Under the Radar RSS Feed Overcast Link iTunes Link PocketCasts Subscribe Link I am delighted to announce that today I am launching a new development related podcast with Marco Arment. It is called Under the Radar and starts today on the fine Relay FM Network. I have been doing Developing Perspective since July 13, 2011 (roughly 4.5 years). During that time I have chronicled the rises and falls of being an independent developer in the App Store. I am immensely proud of Developing Perspective and glad that I have it to refer to later on as I look back on my career. The time has come now to embark on a new adventure in podcasting. Back in late 2010 a new podcast was started called Build & Analyze with Marco Arment and Dan Benjamin. I hadn’t really heard of either of them before but I immediately latched onto it. Marco’s experiences and perspectives in being a developer were both relevant to my work and engaging to hear. For the entire run of Build & Analyze you’d always find me in the chatroom listening live, suggesting titles. In many ways it was the show that most motivated me to start podcasting. To create a venue for sharing my experiences and hard learned lessons. I was very sad when it finally wrapped up its 108 episode run. All that makes the prospect of starting a new development podcast with Marco a great joy. If you liked listening to Developing Perspective I’d really encourage you to subscribe to Under the Radar. It is in many ways the spiritual successor to Developing Perspective and Build & Analyze. A venue for us both to discuss and examine what being a developer means today — the challenges we face, the opportunities we see, the lessons we learn. Oh, and it’s never longer than 30 minutes. So let’s get Started

I tend to think of my app business in terms of revenue per day. Breaking it down to that level helps me keep a close eye on it and know how well or poorly I’m doing. Today I walk through the reasoning for this as well as do a thought experiment of what the numbers might look like for a new business.

Some thoughts on the implications of having to take an unplanned absence from your work when you are self-employed. There are a lot of benefits of being independent that manifest themselves in a situation like this but also a few things to be careful of and plan for.

An overview of what to expect this summer: the beta schedule, timing for release, the importance of RADARS, my growing interest in Swift and an encouragement for everyone to build something new this summer. Will Hains’ iOS Beta History

First Impressions from WWDC 2015. These are my initial reactions right after the Keynote, I’ll probably do another episode later in the week which has more considered reactions.

Some high level thoughts about WWDC and my excitement for it. Then, a few thoughts about whether mobile advertising is in a precarious position.

Today I begin a new Start-to-Finish series discussing the creation of an application from idea to the App Store. My Essential Experience Target: An application focused on surfacing the data currently collected by the Apple Watch and iPhone and presenting it in a useful, actionable, and encouraging way. Blizzard’s Games I discuss: Hearthstone Heroes of the Storm My previous Start-to-Finish series discussing the creation of Check the Weather: #91: Thank you and the Road from Here. #90: Check the Weather #89: Counting Down. #87: Basic App Marketing. #86: App Pricing. #85: Pragmatism. #84: Shipped it. #83: Performance and Letting Go. #82: Localizing an App. #80: Managing functionality. #77: Prototyping a new project.

2015 Developing Perspective t-shirts (4 days to order, ends May 18.) One of the most dangerous traps when learning from someone else’s experience is ascribing intentionality to what in reality was accidental. This can make it feel somehow magical or impossible to learn from. We are all just muddling along. Pedometer += 1,000,000 Joe’s Extraordinarily Kind Words

2015 Developing Perspective t-shirts (1 Week left to order.) Once again the topic of sustainable revenue has surfaced around our lovely community. I’ve recently been changing/adapting my thinking on the subject so it seemed the time to wade in again. Tim on the App Store “The app store had its best quarter ever, with a record number of customers making purchases, driving a new record for revenue, and 29 percent year on year growth.” App Store Metrics In April, 2015: 1,561 apps per day (35,929 non-games, 12,451 games, 48,380 total) Where we are: Redacted for Mac Launch Realmac Product Revenue Snapshot Sensor Tower Top Grossing Analysis From here: Inquisitive: Behind the App #11 Learning to Ride a Bicycle, Again. Sam Soffes on Developing Perspective #208

2015 Developing Perspective t-shirts My WatchKit Apps Release Notes Conference In some ways this week’s episode is a follow up to last week’s show about hustle. All that thinking about the role that asking for money plays in my business got me to thinking about some of the complications that being the face of your business carries. When you are an independent business owner your own personal brand becomes the brand of your products. This can be awesome but also makes certain parts of promotion and discourse more complicated.

Thinking through why I have such a hang up about talking about and asking for Money. Why this is probably not such a great thing for my business and what I might do to fix it. My WatchKit Apps

How to build little features into your applications that re-wire your user’s brains to come to expect a certain behavior. These ‘insidious’ features are a delightful way to help build loyalty with your customers.

Simultaneous Invention or setting realistic expectations for uniqueness. Simultaneous Invention

After a longer than typical break I’m back with another episode…on a related note I’m talking about how to get unstuck. How I manage the situation that seems to happen often enough where I get stuck in a creative rut. Then I talk a bit about how to manage the process of submitting WatchKit apps. Chart of my consistency track record for Developing Perspective:

In the run up to Apple’s media event on March 9th I keep hearing the phrase ‘Gold Rush’ over and over again. Today I unpack that concept and whether it might apply to the Apple Watch. The Phases of Gold Rush: The Rumor The Legend The Rush The Reality Luck = Opportunity + Preparation My WatchKit Series Scott Forstall, “Whole new Gold Rush” The California Gold Rush Trism WatchCon 2 There is unfortunately no shortcut to gaining expertise in a subject. You can only truly understand something by working on it, by immersing yourself in it, by building terrible prototypes and throwing them away. You cannot throw away what you haven’t made.

Prompted by some thinking I did around building the App Preview for Pedometer++, I start to wonder about honesty in advertising. How honesty should I be? What level of candor is appropriate, helpful, reasonable? Building an App Preview

I’m not a huge fan of the term polymath. It sounds kinda pretentious but sometimes the best word for something is that way. Today I was struck by the wild variety of tasks and skills that it takes to run a business principally on your own. So I wanted to walk through some of disparate aspects of the ‘job’. Hopefully giving someone who is considering going out on their own some good food for thought. My intention isn’t to scare anyone off, but just to help you understand the inherent complexity of this line of work, and an appreciation for the things other people handle for you in a J-O-B, job. General Development Software engineering Bug tracking Product Design Release planning Customer support Version Control iTunes Connect submission lifecycle iOS Development Objective C, Xcode, Interface Builder Device and iOS version management Photoshop, PaintCode Testing / QA Server Development Ruby on Rails Postgres Memcached, nginx, redis Queueing, sidekiq Linux system administration, Backups, Security updates Operations iTunes Connect, contracts, payments, Accounting, Taxes and banking. Budgeting Compliance, Local, State, Federal, Business Licenses Benefits / Welness General hosting, email, domains, etc Marketing Websites ‘Brand’, personal and otherwise Photoshop Marketing concepts and ideas Microeconomics

Today I walk through my history thinking about Swift. From WWDC to now I’ve done a lot of thinking about Swift as whether I should be using it. The result makes me feel a bit conflicted, but the brutally pragmatic part of me is winning out. Swift on Apple.com My WatchKit series

I take a break out of my normal 15 minute format for a return of my occational interview series. This week I’m delighted to talk to Sam Soffes about balancing your own product work with doing consulting, different ways of thinking about success and deciding what it is you want to do with your time. Sam has been developing for iOS since 2008 and has worked on a wide variety of successful products. He is currently working on Whiskey, a Markdown editor for Mac and iOS.

Rather than wading into the hullabaloo regarding Apple’s software quality directly I instead decided to take a step backwards and consider the forces that have driven us to this situation in the first place. My goal is to consider the forces that make keeping software stable over time difficult. The result can apply to small projects as well as to a company as large as Apple. Marketing Complexity: The pressure to keep adding features in order to keep software relevant in a marketplace. Intrinsic Complexity: The unfortunate reality that any added feature doesn’t just linearly increase complexity, instead it increases radically. Personnel/Personal Complexity: The tension and struggle around keeping sharp, talented engineers focused on stability when the promise of working on something else, newer and more exciting looms. These are the concerns we need to stay conscious of in order to manage our software over time. Handshake Problem