“To be appropriate for the App Store, your app must be published under a Seller name and Artist name that reflects the [redacted] brand, as required by the iOS Developer Program License Agreement.

Section 1.2:
“You” and “Your” means and refers to the person(s) or legal entity (whether the company, organization, educational institution, or governmental agency, instrumentality, or department) using the Apple Software or otherwise exercising rights under this Agreement. For the sake of clarity, You may authorize contractors to develop Applications on Your behalf, but any such Applications must be submitted under Your developer account.

If you have published these apps on behalf of a client, it would be appropriate for your client to enroll in the iOS Developer Program, then add you to their development team so you can develop an app for them to submit under their developer account.”

So if you’re planning on creating a series of white-labeled apps for different clients under one umbrella account you better think twice. You’ll need your clients to create their own developer account then add your development team to their account. It’s not the end of the world but something to be aware of.

]]> http://iamnotrobot.com/2012/01/apple-rejecting-white-labeled-apps/feed/ 0 http://iamnotrobot.com/2011/12/developeronomics/ http://iamnotrobot.com/2011/12/developeronomics/#comments Wed, 07 Dec 2011 18:28:15 +0000 Jeff http://iamnotrobot.com/?p=1439 Continue reading →]]> http://www.forbes.com/sites/venkateshrao/2011/12/05/the-rise-of-developeronomics/

“At the moment, the only thing potentially more valuable than a relationship with a great developer is a relationship with a survivalist who is good with things like guns, bunkers and cabins in woods (that’s in case the apocalypse does come about in 2012, with bullets for currency). Which you think is the better bet depends on exactly how gloomy and bearish you are. I am pretty gloomy, but not yet gloomy enough to turn to survivalist capital investments.”

Great (long) read on the importance of developers in our modern age.

“Reading magazines on the iPad is an exercise in frustration.”

100% agree with all the points in Justin Williams’ post. To add to the frustration- many magazines have created their own navigation schemes that make users tap and swipe like mad in order to figure out what portion of the content will offer some reward.

Any time I open Path, I feel as if I’m leaving the clutter of Facebook, Twitter, and G+ behind. While it might be due to the fact that a good portion of my friends are not on it yet (I don’t know what you guys are waiting for), there is something about the UI that keeps everything pretty clean and easy to navigate. They also have a model that only lets you connect with up to 150 people.

“We are inspired by Professor Robin Dunbar from Oxford University, whose research delves deeply into the number of trusted relationships humans can maintain throughout life. We tend to have 5 best friends, 15 good friends, 50 close friends and family, and 150 total friends. At Path, we’re building tools for you to share with the people who matter most in your life.”

A company with a philosophy and a solid product to back it up. I love that.

It’s also very refreshing to see a startup that is able to get their act together. About a year ago, I signed up for Path and my only post was “This site sucks” or something to that extent. And it did. One of the top questions on Get Satisfaction was titled “I don’t know what to do” and it was true. Upon first signing in on the earlier version of Path a year ago, it was not clear to anyone what the purpose of the app was at all. Even the website greeted you to a pretty bare and empty home screen.

All this has changed. Path is now a serious contender in the social web world. I urge you to join Path and keep your eyes on them going forward as it seems like they’ve built a company and product centered deeply on the user experience.

http://path.com

Check out the demo videos below:

Path – Introducing Path 2 from Path on Vimeo.

Path – Share Life from Path on Vimeo.

“It’s fully accessible on mobile devices, and it won’t mislead you about where to find the health services you need. The humans who manage it make sure of that.”

The above quote is from Cecile Richards, president of Planned Parenthood Action Fund. Perhaps a little passive aggressive? Siri hasn’t mislead anyone and it’s a bit silly to call Siri’s lack of information on abortion clinics a “programming glitch”. It’s not a glitch. Sometimes Siri’s vocabulary and knowledge just doesn’t cover the question being asked and while Apple has touted Siri as your personal assistant it’s obvious to most people that Siri can’t do everything. If you depend on Siri to help you navigate complicated life issues, then there is something wrong with you. Siri is a novelty.

There are plenty of things Siri doesn’t know the answer to and some things it just likes to have fun with. Skynet will be here before we know it and will be begging again for the days when Siri didn’t even know where the nearest abortion clinic was located.

]]> http://iamnotrobot.com/2011/12/planned-parenthood-siri-sucks-humans-are-better/feed/ 0 http://iamnotrobot.com/2011/12/hide-your-developers-facebook-is-coming-to-nyc/ http://iamnotrobot.com/2011/12/hide-your-developers-facebook-is-coming-to-nyc/#comments Fri, 02 Dec 2011 20:08:03 +0000 Jeff http://iamnotrobot.com/?p=1418 Continue reading →]]> Everyone knows by now that NYC is quickly becoming a hot bed for upcoming and innovating new technology. Lots of startups have flocked to NYC in the past few years and major (west coast based) companies who have opened wings of their companies in town. If you’re involved in the NYC startup tech scene you probably already know that finding top tier engineering talent can often be very difficult. This is partly due to the fact that there are several existing industries that already greatly absorb the existing engineering talent. Finance, advertising, and big media/ digital agencies recruit a good majority of the engineering talent in NYC. So it’s no surprise that small startups can sometimes have a difficult time recruiting and retaining this talent. With another big company like Facebook coming to town, a company that can afford to hire “thousands of engineers”, I believe we’ll see a bigger strain on the talent pool available to startups in NYC.

For more info on Facebook’s new office announcement:
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/facebook-to-open-engineering-office-in-new-york-city-in-2012-2011-12-02

 ”Skeumorphic UIs resemble physical objects, but they cannot hope to emulate the myriad ways we have to emulate physical objects — so they are always doomed to disappoint on some level if we let ourselves be fooled.”

The latest hoopla regarding Apple’s iPhone 4S Siri feature and its lack of information on abortion clinics has tied into another hot topic in the design world: Skeuomorphism. Simply put, I think it’s amazing that consumer technology is getting to the point where things like UI and UX seriously matter to ordinary, non techie, people.

“I’m so fucking burnt. Existence is suffering.

We’re doomed.

I’d work on my resumé, but I don’t even have anything new to put on it yet, because we haven’t actually shipped anything.

I’m going to go home and cry myself to sleep now.”

Zawinski’s diary is a great read into what engineers have to go through sometimes in their field of work. However, Michael Arrington use of Jamie’s diary to try and promote a notion that engineers should shut up, work long hours, and burn themselves out has seriously backfired. In Zawinski’s response titled: “Watch a VC use my name to sell a con”, Zawinski writes:

“He’s trying to make the point that the only path to success in the software industry is to work insane hours, sleep under your desk, and give up your one and only youth, and if you don’t do that, you’re a pussy. He’s using my words to try and back up that thesis.

I hate this, because it’s not true, and it’s disingenuous.”

I can only say that as a software engineer myself, I know how miserable things can get at times. It’s ok to cry, it’s ok to whine, and it’s ok to work your ass off. We’re only humans after all and seriously if you’re not crying and whining because of your work, then you’re doing it wrong.

Do what you love and cry if you want to.

“Don’t hang on to ideas from the past even if they have been successful for you. You don’t build a product just because everyone else has one.”

Great insight into what makes Apple tick.

Zinio provides global access to thousands of magazine titles from most major publishers in a variety of languages. The company’s website allows publications to be read online or offline on desktop computers (Windows, Mac OS X and Linux) and mobile devices such as the iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch, WebOS and Android handsets (they just launched their Kindle Fire offering).

I used to hate on Zinio back during their initial iPad launch because of the poor user experience but for a strict magazine reader, you really can’t get a better experience these day. Hopefully this new round of funding will bring on new features to the platform that will enhance the reader experience.

Congrats to Zinio!

“Inspired by the collaborative intelligence of her fellow software designers, Kare stayed on at Apple to craft the navigational elements for Mac’s GUI. Because an application for designing icons on screen hadn’t been coded yet, she went to the University Art supply store in Palo Alto and picked up a $2.50 sketchbook so she could begin playing around with forms and ideas.”

I’ve always been a huge fan of sketching notebooks. It allows for free thinking, sketching, and planning you wouldn’t get otherwise using desktop software. I always have a notebook within arms reach and carry one in my bag. You never know when inspiration will strike.

Did I ever show you my autographed Susan Kare print?

 ”You have a task which starts off seeming simple, then upon further thought and exploration it becomes considerably more complex (with several nebulous unanswered questions). Then, upon still further examination, it becomes clear that the level of refinement of thought has lead to discovering once again that the problem is simpler than it seemed to be.”

http://mattgemmell.com/2010/06/11/perceived-software-complexity/

“Through next Monday, Amazon is selling all non-iPhones for one penny with a new two-year contract.”

Will amazon making a killing? You betcha.
Quantity over quality anyone?

Foursquare Core Data Talk

“Most startups fail not because they can’t build the product they set out to build, but because they build the wrong product, take too long to do that, waste a lot of money doing that, and waste a lot of money on sales and marketing trying to sell that wrong product”

Truth. Feedback early and often is the key these days.

- Steve Jobs

Your legacy will live on forever.

Thank you Steve Jobs and may you rest in peace.

A few days ago Spotify made its USA debut and wow wee wow what a service. If you know me even a tiny little bit you’ll know that I am really hard to impress when it comes to apps and/or web services and Spotify knocks this one out of the park.

The music industry has been hurting for a LONG time thanks to Napster, P2p, and Mp3s and while iTunes put a bandaid on the music labels, the artists themselves (at least indie ones) have still been hurting. While I can’t say I’ve always acquired all of my music via iTunes or some other legitimate online music store, the process of purchasing, downloading, dealing with DRM issues, backing up and syncing music has been broken for a long time- making it easier to pirate music than to actually pay for it.

Last night after two glasses of Gosling’s I signed up for a Spotify premium account. Holy. Shit. All I can say is Spotify will trick you into paying for music again and you’ll feel good about it.

Spotify Key Observations

• SUPER FAST – searching seems almost too fast. WAY faster than the itunes store hands down.
• OTA Syncing – syncing is so seamless  you won’t have to think about it
•  An interface that makes sense both on the desktop version and the mobile version
• Sharing with other Spotify friends is really easy. You can drop a song in someone’s inbox and they have it!
• Spotify seems to have a good majority of the music I like (even the obscure stuff).
• Since everything streams (although you can make things available offline) you save A TON of disk space

How does Spotify stack up against iTunes
I believe Spotify just took a shot across the iTunes store bow. With the feature set iTunes Match introduces it might be too little too late. Although iTunes Match is $25/yr vs Spotify’s $120/year for a premium account, the functionality you get with Spotify is well worth it. From my understanding, iTunes Match will find music you’ve previously downloaded (from anywhere) and will match that song to one in the iTunes Library if it exists. In the other corner Spotify removes the need to even think about illegally downloading a song or album. It’s all right there in Spotify’s library and ready to sync. So from a user experience perspective, Spotify crushes the iTunes and the iPod ecosystem. All I can do is hope Apple is paying close attention to what Spotify is up to and continues to innovate the iTunes Match and iCloud system. People like things that are ‘easy’ to do (like illegally downloading music), so if ease of use is backed up by a large music library, an awesome feature set, and is also significantly easier to use that iTunes … that sounds like a recipe for [something].

It’ll take sometime before Spotify is a household name but mark my words in this permanent blog post that will live on the internet for eternity: Spotify will become a household name.

UPDATE:
After a week of using Spotify I have noticed that the one important feature it is missing is the ability to browse for music.  You can check out “What’s New” but there is no way to browse music by genre. Essentially Spotify needs a solid music discovery layer. Only a matter of time but this is an area where services like Pandora and Last.fm shine a bit more than Spotify.

A totally random twitter search resulted in:

Of course, Google’s lack of communication with its users results in several hundreds of duplicate threads on Google help forums were people are trying to figure what they should do. For example, there are many threads were users are trying to figure out how to downgrade their paid Google Apps Business accounts. Google can’t possible want this.

If Google wants to keep its paying Google Apps users it shouldn’t introduce a product that could potentially cannibalize another portion of their business. If Google ever allows for Google Apps users to user Google Profiles and/or Google+ … I shall revisit.

Then there are people who are real.

The best thing you can do for something aspiring to “make it” is to be totally upfront and honest with people. Whether you are a engineer, a designer, a manager, a business owner – being real is your greatest weapon. It builds trust.

I recently met with a potential client who needed A LOT of help. From programming  to marketing. From design to fundraising. While I obviously sold the potential client on our company, I also actively recommend alternatives and explained the pros and cons of these other options. People want options and they also want someone they can trust. There is a very clear value in that kind of relationship that will be known to you and your client only if you are being real.

Don’t be afraid to acknowledge missing features or in-experience in your product or service. Use this as an opportunity to highlight your expertise in another area. If your expertise doesn’t perfectly align with what is being request of you and you’re thinking about “faking it” … don’t. This never ends well.

Be real with yourself, the people you work with, and your clients.
It builds a culture of trust.