HN user

greengarstudios

121 karma
Posts7
Comments36
View on HN

In one sense, it's actually the opposite. In iOS 5 and earlier, they were at the mercy of their arch-rival.

Now, by doing their own map, "crippled" or not, they're independent. They're less at Google's mercy than they were before.

If the Apple Maps app someday becomes as good as (or better) than Google Maps, this move will be seen as genius.

They depended on craigslist too much. It worked really well when craigslist wasn't stopping them from using craigslist. craigslist is international. Does craigslist have listings for Cologne, DE, Berlin, or Tel Aviv, IL? If it does, they would have appeared on PadMapper. I've used PadMapper before. I didn't even know they had any other sources; I thought it was strictly a mapping of craigslist listings.

The Patent Pledge 15 years ago

pg is concerned with startups, and I am too. But I think a lot of the rest of the world is concerned about what's going on between, say, Apple and HTC.

I am nothing 15 years ago

Reminds me of this:

"Remember, dear brothers and sisters, that few of you were wise in the world’s eyes or powerful or wealthy when God called you. Instead, God chose things the world considers foolish in order to shame those who think they are wise. And he chose things that are powerless to shame those who are powerful. God chose things despised by the world, things counted as nothing at all, and used them to bring to nothing what the world considers important. As a result, no one can ever boast in the presence of God."

- 1 Corinthians 1:26-29 (NLT)

I'm an independent iOS developer. My paid apps have sold over 100,000 copies at 99¢ or higher. In total, my iOS apps (including free apps) have been downloaded over 7 million times.

I took a look at your app in the App Store.

Here's your problem: your icon.

The icon is the most prominent thing the user sees when first looking at your app in the App Store.

Change your icon, and you'll get more downloads. Trust me :-)

Feel free to contact me if you'd like to discuss good icon design, or other under-appreciated aspects of selling an app.

You're right that it can't be strictly enforced, but I think the added inconvenience would be enough to subtly change the behavior of the majority group. Most people won't bother to create multiple accounts or install a browser extension.

In a similar fashion, nothing prevents someone from writing a browser extension to add comment scores back today, e.g. http://hnpoints.com/ ; The scores aren't official, but they serve the same purpose. Most people aren't going to install a browser extension. Of course, some will. But most people will just use the site as-is, out of convenience.

"there is no indication to the user at all that the camera is in use unless the app provides its own. There is no permission alert, nor any LED indicator like a webcam. An app could secretly be recording your face with the iPhone 4′s front-facing camera and sending it to who knows where."

http://www.bunnyhero.org/2010/08/17/thoughts-on-ios4-camera/

As a fellow iOS developer, I believe this is true. It's pretty amusing that there's a guy on the Apple Discussions forum claiming that this is impossible. Actually, it's very possible.

They do this already. It allows the phone to detect whether you're in the same place as someone else: if two phones are hearing similar sound, then you're likely to be next to each other. Color shows you photos taken by people near you. Audio is one signal for detecting who's near.

Note: GPS sometimes doesn't work indoors, where there's no line of sight to the satellites in the sky. Cell towers and Wi-Fi work, but aren't as precise.

I'm not the parent, but:

card-carrying means "thorough" or "avidly devoted to a group", so I take this phrase to mean that he is very non-academic, especially compared to those in his social group, who are relatively much more academic than he is.

What makes the biggest difference on the iPhone is the sheer number of downloads. There are more iOS users, and each user uses a lot more apps.

So an app that gets 200,000 downloads on Android, might get 2,000,000 downloads on iPhone. (These numbers are roughly based on actual figures for my apps, like Brain Tuner [a simple game I created], which are available on both iOS and Android.)

Even if the CPM stays the same, revenue would be 10x because there are about 10x the impressions.