Ask HN: Review my $1.99 iPhone app | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Review my $1.99 iPhone app

itunes.apple.com

9 pointszin19 comments

Have you ever wanted to have an online address book on your iPhone or iPod touch? Would you like to be able to share contacts across your whole company or group of friends without the need to sync your device? hContacts for Highrise can do just that.

hContacts provides instant access to your Highrise contacts no matter where you are. hContacts features the look and feel of iPhone Contacts application yet it allows you to keep your Highrise contacts separate from iPhone contacts. With hContacts, you can search contacts, view contact information and contact's photo, it also lets you call, email or text a contact right from the contact info screen.

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Is it possible for anyone to review your application without buying it? If not, then I think it's bad form to ask HN to review it.

I don't know if it's "bad form" per se, I mean, part of what people here aim to do is make money off of their work. However, I certainly am not going to pay to help you out with your app. But I don't own an iPhone anyway. I would simply say that you shouldn't expect too much help if you don't provide an 'early access' version to users of this site or something like that.

I say it's bad form because it's disguising an advertisement as a community-based request for feedback.

I agree. If you're asking for free reviews here you should be giving free access (even if it's limited in some way).

It could be. I didn't vote it up, even though I usually do vote for this kind of posting, because I can't review his app (and wouldn't anyway unless he made it available to me for free). It probably depends on the user in question. Looks like this guy's had an account for a while, even if he hasn't participated much.

i still don't understand why apple won't introduce some sort of trial period for apps. they already have the code signing/drm framework in place and can control what can run and can't run on your iphone. how hard can it be to allow it to only run for x number of days like their downloadable itunes movies?

and even without that framework, there are thousands of non-drm trial apps for mac os x, windows, and other phones that are time-limited and stop working after 30 days or 30 runs.

i understand they are probably banking on the fact that users have to fork over money to try anything now, but can it really be that much more money than would be made by additional sales from users that now won't buy apps before they can try them?

It seems they are relying on the developers to offer free "lite" versions of their applications in order to provide a "trial period" sort of thing. And I suspect this might be better overall for the developers.

Consider, if you released an application that someone might plausibly only want to use for 30 days or less, and then have no more use for it. If Apple forced all non-free applications to have a 30-day trial period, then you may be losing out on many sales from people who only need your program for a short time. (E.g., a city travel guide for a one-week trip.)

On the other hand, surely Apple could let the developer choose if they wish for their applications to participate in such a trial program or not.

Agreed, this just seems like marketing spam to me.

This whole thing just doesn't taste right. I feel like our community is being taken advantage of with the whole 'AskHN' thing when I see this type of offer. This isn't about iTunes apps, it's about how you position the product for the community.

The product costs money, he could have built a feature-limited free version for us to download and check out. The author didn't provide any insightful information here or on a blog.

And a direct link right into iTunes, ugh, that's almost as bad as linking a PDF and not mentioning it.

It's this exact type of thing that will eventually force the community to say: 'no more'. And that's sad, because not only do we get to see some really cool services early on, but we learn from the feedback the community gives.

I don't have a highrise account, however looking at the screenshots it looks well done. I like the 'Text Message' option I see there as well.

Did you do a write up anywhere of what your experience was with the app store and all of the process involved in getting in? I'd love to hear more as I've just started working on my first iPhone app myself.

Edit: If you don't mind, would you be willing to give us a hint at sales at some point (not sure how long this has been up... has anyone bought yet?)

Cool.

So what frameworks did you use to build it? Are you using pure Obj-C sqlite access, or something like fmdb/pldatabase/sqlitepersistentobjects?

What was the most challenging aspect of building it?

How will you market it? The app store is great, but I've found that outside visibility has started to matter even more now that there are tons of apps.

Also, you may want to change your application name in iTunes Connect to "hContacts - Highrise for your iPhone/iPod Touch" or something similar. Just be sure to have "Highrise" in it, so that your app name shows up in the table list when users are searching for the term "highrise" from their devices.

Not to take away from your review, but for those people that use Basecamp I have a native iPhone client here: http://appremix.com/projects/

A little more information would have been useful. As it is, only those with iTunes installed can review the app.

I hate the way iTunes tries to reinvent the web for their little walled garden

The walled garden has given Apple enormous powers. It also gives some of us developers visibility that we couldn't otherwise get. And it makes things consistent and simple for the end-user. It's a tough call.

yeah , but putting up some website with some screenshots never hurt anyone. Now all I see is : " We are unable to find iTunes on your computer."

Haven't used the app, but 2 things:

1. Would be nice to support login via openid. 2. I've been using a Highrise to LDAP proxy with moderate success with Address Book for OSX. I think I'd rather see that sort of integration with the address book than a separate app. (proxy link: http://giantrobots.thoughtbot.com/2007/5/22/highrise-to-ldap...)

What's that site that lets you see iPhone apps in your browser? I don't have iTunes handy to look at this.

I have one at http://appshopper.com/

That's really nice, but now that this story is killed? I don't know the name of his app to look it up/

A video would have been much more productive for you.

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