WWDC

This story will sound familiar to a lot of people this morning, I fear: I woke up to a handful of text messages, emails and IM messages saying Apple had opened sales for WWDC tickets at 5:30 am. I frantically jumped out of bed and to my computer, to try and buy one immediately. Of course, as it were, all tickets were sold out.

The rules this year around state that a personal Apple developer account can only get one ticket, and a company account can get five. Tickets are non-transferable to and non-refundable prevent scalping.

I appreciate the fact that Apple is trying to prevent scalping, and tickets going on sale for double the price on Ebay and Craigslist, but I think they’ve only exacerbated the problem. Now, legitimate developers such as myself do not even have a third-party recourse to buy a ticket at a premium.

Here are some things Apple could have done instead:

• If first-come first-served is really the approach they wanted, a better way would have been to announce when the tickets go on sale in advance, and let everybody set their alarm and fairly race for the ticket.

• They could have staggered the ticket sales over the course of the day; making 500 new tickets available every hour.

• They could have used a criteria other than luck to decide who gets a ticket. Perhaps limit it to developers that have apps in the store, developers who can solve a programming puzzle. Even an application where developers have to state what they hope to get out of the conference.

• They could have solved the supply / demand problem by making the price proportional to the amount of tickets left. Every ticket sold augments the value of the remaining tickets. The 1000th ticket could have been worth $2250, the 2000th $3000, and so on, going up in price as the supply dwindles.

I don’t think any of these solutions are perfect. But I think any of them would have been better than the way Apple chose to go, screwing legitimate west-coast developers out of the most important conference and learning experience of the year.

Sexism

It’s often claimed that we are creating a negative environment for women in tech, through the way we like to have fun and blow off steam. A startup is an intensely stressful environment, and staying sane is crucial. In-jokes, brogramming, and good-natured debauchery is a way to do that. If somebody cannot handle some crudeness, I’d postulate that he or she does not belong at a startup, regardless of gender. Because, when shit hits the fan, as it invariably does, we need people who can take it.

Recently, a developer was forced to rename his open source project, because “testosterone” wasn’t politically correct enough. I’ve talked before about the hypocrisy of our constant striving for political correctness—but that’s an entirely different argument altogether. My goal in life is not to please everybody. Sometimes I’m vulgar. If I call something “retarded” or “idiotic,” it should be obvious that it has nothing to do with people afflicted with Down’s syndrome. In my opinion, when people call it out, the correct response really should be lighten up.

We cannot beat sexism until gender is no longer an issue. Keeping up the current level of discourse is making things worse. Subsidizing women in tech with money, like Etsy is doing, is widening the gap between men and women. By doing this, you’re not only admitting that women cannot make it in tech without some extra help, you’re also effectively creating inequality, affirmative-action style.

Equality, by the way, does not mean gender balance. It means equal opportunity. It means that a woman will not be passed over for a job because of her gender. It means that she has as much of a shot at becoming the next Zuckerberg as I do. It does not mean her company will never produce sexy ads, or use booth babes, or have a tightly knit group of programmers who like to drink beer and jokingly call themselves “brogrammers.”

I’m tired of being told, over and over again, that I’m a sexist pig because I’m not in favor of achieving an artificial gender balance. I’m tired of being called a homophobe, or a racist, sexist, or even a nazi because I said something that’s technically not politically correct—even though my statement had absolutely nothing to do with any of the groups offended.

Again, these are my own controversial opinions, and in no way reflect my employer’s.

A fractal of bad design

Alex Munroe:

I can’t even say what’s wrong with PHP, because— okay. Imagine you have uh, a toolbox. A set of tools. Looks okay, standard stuff in there.

You pull out a screwdriver, and you see it’s one of those weird tri-headed things. Okay, well, that’s not very useful to you, but you guess it comes in handy sometimes.

You pull out the hammer, but to your dismay, it has the claw part on both sides. Still serviceable though, I mean, you can hit nails with the middle of the head holding it sideways.

You pull out the pliers, but they don’t have those serrated surfaces; it’s flat and smooth. That’s less useful, but it still turns bolts well enough, so whatever.

And on you go. Everything in the box is kind of weird and quirky, but maybe not enough to make it completely worthless. And there’s no clear problem with the set as a whole; it still has all the tools.

Now imagine you meet millions of carpenters using this toolbox who tell you “well hey what’s the problem with these tools? They’re all I’ve ever used and they work fine!” And the carpenters show you the houses they’ve built, where every room is a pentagon and the roof is upside-down. And you knock on the front door and it just collapses inwards and they all yell at you for breaking their door.

That’s what’s wrong with PHP.

PHP can be used to build some awesome stuff (Facebook is living proof!), but it’s important to realize that it’s also a fundamentally awful language. It’s like crack. It’s useful enough that it keeps us using it over and over again, while systematically destroying our productivity with its quirks.

When I complain about PHP at work, some like to remind me that I’m a hypocrite, since I wrote a blog post praising PHP. Or, rather, claiming that it’s possible to code PHP smartly and avoid its pitfalls. I’m not sure if I still agree with it today, but I sure do feel my brain turning to Jell-O whenever PHP fucks me over with one of its silly, silly idiosyncrasies.

App Store Retrospective

Three years ago, I wrote a summary of the major problems with Apple’s App Store as an email on the iphonesb mailing list. Three years later, I think it’s a good time to look back and see how Apple has handled the situation, and assess whether we’re better off.

App Store:

Junk Apps: The App Store is filled with junk apps made in, at most, ten minutes. The proliferation of iPhone success stories has given rise to an epidemic of hopeful developers taking shortcuts hoping to make a quick buck. These apps make up 98% of the App Store’s 50k apps. This creates needless clutter that makes it hard for the real apps that real developer spent real time and real money on to get noticed.

App Store Reviews: There are plenty of problems with the reviews on the store: they’re nearly always of terrible quality. There’s no way to contest or respond to an erroneous review. There’s not even a way to respond to a review saying there’s a problem with the app with a solution, or a “that’s coming in the next update—hang tight.”

Rate On Delete: Apple is artificially creating needless bad ratings by asking users to rate an app when they delete it, which quite obviously only creates 1-star ratings. For example: iLaugh Lite 1.0 had over a third of a million users, and many of them were happy and kept coming back to the application, I could see from the analytics. Yet, my rating was 2 stars, because a couple thousands (out of a quarter of a million) users didn’t like the app and deleted it and rated it 1 star. The hundreds of thousands of happy users, though, didn’t delete the app and therefore were not asked to rate the app. This creates artificially low ratings.

Search is broken. Either you’ve got to put a whole lot of keywords in your application name, which sucks for plenty of reasons, or you’ll fall behind the ones who do. Often, you just won’t show up in search that should totally return you first. Advanced search is useless and impractical.

Top Apps Charts: These charts have so much effect on whether an application gets noticed and downloaded that whether you show up on these charts can decide the fate of your application. Which also causes the next point. 

Ringtone ($0.99) Apps: As has been very well discussed by Craig Hockenberry on his furbo.org blog, app prices have become a race to $0.99. Since the charts are counted by downloads, no matter the price of the app, it means that a lower price which causes more downloads will make your app more likely to succeed.

Upgrades, Promotions, Variable Pricing: No way to offer paid upgrades, which is a HUGE problem. There’s still no way to give out copies of your app over the 50 promo codes limit, which only work in the US. You can’t do bundle promotions, discounts or anything of the sort either.

Customer Data: Your customer data is hidden. There’s no way you can promote another app by you or a paid 2.0 upgrade (since you’ll have to create a new app for that). There’s no way you can switch an app to another iTunes Connect account if it gets acquired, without losing all customers and not giving them any further updates. (Check out futuretap.com’s blog post.)

App Review:

Lack of Transparency: There is no communication between us and Apple. Apple doesn’t want communication. They specifically block communications. Emails to their support never get answered, and phone calls just tell us to email. Often, they reject apps on no grounds, or simply obscurely and vaguely referring to some TOS article that only partly applies to the situation, leaving you no way to communicate back and contest the decision.

Updates: Updates take ages to get approved. They sometimes get rejected while being only a bug-fix update to an app that got approved. (This has happened to me.) And even when they get approved, it takes forever, possibly leaving some critical bug or crash in your application and costing you tons of negative reviews and ratings. (Has also happened to me.) Garrett Murray posted a couple interesting articles on the topic.

Review Time: Apple often takes many weeks to review anything posted to them. Some of my reviews took up to three months. (No kidding!) This is just not viable. Period.

Arbitrary Rejections: There have been countless examples of arbitrary and unwarranted rejection. I have my very own. There have been countless more examples reported.

iTunes Connect: It is a piece of garbage. There is simply no other polite way to put it. It is painfully slow. It is awfully designed. For example, not too long ago I was editing the description for my application, iLaugh. I had opened iTunes Connect’s page for my application in one tab and in another tab I opened another of my application’s info for reference. When I was done, I submitted the changes and, to my horror, instead of updating the description as it should have it overwrote the info of the other application I had open in the other tab with what I had submitted in the first tab. This is just an example, but there are plenty more ways in which iTunes Connect constantly screws up. There’s no way to delete an application, or change an update’s version number. It also gave me erroneous sales reports a few days back. Overall, it easily wins as the worst web app I have ever used. Period.

If this list of complaints sounds oddly familiar, it should, because it’s surprisingly still relevant today. While Apple has made a few steps forward—for example, by getting rid of rate-on-delete—it has made an equal number of steps back. An example is the recent UDID fiasco.

But what’s even more scary, to me, than a mistake Apple might have made recently (such as its deprecation of UDIDs) is how relevant this old list of complaints remains. Remember, when I wrote this, the App Store was just one year old. I figured, they might just not have had time to get to these items, and that they’d improve as time went by. But, since then, they’ve had time to replay the entire life of the App Store thrice more, and for the most part, nothing has changed.

This indicates apathy. Apple just doesn’t care about its third-party developers. Their business, at the end of the day, is in selling hardware. They have no motivation to make it easy for developers to build a business on top of their platform. They don’t even care, it seems, about fostering innovation.

The App Store’s biggest flaw, at the end of the day, is that it is not a free market. It is not a meritocracy, and app success is slave to the whim of a corporate overlord that changes it mind without explanation more often than a 5 year old.

Disclaimer: this is my own opinion and in no way reflects my employer’s.

America is one of the most hospitable countries. The American people are genuinely nice: they give a lot to charity, they like to have fun, they smile. It’s hard to realize how much of a difference this makes until you spend some time living somewhere else. In Russia, for example, people seem sad and distant, while in South Africa the pleasantries feel much forced and status-driven, as if you were talking to a butler or a panhandler.

Only in America do tellers ask you if you’ve had a good experience finding what you needed, say “please” and “thank you,” and strike up conversations while scanning in your purchases. Only in America is it not inconceivable to share a cab or an umbrella with a perfect stranger—in fact, I did both of those things just yesterday.

What surprises me, then, is the disparity between that and the experience of actually getting here. The United States is notorious for its extremely paranoid and unfriendly security practices when it comes to travel and immigration control. Of all the countries I have travelled to or lived in (the list is quite large), the process for the United States has been and continues to be hands down the most painful I have experienced.

This realization came to me when reading Mark Vanhoenacker’s New York Times op-ed, in which he writes:

No country’s border staff is perfect, as every traveler knows. But America — a land where strangers greet one another in elevators, waiters act as if they like you, stores deploy professional greeters and government serves the people — should aim to be the best. That means a smile or “hello” as we approach every agent, a “please” and “thank you” to bookend every official request and an occasional “welcome” as we cross a secure border.

How to fix the US economy in a week*

* if the president had dictator-like powers and could bypass congress.

Monday: Morning coffee. Get ready for a crazy week. Declare economic state of emergency, or whatever other excuse will let a president do whatever he deems necessary for a week.

Start with taxes. Abolish progressive taxes. Set fixed-rate income tax at 35% on any income above $30,000. (10% goes to states.)

Tuesday: Declare immediate retreat from all wars and “police actions” in the Middle East. Cut defense spending by 80%.

Reinstate NASA space program, and reallocate ample funding. Pledge $500B to the construction of a high-speed rail network to cover the entire continental US. Work to be completed over 5 years by the private sector, with no union labor.

Wednesday: Abolish Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid—to be phased out by the end of the year. Announce new legislation to 1) force private insurers to offer a basic health plan with minimum benefits at a fixed rate, and 2) make health insurance mandatory.

Announce immigration reform. Lower requirements and processing times of work visas, and instate new entrepreneurship visa program. Announce a one-time amnesty on illegal immigration, and announce legislation with severe consequences for future infractions.

Thursday: Abolish oil subsidies, let oil spike to $8/gallon. Order cities over 100,000 inhabitants to develop high-quality public transportation networks. Slash all street parking, and impose a parking tax to discourage car commute.

Pledge $500B in state-owned nuclear and alternative energy developments.

Friday: Announce plan to subsidize employment in creative industries. Subsidize people working as artisans, journalists, artists in order to put to good use people who have been rendered obsolete by advances in technology.

Drastically cut corporate income tax to 13%, in order incentivize corporations to remain headquartered in the US and keep employing US citizens.

Sigh. Enjoy the cool breeze on the White House balcony, sip on a glass of single malt scotch, and get ready to take a much-deserved weekend rest.

The Incredible Hypocrisy of Modern Citizens

One thing I’ve noticed about American culture from living in the USA for over two years now is that there’s a deep kind of hypocrisy running through our morals. We condemn many things for being indecent, while we allow much worse things to go under the guise of free speech. Meanwhile, individuals feel an incredible sense of entitlement when it comes to their perceived rights.

One recent example was when my social network feeds were inundated with calls to sign a petition for Facebook to add transexual options to the gender option. Now, I don’t want to get into gay-rights politics, but I am fervently against the idea that Facebook has any kind of obligation to include a feature because not doing so would offend a minority of its users.

I take issue with the idea that some people think they are entitled to the feature—that it is their fundamental right. They are not, and it is not. Should we start adding “Flying Spaghetti Monster” to the religion drop downs too, because some people want to identify with it? Point is, with any popular product, people will find something to rebel against. If not this, it would be something else. People need to realize that Facebook has a vision for their product, and that they need to be able to follow it unimpeded.

One fundamental aspect of good design is that it has been curated by somebody who knows what they’re doing, and has intimate knowledge of what they’re designing. This is why when users tell you that you should implement a feature, and that it will make your product better (and make you money), they’re most often full of crap. This is why anything on 99designs.com is crap. This is why Apple products are so great, and why Facebook beat MySpace.

Remember Henry Ford? “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

My goal as a developer and designer is to make a product that people will love, and will make the world better. However, the way I’m going to do that is by thinking about what’s best for the majority of my users. The truth is 99.9% of users don’t care for outlying setting such as transgender identity. Transgender identity is much trickier than just adding an “Other” drop down item. If you allow it, how do you then genderize all the pronouns? Do you default to “he,” “she,” or use the combination “he/she?” Or worse, do you turn the user into an object and go with “it?” Bottom line is, it’s just not worth doing for the 0.1% of user’s feelings. They’re convinced with all their might that, surly, they deserve special treatment. But really, they don’t.

Secondly, I’m growing extremely tired of America’s prude culture. People are constantly getting offended at really silly things. Just look at video games, for example. You can’t sell a video game with “sexually suggestive” language to teenagers under 18, if you can put it on the market at all. Yet, there’s no problem with selling games to 10 year olds that vividly depicts ripping people in half.

Meanwhile, in real life, some words are prohibited and frowned upon for the sake of political correctness, while much worse sentiments are perfectly acceptable. It’s perfectly fine to go on Fox News and say “Mexican Immigrants are mostly criminals and should be deported,” or even openly be a member of the Ku Klux Klan, because it’s free speech. On the other hand, though, exclaiming “Holy Shit!” on broadcast television when the Giants score a home run will get you a class action lawsuit.

Personally, I think people should be able to say whatever they want—except for maybe hate speech. As for products, their owner have the right to design them however they want and let the general population vote with their actions. Isn’t that the founding principle of capitalism and the American Dream? Lastly, people really need to get off their high horse, when it comes to accusing everybody of discrimination.

Aviv Aronov, in a online comment:

There has never been and never will be a democracy in the Middle East. And those are stupid who think the democracy is what these people are fighting for. No! No! No! These people fight for the piece of bread, for $10 a night… They are just a huge and ugly crowd with stones. What democracy you guys are talking about? Name it! Iran, Iraq, Algeria, Tunisia, Somalia, Saudi Arabia or the most democratically elected Turkish government!? Most of those ‘brave’ commentators of the Egyptian revolution prefer to stay online neither to go in the street. No one really would trade his bottom for a stone flying straight in to your head. Your courage ends up with your facebook and twitter comments. That’s all you can do. But you don’t believe or you simply don’t care what happens next, when Muslim Brothers come to power? What happens next, when those who treat the US and the entire West as an enemy of islam, will control the second largest army in the Middle East? More than 1000 Abrams tanks, F-16 jets… What happens next when these guys to control the Suez? Will they give up their power as you expect them to? Do they continue to reform the democratic institutions? In a certain sense, yes, they will… into the Rule of Shariah with all the out coming consequences. What price you are ready to pay for your gas tomorrow? I’ll tell you what… It’s not the success of the democracy, but the ugliest face of it. And shame on all of you, who think that what has been happening in Egypt is right. It’s not right, it’s not fair, it’s damn dangerous and what is even more terrifying - there is no way back.

Note: Not that I agree with the entirety of Aviv’s comment, but I’m reposting it in its entirety because I think it raises an important issue that people are not thinking about.

I don’t know what’s going to happen next in Egypt. What I do know, however, is that we all like the warm and fuzzies we get from hearing the romantic story of people fighting for their freedom, and for democracy. Unfortunately, the truth is that the repercussions, both for the Egyptian people and for the entire world, will be mostly negative. Egypt turned from a stable country and a US ally in the region into a ungovernable anti-American wildcard. Tourism, crucial to Egypt’s economy, has crumbled, and the country’s image is forever tarnished.

My Mac App Store Plans

The recently unveiled Mac App Store is, unfortunately, an affront to Mac developers. Importing the iOS’ closed model and applying it to the Mac, the new store carries with it all of the major disadvantages of its smartphone equivalent. I can’t stand the thought of losing thirty percent of my revenue, in return for which I get harsh restrictions on what I may do, week-long approval queues (even for critical updates,) a public expecting a ridiculously low price, months of revenue held off by Apple, and the risk of being cut out from said revenue at any time.

I’m not even going to get into how I will lose control over my own customers because Apple won’t let me send them promotional emails or sign up for an account. It won’t let me give away my software either, or have flexible pricing structure, educational discounts, volume discounts, promotions or giveaways.

Most excruciatingly, though, the App Store itself rocks. It’s beautifully designed and as a user, it is pure joy to use. Unfortunately, I am not willing to sign my soul to the devil to be a part of it. I was willing to deal with the limitations on the iOS platform, because it was presented as a new option, an is still somewhat reasonable on a smartphone. However, on the Mac, where we’ve been restriction-free for decades, this is most unwelcome. So here are my plans regarding the App Store:

1. My apps will always be available from my own store. This will function the same way it always has: Sparkle updates and email-based licenses and trial versions.

2. My apps will also be available on the Mac App Store (provided they get approved), crippled however Apple may wish. They will have a 30% price premium over the standard price, to make up for Apple’s cut. I will make sure that the standalone version is never inferior to the App Store version and I will advertise the cheaper, standalone version heavily.

The more I think about it, the more I am opposed to the way in which Wikileaks and Julian Assange operate. While investigative journalism and the questioning of government are vital to a free society, I find myself increasingly convinced that Wikileaks does not constitute investigative journalism, but rather a random and harmful dump of classified information for the sake of making a political statement.

There are valid reasons for secrets and “white lies.” Without them, civilization would collapse and social interaction would become pointless. In a well-reasoned and quite convincing article, Jaron Lanier writes:

What if we come to be able to read each other’s thoughts? Then there would be no thoughts. Your head has to be different from mine if you are to be a person with something to say to me. You need an interior space that is different from mine in order to have a different, exotic model of the world, so that our two models can meet, and have a conversation.

[…]

Asking whether secrets in the abstract are good or bad is ridiculous. A huge flow of data that one doesn’t know how to interpret in context is either useless or worse than useless, if you let it impress you too much. A contextualized flow of data that answers a question you know how to ask can be invaluable.

On the argument for Wikileaks as investigative journalism:

If we want to understand all the sides of an argument, we have to do more than copy files. It’s not as though we are supporting reporters out there on the ground to do independent investigative journalism. Random leaking is no substitute for focused digging. The “everything must be free and open” ideal has nearly bankrupted the overseas news bureaus.

I don’t mean to make this a pro-government rant. Don’t get me wrong, I think there’s plenty of things that are wrong with the US government and political landscape as it is. I just think Wikileaks’ approach to the problem is neither helpful nor ethical.

A short list of currently ultra-popular songs vs. the originals they’re stealing an integral part of the song from.

• Eminem—No Love
  — Haddaway—What Is Love
• Jason Derulo—Whatcha Say
  — Imogen Heap—Hide and Seek
• Kanye West—Stronger
  — Daft Punk—Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger
• Pitbull—Hotel Room Service
  — Nightcrawlers—Push The Feeling On
• Pitbull—Krazy
  — Federico Franchi—Cream
• Far East Movement—Like a G6
  — DEV—Booty Bounce
• Black Eyed Peas—The Time (Dirty Bit)
  — Bill Medley & Jennifer Warnes—(I’ve Had) the Time of My Life

A Short Case for Don’t Ask Don’t Tell

I think we’re missing the point. The Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy doesn’t withhold any rights from gay men and women serving in the military. Serving in the army is a very tough job, and the soldiers need to focus on the job to be done rather than on their differences.

The policy is not asking gay men and women to lie, or renounce their sexual orientation. Rather, it’s about asking all soldiers to distance themselves from their personal feelings in order to give their full attention on the job to be done.

Ideally, this would not be an issue and the military would be able to function just as well with openly gay members, but the reality is that that would make other members uncomfortable, cause a division within the force and damage the social dynamic of the military.