![]() Developers need only cut down their feature set, change a few options and ship the result out to App Store. “Demos help sell products for very little overhead. The obvious one is “what functionality should I remove?” and the slightly less obvious one is “what will Apple actually let me put in the store?”.Įrica Sadun wrote a nice guide on Ars recently entitled “ App Store lessons: creating demos for fun and profit“. This is more a “pre-mortem” rather than post – I haven’t started working on it yet, but I thought I’d encourage some debate before I do. And I’ve heard at least some anecdotal evidence from other developers that lite versions can increase sales. The App Store is filling up with such little tastes at the moment, so it certainly qualifies as a trend. In the continuing absence of demos or trial periods, I was thinking I should create something useful to give people a taste of the full awesome PCalc experience and encourage them to buy it, but not quite so full or as awesome as to cannibalise our sales. ![]() At the moment, I just have the tail end of a cold, so it’s back to work.Īnyway, one of the things I was mulling over in my feverish state was the possibility of doing a free “Lite” version of PCalc for iPhone. 24 hours later had a temperature of 39☌ and I haven’t touched the code since… That’ll teach me. Two weeks ago, I started working on a PCalc 3.4 release, and in less than a day of highly productive work I had ported the themes from the iPhone version back to the Mac. ![]() Or a culinarist? Author James Thomson Posted on DecemCategories Development Tags dragthing, macupdate, pcalc, selling your soul to the highest bidder 6 Comments on Four Legs Good, Two Legs Better! Īpologies for my silence over the last few weeks gentle reader, I caught the man-flu that’s going around these parts, and haven’t felt up to much until now. The bottom line is that our decades-old kitchen is due to be replaced in January, and it would be nice if this deal helped pay for it… Does that make me a capitalist? Feel free to multiply that by the current sales figure. I’m legally not allowed to tell you exactly how much of the $49.99 we’re getting, but think of a very small number. Will we make more money over the next two weeks than we would have otherwise? Am I damaging future sales of our apps? That remains to be seen. You can see the total number of sales of the bundle on the MUPromo page. Path Finder is another veteran app in the bundle, and I know lots of people use that in combination with DragThing. Plus I’ve heard good things about Socialite and GarageSale, and many of the others. I’ve been looking forward to the point-and-click adventure game Machinarium for ages, and I didn’t realise it was already out. It’s a good bundle of apps – I fancy getting a few of them myself. And likewise, PCalc on the Mac has always been a good promotional tool for selling copies of PCalc on the iPhone. Sales of DragThing have slowed a little bit of late since I’ve only done fairly minor updates recently, and I figured it couldn’t hurt to get it back into the public eye. What they offered per-bundle-sold wasn’t completely terrible – I’ve been offered a lot worse. Annoyingly, he was actually right.Ī couple of months ago, the MacUpdate people contacted me and asked if I wanted to be part of their winter bundle. ![]() It was mocked at the time by the ever-tactful John Casasanta of MacHeist, who basically said that without a substantial marketing budget, it was doomed. Sales of the bundle were small, not down to the quality of the applications or people involved, but partially because it was going up against the much stronger MacUpdate bundle at the time, and partially because – in my opinion – it didn’t compare particularly favourably to the slick marketing efforts of MacHeist and MacUpdate. In practice however, it was something of a disappointment. The idea was a great one – this was a bundle by developers, for developers, with an equal split of the profits for all who took part. Way back in June, we took part in the inaugural bundle. Is he a just a big capitalist sellout after all?” Imagine my surprise when I saw this offer in my inbox this morning – both DragThing and PCalc are part of the new MacUpdate Promo Winter Bundle. ![]() He had that spat with John Casasanta and everything. “So”, I hear you thinking, “I remember James being very anti-software bundle earlier this year. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |