tapadoo

Why App distribution policy could be bad for iPad

dermdaly — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 22:35:40 +0000

I see lots of people thinking of great ideas for the iPad. I agree with pretty much all of them. Anywhere where there’s a person carrying a handheld device, or indeed a notepad an pen, could be a potential application. Here’s a few examples

Waiter taking orders at a table
UPS Delivery guy
Gas man coming to take a reading
Charity worker – getting sign-ups but also using the multimedia capabilities to show where the donations are going to good work

etc. etc.

Right now, there are three ways to distribute iPhone apps:

The App Store – This is designed for general purpose apps that anyone may want to use
Enterprise Distribution – This is designed for “in house” only apps. This is where a company wants to supply apps for their staff use only, and not put them on the app store.
Ad Hoc Distribution – This is where a developer can distribute the apps privately to a group of people. It is primarily aimed at developers who want to get real-world feedback before really releasing the app through 1 or 2 above

When we consider that some of the app ideas (e.g. the waiter concept) is really an “in house” app. But each of the distribution mechanisms has its drawbacks:

You may not want to put it in the app store, because it only works with your restaurant management system.
You’ll not qualify for Enterprise distribution, because Apple restricts this to companies of 500 employees or more
You could use ad-hoc, but this does take a fair bit of management for the developer. The developer needs to know each and every device id that the app will be installed on (and has a limit of 100 slots per year; which cannot be re-used during the year).

None of these are insurmountable, but they are niggles. Basically, there isn’t a simple way to distribute “private” apps. This is by design; It is a commercial decision by Apple. If there was a way, people would use it to bypass the app store (to avoid the apple cut), so its unlikely to change.

One thing it could lead to is an explosion of “new” software as a service offerings. Consider the “menu ordering” SAAS system; The restaurant signs up online, and enters their menu details. The Menu Ordering App is sold through the app store, and the restaurant simply enters their restaurant id and password when they use the app for the first time. This could work, but its a big education job to explain SAAS to restaurant owners.

I think all of those who want to put iPads into their businesses will find the distribution options confusing and consider it a hinderance.

That’s a challenge for us developers.

You’re reading the tapadoo blog. Did you know that as well as publishing our own applications, we offer iPhone development services and consultancy? If you have an idea, project or something you think we can help you with, please get in touch through our contact page.

The iPhone killer is on the way

dermdaly — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 17:31:49 +0000

The new windows 7 phone is upon us. Finally there’s an “iPhone killer”!!!

Ehhhhh. No.

There will be an iPhone killer. But it’s not going be today tomorrow. The iPhone is just far too advanced of any competition.

Why? Apple have one thing in spades that no other computer or handset manufacturer has: Taste.

This seems to be lost on most non-iPhone owners. The arguments for the competition are usually about specifications. That’s just silly. Most people don’t know megabytes from kilohertz so don’t give a monkeys about specifications.
I’ve often listened to arguments about x device having a faster processor, or doing background processing. But these people never ever do what almost every new iPhone owner does : tell me how much they love their phones.
Try it: borrow a buddies iPhone and play with it. 2 things will happen : you’ll say “yeah…it is lovely” and your buddy will start to twitch; we don’t like letting our iPhones out of our reach for too long.
You don’t get that reaction from a new Sony Ericsson, Nokia, Samsung or Android for that matter. In fact the most common utterance I hear from nokia owners are

“look I just want to make calls and send texts”

not

“I love this phone”

Every time I try out a new other vendors phone I usually finding myself not liking it. sometimes the annoyances are subtle like just slighlty too slow to respond or jerky scrolling. That just tells me that someone in the company, high up, with the final say said

“it’s good enough.”

That’s understandable; getting the last 5% so that something goes from “good enough” to “perfect” may well take ages or cost the earth.
But thankfully, Apple don’t do “good enough”. They take the “it’s gotta be perfect” approach as a matter of course. And for that…we have the iPhone

So when’s that iPhone killer coming?
Consider this: for a few years, every new mp3 player was being dubbed an “iPod killer”. It hasn’t happened yet and nobody even writes about iPod killers anymore.

So far the only iPhone killers have been, well…newer iPhones.

It won’t last forever; it never does. Walkmans were toppled; iPhones will be, but it will take new technology that I can’t imagine right now. iPhone could easily dominate for a decade……

The Future’s Bright

dermdaly — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 13:37:35 +0000

I was asked to speak at the Young Entrepreneur event in Kerry last week. The organisers wanted the perspective of an iPhone developer to show that developing iPhone apps can be done with reasonably low barriers, whilst still being able to produce a viable business.

I’ve done a few speaking events on iPhone this year; two Dev Days, Epicenter, one for Enterprise Ireland and the Young Entrepreneur event, and feel I’m getting the hang of it, but this event was particularly interesting.

At the Epicenter event last year, I attended a “round table” event for all speakers to have a broad discussion on the software industry in Ireland. I was bemoaning the fact that university prepared me for a job, perhaps even for a career, but it didn’t suggest starting a business as an option. As I left this talk, Chris Horn came to me and said “take a look at what Jerry Kenelly is doing in the institute of Tralee”. He suggested that Jerry has put Entrepreneurship on the programme, and that it is paying dividends.

Back in January, out of the blue I was contacted by Jerry Kenelly asking would I speak at the event. Naturally I jumped at it, I’m really glad I did.

Why? Well it gave me a chance to see first hand what they are doing to promote Entrepreneurship as an option for students. Their mission is to promote “the fact that becoming an entrepreneur is a viable career option”. They do this by running an annual Young Entrepreneur of the year competition. The event is kicked off in October and is open to all 2nd level and 3rd level students in the area. This year was also open to students in Limerick.

The event last week was the mid-programme event. It is called “Business Boot Camp”. Its attended by all 600 entrants, and has talk from business leaders along with some practical work. What most impressed me was the respect shown to the audience. The dialog was not dumbed down or simplified for students. This was real practical advice. Speakers included former Entrepreneur of the Year (from the Ernst & Young competition, the “Senior’s” if you will), Colum O’Sullivan of Cully & Sully Foods (who crunched the numbers with a student), and the most revered man in Kerry, Kerry Bainisteoir Jack O’Connor.

During the event, the students were given a chance to pitch their ideas. One girl in particular did a pitch worthy of Dragon’s Den, and when Sully attempted to dissect them, she was quick to show how her market research stacked up. Very impressive stuff.

So there – Setting up a company is a real option. I really wish it crossed my mind 15 years ago. That’s nobody’s fault, but with I can’t help but think that what’s going on in Kerry will plant the seed for some, and could be where the next great business leader will come from.

The event will have its proof in the coming years, when a guest speaker will be able to say “I was sitting in this audience like you just 3 years ago….”

The future’s bright.

Style guidelines and pot roasts

dermdaly — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 20:41:28 +0000

In many companies I’ve worked I’ve engaged in the usual “style wars”. It goes like this.

A senior developer decides that for the new project, the entire team should use a single style. This will mean that the code is consistent across the project and make it easier for developers to work on each other’s code. It also means there will be a level of consistency on commenting etc.
A sub-group is put together to decide the guidelines.
The guidelines are issued
The team fight over them
A manager steps in and tells them to use the ones laid down.
There’s huffing and puffing but eventually everyone uses it.

Well, that’s been my experience anyway.
But, its always the fight that interesting. People fighting over where its a newline before an curly brace or not, hungarian notation or not, tabs versus spaces always makes me think that people are missing the point somewhat.
The point is about consistency. The arguments are usually about some people consider more whitespace more readable, whilst others think that the more code on the page, gives you a better understanding of what the code does, without having to always page up and down.

So…when you have a few years under your belt, you realise this, and you sit back, enjoy the fireworks knowing that the manager will step in, put an end to the arguing, and we’ll get our consistency mojo.

But….every now and then I do feel that some rules are just stoopid. I was reading the excellent google style guidelines for Objective-C tonight and saw my personal pet peeve stupid styleguide rule:

Each line of text in your code should be at most 80 characters long.

Why?
Why?
Why not 79 characters? Why not 81? Why not more?
I know why.
Before we had GUIs, your typical PC, or VAX Terminal, etc had a width of 80 characters. Printers too. Typically printed 80 characters per line.
But c’mon. We’ve not used text terminals for years, and a typical monitor can show much wider than 80 characters. And…we never print code anymore; If we did, the printer can handle more than 80 characters wide anyway.

I think its silly to have a style guide that was relevant in 1990, but has no relevance to the real world apart from “that’s how gran did it”.

There’s an excellent couple of books by a guy called Steve Maguire. One is called “Writing Solid Code” and another is called “Debugging the development process”. They are more relevant to writing C code, but the sentiments in them are excellent, and I still think all developers should at least read “Writing Solid Code”. There’s a great anecdote in “Debugging the development process” that as I remember it, is about Steve’s wife and her pot roast. It went like this (I hope Steve doesn’t mind me quoting it):

“A boy asked his mother how come she cuts off the edges of a pot roast when putting it into the pot. Mother told him that that’s how her mother taught her to do. So, boy went to his grandmother and he got the same answer. Then he went to his grand-grandmother and ask her the same question. The answer was: Well, back then my pot was to small and the meat didn’t fit inside.”

80 Characters per line when writing code: Pot roast rules for developers.

A message about Ireland’s Phone Book

dermdaly — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 15:23:59 +0000

It has come to our attention that current versions of “Ireland’s Phone Book” and “Ireland’s Phone Book Pro” are currently not operable. We regret to inform users that in light of a recent threat of legal challenge, we WILL NOT be providing a fix to the application in its current guise. We have also taken the decision to remove “Ireland’s Phone Book” and “Ireland’s Phone Book Pro” from the App store.

We are engaging with a number of potential partners with a view to a long term solution and hope to be able to announce something shortly.

Apologies for the inconvenience caused.

Two tools if you’re developing iPhone apps for clients

dermdaly — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 13:14:03 +0000

I’m gonna speak about two tools that I recommend if you are planning on developing apps, particularly for clients. These are just as important for any sort of iPhone app development, but they are very useful for interacting and collaborating with customers.

Balsamiq

Balsamiq mockups from Balsamiq Studios plain and simple rocks. What is it? It is a very rapid prototyping tools for UI and User Experiences.
They’ve added specific iPhone stencils into the product so you can create mockups really, really quickly.
Why do I like it? Lots of reasons:

Its runs everywhere. Its an Adobe Air application, which though is not native to Mac, it runs nicely on the desktop. But, they’ve also got an edition that runs in a web page, so you can deploy it on your wiki, or any other collaborative web server you may use. They’ve even got a hosted edition which you can play with for free (go here, have a play)
Doing up stuff is fast. It is genuinely as quick as using a pen and paper. Just last week I was working on a proposal; the client had given me his ideas, and I already formed my opinion on how it would look. I mailed him back my response as a bulleted point list (It was a small project!). He wasn’t convinced. So…I spent a bit longer, and did up a couple of pages of a proposal. I used mockups to illustrate my ideas. Without spending too much time, I had gone from a boring e-mail response, to a professional, well thought out one, which immediately struck a chord with the client.
It is focused on function rather than detail. I really like this. It produces mockups that look like they are hand drawn. It avoids details like colour, animation etc. This means when working with the client we can focus on what the app does ( not “Shouldn’t that button be bluer?”). We get across high level ideas, get them across well, and by being low on a lot of details, it means we can get more feedback with the client. I love the phrase Balsamiq use themselves:

A low fidelity look which encourages hones feedback. We call it “a look no-one is afraid to criticize”
They have an agile approach to their product; They update their application on a regular basis, based on feedback taken through GetSatisfaction

Enough of my rambling; Here’s a mockup.

iPhone Application Sketch Book

Next is…an actual sketch book. Its available on amazon, but you can find details about it on www.mobilesketchbook.com. I think this is a great one for grabbing ideas, or scribbling down initial design thoughts.
I like this because it is a low-tech answer; Each page is lined graph paper, with a full-size image of on iPhone on it. The screen area is blank, so you can draw on it to capture your app ideas.

You can have this in your laptop bag, and use it when an idea comes to you. (when travelling, for example).

Having this along at a client meeting is great. It shows the client that you are doing this often, and you are serious about capturing the ideas

I know there’s others out there, based around Powerpoint or Keynote, but frankly, these two are my favourites right now.

If you’ve other tips, please leave a comment with your favourite tools for iPhone design and development.

A simple credits screen with Core Animation

dermdaly — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 19:10:16 +0000

Whilst working on my latest iPhone project (not yet announced), I wanted to do up a useful credits screen. This project had more than just myself involved and I wanted to ensure everyone got a mention.

I was also conscious of the exposure my apps were getting through apps.ie, so wanted to do something that would link back too. So..I’ve put together a simple credits screen which uses Core Animation to show the individual credits. This post explains the code, and how it works. There’s a gotcha or two in there as well.

How does it look?
Before I start, here’s a quick preview.

Data Structure
For the purposes of a credit, I wanted to be able to store

The person’s name
What they did
Their twitter id
The web site
An avatar

That’s easy – I wrote a class called AppCredit, which is a pure data structure. It doesn’t do anything beyond store the above details.

The View On The Data
So, how would I visualise the data structure ? I had an idea of how this should look, so I created a CreditsView (in fact a view controller XIB), which layed out the information in a way that I thought looked nice:

I wanted the twitter name and the web address to be tappable, to take you away to the relevant website. To achieve this, I overlayed the labels with custom buttons (essentially invisible buttons). I wired up their touchDown (so we can highlight), and their touchUpInside so we can actually open the relevant URL. We also followed good UI principals, in that we have an alert box pop up to warn that the user is about to leave the application. All of this is handled in the class CreditsView, along with the relevant nib file CreditView.xib

So where’s the animation?
Well, I wanted that the entire view just described would fade in and out repeatedly, for each of the credits, so I wanted them showing as part of a larger container. This is the CreditsViewController.
The CreditsViewController is the UIViewController for the overall credits page. It consists of

A large label to show your application name
An area for the animated credits
A scroll area to store a brief description of your application
A “bottom third” with a description of apps.ie, along with another “invisible button” to take you there

In addition, in the sample code, I added a toolbar, with a “Done” button to be able to dismiss the credits screen. For the purposes of this example, I worked of XCode’s standard “Utility application” template, and replaced the flipside view with my CreditsViewController. This meant adding some way to dismiss the credits view (In my actual app, it shows on a separate tab, so does not need a dismiss capability). The Done button is wired up the sample as the XCode sample, and should be obvious.

Supplying the data for the credits view
I adopted a delegate approach to this. So theres a CreditsViewDelegate protocol, which we assign to the CreditsViewController. Once you implement this, and assign it to your CreditsViewController.delegate, it will ask the delegate for the necessary data as it needs it.

The actual animation
The actual animation is quite simple. In a nutshell, it animates the first credit, when this is complete it animates the next one…and so on. When all have been animated, it just starts again. Here’s the detail

When the CreditsViewController is loaded, it also loads up a CreditsView from the nib file
As it is about to appear, it asks its delegate for the necessary data, and fills in the labels
Once it has appeared, it starts to animate the CreditsView. It does this using the following code

-(void) animateNextCredit
{
  // Use animation to fade it in
  CABasicAnimation *animation =
      [CABasicAnimation animationWithKeyPath:@"opacity"];
  animation.fromValue = [NSNumber numberWithFloat:0];
  animation.toValue = [NSNumber numberWithFloat:1];
  animation.repeatCount = 0;
  animation.duration = 2;
  animation.autoreverses = YES;
  animation.delegate = self;
  // Ok...Start showing our credits
  [self getCredits];
  if(credits != nil) {
    AppCredit *credit = [credits objectAtIndex:currentCredit];
    [creditsView setAppCredit:credit];
    [self.view addSubview:creditsView.view];
  }
  currentCredit++;
  if(currentCredit == [credits count]) {
    currentCredit = 0;
  }
  [creditsView.view.layer
       addAnimation:animation forKey:@"credits"];
}

Basically all that is happening here is we are telling the CreditsView (i.e. the small pane) to vary its opacity from 0 to 1 and back again, over 2 seconds. We set up self as the delegate to the animation, which means a method called animationDidStart will get called when we start, and animationDidStop when the animation completes. So..when animationDidStop gets called, we know we can move on to the next animation:

- (void)animationDidStop:(CAAnimation *)theAnimation
       finished:(BOOL)flag
{
  creditsView.view.layer.opacity = 0;
  if(flag) {
    // This means that animation ran to completion.
    //  I.e. Was not interrupted
    // e.g. by removeAllAnimations
    // Cool - time to start another
    [self animateNextCredit];
  }
}

Gotchas
There were a few problems I encountered when writing this code. Firstly, when the animation completed, there was an annoying flicker just before the second one started. This was caused because I had set the opacity to 1 in the CreditsView – Once the animation completed, the CreditsView was refreshed briefly back to full opacity. The fix was to set the opacity to 0. Once complete (i.e. faded out), if it were shown, it would be shown with full opacity, and therefore invisible.
However, this led to a second problem. With the opacity set to 0, the CreditsView was essentially hidden, and so did not respond to taps. I couldn’t jump off to my twitter url, etc. I could see my view (because it was being animated from 0 to 1, but I could not interact with it).

This is caused by the fact that the actual state of the view and the displaying of it are independent; I could see it animating, but its opacity value was actually 0. When its opacity is 0 it is considered hidden, and therefore won’t respond to user input.
To get around this, I experimented with very low values of opacity which would still respond to input, and found this to be around 0.02. So putting both of the above together: In animationDidStart, I set the opacity to 0.02. In animationDidEnd, I set the opacity to 0 (to avoid flicker). This all seems to work well.
The next issue I found was another part of my app was slow after I ran my credits screen. I guessed that the animations were never cancelled. This was easy to fix, In my viewWillDisappear method, I just had to cancel my animations:

[creditsView.view.layer removeAllAnimations];

Note however that this will result in your animationDidStop method being called (which was where we started the next one, right?). But we can tell if we completed or were interrupted by the second parameter sent to animationDidStop, so this was easy to ensure we didn’t re-start. That’s what the if(flag) bit above is all about.

Improvements
So how could I improve the code? There’s a couple of obvious points:

In the credits view, I could extend UILabels and make them respond to input. This would negate the need for invisible UIButtons. Thanks to @stroughtonsmith for that one. (Oh and for helping me with other gotchas).
I’ve done no internationalisation. Again, should be straightforward

So that’s it. You can get the code It looks better than the video on the simulator, and better still on the iPhone or iPod touch.

The code also uses a technique for doing a gradient background, as outlined by Matt Gallagher in his excellent “Cocoa With Love” blog. There’s two source files from that blog post in the code, unchanged.

If you’re an Irish Developer, you may consider using this as a basis for your upcoming projects, so it will link back to apps.ie. If you’ve come from elsewhere, welcome!

Feel free to use this code as you wish. If you’ve any comments, questions, or improvements, I’m happy to hear about them. Use the comment section below to leave feedback.

Engaging your users – The holy grail for iPhone Applications

dermdaly — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 10:39:47 +0000

When you launch an iPhone Application, you put it up on the iTunes App store. If you’re lucky it will be purchased by users. If you’re very lucky, they’ll give it good ratings, and if you’re very very lucky, the’ll add favourable reviews.

Apple will share with you download and sales figures, but you will have no real way of contacting those users – Apple don’t give you, for example, the email addresses of your users; Which is perfectly understandable; they may have downloaded your app, and immediately deleted it. They aren’t your users, they’re Apple’s users. Apple, understandably wouldn’t like iTunes users getting spammed by people who wrote the apps.

This does lead to a disconnect though; How do you engage with your users? The people who use your apps regularly are the same people who can give you the best feedback. I’ve done one or two of these, and need to do more (”A lot done, more to do” as the phrase goes). But here’s my thoughts

Read your reviews. Some people will give useful feedback here. Read them all. Go over them, regularly
Provide a number of channels to take feedback. My page about “Irelands Phone Book” and “Irelands Phone Book Pro” has a UserVoice feedback tab at the side of the web page. It allows users to submit feedback directly; I take comments on my blog, and reply to them all, and I also publish my e-mail address on the site.
Allow for feedback within your app I fell down on this one. But the 3.0 SDK now allows for embedding emails, so allow the user mail you direct with feedback. All my future apps will do this.
Get yourself a bug/issue tracking system. Any useful feature requests, put them in there for your next version. Also to record where you got the request

People will have gripes or dislikes about your app. Its how you choose to deal with them that is important. By taking it on board, you can turn an estranged user into one of your biggest supporters.

Also, if you do act upon user suggestions, its a good idea to let the user know that you’ve implemented their feature request.

And with that, I’d like to thank the following. All of you had influence on deciding what to put into Irelands Phone Book, Pro Edition:

User Nabidana on iTunes: You asked for SMS directly through EirText Pro. You got it. I also added support for EirText (free) and JellySMS.
User Wez77 on iTunes: You asked for mapping. That’s there now too.
Twitter User : @mejooley: When you heard I was adding maps, you said “Will I be able to get directions?” – Well, that would be complicated..let me see..OK; You can tap on an entry in the map and it will open it the iPhone Maps application. Now you can get directions.
Dan Laffan: You said you didn’t like when you use the previous and next page buttons, that the table remains at the bottom of the results – Like, If I hit next page, surely I want to see the top of the next page. Yup. Agreed. Done.
Twitter user @conorwinders. You asked for better integration with contacts.app. I’ve done some of it (more to come), but now you can either create a new contact, or save the contact to an existing one.
Tom Fennelly: You suggested being able to override the default search location. You even suggested the concept of “name@town”. That’s a great idea. Good for users, and really easy to add. So I did it. Its in there.

On the off-chance you’ve not read the main page about the pro version, here’s an App Store link (Opens in iTunes).

Have you thoughts on engaging your users? Are you one of my users with an idea, or some feedback? Do get in touch. Just use the comments section below.

Networking Out the Wazoo

dermdaly — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 08:15:55 +0000

We’ve got biz camps and bar camps, open coffees, networking (with or without speed), developer garages, meetups, tweetups, seminars, congresses and a whole host of other such events. One could easily spend their entire week going to events to network and get one’s business “out there”.

But in these difficult times, attendance at these events skyrockets. Everyone is there to raise awareness of their company, looking for business, staring a new business, etc. Here’s the question

Is there much actual business going on?

Almost everyone is a seller, very few are buyers. In fact, buyers don’t need to attend network events to find suppliers. Most people’s compelling reason to go along is to speak rather than to listen.

Ok. I’ll caveat some of this

I know that networking events are to make contacts, that may be fruitful in the long term, not necessarily right now.
I know that effective networking is about listening first
I know that going along to networking events is important and beneficial

But.

You can kid yourself that attending these events is very high priority, important work; essential to your business. Sure its important, but its not the most important.

I often refer to this kind of non-essential work as “non work“. The kind of work that you can claim (to yourself) that you’re working, when in fact, you’re actually doing something more enjoyable than the stuff you should be doing. (Writing a blog entry when I should be coding anyone?). We all do it, but sometimes there’s a need to focus.

I’m not suggesting that one shouldn’t go to events such as these, I just think you need to choose wisely. Go along to a few, and you’ll find the same names and faces. Its great to speak in person to those people you’ve only ever conversed with on twitter, but there isn’t a benefit in having the same conversation with the same person in 2 days time.

So…review you calendar, then take a look at the deadlines you’ve set to getting the actual work done. What’s a better use of your time? Going to that event, or finishing the product features roadmap?

The problem with “revenue share”

dermdaly — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 18:06:00 +0000

As an iPhone developer for hire, I get regular approaches from people with ideas that they would like to turn into realities. I sign non-disclosure agreements and then get brought into their confidence to explain their idea.

Some turn out to be better than others. Those with a broad appeal may become successes; those with a niche appeal will most likely not make much money; they possibly won’t turn a profit, but one man’s great idea, doesn’t appeal to another so generally I try to not make an early judgement call.

At some point in the conversation we get around to ballpark figures. This is usually when I explain why we will need to go into more detail. In fact, I typically cite my own blog post about pricing. The potential client usually sees the benefit in what I am suggesting, but 9 times out of 10, they will still want ballpark pricing. I understand this. They really want to know if I think their projects is a €500 project, a €10,000 project or a €250,000 project; They are basically asking for scale and if their budget will work.

In many cases, the potential client starts to talk about doing the project on a revenue share. The logic goes like this:

They’ve put time into developing their idea; its a good one, and it is going to sell like hot cakes
All that needs to be done is to knock the code together, get it on the app store, and await for the money to start rolling in

Picture Credit: Flickr User amagill

There’s a big problem with this approach. It ignores one large part of the problem.

Risk

If we work together on your idea, I’ve to put a great deal of effort into the software development. Software development is complex, detailed and a good programmer has very real talent, which has taken many years to hone. (I’ve never met a great programmer who wasn’t already at it from around 12 years old). Experienced programmers know that the devil is in the detail

So lets look at the proposition from another perspective. When did your idea come to you? While lying awake trying to go asleep? Perhaps you sat at home, with a pen and paper over many nights, scribbling ideas, honing them, refining them…
or

perhaps it came to you while you were sitting at your desk in work…getting paid.

And when am I going to do the work? Well, during my working day..when other customer’s should be paying me, so aren’t, because I am working on your idea, but that’s ok, because its gonna sell like….well..I’ve already explained that.

So..Imagine all goes well…and the sales do well…From day 1 we’re splitting the spoils, and this has really paid off. The customer who was going to pay me has gone to a competitor, but hey…I’m doing ok out of “very cool idea 1.0″. Version 2.0 will probably make even more anyway.

It hasn’t sold well…I’m behind on my mortgage…The customer who was going to pay me has gone to a competitor..and he’s not coming back.

How are things with you?…..Oh…this was actually just a side project…so all is well; you’re still in your day job. Hey…nothing ventured, nothing gained right?

Ehhh…..

A good idea is valuable. If there’s real evidence of work being done to develop or prove the idea, that mitigates the risk. If you’ve crunched the numbers, even better. (If its that good, you’d be crazy to be giving chunks of the revenue away).

Tell you what. I’ve another model. Lets use some hypothethical figures. We’ve knocked around your idea. Its going to cost €10k to develop, and you’re interested in a revenue share. Now…lets consider the risk element.

Here’s a deal: I’m taking all the risk, and I see the value of your idea. So how about I do it for €5k, and there’s some compensation for the risk. There’s two things we can do. How about the first €10k it makes goes 100% to me, and after that we go 50/50 ? Or…How about we reflect the risk in the revenue share from day 1. So…Your investment is only €5k, but the revenue split is 70% to the developer, 30% to you.

Still interested?

Pic Credit: flickr user texaseagle

Hey…..where’d ya go?