paulkafasis

We started small and with no obvious path for going from the app we'd made, to running a company. Nevertheless, we were able to figure it out back in 2002, and it's gotten easier since.

It's slightly more work to sell outside the App Store, yes, but it's really just not that difficult. If a developer plans to make a living, or even just side income, from app sales, it's work that's worth doing.

At this point, we don't have any way of knowing for sure. But given the results in the year since we left the store, it appears that most people got to us, and then went to the Mac App Store to purchase. It would seem very few people found us directly via the Mac App Store, given the way sales shifted to direct when we were no longer there.

That is quite correct. When we removed Piezo from the Mac App Store a year ago, we didn't send out a press release, nor seek publicity over this move in any way. We simply removed it and explained why on our blog (https://weblog.rogueamoeba.com/2016/02/12/piezo-1-5-arrives-...). That was it.

We can certainly debate how well-established or tech-savvy our users are (though I will note that Piezo is by far our simplest application, and used by the least technically savvy among our user base). But to say that we did this in a “public fashion” is just false.

While I certainly didn't go into depth on this, this line acknowledges the cost of both direct and App Store sales:

“Direct sales cost us just a few percent, so each direct sale of Piezo earns almost $5 more than a sale through the Mac App Store.”

That “few percent” takes into account the cost of our site and our downloads, as well as handling payment.

As far as acknowledging what Apple provides, it's simply not worth very much. The cost of infrastructure is incredibly low (nowhere near the 30% they take), and none of what you list is difficult to manage. Further, any developer who's looking to earn money is going to want to replicate most of that anyway. You should have a website you control to provide information and promote the product (see the many comments about Googling for apps, rather than using the App Store). You also ought to provide customer support for the product itself - Apple certainly doesn't help you there. Once you've got a web site, adding direct downloads is easy. Payment processing and license keys are certainly the most difficult pieces, but anyone making a Mac app can manage them as well. It can all be set up in a manner of days, if not hours. I wouldn't tell a developer that they must steer clear of the Mac App Store, but I absolutely would say they're doing themselves (and their customers) a disservice if they don't also sell their product directly.

Just heard from FastSpring, with a forward of the reply from Google:

"Status of the latest badware review for this site: A review for this site has finished. The site was found clean. The badware warnings from web search are being removed. Please note that it can take some time for this change to propagate".

Sounds like this should all be clear in the AM. Or later in the AM, as it were. Or, within a few hours, for a less US-centric time.

For what it's worth, the warning isn't appearing in Firefox in multiple test machines either. It certainly is appearing in Chrome, and as you note, it's scary looking. Fortunately, it DOES have a bypass link.

For now, we're just hoping they'll get it cleaned up by the AM. If not, we'll have to consider more drastic steps (a very first step being user-agent based warnings on our side of things).

For the future, we'll certainly want to see a smarter separation of domains, to avoid this very issue.

herf, can you tell me where the menubar icon comes from, for the current (not 1.2) version? I don't see it in the bundle, so now I'm curious.

I ask because on Mac OS X 10.7, I'm getting a wildly different, annoyingly-color, icon:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/13236/hosted/color.png

Whereas on the same machine, with the same version, under 10.6, I get:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/13236/hosted/normal.png

I think having the level meter in JUST the "i" would be far better. As others have noted, readability is very low on this as it is. Adjusting just one letter can work, but not three, especially two in a row.

As far as colors go, none of these are very vivid. Perhaps all white with just the "i" as a green level meter, with a white dot.

I'd also highly recommend The Monk and the Riddle - I don't think I've ever seen it suggested elsewhere, but I recommend it to everyone.

I found PayPal Wars to be a bit dull, and the author a bit smug.

There are 6 rules here, and with text like "In the end you won’t get nothing out of a confrontation", I find this quite hard to read and take seriously. There may be some gems in here, but it's in need of editing.