37 Signals comments on a trend I’ve been noticing for a few years. Data centers and IT departments are not the core competency of most businesses, they are a requirement of operating the business. Or, at least, they have been for the past thirty years or so. Businesses are now seeing the benefits of moving what they are not good at, controlling IT, to what they are good at, which is whatever makes them money.

You no longer need a tech person at the office to man “the server room.” Responsibility for keeping the servers running has shifted away from the centralized IT department. Today you can get just about all the services that previously required local expertise from a web site somewhere.

via: The end of the IT department - (37signals)

John Gruber from Daring Fireball has a comment that matches what my thoughts have been when I try to explain the consolidation I see in the sysadmin field:

Certain of the comments on Hansson’s post remind me of this quote from Upton Sinclair: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”

I’ve even heard that virtualization technologies and cloud services will provide more opportunity for sysadmins. That makes little sense to me. People are assuming that the work in the future will be just like the work of the past. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of work, especially work that revolves around technology. It grows, it changes, it merges into new things. Consider the iPhone.

Disruptive technology changes things, and the iPhone was, and continues to be, disruptive. It is powerful, both in means of hardware capacity, and the operating system and software that it runs. How long will it be before the iPhone, or one of it’s many competitors, completely supplants laptops as the computing device of choice for people? I imagine a future where you dock your phone to a monitor, keyboard, and mouse and use it as your one and only computer. I don’t think its too far away. When that happens, how much need will there be for a traditional IT department?

Software is becoming simpler and easier to use. Hardware is becoming more reliable, and longer lasting. And, most importantly, harder to break. This comment from the 37 Signals post stood out to me as a common misconception in the IT industry:

I’ve “done” IT for multinationals and startups, and the thing that is most obvious, is that if you leave the kids alone with their toys, you end up with a network which hardly ever works, more viruses than you can count, the mail server acting as a spam relay, the company being raided by FAST , the fans overheating in the PCs, the aircon never having been considered in the server cupboard, the backup plan being a mystery… need I go on?

No, you need not go on. Because every single argument stated is a symptom of the Microsoftian workplace. A computer on every desk, and every computer running Windows. Since Windows is easy to break, people break it. It’s a self-perpetuating cycle. Over the years people have been trained to “click here, and here, and once a week here, but no where else or you’ll break it”. People don’t need to become smarter about computers, computers need to be easier for normal people to use. When they are, when the computer is as simple (or, is) an iPhone, the need for things like anti-virus and defragmenting schedules, and wallpaper policies go out the window.

Desktop support departments are a symptom of misguided use of technology in the workplace. What is the purpose of that Dell on your desk? To assist you in performing whatever task your job really is. Perhaps if you break your tools, you are not really fit to be doing the job in the first place. If you don’t understand your tools, how can you be really good at what you do? Would you hire a carpenter who doesn’t know how to use a jigsaw?

Change is coming. I can feel it, see it on the horizon. Between web services, increased business specialization, and incredibly small and powerful computers, there is a shift in the culture of work brewing.

Alex Payne from Bank Simple sees it

Finally on the technology front, we’re deploying into Amazon’s cloud. Our information security architecture allowed for this even before Amazon announced PCI compliance; their support for these more stringent security standards is a happy bonus for us. Using AWS today is a no-brainer, particularly for an operation of our modest scale and performance requirements.

They are a bank, and they are gong to be using Amazon’s AWS. Independently responsible employees, outsourced data center, and no IT department. How long will your business hold on to the ’90s mentality of what IT needs to be.

I love these videos from Field Notes.

Field Notes: Making of Steno Book from Coudal Partners on Vimeo.

If you take a moment to look around the room you are in now, what do you see? Are you surrounded by things that matter, and were built by people who care? Or, more likely, are you surrounded by mass produced, assembly line, imported goods that you honestly don’t believe will last all that long? I’ve been thinking about quality again, and how it applies to me, to what I do, and how I spend my time.

It started with our washing machine. After seven years, our washing machine looks like it’s on its last legs. Seven years sounds like a long time to have an appliance, but its really not. When our grandparents bought appliances they were built to last for thirty years, now they are built to last five. We called up a repair man who stopped by the house to take a look. He was an older guy, and didn’t bring the right tools for the job, so he just looked at the machine and told us his view of the model we own. He said that he had just told a customer that day that his washing machine, same model as ours, was not worth the cost to fix it, and that it would be cheaper and more economical to buy a new one. As older people do, he lamented the quality of todays machines, so I asked him what was being built today that was as good as the machines of the past.

He looked me in the eye and said “There are none.”

The repairman’s view of the world has become so pessimistic that he truly believes that there is nothing built for the common man worth buying. This is sad, but I believe he’s wrong. I believe it in part because I’m typing this on a MacBook Pro, in my opinion the best computer ever built. The perfect blend of power and portability, but more than that, an example of manufacturing excellence. Apple is a company that cares about details, and they are not alone. I believe we may be at the beginning of a renaissance of sorts, a return to traditionally crafted goods created by artisans and engineers.

These people have inspired me to do better, to be more, to remember the attention to detail that the Navy demanded of me. Take a minute to read these stories, watch their videos, and see where they are coming from.

Saddleback Leather, Coudal Partners, DODOcase, Blackbox Case, and finally, Staber Industries.

Staber may very well replace our Maytag washing machine. Its all they do.

We don’t have to live in a world where all of our things are replaceable, where everything around us falls apart after a couple of years of use. We don’t have to live in a world where everything has a computer chip and can’t be fixed if it breaks. We don’t have to live surrounded by junk. But that’s what the past thirty years of steadily declining quality of goods has taught us, it’s become a core belief that affects everything we do. We go to work, and sigh, and think, “here it is, another Monday…”, and do what we have to do until we can go home. Punch the clock, earn a paycheck, who cares if our work is any good? That’s wrong, and it doesn’t have to be like that.

Living in a world of quality goods and services starts with each one of us caring more about what we do with our lives, what we spend our money on, and most importantly, where and how we spend our time. No matter what you do, if it is writing software or changing oil, I want to encourage you to do your absolute best. Because no matter what you are doing, you make an impact on the world around you, you matter because you are here, and when you start to believe that what you do makes a difference, you start to care a little more, and when you care about your work, you make the world around you a little better every day.

So, today, as you go to work, or prepare for the next day, or think about what might come next…

be great.

Readability is a subscription based service that allows you to read the text off of websites in a beautiful, clean, consistent interface. Since I started reading the web through Readability a while ago, I’ve appreciated it’s consistency, meaning that one site looks the same as the next, as the next, and the next. Reading articles on the web becomes more about the writing, and less about design. Jumping from site to site can be jarring, distracting, but when using Readability, the entire web can feel like a single book, one with many chapters.

However, I’ve been able to achieve this consistency with Safari Reader (yes, I know it’s built off of Readability), and Instapaper text view (yes, also inspired by Readability). So, the discussion is not about the value of the Readability service, since you can get the same thing for free, but who should pay for the content rendered through Readability. Advertisers… or you?

Do you feel generous?

I feel that I get value from the sites that I visit, the sites that I’ve marked as “Can’t Miss” in NetNewsWire, and knowing how publishing works on the web, I often visit my favorite sites and click on an ad. That click gives the site money, which ensures (hopefully) that the site will continue to be published and continue to provide me with some kind of value. That value might be entertainment, news, opinion, or instruction, but it is worth something to me. Readability is a way to pay for that value, while reading the site in an interface that makes sense.

Paying for the experience is where Readability differs from Instapaper. In my mind, I think about reading with Readability now, and reading with Instapaper later, but the overlap between the two is too obvious to ignore. Evidently the developers of Readability agree. They have been working with Marco Arment to develop a special build of Instapaper that will credit the sites you read through the Readability service.

Readability has a few surprisingly big names behind it. Not only is Marco onboard, but also Frank Black, Jeffery Zeldman, and more. With a team as talented this, I think its important to think through any criticism of the service carefully. I’m sure they have.

Unfortunately, the current quality of the Readability service is a little less than I would expect. There have been several times in the past couple days I’ve hit the Readability keyboard shortcut and was shown this error.

Going back to the site and trying again fixes the problem. I’m assuming that they are making improvements to the Readability back-end continuously, and that this error is a symptom of those improvements. Annoying, but I’m chalking it up to growing pains.

The second problem I’ve found is when using HyperDock to split the screen of my 15” MacBook Pro between Safari and a text editor, Readability pushes the text off the right side of the Safari window. The last six or so characters are off the screen. Stranger yet, when resizing the window smaller, the horizontal scroll bar does not appear to allow you to scroll to view all of the text, the text is just gone. The Instapaper text bookmarklet does the right thing and formats the text correctly for the current size of the window, and provides the normal scrollbar when needed. I’m not sure why Readability doesn’t, but its just a bit disappointing.

I’m hoping that both of these problems are fixed soon.

Ian Hines is a fan, and had this to say:

It’s a wonderful concept. It’s all the things we’ve come to know and love about Instapaper, with the added ability of finally allowing us to easily support our favorite writers.

In contrast, Colin Wheeler is skeptical:

…for me it feels wrong cause it puts the burden on consumers instead publishers who need to clean up their websites in the first place

What Colin is saying is when a site is well designed, there’s no need for Readability. The sites many people are most likely to read in Readability are the sites that do not understand the value of clean design in the first place, sites that are covered with ads and distractions. He makes an excellent point, and one that I think is going to be shared by a lot of people.

Herein lies the rub. No one likes ads, but no one wants to pay for online content. So how can sites that make their money off of page views continue to exist if they do actually clean up their interface? That’s the answer that Readability is designed for. An alternative revenue stream. It is an interesting test.

Also interesting to note is that Readability is not a startup, it’s an experiment by an established company. Arc90 builds and designs internal applications for other businesses. Richard Ziade, the original creator of Readability, has this to say about why Readability exists:

We also believe that quality content is worth paying for. The rat race for page views and impressions has not only led to an oftentimes painful experience on the web, but also to a diminishing of quality content on the web. Today’s reality isn’t anyone’s fault but ours. We won’t hesitate to spend $4.00 for our daily cup of coffee … but we’ll balk at even a modest attempt at supporting the volumes of content we consume on the web. Readability represents an opportunity to show all the great publications, writers and bloggers out there that we care about quality and we’re willing to pay for it.

Readability may turn out to be more important to the future of the web than we can currently see. I’m rooting for it. I’m rooting for less ads, higher quality, and more thought.

Like many who are interested enough in the tech industry to attempt to stay up to date on current happenings, I’ve been struggling with an ever increasing number of interesting sites and feeds. In the past I would categorize the feeds into folders with names like “Blogs”, “News”, “Design”, and “Friends”, but eventually I’d wind up with a folder with a name like “MetaBlogs” or some such ridiculousness. While the multiple folders did help to organize the feeds, they did not help with what I needed; keeping up with what was important.

So, a few weeks ago I gave up on organizing the feeds by type of feed, and instead dropped down to three folders of what the feeds meant to me. My New organization is Can’t Miss, Skippable, and Staging. Three folders, no exceptions.

Can’t Miss

I read everything that comes into this folder, without exception. As such, I’m extremely conservative with the feeds that I allow in this folder. For each site I decide that I do not want to miss a single post, I’m making an agreement with myself, and deciding that my time is well spent reading what they have to say. I have several sources in this folder, but most of them are low-volume personal blogs. There are no high-volume sites in this folder.

Skippable

I like your site, I’ve found what you have to say interesting at some point, or I’ve found some value in your site, but I don’t need to read everything you write. Skippable is where you belong. These are the sites that post twelve times a day, the news sites, hacks, and inspiration. I like you, but it’s not love just yet. Skippable is giving myself permission to select everything, mark it read, and not feel the least bit bad about it.

Staging

This folder is also about giving myself permission, but this time it’s the permission to subscribe to anything I choose. Every interesting blog, news site, or any other feed source first winds up here. Like the Skippable folder, I still don’t mind marking everything as read and skipping whats in here, but from time to time I’ll puruse this folder and see if anything has caught my eye enough in the past few weeks to warrant moving the feed into one of the other folders. Sometimes I read one good post on a site and that’s it, everything else is something I can do without. Eventually that feed will be deleted. If I’ve enjoyed several posts, I might move you up to Skippable. And if I’ve found myself searching for your feed, then it might be time to move it up to Can’t Miss.

I think RSS is still very much alive and kicking, and I’m finally feeling like I’ve got a sustainable system for keeping up with the news I care about. Finally, it’s a great idea to break out of your RSS reader and visit the sites you care about.

A friend was explaining his preference for Google’s Chrome browser the other day, and was using 1Password as an example of why he felt that Chrome was a better designed browser. The 1Password extension in Chrome drops down a menu that looks almost like an iOS window, which he felt was more polished than it’s Safari equivalent. In Contrast the “1P” button in Safari drops down a normal cocoa menu. Funny thing is, I’m fairly certain that I had never seen that menu, simply because that’s not how I use Safari.

Chrome is an excellent browser, and got several things right with their design and philosophy, it’s fast, light on resources, and I love that it separates tabs into their own processes. The one thing I think they got spot on right was the name. The browser is a pane of glass that the web shines through. When the browser starts outshining the web there’s an imbalance. The browser really is just the chrome around the content of the web, which is why I choose to hide all of Safari’s toolbars.

I use Safari because it is a proper Mac app, and so it respects the standard keyboard combos that I’ve become used to over the years. I browse the web almost without touching the mouse. Almost, because I still use it to click links and to scroll down a page, but for the most part I use these keyboard combos:

• ⌘ + [ = Back
• ⌘ + ] = Forward (I don’t use this one much)
• ⌘ + L = Pop open the address bar to enter a URL
• ⌘ + F = Search for text in the current web page, immensely useful when searching for an answer to a technical question in a long newsgroup, mailing list, or forum page
• ⌘ + ⌥ + F = Pop open the address bar with the cursor focused in the search field
• ⌘ + Shift + R = Safari Reader mode, inherited from Readability

And, for 1Password:

• ⌘ + \ = Log in to the current web site
• ⌘ + ⌥ + \ = Pops open a HUD window that lets you quickly select a saved login, then opens a new tab and logs into the web site for you.

I also use bookmarklets fairly extensively, particularly Instapaper and Yojimbo. Safari let’s me use these keyboard combos to trigger bookmarklets I have saved in the Bookmarks bar. These change a bit more than the others, like once every six months or so, but here’s what I currently have:

• ⌘ + 1 = Instapaper Read Later Bookmarklet
• ⌘ + 2 = Readability, for those few times when Safari Reader fails me
• ⌘ + 3 = Bookmark in Go2, something special I’m working on for Go2 1.2 release
• ⌘ + 4 = Share on Twitter, because… well… you know…
• ⌘ + 5 = Archive in Yojimbo

As I said earlier, extensions can drag down a browser, clutter the interface, and generally do bad things. However, there are a few absolute gems that I keep around.

• Shut Up
• YouTube5
• Incognito
• uTube
• Beautifier
• Optimize Legibility
• Beautipedia
• Google Search Cleanup

New windows and new tabs both open with Top Sites, which I think is just a beautiful home page. My current Top Sites are:

• TeuxDeux: All the “task management” I need
• iTunes Connect: To keep tabs on Go2
• Farmdog Software: because I’m really happy with how the design turned out
• This site: Evidently because I’m my biggest fan
• 5by5: I’m constantly checking the site to get to the links in the shownotes. I wish there was a separate RSS feed just for these links, that’d be pure gold.
• FogBugz: My bug tracker and customer support for Farmdog, also hosts Kiln, a Mercurial repository which keeps Go2’s source nice and cleanly revisioned.

Another part of Safari being a proper Mac app is it’s support for the system-wide dictionary. One of my favorite features of Mac OS X is that I can highlight a word, press ⌘ + ^ + D, and see that words definition in a little window below it. I use it constantly.

At this point i’m fairly invested in Safari. I’ve tried other browsers, but Safari is the one I keep coming back to. Omniweb used to be my go to web slicing and dicing tool, but sadly, it’s been leapfrogged. Safari lets me keep everything out of site, and just a quick keyboard press away. Everything I need, nothing I don’t.

It’s snowing again, which means my normal 40-minute commute will now be closer to an hour. I’m actually a bit excited by the prospect of a long drive; it will give me some time to catch up on my favorite podcasts, most of which come from Dan Benjamin at 5by5.

What Dan has built at 5by5 is important. He’s amassing a collection of incredibly smart people, the people who design and build the things we use on our computing devices every day. Dan is an accomplished developer himself, and has been publishing online since the paleolithic age on Hivelogic. The 5by5 interviews are an audio library of intelligence. Inspirational and honest, Dan has a talent for asking meaningful questions that cause his guests to think. What I love most about the 5by5 shows, especially The Pipeline, is that Dan always asks questions along the same subject line: “How did you get to where you are?” and “How can the guy sitting in a cubicle get to where you are now?”.

The answers to his questions are often hard, but always truthful. There’s a theme of hard work and dedication that goes through all his guests. You don’t get to be a successful developer, designer, producer, writer, or any other profession without hundreds of hours of sweat and tears. You don’t get to be a successful small business owner without the guts to take the necessary calculated risks.

I don’t subscribe to all of the 5by5 shows, but here are my favorites:

• The Talk Show: John Gruber, from Daring Fireball, and Dan Benjamin talk about technology, Apple, Star Wars, and all kinds of assorted nerdery. Listening to the Talk Show is like sitting at the pub with a couple of good friends over a pint.
• The Pipeline: The main 5by5 interview show, Dan’s guests are makers, they build what we use. The Pipeline is an inspirational, entrepreneurial show about chasing your dreams, never giving up, and being honest with what your passion is.
• The Big Web Show: Tagged as “Everything Web That Matters”, Dan co-hosts this show with Jeffery Zeldman, author, speaker, designer, developer, and pioneer of web standards. Dan and Jeffery’s guests range from the unknown trying to get tracktion on a start up to Roger Black.
• Back to Work: Merlin Mann brings his unique view on work, attention, and real productivity to the newest addition to the 5by5 network. I’ve been a big fan of Merlin’s for a long time, and I’m happy to see him back in the public again after his hiatus to write a book. As of today, there has only been one episode of Back to Work, but I’m excited to see where this show goes.
• Build and Analyze: Marco Arment, co-founder of Tumblr and developer of the amazingly awesome Instapaper hosts this show about programming, coffee, and doing things the right way. Marco is super intelligent, and equally opinionated, a combination which that for a really great show.
  The 5by5 shows remind me of broadcasting in the 1950s, an idea that I think Dan shares, if the current design of Hivelogic is any indication. One of my favorite parts of each show, strangely, is the advertising. At some point in the show Dan will stop and acknowledge the sponsors, and read a prewritten release. It feels low-tech, and so much more authentic than a gimmicky advertising agency, and far, far more human than a banner ad on a web page. Whenever I hear the ad I imagine a guy in a suit standing at a microphone tossing papers on the wooden floor after each page is read.

My daily drive is easier now because of 5by5, so, thanks.

I’ve loved reading some of the “Past Blast” articles that have been linked about in Twitter, so here is my contribution.

Two from Me

On Graduation Day, written after I, finally, finished my bachelors degree. A personal accomplishment that means a lot to me.

The Master Craftsman, solidifying the concept of my work as a craft, whatever that work might be.

One from Daring Fireball

The Life, I just wrote about this article, but I think linking to it today is in keeping with the spirit of the meem.

This past Thursday I was privileged to speak at our local CocoaHeads about my history, and how I was able to bring my app to market. Since someone on Twitter asked for my slides, which don’t amount to much, I thought writing up my experiences would be a little more useful.

I didn’t grow up with computers. My first experiences programming were not when I was six on my Dad’s Apple II. We were poor, we lived on an Indian reservation in Montana, and for a good part of my life we lived in a mobile home. My first experience with a computer was in high school, after a semester of learning to type on an IBM Selectric, we moved on to one semester of computers, which was basically typing out documents in WordPerfect. That was it… for years. I didn’t start learning computers in depth until I had been in the Navy for a few years, and needed to learn them to make rank as a Radioman. It was then that I found I had a knack for technology, and started pursuing it. My first computer was a PC, a mistake I made exactly once. I had the machine for a few months before Linux was loaded on it for the first time. In 2000 I was introduced to Unix, and started working with OpenBSD, Linux, HP-UX, and Solaris. I enjoy Unix, I find that the system has a spartan elegance to it, especially the BSD flavors. Around this same time I heard that Apple was basing their new operating system, OS X, off of Unix, and I was anxious to try it out. In 2003, we moved back to the states, and I bought my first Mac, an iBook G4.

The iBook served me well, and I fell in love with the Mac and with the Mac community. I became a regular reader of Daring Fireball, and was inspired by a post named “The Life”. However, I had one college semester of programming experience in C, an experience that left a bad taste in my mouth, so I figured that “The Life” was out of my reach, put it behind me and moved on. Eventually I got out of the Navy and found work as a Unix sysadmin, using the skills that I learned while on active duty. The reality of work in a cubicle is much different than I imagined it would be. In the Navy there is always something different right around the corner. You will spend a max of 3-4 years at a single command, and during those years you will most likely have several different jobs. Things are much different as a civilian, and while I have a good job, the prospects of keeping this same job for the next ten or more years scares me more than a little. So, the question that came to mind was “is this what I want to do for the next 30 years?”, and Gruber’s article on The Life came back to mind.

So, I decided to learn Objective-C.

This decision was not taken lightly. I considered the possibility that it was beyond me, that I was not smart enough, or that I did not have the necessary math and programming and educational background to become a developer. Could I be dedicated enough to learn something so far out of my area? Was I smart enough to learn this? That last question gnawed at me, and I finally decided that there was no way I was going to know unless I tried, and gave it everything I had. So, I did some googling and found that for first timers wanting to learn Cocoa, most experienced developers pointed to what I now simply refer to as “The Book”, Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X.

For the next several months, I would wake up at 5AM and go through The Book, page by page, chapter by chapter, every challenge, no cheating. If I got stuck on something, I’d search the Apple developer documentation (which is excellent), or search through the CocoDev mailing list archives. I was investing in my future, so it was important to understand everything in The Book. Eventually, I finished The Book, and started working on my own little Mac app, a GUI version of a little shell script that I wrote called “go”.

The first few versions of Go were tough. I had a hard time getting my head wrapped around the “Modal, View, Controller” framework that Cocoa and the Mac developer tools are built around. I could not for the life of me figure out how to get an image to display in an NSTableView. That was by far the single most difficult hurdle I had to overcome. Changing my mindset from “Ok, place button here, and place image here”, which didn’t work, to “OK, place button here, and display data from my data source in this table”. I struggled for weeks, months even with this simple concept. Trying to work against the MVC is a sure way misery and failure. It was around this time that I found the local CocoaHeads group. I went to a meeting, and the speaker (a great guy), was talking about drawing pixels and getting your views to look just right. It was interesting, to be sure, but over my head at the time. I left that meeting disheartened, feeling that maybe it was simply too much for me, and I was just not smart enough.

I gave up, and for several months did not touch Xcode or Cocoa.

I’m not sure what brought me back, but I have a feeling it was stubbornness. The idea that there was a learned skill that I could not learn was too much for me. I started getting the feeling that I was almost there, that my understanding of Cocoa was incomplete, but I was just one more article read, one more blog post scanned, from finding the missing piece. So, I started reading again, I started building again, and piece by piece I started to understand Cocoa. I found that the best way for me to display an image was to use a value transformer. Store the data as a string, transform that string to an image, and the NSTableView would happily display that image for me. I started asking questions on Twitter and the mailing lists, and was recognized by Jim Turner, who ran CocoaHeads in Des Moines.

Jim is not the type of guy to give you an answer, but he is the type of guy to point you in the right direction. Jim and I exchanged emails a few times, and he pointed out where I was going about things wrong, or making things harder than they needed to be. Eventually, I built real, working versions of Go, which Jim was kind enough to beta test. Some of his critiques of Go were scathing, but absolutely necessary. Each email Jim would send me with a list of things that were wrong with Go, I’d drop into a to-do list and check off each item as it was fixed.

Some features that I worked on for months I killed. Some features that I spent months working on and hundreds of lines of code I found could be replaced with only a few lines of more functional code. The original version of Go used AppleScript and the Cocoa ScriptingBridge framework to launch the Terminal. I would build a shell script in Cocoa, then send that to the Terminal as a “Do Shell Script” AppleScript. This entire structure was replaced when I learned about the functionality of NSWorkspace and NSURL. Now, all bookmarks are URLs, and opened by NSWorkspace. Much simpler, and more functional. This discovery allowed me to take Go in a new direction, instead of being a launcher for SSH connections, Go could be a universal bookmarker, storing and launching bookmarks for anything that could be addressed by URL, which turns out to be just about everything. I finalized the functionality of Go, and spent another month or so building in a copy protection scheme and a 30 day trial, and… launched.

Farmdog Software was launched to the amazement of no one. I had the store open for three months and sold a grand total of seven copies of Go. I was languishing in obscurity. No one knew what Go was, who I was, or had heard of Farmdog Software. Then Apple announced the Mac App Store, and I knew that was my opportunity.

I started an entire redesign of Go, and renamed the application Go2. I redoubled my efforts. Now I was not only programming in the morning before work, but also at lunch, and at night after the kids were in bed. I built a custom NSCell class, and spent a long time building the Status Bar search menu that Go2 has now. Jim came to the rescue once again with a way to use the down arrow to navigate out of the search field, which was the final piece of the Go2 puzzle.

I submitted Go2 to the App Store, and in the last week of December it was rejected. Turns out there was an odd bug that only showed itself at launch time, and only on the first time the app was launched. I fixed that bug, resubmitted, and Go2 was in the store on day 1.

Go2 and Farmdog still have a long, long ways to go, but they are on their way, and that’s the important thing. If anyone can take anything away from all this I hope that it is to never give up. Never. Nothing worth doing is ever easy.

Yesterday, Go2 was one of approximately 1000 applications available on launch day of the Mac App Store. It’s been a nerve wracking experience, but overall I’m pretty happy so far with the way its gone. I’ve been able to identify a couple of last minute bugs and get their fixes incorporated into version 1.1, which I’ve had in beta testing for about a month now.

I’ve created a new version of Go2 in iTunes Connect, and I’m waiting now for Apple to let me know that they are ready for me to upload. Once I do, the new version should take a week to two weeks to be approved, and will then be available in the Mac App Store. Thats being optimistic, but so far my experience with the MAS has been very positive, and I’m expecting for it to remain positive in the future. I won’t go into any numbers, mainly because they are all very small, but I will say that I’ve sold twice as many copies of Go2 on the first day of the MAS than I did for the entire four months of running my own store.

However, simply being in the MAS is not enough, I still need to be better at marketing, and getting Go2 in front of people. Wording in the short explanations of Go2 provided is important, and getting the definition of what Go2 is right, and getting it brief is important. I’ve started marketing Go2 with a tagline suggested by a friend “What the Finder’s Connect to Server Should Have Been”, but I’ve already had at least one person download Go2 thinking that it was an FTP client like CyberDuck or Transmit. It makes me wonder how many others have thought the same thing and simply didn’t say anything. (Note to all non-spammy types: you can always get ahold of me, I’m a friendly guy!)

I’m confident as people use Go2, they’ll see that it’s a great app and really like it. I don’t want to sound like I’m boasting, but I am very proud of Go2 and very happy with how it turned out. There’s still a great roadmap for the future of the app, and the eventual suite of apps I’m planning on building, in which Go2 plays a big part, but for version 1.1, I’m happy with it. The biggest challenge for Farmdog Software right now is getting noticed. I’ll be working on press releases and contacting people I respect and seeing if they are interested in Go2.

I also developed a “Go2 Lite”, a version of Go2 limited to only six bookmarks and intended to simply be an introduction to what Go2 is. My original intention was to submit Go2 Lite to the MAS and see it alongside Go2, one for $4.99, and the other free. However, I tweeted about this and was promptly reminded that Apple recommends against (read: will reject) demo or lite versions of apps, and they recommend hosting demos on developers web sites, like here at Farmdogapps.com. A secondary discussion popped up about needing a free demo version of a five-dollar app, with the general consensus being that it’s not really necessary. Which brings me back to my original problem: press and marketing coverage. Having Go2 Lite in the MAS might have encouraged people to download and try the free version, just to see what it does, then, if they liked it and wanted to use it, they could download the full version. Ideally, Apple would support a limited trial and in-app purchase to the full version, similar to the original Go’s 30 trial period. Is five dollars enough of a barrier for people unsure of the purpose and functionality of the app? I’m not sure, but it might be. It’s a problem I’m working on.

I’m also still waiting for promo codes to allow the original users of Go to upgrade to Go2, but so far Apple has not provided developers with the codes. I’m hoping that they will, soon, and as soon as I have them I’ll be sending them out in email.

I’ve been quiet on the Farmdog Blog, but that’s because I’ve been neck-deep in Objective-C, writing code and getting Go2 ready. Farmdog Software is in it for the long haul, and the MAS is a great step in the right direction for our tiny, independent company.

Thanks for stopping by.