grayprog

It seems to me that the reason he went with Noah is because Noah suggested a double or triple of previous value of a metric. While he compared it to a 16% improvement in another.

What if he could reduce his cancellation rate from 3% to 1% and triple his Life Time Revenue? Wouldn't it be as important?

And what if he first reduced the cancellation rate from 3% to 1% and then increased the sign-up number threefold? Oh, but then he'd be almost 9 times as profitable because the same times-3 customers will stay longer.

If you think we developers don't test in-app purchases before releasing, think again.

It's one the most critical parts of user's experience and certainly this is not a place where we'll just write code and ship without testing.

The problem is that it didn't happen for all transactions and appeared to work for some users but not for other. Sometimes it worked for some user on one machine but not on another.

And another developer who hit it with his app in testing didn't understand it was Apple's issue. He created another test-user Apple ID and it worked then so he supposed it was kind of a glitch related to his use of the previous test Apple ID. Really, the last thing you'd think is that Apple has bugs in the payment system.

In-app purchases don't existing in Snow Leopard. I think it was some other issue.

For this reason (and for clean installs) there's an option in the API for "restore purchases". Applications should provide this option in addition to "buy".

Another benefit of it is that it restores all in-app purchases for this app. Very helpful in case the application provides more than one purchase product.

Not sure I'd advise to those starting out today, except for the following cases: 1. You consider enterprise or other large sales, which are not comfortable through Mac App Store. 2. You want to participate in bundles or other promotions. Technically, you don't need a store for this but you need to create a version which can be licensed outside of Mac App Store.

Personally, I started selling ImageFramer (my first Mac application) in 2006, so we first had our own store and Mac App Store came second.

I also moved to a standing desk about two months ago. I already had a rather narrow shelf cabinet whose top was used for the printer. I moved the printer down to the regular desk and the monitor up there.

I started this set up as an experiment to see if standing will work for me. And thus far I love it very much. If I were to write an article myself, it would be quite similar to Leo's. I don't track my weight as I'm not overweight but I agree about the focus effect and the general "more energy to work" benefit. Standing has eliminated the post-lunch heaviness that I used to experience, especially when I was working in a corporate environment, before going indie, working at home.

So far I had no negative impacts, except temporal lower back pain while I adjusted in the first couple of weeks and occasional sore feet. On the other hand, I believe I had several benefits, related to the occasional back and neck pain which is often the result of sitting. Plus the increased energy, like I wrote previously.

My verdict, I recommend everyone at least to try it as an experiment for a month or so and see if it works for you.

Once again, you get a lot of services for the price. If you only need to accept paymemts and you handle all the rest yourself, plus you don't need a good, personal customer service (PayPal and Google's service are not good at all), then PP or GC are a better choice for you.

Plus GC only works in the US. Maybe UK. There's rest of the world as well.

That's hard or simply impossible if you're not in US/UK.

Also, even in the US, you'll need to build a lot of code on your site to support all the options that FastSpring and other similar services provide, such as all the offers, discounts, cross-sales etc. It's possible to do and maybe even more integrated, but still it's additional work that needs to be done and maintained.

Cashculator indeed needs better press but unfortunately many Mac sites are now instead iPhone/iPad sites almost exclusively. It's like Macs and Mac software are not cool to write about anymore.

I had a very similar experience to what fookyong had with FusionAds. We were running 2 parallel one-week "blasts" for our MacGraPhoto (http://www.macgraphoto.com) bundle of graphical Mac software exactly 6 months ago.

FusionAds seemed to be very fit for this because of their focus on design and graphic professionals. It was also the biggest one source of advertising for us.

The process and their support were very good. Unfortunately we've had extremely little return from the ads. At least in terms of direct sales. I think the gross income didn't cover 10% of the budget of ads and after split of the revenue it's negligible.

I don't know if it had any effect in raising awareness or interest from bloggers/news agencies as its hard to measure and we also did a press-release and advertised and were reviewed on other sites.

So for this campaign of us it turned out to be quite non-helpful. We lost money with it. Of course this doesn't have to happen to you if you have a different product or market.

Coincidentally, today is exactly the date where the PayPal money from my campaign should have been unfreezed if not for my blog post 6 months ago, which was #1 on HN back then. Thanks guys. I think your support helped to make PayPal their move and unfreeze the money on short notice.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1000829

I'm also using bazaar, after moving from SVN. I selected it over git or hg because 1) it is very adjustable regarding using it either in a centralized or distributed setup, working over ssh, even without any server-side support and 2) its command are very easy to learn and the branch and version numbering is best of the 3, IMO. Git was very foreign for me, coming from the SVN.

The site looks really professional and with nice touches, Idan. Jacob.

The point with this case is that the first 2 reps told me it's ok to fax emails. And then they closed the account.

And when I faxed signed paperes nobody wanted to look at them. Although they said "go ahead" and send.

The real problem is that the support personnel are not the one making decisions, are not telling the same, and you can't talk to the people who really do decide.

Plus, their action of closing my ability to receive payment (and provide service to my customers) without any warning is an extremely aggressive sanction, for no reason.

Let's close his account and then see if he was doing legit business. In the mean time, "we're sorry for any inconvenience this may caused you". When you're doing a 2-week promotion, getting an account closed even for a week for "inspection" is not an option. After 2 weeks we were back to normal low activity, without the bundle.

On the first page of the fax we wrote all 6 paypal accounts of our partners + all the URLs at _their sites_ where they show link to the sale.

Surely, the 6 vendors won't point to a pirate selling web site, right? Also, we provided all their 6 paypal accounts. They could just call them to verify (which they apparently did when processing limitations of my partner's account).

Jacob. Apparent Software.

So, is an email "signed" agreement valid or not?