. And this increases sales especially in matured markets where users feel often lost for they have too many choices.

And when some Electronic Arts is giving away all their games for free for a day they automatically get the social networking word-of-mouth that pushes all their games ever higher in the sales ranks.

BUT, a big but: I mentioned before that big companies continue to have attrition. For the longest time there was a letter by an EA employee’s wife complaining about the bad working conditions and inhumane situation at this company.

There’s one form of small business that kind of falls between a “real business” as described above and self-employment. I’m talking about somebody who does not have employees, but has several apps made by contractors exclusively. Yes, these actually exist, but doing this successfully is hard and so these are far in between.

But hey, who’s talking about founding a Rovio. That’s not realistic. But if you have a good idea you can and should build a startup around that.

Here the culture is sharpy different between the United States and Europe. In the USA the mentality is “fail early. fail often. But always get back up”. A typical billionaire sunk two companies before striking rich on the third.

Failure is an option in the USA, even an accepted fact of starting up over there. This is possible because venture capitalists and angel investors understand that 7 out of 8 companies can fail, but the 8th probably then makes you back what you “lost” many times over.

In Europe most of startups are funded by the people themselves, or their families. Somebody might also try to get a business loan, but with Basel 2 this has become next to impossible if you don’t already have much capital of your own. And you cannot fail if you are financed by that. Failure would mean bankruptcy, being tainted as a business person for the rest of your live.

There’s just more phantasy in America. In their startup culture somebody like yCombinator might approach you and offer you $10,000 for 10% of your business. And this achieves two things: right then and there you have invented the valuation of $100,000 and purchased a share in this company you just invented. Getting funding for so-called “early phase startups” – which don’t have any actually profits or even products yet – seems to be comparatively easy. Invent a social photography app with a few interesting twists, get $40 Million.

Because of this difference in mentality we Europeans have instead cultivated the “wait and see” approach. “No risk, no fun” is interpreted as: “We don’t risk and we don’t have fun”. Business has to be serious because we cannot afford to fail at it. I say, that has to change!

There is one company that set out to trying to change that for the better: STARTEurope was founded with a similar interest as yCombinator but with a fundamentally different approach. Instead of being the investor they focus on the networking aspect. There are events where you can attend either as somebody pitching his idea, or as a creative person (engineer or designer). Then the pitcher pitch and the creatives can choose which idea they like the most. They sit together and work on the idea for a while. When they are ready they present their result to a panel of experts and investors and the rest should be history.

Two of the names that already came out of this, that you might be familiar with, are Runtastic and Qriously. I especially love the idea of the latter: essentially in-app banners, but instead of ads they show questions: do you like A or B more. Ingenious!

Actually it sounds like very much fun, I guess we all should attend such a STARTup event some time, just for the fun of it. You never know …

For most Europeans there is one catch: because of the above mentioned reasons we are training ourselves to keep many irons in the fire at the same time, but for a startup to be successful you have to let go of all but one of your options and solely focus on that, at least for a certain duration until which it has to show profits or you have to pull the plug, without emotion.

Conclusion

Hopefully this article can inspire some thoughts off the beaten track. If your brain buzzes now with the feeling that there is so much more that you might want to have a closer look at then I did a good job.

I collected many experiences and I can say that almost all where worth it. In the least you should reevaluate the situation you are in yourself. You still have the option of being satisfied with what you have. But if you are overflowing with ideas then grab the best, build a team and astonish the world.

There are many adventures, wonderful people and amazing ideas waiting to be making your acquaintance.