Toluu

Red Sweater Blog

Mac & Technology Writings by Daniel Jalkut

Let’s Kick Ass In 2009December 31 2008

I’ll keep this short and sweet.

I’m grateful to my family for supporting and encouraging me in my life pursuits. In particular, to my wife Chrissa and my infant son Henry. It’s cheesy but true, their love keeps me going every day.

I’m also grateful to everybody on the internet who gives me the time of day. You invigorate and revitalize me. Customers, bloggers, journalists, podcasters, twitter followers, Mac and iPhone development colleagues, and most significantly at this particular instant, folks like yourself who are bothering to read this post.

Talent and ambition are meaningless in a vacuum. All of us depend on all of us for mutual inspiration and gratification. Let’s make an effort in 2009 to help each other and to thank each other as much as we can.

Let’s kick ass in 2009.

Touch And Go PricingDecember 27 2008

There has been much debate in the iPhone developer community about the price of applications for sale in Apple’s App Store. These prices are trending cheaper and cheaper, such that even products of considerable complexity are often available for just $1 or $2. I have myself experimented with selling a dirt-cheap and dead-simple application, Shush, in the App Store.

I have opinions about product pricing, and have not hesitated to share them in the past. I have mostly stayed quiet about iPhone application pricing, but for some reason I now feel compelled to add my voice to the choir:

iPhone applications are too cheap, and changes are needed to encourage the development of premium applications that sell for a fair price.

In particular, I agree with Craig Hockenberry, who suggests that the complexity and ultimately the greatness of applications is limited if Apple encourages bargain-basement prices across the board.

But what happens when we start talking about bigger projects: something that takes 6 or even 9 man months? That’s either $150K or $225K in development costs with a break even at 215K or 322K units. Unless you have a white hot t

Textcast 1.0December 24 2008

Congratulations to my friends Dave Dribin and Wolf Rentzsch, whose recently formed company, Bit Maki Software, has just released its maiden product: Textcast 1.0.

The application is designed to make it easy to turn any text from the web, an RSS feed, or a simple text file, into an audio podcast you can listen to just like any other podcast in iTunes. The software takes advantage of Mac OS X’s excellent “Alex” voice synthesizer.

There are some similarities between Textcast and my application, Typecast. Aside from the names, they are both designed to package up data into podcast form so that it can be easily digested using iTunes. I suggested to Dave Dribin that I would be happy to donate Typecast’s source code if they ever decide to incorporate its functionality into Textcast. We shall see!

The Gift Of SoftwareDecember 16 2008

The holidays are upon us, and if you’re anything like me, you’ve put off buying gifts for your friends and loved ones until almost the last minute!

I hope you won’t overlook the possibility of sending the gift of software this year. Thanks to a new feature in the Red Sweater Store, it’s finally easy to order any of our applications as a gift license for somebody you care about.

Just make your purchase as usual, but when you get to the checkout page, fill in the lucky recipient’s name:

The license information will be sent to you by email, so you can package it up in your own charming way, before passing it on.

One of the “problems” of gifting software these days is that most of the best applications are sold as purely electronic downloads from the web. I have to admit that the old-fashioned boxes made it easier to stick something under the tree, but with a little creativity you can give software gifts that are thoughtful and also have an element of “hand assembled” uniqueness to them.

For the puzzle lover in your life, may I suggest Black Ink bundled with a

FastScripts Is A Team PlayerDecember 10 2008

These days, most of you know Red Sweater Software and my work for MarsEdit, the amazing desktop blog editor that I acquired from NewsGator almost two (!) years ago.

But I love my other apps, too. And among these, FastScripts is one of the oldest. Even before expanding my product line a couple years ago, I didn’t bother promoting FastScripts much, because it’s very much an application that “you either get, or you don’t.” Fortunately, as the years have passed, people continue to get it without much work on my part. Coincidentally, Brent Simmons, the original developer of MarsEdit, recently caught FastScripts fever and summarized his thoughts:

I actually have a fighting chance at keeping up on email thanks to FastScripts! Easily worth more than its price.

See, FastScripts is kind of a nerd tool. You won’t know you need it until you need it. And if you never do? More power to you!

The latest example comes from Dr. Drang, who discovered FastScripts makes a nice adjunct to a couple other tools, LaunchBar and Jumpcut. In his post, Dr. Drang de