paulsilver

Looking at your iTunes page, when it first loads the description I can see of the app does not make me want to buy it.

Because of the Christmas special text you've put in, all I see about the app is "Read is a beautiful and revolutionary app to consume your favorite news, blogs or stories. Flick left & right to jump"

Lots of people claim their apps are beautiful and revolutionary. I have no idea if your app is either of these things, but also neither of these points is particularly useful for me to decide whether to buy it.

"Read your favorite news, blogs and stories without adverts" would sell it more to me. You either need to convince me to spend the money with that one line, or at least to click the 'more' link to see the whole description.

When the description is expanded, the list of features needs to be adjusted. I have no idea what "Casual Google Reader Integration" is, rather than normal Google Reader integration.

Personally, I would re-order this and put "Get rid of all the Ads & Clutter with our Clear Read technology" at the top - say what the feature does before what it's called.

Second, I'd put your point about streams.

As the third point, I'd probably have "Read more easily with our hand-picked fonts." or something similar

The other points I'd probably split in to a separate list. They feel more like details that I'd kind of expect in a reader, rather than big selling points. However, I'm not an iPad user so I'm not comparing this to other apps I've seen.

Personally, I'd have thought mentioning Instapaper & Read it Later would just remind people they already have an app that makes it easy to read some content they are interested in. However, as I said I'm not particularly familiar with this space, so that could be good. I'd definitely have them down on the list of features though, as that sort of point starts confusing people who don't know about those services.

Moving to the website:

I can't see most of what's going on in the app when I click on the links as the mock iPad is mostly off the screen when I'm reading the text. Also, your tag line is going to be 'below the fold' for most people when they load the page.

What's with the weird eye in a ring?

The text doesn't sound particularly professional, e.g. "Going through articles is an estimated 170% faster than regular browsing. Since all the clutter is gone, Read will only load the most important stuff: content."

"Going through" and "stuff" doesn't fit with a pro reading app. Also, "estimated 170% faster" sounds made up.

Looking up forgotten words doesn't fit under "Personalized".

Under "Simple" you say "Don't think of Read as a feed browser", which I wasn't, as I can't tell what it does do on the website. I can guess it's an app to read stuff in, because of the name and the amount of text on the screenshots, but you don't actually tell me what the app does on the website.

Personally, I'd move the mock iPad over to the left, then put some text next to it on the right which tells me what the app does which is unique and why it's nice to use. You can do extra selling underneath, once people know what the app is.

I'm sorry if this comes across as a bit brutal, but you did ask. From what I can see you've done a load of work in the app. Getting the website and App Store description improved should be a whole lot less work, and should help you convert a little better.

My friend Sky wrote an HTML/CSS debugger for iOS - http://skyapp.co.uk/dbug/ - it doesn't give you all the functions of Firebug, but it's very handy and easier to start than this.

I'm in the UK too. When I was hired for my last full time job (about ten years ago, so memories are a little fuzzy) when I was asked what my current salary was, I just replied "I want x", rather than saying what I was earning. They could find that out from my P45, but that was after everything was signed and I'd started at the new place.

At my previous job, I was underpaid compared to the average rate for developers in my area, so I needed to short cut a decent payrise. I wasn't asking for an outrageous amount, but so the company who were hiring me didn't find what I was asking for too high to pay.

I don't know whether they actually ever checked my P45 for my old rate, I doubt it. That side is handled by the accounts/payroll department, rather than upper management. If the upper management were that concerned about the rate at which they hired me, they'd have negotiated down at the time, not once they'd hired me.

My friend Ian hacked a 'social printer' which is like an alpha version of The Little Printer, blogged about: http://ianozsvald.com/2010/11/06/building-a-social-microprin...

Berg's product looks like a proper, developed version of what Ian made, and does many of the things that were talked about as possibilities when he showed it at at couple of events.

Does it have a massive market? No. Does it have a niche market where Berg can make some money back? I think so. Did Berg see this as a fun internal project to see what's possible and can the ideas it sparked be used by some of their clients? More than possibly.

Berg have a decent following in the crowd of people who might buy something like this. It's not going to make them a fortune, but they're bright people and I'm sure they don't expect it to. It's just as much an advert for what they can do as it is a product in it's own right.

I think when he was talking about ads for weight loss programmes etc he was talking about what comes up on the Content Network, not what is seen on Google's results pages. The Content Network is what you're in if you display Adsense adverts on your website.

Interesting, but note that the writer didn't get a chance to actually use it, just saw it boot up the Android environment in a window on the laptop. So, it could be great, or it could be unusable. Also the company aren't selling direct, they're hoping for someone else to pick it up and turn it in to a real product we could buy.

So, interesting, quite advanced concept, but I'd be more interested when I can buy one than it's current state.

I had some hassle filling in the final part of the registration form with my company details, this might help if you're have the same problems:

If you're in the UK and registering with your Limited company, you need to put your company name in the "Tax Identification Number" field, and your VAT number in the "Registration Number" field (if you're registered for VAT, obviously.)

If you're not sure what your VAT number is internationally, you can check it here: http://ec.europa.eu/taxation_customs/vies/vieshome.do?select...

For the UK, you have to put "GB " in front of your VAT number.

Microsoft bought FolderShare a few years back, which let you share & sync directories across PCs and Macs across the internet - so like Dropbox but without their online backup.

Unfortunately Microsoft turned it in to something that didn't work anywhere near as well. It might have been improved now, but my business partner and I moved across to Dropbox, which has been much better. Since then I've also received files from various people working on joint projects across Dropbox, within the web industry it appears to have become the standard for that.

Getting something else that works well on one OS will be straightforward, especially for someone like Apple. Getting it to work well (and wanting it to) for multiple OSes and getting people on the other OSes to adopt it will be another matter.

That's partly why Dropbox survived their security problems so well, it's become part of a lot of people's background workflow.

The problem with selling direct is, if people don't like your themes, they'll go searching elsewhere and you get nothing. If you're in a larger site, if they go elsewhere and you've sent them to the site with your affiliate code, you get a chance of a sale after all, even if it is less than you'd make off your own theme.

Whether that's worth the 30% you're giving away, I don't know. I do know it means the designer/author hasn't had to program (or pay to have programmed) any payment gateway, doesn't have to deal with refunds, isn't a higher target for being hacked as they're dealing with e-commerce, etc etc.

Basically, if you have a small number of themes and don't like programming, my gut feeling is you're better off on a large-ish site who is getting traffic independently from your efforts. If you can make a ton of good themes and handle all the programming and marketing, being on your own starts to make more sense.

As well as how much material, you have to wonder how much marketing he puts in to getting the sales.

To be honest, I wouldn't be interested in the median author/designer. They're most likely putting little to no effort in to promoting their work. Discovering the level of interest you need to create to get near the top earners would be interesting.

Orman doesn't have very many themes on the site, but he does do a lot of off-site promotion on his blog (and perhaps elsewhere) and give away a lot of material as part of that. That could be a huge time-cost, but may be well worth it from his point of view given the earnings.

I may not have read it closely enough, but I couldn't work out how much of his earnings came from selling his own themes on the site, and how much came from the affiliate income he earned from selling other people's themes when the entry point to the site has included his affiliate code. That affiliate income could really add up if he's sending plenty of traffic their way.

Sorry, I got the headline wrong and I've now edited it. I went from the article to read a couple of other pages from the links and picked the wrong figure when I came back to submit.

Thanks for picking that up.

I've met a couple of people who've worked there, one was quite bitchy about working conditions but you could get that at any company.

About 2000-2001 the company I was working for tried to buy a license to use their search software on our internal documents. It all fell apart for various reasons, including a price tag that was well in to six figures (Sterling) may even have been almost £1,000,000 my memory fails me as it wasn't going to be a good fit for our project anyway (long story.)

The tech they had then was very impressive when demoed, and I've heard even more amazing things about it since, but again, all in demos. I've not used the software direct, partly because I haven't worked for companies that could afford to use it.

I rarely find this an issue. I've found I'm more likely to be waiting for a client to be getting back with some sort of feedback, and therefore using my time to be working on another project.

This may be down to handling client expectations at an early stage. If you make it clear that as a freelancer you will be working for several people at any one time, and give them a time estimate for when progress will be made, I've found most clients are fine.

This does mean I have to make sure I'm progressing enough on each project to keep each individual client happy, but I've found for a lot of people, as long as they see some progress and you're keeping up communication with them - which can be as simple as a 'here's a quick update' e-mail - then they're happy.

If you get a client who wants you to work solely on their project, this can be more of a problem. As I've been freelancing a while I'm in a position to say I can't work that way, and know that I'll find other work if they then do not want me to work for them. When I was starting out and work was thin on the ground, I couldn't be so picky. Then again, I didn't have as much work to juggle either.

In my experience (seven years as a freelancer), most clients are good. You need to build up your sense of who is good and who is bad so you can weed out the bad ones early on. Things to look for are:

* Have they fallen out with their previous developer / team

* Do they start off saying they have no budget

* Have they decided it's a short job but have no noticeable idea of how long things will actually take

* They only want to pay at the end of the job, when they've received everything

* They won't sign a contract

On their own, none of these is a deal breaker (apart from the last one.) However, if you start hitting two or three points, that's real warning signs that they're going to be a bad client.

In the UK, I and a lot of other developers and designers ask for some money up front (for new clients, long running clients not so much, it depends what they're like.) I started doing this from advice from another freelancer, and it's the easiest way of weeding out bad clients. People who argue about paying 25% to 30% up-front also tend to be the ones who pay late or argue about paying the whole amount.

By not working for clients who won't pay a deposit, I've actually saved myself hassle in the long run by not having to chase for payments.

The most I've been ripped off for is £300, but I've some freelancing friends who are owned thousands of Pounds by various clients.

To mitigate risk, if you're doing a lot of work for a client it's best to break it down in to milestones and bill frequently - at least monthly. That way if they haven't paid a previous bill you can stop working until it is paid, and you have less to lose.

[Edit - trying to format list]

Bruce Sterling has a short story which also explores the effects cheap fabrication could have - The Kiosk. It's narrated by the StarShipSofa folks here:

http://www.starshipsofa.com/20100113/aural-delights-no-116-b...

Given they're top names within their industry, they might have staff checking the search results quite frequently to ensure that competitors aren't showing ads against their names. Something like this then gets flagged up as something for the boss to see.

Given his target market, I think this was a great way to get an interview.

I too hope you've done well out of the deal. I've been a paying Fastmail customer for ~7 years and am very happy with it. The 2006 downtime and a few other hiccups around the same time were annoying, but since then things have felt rock solid.

I find the spam filter better than the one in Gmail, so thanks to whoever's done the hard work with that.

And thank you for keeping the old web interface around, I prefer it over the newer one. There's nothing particularly wrong with the newer one, I'm just very used to the way the old one works and find it fast enough without AJAX enhancements. That you kept the old interface going is one of the reasons I stayed with Fastmail, if you'd forced a switch to the new one I'd have probably gone to Gmail.

You can hear Russell Davies, one of the founders of Newspaper Club, talking about the project that spawned the startup in his talk "Materialising and Dematerialising A Web of Data. (Or What We’ve Learned From Printing The Internet Out)" from dConstruct last year:

http://huffduffer.com/dConstruct/8908

He gives a very good talk, and it'd be even better if you had the slides too but I don't know if there's a video of the talk.

There are employment laws in the UK which mean a Mechanical Turk-like system wouldn't be able to have jobs listed for such low amounts - I think it comes under the minimum wage laws.

Because of this and similar laws in other countries, Amazon have kept job-posting MT accounts limited to the USA at the moment, which doesn't have the restriction.

I don't know enough about Dutch or Indian law to know whether a similar system could be set up within them, but there are problems with rolling something like this out globally.

If you look at the next photo in the stream - http://www.flickr.com/photos/dustpuppy/4580359 you'll see the red light is still two-thirds visible. Whilst that's not perfect, it's better than nothing. Coverage of the amber (middle) light isn't much of an issue as it's used in transition between the main lights. In those conditions, not seeing the amber isn't going to need much of a behavioural change.

It would be interesting to know if paul9290's Hero had the latest software update on it. The update certainly helped my Hero feel snappier, and has improved battery life a bit. Pre-update I was pretty happy with the Hero, though it was a little laggy at times, post update it's much smoother.

That said, I don't run many widgets which constantly update. When I was running a lot of widgets some of them slowed the phone down a lot more than others and it feels to me like one or two dodgy widgets could destroy the experience of using this phone.

As I've been very busy recently I've turned off a lot of the things that update constantly on my phone as I found them a distraction. From that angle, I can understand some of the thinking behind the iPhone not having programmes running in the background, though that's a different conversation.

I haven't seen any adverts for Android phones pushing that they have 'Android' as a feature, nor have I seen any adverts for the Android app store. Whereas the iPhone was heavily marketed at normal consumers. It is not surprising that very few people are using the Android store, given that few people know of it's existence.

Google and the phone makers are playing the game very differently to Apple. I think it's going to be a long time before I could claim Android is a failure, it's still very early days for the project.

Thanks branden, I didn't re-read far enough down the article.

A couple of points for accuracy - the corpus callosum isn't the only path of communication between the two hemispheres of the brain. There are at least two minor pathways, unfortunately I can't remember either of their names well enough to find them and my neurology books are at home. The corpus callosum is by far the biggest pathway of communication, but studies where it has been split have shown that the minor pathways are also used for some communication.

And... while the left hemisphere of the brain controls the right side of the body and vice versa, the eyes are a bit different. When you show something to one eye, the signals from the left side of the eye's visual field are sent to the right side of the brain, and the right side of the visual field _of the same eye_ are sent to the left hemisphere.

This makes studying people who've had the CC severed very awkward as you have to present images to one side of their visual field and then remove it before their eyes have moved to see the image with the whole field. In turn, this affects which images you can show as they have to be simple enough to be understood quickly enough that you only have to show them for a very limited time. Again, this is something I'd need to look up in my old university notes or textbooks but I have a feeling it was something like 22ms - it could well have been a bit longer, but it's a very, very short time.

I too love neurology and studied Experimental Psychology at university, now a bundle of years ago, and we covered a chunk of neurology in that. One of my lecturers, Alan Parkin, had studied people with split brain and some with alien hand syndrome. His books are well worth a read if you're interested in neuropsychology, but you might find them a bit heavy if you haven't already read around psychology, they're made for 2nd-3rd year undergraduate students.

I had to re-read the article about the eight digit password. As it is for his phone provider, I presume it has to be numbers so it can be typed in from any phone keypad. I can't believe someone with Mitnick's track record would use an all-numbers password by choice.

I've recently gone back to Tweetdeck having tried it when it was first in beta. It's not perfect, but the groups feature is great and I find I'm able to handle following a lot more people because of it.

I've turned off all alerts from Tweetdeck so it doesn't bother me when I'm focussing on work, and use 'clear' in each group when I've finished reading through it. Sometimes that means reading all the updates, others it's just a way of removing the old stuff I'm not going to bother with.

I only have two groups which basically split in to people I know well and want to read, and people who I don't know as well or are very noisy. The latter gets cleared a lot more without reading all the messages but lets me keep track of more local conversations and the interesting nuggets that come up occasionally.

The guy who makes Tweetdeck recently got some funding so he can work on it full time and hire in some extra talent, so it's likely to improve more rapidly than it has been.

It was mentioned on the front page of The Guardian (national UK newspaper) of Nov 29th, here's the article:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/nov/29/mumbai-terror-at...

It is no where near as mainstream as Facebook, but it is starting to be mentioned in mainstream places, not just in the technology sections.

To be honest, I'm not sure Twitter will go mainstream like Facebook has. Most of the value I get from it is to be in touch with friends throughout the day. Not a lot of workplaces will let you do that (mine does, but that's a benefit to being self employed :-) ) From what I see, Facebook is more oriented around much more asynchronous usage, which is a lot easier for most people to use.

I would strongly suggest having a handful of clients. Currently the two things likely to kill an early consulting / freelancing career are: the client you're working for going out of business, or the client you're working for cutting budgets back to the point where they can't afford you any more.

Being spread across a few clients lessens your risk a great deal, but it shouldn't become unmanageable to keep in touch with all of them.

[Edit] I should have said - couldn't agree more about the conferences. Whether full on conferences or more community driven events like BarCamps, they're a great place to meet very good contacts.

Yahoo's policy is different from GMail's. In GMail's terms it says they will hand over the account to the next of kin if you send them the death certificate, or if you have power of attorney over that person. Yahoo won't give access under any circumstances, although that's obviously over-ridden by the court's decision.

I found out about this was thinking about social media sites and how they're affected by death recently, which I did as a BarCamp talk and wrote up here:

http://www.paulsilver.co.uk/blog/2008/10/death-and-social-me...

I think there's stuff that should be in web applications that we miss because we don't think about death, i.e. should we have an extra e-mail for the next of kin of a user? (or effective next of kin in this context.)

The EU online store - http://www.muji.eu/pages/online.asp?V=1&Sec=1&Sub=4&... and they seem to have quite a few stockists over here: http://www.muji.eu/pages/stores.asp?str=UL