Showing category "resources" (Show all posts)

The Divide

Posted by Stuart Carmichael on Saturday, January 28, 2012, In : Curiosity 
A little over three hundred years ago Joseph Marie Jacquard invented a way to weave richly patterned fabric using punch cards.  These patterns could be changed with new punch cards.  This made it different from the high volume fixed pattern looms also being developed at the same time.  Jacquard's loom pointed the way to industrialization based on flexible specialization instead of rigid mechanization.  Over time, the less flexible looms out competed punch card looms on price and volume.  Rigi...

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Ten by Two Thirty

Posted by Stuart Carmichael on Saturday, January 14, 2012, In : Mechanics 
There is a big difference between doing something that is a waste of a time and something that wastes your time.  It's the difference between drifting backwards or moving, if only painfully slowly, forward.  It's also the difference between doing an excellent job on the wrong thing or doggedly pursuing something great.

Many seemingly important tasks fall squarely into the category of "things that are a waste of time".  You can keep your desk perfectly tidy.  You can hold meetings with lots of ...

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You Are Here

Posted by Stuart Carmichael on Thursday, January 5, 2012, In : Mechanics 
Getting yourself found above the search engine clutter is an interesting feat.  A whole industry of search engine optimization exists to help you rise above the noise.  SnapEng so far seems to have faired well in the googolplex without any special tricks of the trade.  This seems to be based on three lucky hunches and the unexpected help from a host of app catalog sites.

The first hunch was to create a name, a tag that was unique and unexploited as a URL address.  SnapEng did not show up in se...

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The 99 Cent

Posted by Stuart Carmichael on Tuesday, December 27, 2011, In : Economics 
Why charge 99 cents for an app that could also just be given away for free?  After all, the economics that go with 99 apps is pretty grim.  Grim as in, don't quit your day job.  Grim as in, welcome to the new World order of whales and free-minums.  It costs about a dollar to drive a single visitor to your app website using online advertising.  If the app store lets you keep about 70 cents on the dollar and you are charging just less than a dollar, it is a losing proposition.  So unless you ar...

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Tax Off, Tax On

Posted by Stuart Carmichael on Tuesday, December 20, 2011, In : Mechanics 

Who would have thought resolving a pending tax issue could be so exciting?  But that was just what it felt like when my iOS Paid Applications contract with went from Pending Tax to Processing and then quickly to Effective.   Getting started with a development certificate and putting my app onto my own iPod was straight forward.  Getting it a spot in the app store was a little more involved.  Here is an outline of events and some hindsight.


As it sometimes is, the internet was long on informa...


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Plans vs. Zombies

Posted by Stuart Carmichael on Wednesday, December 14, 2011, In : Curiosity 
I've seen enough smart phone zombies squashed and irritable birds chucked to last me awhile.  I carry a less-than-smart phone with its week-long battery life and lightening fast text messaging.  Sure, each received e-mail message appears on my handset like some kind of lesser miracle.  Like tuning in the local radio station using duct tape and a cinderblock.

But curiosity finally got the better of me, especially because a similar family of questions kept coming up at the engineering meetings I...

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