Lori M Olson 
OPED — Lori’s Unvarnished Opinion
Thomas’ post reminded me the App Store’s original sales and marketing normalized the proliferation of the $0.99 price for apps. And that has been a very big problem for the viability of apps for independent developers.
Back in the before-internet-times indie devs advertised and sold their software in magazines and on BBS systems. Sometimes you even had to mail order a diskette copy. And it wasn’t cheap. Most software was over $20. And most software was focused on a specific niche, with very specific, limited features.
Now, the App Store is a great way of distributing software worldwide, but no longer a great way to market your app, because there’s literally millions of other apps competing for attention in the Store.
So you’re still going to need to market your app. And that costs money. Which means that $0.99 price point becomes even more problematic. I’d encourage you—and any of your friends—to think about that $0.99 price as an introductory fire sale, to generate interest in your app, but then to price it according to the value it provides to the people using it. An app with a useful function or a game that provides hours of entertainment should always be worth more than $0.99.
FITS — Featured in the School
Today, I’m very excited to share with you that the book project I was privileged to be asked to co-author has, in less than a week, hit the best seller lists for Entrepreneurship, Business Development & Finance in multiple countries on Amazon!
In this book, I share my journey to succeed in a male-dominated profession—software development. You will find similar stories in a wide variety of fields: health, wellness, business ownership, consultancy and finance.
The e-book version is available right now for just 99¢ (or similar in the currency of your local Amazon store). Written by 20+ professional, business and entrepreneurial women, our chapters are based on our life experiences, triumphs, and sometimes tragedies, but focused on Dreaming Big, and Doing Bigger.
We hope these stories of our experiences help you move from dreaming about success to concrete actions you can take to achieve your big goals.
Order yours today: USA 🇺🇸, Canada 🇨🇦, United Kingdom 🇬🇧, Germany 🇩🇪, France 🇫🇷, Spain 🇪🇸, Italy 🇮🇹, Netherlands 🇳🇱, Japan 🇯🇵, Brazil 🇧🇷, Mexico 🇲🇽, Australia 🇦🇺 and India 🇮🇳.
APP — All Things App
If in doubt—niche down! While it’s easy to be lured by a huge potential market for some sort of generic functionality, think also about the benefits of something very specific for a very small market—one where you might have almost no competition.
Okay, maybe not the eight recipes of Computer Cajun Cuisine—that’s a bit too niche—but here’s a great example: Nightscout and Oh My Posh integration so you can see your GitHub branch and realtime blood sugar in your command line prompt no matter what shell or terminal.
Sure, its only truly useful to devs with diabetes but that’s a well-defined, important market not everybody thinks about every day. And sadly, it’s likely a bigger market than you think.
TALK — Talk of the Tech
Here are our selections from the two most widely used RubyMotion/DRGTK chat spaces, respectively:
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Slack — If you’re like us, you tend to think of automated testing for things not of the user interface. But it turns out that automated testing can apply to UIs as well. Maestro is described as “kinda slow but surprisingly functional”. The examples illustrate how it works quite well.
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Discord — Game mechanics generally strive to be as realistic as possible. But how about when they are ‘super-realistic’ which is to say a bit more real than real itself. OK, you really have to see it, to understand what we mean, exactly.
GAME — All Things Gaming
With all this talk of AI replacing writers (that is, people like us 😱) it’s refreshing and reassuring to see that there are still tools out there which are intended to be used by humans to produce dialogue which sounds, well, human and therefore appealing to other humans. For example Crochet, an interactive dialogue editor which was mentioned in a recent Discord discussion regarding narrative story telling.
SPOT — Spotlight On…
Brett Chalupa has launched DragonRuby Zine which is—miracle of miracles!—printed on paper. How cool is that! But alas, it’s already sold out. However if you all pile on Brett Chalupa (Discord: Brett Chalupa#7666) there’s a pretty good chance he’ll print some more. Here’s where you can look at a digital preview.
TWIL — This Week I Learned…
‘Blood is thicker than water’, ‘the customer is always right’ and ‘one bad apple’ are all common sayings that we use all the time. It’s likely you do, too. But as pointed out by Eniko Fox recently, in a lot of cases they mean exactly the opposite of what we think, when seen in their entire context. Turns out German has a phrase for it: sinnentstellende Verkürzung.
HAHA — And They All Laughed
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“Life just doesn’t hand you things. You have to get out there and make things happen. That’s the exciting part.” — Emeril Lagasse