19 karma · joined September 13, 2022
I agree with this in principle, but this seems conceptually at odds with selling lifetime licenses (which this product does). The lifetime license option reads like a statement of intention that they'll be around for a long time, but when the TOS of the underlying services come into play as they do here, offering (or buying) a lifetime license seems like a gamble.
For some reason, printing 1 page of an Excel or Word document to a PDF often gets up to around 4MB in size. Passing it through this compresses it quite well.
Just ran a quick test:
- 1-page Excel PDF export: 3.7MB
- Processing with Dangerzone (OCR enabled): 131KB
I hadn't even thought of the point most of you have raised, that $0.99 would signal "this is crapware". My thinking had entirely been "well it's a 1 trick pony, that 1 trick can't be worth more than $0.99 to people", and I expected the responses to be more along the lines of "for $0.99 you shouldn't bother with the Mac App Store and just use Gumroad".
After reading these responses, my thinking is now this:
1. Upgrade it to 2 or 3 tricks - I've already started doing this and it's going pretty nicely. The things I'm adding might have occurred to me to add eventually, but the responses to this post helped spur me on to add them now, so thank you.
2. Aim for a price point of ~$10-$15. In the audio / video production software world, that is still quite cheap for a utility app, but the 2nd and 3rd tricks I'm adding should put it in the realm of good value at that price point (I think).
3. Still up for debate whether Mac App Store is worthwhile - putting $99 per year into ad spend is potentially a better use of that money, but I already have a grasp on some more targeted avenues to get the word out to its target audience. Plus the seamless auto-update aspect of the Mac App Store suits this app & its target audience well also
In this case, the phone was marked as lost immediately, but a couple of days later the thieves started trying to reset the password on the owner's iCloud account using various methods, the first of which produced 1st party push notifications asking to confirm the account password reset that were sent to the owner's other signed-in devices that were still in their possession. In the moment, it would be so easy for a confused & stressed person to accidentally or mistakenly tap those notifications and enable their own account hijacking.
The thieves then evidently called Apple Support and tried to get the iCloud account password reset over the phone, but by this point the owner had already gotten a new phone and SIM for their phone number, which meant that Apple Support's 2FA SMS codes were received by their replacement phone (in their possession) instead of the stolen phone (in the thieves' possession, and which no longer had cell service). It seems like if they had delayed in getting their new phone and left the stolen device with functional cell service, the hijacking might have succeeded at this point.
Apple's own "What to do if your iPhone is stolen" page [0] has no info these tactics that are actually used in the moment by phone thieves. That page does link to a page about social engineering scams [1] but approaches that in a general sense.
I think Apple's way of handling it should be way more intuitive. For example, they should differentiate between phones that are lost and stolen. If your phone is lost, you want to protect against someone finding it and being able to access the phone's contents. If your phone is stolen, the thieves will most likely try to hijack your iCloud account as well, and they'll try and social engineer both the owner and Apple Support to do so, so add a "Mark as Stolen" option that also adds protections against iCloud account hijacking.
I think it’s because Gumroad hiked their rates at some point, and Lemon Squeezy is cheaper but the customer experience is similar.
Mac Source Ports is fantastic overall, there’s a ton of other games available too.
My account has been flagged several times for "speculative currency trading", even though that's not what I'm doing, and my usage patterns haven't really changed much since I started using the platform.
If you set up a transfer and don't fund it immediately, or you cancel it and set up another transfer within a narrow time window where the exchange rate has changed to your benefit, the system thinks you're speculating. This never happened to prior to the last 12 months or so, and recently it seems they're flagging transfers this way much more often. Seems like it's probably due to overall volatility in certain currencies being higher over the last year or so.
The "penalty" they apply is just that you can't "lock" an exchange rate for international transfers anymore. Usually, your exchange rate is locked at the market rate at the time the transfer is initiated, and then you have a time limit to fund the transfer at the rate you locked.
But now, when you initiate a transfer they add a 3% "buffer" on top of the funds required to fund the transfer, and they apply the market rate at the time they receive the funds, and then refund you whatever the difference is.