bjplink

I've been writing custom web apps for awhile now and with my less technically astute clients I usually just refer to the application as a "system" that they can access from your web browser.

Eventually clients will call for help and say "I need you to look at the system." or "Can you login to the system and change something?"

Also, and this is just my perception and probably not 100% true, I feel like you get less pushback on things like pricing when you tell them you are building them a system and not a website.

I've had almost all of my apps rejected at least once; and in every instance is was an app update that was flagged for violating a guideline or rule it passed for on the initial release. Each time I responded with a simple "Why did this get approved the first time and now it's suddenly not ok?" type message and the updates were approved in short order.

This was one of the reasons why I stopped bothering with iOS apps. It's luck of the draw with your reviewer and the time between submitting a new binary and hoping you get someone else is irritating.

US Golf Courses (http://www.usgolfcoursesapp.com) was the first and most successful app I made back when I was starting with iOS development in the early spring of 2011. Over the course of it's lifetime it has averaged about two sales per day but out of the gate it did well after a mention on Mashable.

I wrote a short article last year about how the app fared when I had both a paid and free version: http://www.brianjlink.com/sucks-not-working

I haven't updated US Golf Courses at all since April of 2011. The app is currently both out of date and has a broken weather feature but still seems to generate at least some minimal interest every day.

I've predominantly been a lurker here for quite awhile (my account is only a few hundred days older than your own) and I feel the quality is down from when I joined. Contrary to most people's opinions though I never felt the quality was all that high to begin with. I think the users here vastly overrate their contributions.

I enjoy HN as a nice source of interesting links and stories to read on my own time. Yet I find that I can't make it through even half of the comments on any given thread that is popular. It's too difficult to squeeze out the insightful stuff. I tend to just keep track of several regulars via their comments feed and try my best to avoid the chatter of the masses anymore.

My biggest personal pet peeve since I first joined here back in August of 2008 is when bigger threads devolve into tangential side arguments about who is using ad hominen, straw men tactics and other meta discussion methods. When half of the comments are about someone else's commenting technique the thread has gone into the weeds for me.

I built something similar to this back in 2007 and while it did ok for a few years it eventually fell off of a cliff. It's difficult to compete now against free alternatives and cheap mobile apps.

I haven't tried Flurry. I had Mixpanel working so fast I didn't even bother with anything else.

I use MixPanel in my apps and found it to be very easy to implement and use: https://mixpanel.com/docs/integration-libraries/iphone

This is surprising to the OUYA folks I bet, who were very recently touting that OnLive was coming to their box.

I like Postmark: http://postmarkapp.com/

My guess is that this was the crux of the breakup with 5by5. I have no idea what sponsors pay to be on 5by5 but I would be surprised if Gruber's cut of that was anywhere near $5,000 an episode.

EDIT: Just for the sake of comparison here are the ad rates on daringfireball.net: http://daringfireball.net/feeds/sponsors/

Your reply just reiterates my point because you're doing the same thing the post author does. In between the talk of version control, his post is laced with allusions that people working with technologies he doesn't (PHP & mySQL in this case) are a bunch of dumb baddies.

Why would someone possibly care enough to go out of there way to write a blog post condemning them. I just don't get it. This seems like a popular tactic in the Ruby and Python communities although it's toned down enough over the last few years that I thought this movement was about over. This post just helped remind me it isn't.

From the article:

"...but choosing to build a MySQL editor into a web development package just furthers my impression that Coda is basically designed for the php crowd."

I'm not sure why that is a problem.

This article by Croft is a pretty good summation of almost all of the negative commentary surrounding both the original version of Coda and the upcoming release of Coda 2. The rest of the article is full of digs at people who work in a way different than what Jeff Croft does. It is incredibly condescending.

The reason why I can't stand reading nerdy tech blogs anymore is because everyone is convinced they are right and the rest of the plebes using antiquated (read: different) technology are morons.

I would argue that there are enough people doing things the way Coda best supports to make the creation and marketing of the software justifiable. Otherwise they probably wouldn't be days away from releasing a major new version they appear to have spent a lot of time, money and thought on.

If there's enough demand for software like Coda shouldn't we all just take a big step back and acknowledge that's ok? There's more than one way to operate as a developer today and maybe we should all leave our thousand word treatises that chastise people for doing things the way they want in our "drafts" folder.

I felt the same way as you at the time I listened to it originally but it's very possible we are over analyzing it too.

One day a week I work on-site for a client and it's a monster commute. I need four hours of podcasts each week to make the drive down and back bearable. The Talk Show helped me get through a big chunk of that so it's a bummer to see its old format go away.

I'm going to give the new Talk Show a shot though. Even though Mike Monteiro doesn't appear to be directly involved with this new version (yet) my usual reaction to most things involving him isn't very favorable. I don't particularly enjoy his current podcast at Mule Radio and his recent book is good but not as good as he or the people involved want you to believe it is. But I find Gruber's take on most things, in particular Apple, too good to just automatically discount this new show through guilt by association.

Here are the last ten seconds in the history of The Talk Show on 5by5:

Benjamin: "We'll be back regular time next week, right?" Gruber: "I guess so." Benjamin: "Ok. Thanks John." Gruber: "Adios."

I'm a sports nerd but trolling all of the blogs and newspapers that cover my favorite teams is a bit much. RSS is fine but I like to keep the number of feeds I subscribe to low. My solution was to write my own RSS crawler that scans and saves all of the relevant stories I want to read and sorts them by team and present them in one place. Now I can just go down the list of the latest links and cherry pick which ones look the most interesting by the headline, a short description and an image preview.

I've been using freshbooks.com for quite awhile now and I like it a lot. I'm a one-man shop and it seems to fit my needs perfectly.

You're right. At first glance it just seemed transparent to me because it has that gradient at the bottom. A better complaint would be that since the background color of the menu matches the background of the page it's hard to make out the options.

If I had one tiny criticism about the site it's that the menu bar, once it detaches and scrolls with the user, is a bit hard to make out because of its transparent background.

This was my first thought as well. This is a good reason why you need to take down payments.

There probably isn't a freelancer out there that hasn't wanted to do what this guy has done to a deadbeat client. I just don't see how going this route benefits you in any way though. Now everyone involved looks like a jerk.

I built my first app from scratch almost entirely using Learn iPhone Programming (http://learningiphoneprogramming.com) by Alasdair Allan. Highly recommended.

I use Mixpanel to track interactions on my iPhone apps right now and it's really great. Highly recommended.

You could do with a demo/example I think. It's tough to even bother to signup without knowing what I'm going to be getting.

I wouldn't take any kind of recourse (legal or otherwise) and just consider yourself lucky to be only out $1,000. That they only ask for 20% upfront seems like an amateur hour move to me. I knew how this story ended right away after reading that.

I'm not so sure if this is true. I think the vocal minority dislikes subscriptions but there are millions and millions of WoW or XBOX Live players who don't seem to mind. And I'm sure, in the end, there will be plenty of people paying for CoD Elite as well.

I don't think you'll even be able to complete the submission process with a duplicate name.

One tip I would offer is to use your competitor's app name in your list of keywords so you can come up next to them in searches. I suppose that might be dirty pool to some but it's worth a shot if you have some space left for extra keywords.

It's much easier for Google to ban BMW when they don't run AdSense than it is to shutdown Demand Media and directly impact Google's bottom line.

When I left my last full-time job to return to freelancing I walked in on a Monday morning and gave my two weeks notice to the boss man. I went in with the goal of trying not to piss them off and in the process turn them into a client/customer. Similar to what you're angling for from what I can tell by your comments.

So two tips:

- Make sure you're ready. I knew going in, just like you feel you do, that they would be open to my plan. A lot of the time leading up to giving my notice was spent making sure I was right. I quite literally spent three months getting the balls to jump ship and making sure I was pretty confident I would come out with a client.

- For the love of God, play it cool when you tell them. Try and remember that you're quitting a job and not making a sales call. I wouldn't lead with your plans until they ask. During our conversation about the transition, the chit-chat slowly worked towards what they should do when I was gone. That's when I threw out that they could hire someone else full-time or take me on as a contractor for the technically heavy work and dish out the rest to existing employees.

The only thing I find worrisome about your scenario is that you're apparently counting on them buying a product that doesn't appear to exist yet. They can say "Sure, great idea!" on the day you leave and then, months down the line when it's time to play ball they can act dumb and say "No thanks, baby. That was just pillow talk."

I feel like you might be putting the cart before the horse a bit here but I wish you the best of luck.

"The irony is that most startup blogs are written and maintained by failed entrepreneurs."

In the last six months or so, I've felt the same way about a lot of the users here on HN. It's a joke amongst my friends who also read this site that we wish there was a "PROVE IT" button next to each comment... just as a way to tweak all of the people who like to talk like they've come down the mountain with stone tablets to tell us how to do things.

That's not to say that everyone here who has taken the time to offer advice and suggestions to others is full of it, of course. Yet I still think you should hesitate to take a lot of what people say with any degree of importance until you know that their background justifies it.

Link to Prezi signup: http://prezi.com/profile/signup/

It might not be worth the effort but you might want to consider making this available to the public as a service for freelancers.