vpdn

> Really, there's no excuse for a company that awash in cash to ship shoddy tools.

I think money isn't really the issue here. Just as throwing people at a late project won't make it finish in time throwing money at a crappy product doesn't make it better either.

('crappy' would also be a bit too harsh, XCode 4.3.2 is much more stable compared to a few iterations before).

> Objective-C the language has always been extremely portable.

Is there some inherent feature of the language that would make it more portable than others?

There's something that they can do, it's written as the first option:

"On our side: if Sparrow was to do Push today, we would have to store your credentials (login/password) on our servers to frequently poll your accounts, and send you notifications.

This is a responsibility we're not ready to take. As a startup focused on iOS/OS X development, we do not have the skills to secure your data on our servers and we do not want to put sensitive information at risk."

Not giving a discount of 50cents on the 400$ suit makes the other guy look even more like a dick. So this might be the easiest 50cents you've earned.

Even if you don't use facebook, you should probably have an account to see the mechanics of it. It's mind boggling how a product is able to attract 800 million people, with 50% of the users logging in on any given day. There's something to learn here.

I had the chance to work with some amazing illustrators before. It's actually not very hard to find them, just go to the places where they usually hang out. For the kind of designers I'm looking for, that would be deviantart and to a lesser extend dribbble.

Finding designers and working with them are two separate problems though. They speak in a different language so communication can be an issue. Also I found the design crowd to be very opinionated (just like us developers).

Textual requirement specifications don't work so well, instead replace them with sketches and concept ideas, color palettes, mood boards and a lot of IM communication. Also try to keep the iterations short, ask them to show you the work in progress at least a few times a week. You may also try synchronous design sessions, as described here: http://taptaptap.com/blog/the-design-session

In Germany, it's way below $250. According to GULP, the largest freelancing website here, the average is around 71EUR/h (around 90USD).

"it would probably also be very sensitive to market changes in demand for developers / designers."

So is your market rate as a freelancer.

"If you buy Lifepath, I'll give you some of my time to help you do whatever you want to do with it."

For me, this would be the most interesting part of the auction, which makes me wonder whether well-known designers (and coders) could auction off their time chunks, instead of offering a fixed hourly rate. (e.g. available for three months this year, to the highest bidder).

I tend to listen to people's app ideas when their ideas revolve around their life or area of expertise.

For the rest of us, it's easier to start as a competitor in a big market than to envision a latent need and build a product around it. If the app idea has not been implemented before, there's a high chance the founder is having the "invented here" hallucination. I'd try to find a place where the need is obvious and try to build the best product in that category instead of coming up with an ingenious new idea. I believe ideas are overrated (but vision matters).

Steve Jobs take: "I want [Apple] to be much better, I don't care of being different." (Youtube: http://goo.gl/YPQJt)

http://tastytum.com - One week event in Berlin to match hosts and locals over food.

Assumption is that an event like this might be less scary compared to AirBnB style of renting your flat away.

If someone is in Berlin and interested to host, would love to hear from you!

Others that are also trying in that field: - Housefed - GrubWithUs: http://www.grubwithus.com

Housefed tries to build up a community first before getting into hosting meals (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2379797). We go the opposite road and try to validate our assumptions as fast as possible. I believe we can (in)validate many assumptions while extracting lots of information by running a one week experiment, which also doesn't cost us much either.

Feedbacks so far mostly through friends, but also reaching out to people on twitter (e.g: https://twitter.com/#!/lorenbaxter/status/96319791110946816)

> Internet infrastructure here isn't great

I was in Vietnam last year for a longer trip (worked remotely for a client in Germany). I found the internet to be working extremely well in Saigon, so it might just be your region. For two weeks I worked off Phu Quoc Island. A few times, we had power outage on the island, yet I was able to go online through my 3g connection. Pretty amazing change compared to the last time I visited he country four years back to visit my grand family.

I see two potential target groups here. One focuses on the developer and tries to solve the data storage and synchronization procedure. In that field, I'm not sure what the benefits of your solution are. Could you elaborate on how it is different to CouchDB[1] or even Amazon's storage service[2]?

The other market I'm seing targets users of the CMS system, i.e. the people who actually maintain the data. In most data centric projects I've been working on, you could be sure that the client will at some stage ask, how (not whether) he can change the existing data and add datasets after development has finished. This usually involved creating a CRUD user interface, which was tedious and in almost all cases, was never used.

Your front page focuses a lot on the former target group (create general datastructures, update and query them) whereas I think you might be offering more value in the latter group ("see how simple it is to add another recipe into your cooking app"). If you could combine the client's desire to control his money and time investment while making the solution easy to integrate for the developer, that might be good enough.

[1] CouchDB for iOS devices - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2310863

[2] Amazon S3 for iOS: http://aws.amazon.com/sdkforios/faqs/

[3] Earlier discussion on StorageRoom: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1847115

"I’ve been lucky enough to run a company that’s been profitable for 23 years, so I developed the habit of doing things that way [..] That’s a way of doing business, that if you think about it, computes much better than getting tens of millions in funding for an iPhone app."

How can you tell that it's being downvoted? (And yes, I do miss the points next to comments or other, better means to filter for useful comments)

The issue does not lie in the few emails you get every day, but the distraction which accompanies it.

There are basically two modes of email usage:

1. Pushed: Email gets pushed to your email client or mobile phone, followed by a audio visual indicator showing the amount of messages received, sometimes also a snippet of the email.

2. Pulled: You manually go to gmail.com to check whether new email arrived.

The push-mode is counter productive because it breaks your train of thought. Assuming your 20 emails arrive evenly distributed over an eight hour work day, that's one email every 24 minutes. From my experience, it takes roughly 30minutes to get the mind to focus on any moderately complex problem (especially programming). So there goes your work day.

The pull mode can be highly addictive: On some occasions, checking your email account is rewarded with a non-empty inbox (inbox zero people will think you're nuts), other times your inbox is empty and you don't get any reward. This creates a reinforcement which is variable in amount (emails received) and interval (when and whether you receive some) which psychologists call a variable interval reinforcement schedule and is found to be highly addictive. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinforcement)

Point is, the cost of email is more than just the time required to answer the 20 emails. That is usually not the problem, unless you're a VC :-)

If you cannot load the site, here's an instapaper link to the article: http://www.instapaper.com/go/159728600/text

I didn't say that it does. And I didn't say that it doesn't either.

Too bad the video doesn't go into details on how the application really works from a user perspective and how merging is done.

The software he mentions (rosettastone.com) doesn't work with grammar either if I remember correctly. Instead, for one spoken sentence, they display various images of which you have to pick the right one (i.e. the image the sentence corresponds to).

It's the child approach: When you were a kid, you probably didn't have any clue about english grammar either, yet you were able to produce perfectly valid english sentences.

I saw his tech talk at google a few years back where he shares his ideas for image tagging. Absolutely amazing work. Watch if you haven't yet: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8246463980976635143...

> I'm not in this for the money at all

So what are you in for? Are you looking to live in Austria for personal reasons or is the new job scope intriguing?

If former is the case, maybe sticking to your current employer and telecommuting is an option? Or you could keep ties to the US and do contracting work remotely?

> I'm pretty sure that IBM Germany wouldn't pay you more either.

Wrong guess, they do pay more. I worked for IBM R&D Germany right after graduation and my salary was more than 45k, even excluding overtime, which was paid extra.

As for Germany, there's also a gap in salary depending on the size of the company you work for. Generally, larger cooperations pay better than smaller ones, so if you're looking to make more money, go for the bigger players.

I'm a iOS developer with a UX fetish. I'm not directly interested in regular contracting work, however I'm thinking of attending Google I/O and WWDC this year (may-june) and would love to experience a YC startup from the inside. My startup history consists of creating a sms compression app for "dumbphone" devices back in j2me times (german news:http://goo.gl/fEkdr, http://goo.gl/PmgIc) and a lingerie business in Malaysia (http://d.pr/nF3a). In both, I did all the graphics & UI work. You can find my portfolio at http://mocava.de

If anyone would be interested in sponsoring my trip, I'd be happy to work for free for my time of stay.

Why not? (just curious)

> There are plenty of good developers who could easily immerse themselves in mobile app development for two weeks, and become pretty skilled mobile devs in little time.

It takes more than learning a programming language to become anywhere close to being a good mobile developer. The technical issues such as slow processor, little memory and network interruptions aside, you also have to deal with a usage behavior and human interface which is very different to all desktop application and most web applications. If someone was to ask me for steps to mobile enlightenment, I would probably point him to the human interface guidelines fist:

Android: http://developer.android.com/guide/practices/ui_guidelines/i...

iOS: http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/userex...

Blackberry: http://docs.blackberry.com/en/developers/deliverables/17964/...

> There used to be a time where employers would recognize an employee's abilities, and provide for his learning of new subject matter.

This is wishful thinking and I don't believe was ever the case (or maybe before I was born). If I ever wanted to expand my knowledge in a certain direction, I always took it as my own responsibility to ask and demand for it. The company can provide you the resources and learning opportunities, but you have to grab them yourself.

I just started out as an iPhone developer and have been on that program for a month now. In addition to the startup money, you are also entitled to an advisor/coach to help you start the business (up to 4000Euros, you pay 10%, they pay 90%). The money you get depends on the salary you received prior to your unemployment (60% of net income). It doesn't make you rich, but greatly helps to take out the risk in the first year. Don't know whether I would have had the guts to leave my IBM consulting job if there wasn't this option.

I agree that a tutorial would be useful, and that's exactly the problem.

From trial and error, people build up gazillion mental models of how certain things work. When I show you a bottle of red wine, you most likely know by glancing at it, how the bottle can be opened. That is because you've built up a mental model of bottle mechanics as well as different type of bottle caps and can map them to the new problem space (new unseen bottle).

When inventing something new, especially something as basic and "known" as an input method, you can greatly ease adoption by relying on existing mental models of things people already know, then map your new interface to that.

Swype would probably work reasonably well without displaying the underlying keyboard, but I assume they do so to guide the mapping process. Recently acquired BlindType does the same. I remember that they even state somewhere on their website, that the typing works without displaying a keyboard at all. Unfortunately the site is down after the google acquisition, but this youtube video illustrates the "typing without keyboard": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6eKm1gUnTE (skip forward to 1:02)

click on "iOS SDK beta" in "View" on top left.

Beside efficient communication and faster execution, the approach also helps break the lethargic monotony a one man show has to face, be it as a freelancer or an employee in a distributed team. One month 'off' is also a great way to say thanks to everyone for their endless hours and bang-head-against-wall solo session.

Before my time, IBM regularly held a WebSphere Services Technical Conference (WSTC) in Las Vegas and annually flew in a big portion of the team for a week to learn about the hottest features. I am sure my colleagues learned a lot, but the stories I am told these days about those days also go beyond and usually start with someone getting lost on The Strip at 3am.

It probably doesn't have to be that expensive though. I would assume that renting a house wouldn't take away too much from the experience and benefits but would be significantly cheaper (we had a house which could easily fit up to eight people at the ocean, 60km away from Venice in Italy for 500EUR/week). When the team is right, doing simple stuff such as cooking together can be quite fun and bonding.

A related approach: Designer Stefan Sagmeister gives up some of his retirement years and instead takes a one year 'creative break' every seven years. Here's his TED talk:

http://www.ted.com/talks/stefan_sagmeister_the_power_of_time...