The chorus of disenchanted developers is growing and we’re adding our voices as well. Rogue Amoeba no longer has any plans for additional iPhone applications, and updates to our existing iPhone applications will likely be rare. The iPhone platform had great promise, but that promise is not enough, so we’re focusing on the Mac.

When I said I had sleepless nights about Apple on the whim fucking my business over this is what exactly the type of thing I had in mind.

Before FastSpring

Since launching Today in April of 2008, I was handling all of the purchasing in-house using a combination of a custom-built Web store and a bank provided merchant account. It worked reasonably well, but was limited for a few reasons:

1. Anytime I wanted to add functionality to the store, I had to build it myself and I hate Web programming.
2. Architecturally I designed it for a single product, which was causing problems as I was prepping to launch Check Off 4 as my second paid application.
3. I never got around to adding tracking and analytics to the store, so I was running way too many manual SQL queries to analyze my sales data.

After making the decision to outsource another aspect of my operation, I started researching options. The obvious contenders were Kagi, eSellerate and e-Junkie. While each of them were decent solutions, I always left my trial feeling something substantial was missing or loathing the workflow the products offered. In fact, the only solution I found that didn’t give me that feeling was FastSpring, which I had never heard of until I discovered a Windows application I purchased using it as their store. The purchase experience was top-notch which was important, and as I looked into their backend offerings I was equally impressed.

The Good

First off, the FastSpring backend, called Springboard, is attractive and intuitive. I spend a bit of time each day analyzing my sales and adjusting variables in my store so not hating the user interface is important. That was one of the primary reasons I opted against eSellerate and Kagi. I found their user experience to be a bit convoluted.

FastSpring also offers Google Analytics integration, which helps me analyze where I am getting the most referral traffic from, how much revenue that referral is generating and more. If you’re doing any online advertising, this is a major plus because it can help you analyze what works and what doesn’t.

One of the primary reasons I opted to use my own merchant account and store out of the gate was that I found the other provider’s rates to be sky high for what they were offering whereas a bit of legwork up front got me a merchant account that offered a much fairer rate. FastSpring seems to be the best of both worlds. It’s rates are clearly stated as 5.9% plus $.95 per transaction or a flat rate of 8.9%: you pick. No tiered percentage levels. Simple.

The final and most important thing I absolutely love about FastSpring is their support. They advertise their phenomenal support as a selling point of the service, and I cannot emphasize enough how wonderful it is. The FastSpring folks go above and beyond to answer my questions and resolve my issues. For example, when I was adding Check Off to my store, I knew I wanted to offer both a personal and a family pack license option. I wasn’t exactly sure how best to implement this in the store so I contacted support. Within an hour they had reached out to me with a recommendation and offered to set it up for me so I could see how they did it for future reference. That was above and beyond what I was expecting and sold me on their service even more than before.

The Not So Good

When this post was in my drafts folder, there were two major items on the not so good list. The first was the lack of support for NFR or free license generation either via coupons or the Springboard administration panel. The second, though minor, was lack of native support for AquaticPrime as a license generation option.

As of last week, both of these points are moot as the FastSpring folks have added support for both features!

There are still a few smaller issues I have with the service.

1. There’s no automated way to handle a storefront. In other words, you cannot go to https://sites.fastspring.com/secondgearsoftware and be presented with a listing of all of the products presently available. There workaround for this is to create a container product that lists all the available products, but I’ve never fully grasped how to do that and get it to link to that root URL.
2. I am always struggling to find the documentation linked on the FastSpring Web site. Once I do find it, it’s hard to read as the images are blurry, the typography and spacing is a bit of a mess and periodically there is yellow highlighted text that just burns my eyes. I’m not sure why the FastSpring Web site is so cluttered and messy, because Springboard is fairly clean.
3. Styling your store has a messy workflow. The process involves downloading your template as a zip, making changes locally, uploading it to the Web and then checking it to make sure it renders right. If not, make more changes, upload fresh copy. At a minimum I’d like the option to edit the HTML and CSS in Springboard, but I’d prefer a drag & drop experience a la Squarespace.

None of the issues outlined above are things that bother me on a daily basis. In fact, I can unequivocally recommend FastSpring as a merchant provider for any Indie Mac development shop. If you’d like to see it in action, check out the my product ordering pages:

• Today Order Page
• Check Off Order Page

(via @rentzsch)

But my interest remains, as ever, in the quality of the apps, not the quantity. Let’s say that when the dust starts to settle in this market, Android winds up with far fewer total apps than iPhone OS, but they’re of generally higher quality. That would make Android the Mac to the iPhone’s Windows. I would switch to that platform. (Feel free to substitute WebOS for Android in the above hypothetical.)

While there may be half a dozen Netflix queue management or bowling scoring apps on the AppStore, it doesn’t mean any of them are actually any good. In some cases the choices are so bad that it leaves a poor taste in my mouth and has me contemplating another platform that isn’t run amok with low quality solutions and “me too” software.

10/15/09 3:09:25 PM Check Off[197] *** -[NSCFDictionary unregisterHotKey:]: unrecognized selector sent to instance 0x1086b00 

unRegisterHotKey is a method in SGHotKeyCenter and it certainly isn’t related to SCFDictionary, NSCFString or any other method I saw it being applied to.

I fumbled with this for a while thinking that i had made a change in my code somewhere to cause the memory to be smashed a bit too soon, but kept coming up with no logical conclusion as to why the code worked without issue in Snow Leopard, but failed miserably in Leopard.

Long story short, I found the answer on the objc-language list from Bill Bumgarner:

The problem is that Clang generates the wrong write barrier for the global assignment; right for Snow Leopard, incompatible with Leopard.

If you look in SGHotKeyCenter, the sharedInstance is indeed a static global, and is being eaten alive far too soon by the collector.

...
static SGHotKeyCenter *sharedCenter = nil;

@implementation SGHotKeyCenter

+ (void)initialize {
...

There are two workarounds for the issue:

1. Switch off of Clang until the issue is resolved by Apple. GCC 4.2 works just fine.

2. Use NSGarbageCollector to disable collection on the pointer after assignment.

   [[NSGarbageCollector defaultCollector] disableCollectorForPointer:sharedCenter];
   

Hopefully this post will help a few other developers not waste a day’s work trying to figure out what was causing such a weird error.

Here’s your Radar:

• rdar://problem/7326965

1. It is absolutely gorgeous, especially compared to Kindle.
2. Native PDF rendering is a major boon for likeminded folk who purchase tech books as PDFs.
3. The geek-factor of it being Android factor is a plus.
4. I am somewhat hesitant on the LCD’s scrolling performance based on video I’ve seen.

My desire to buy a Nook on-the-spot has unfortunately made the the DRM issue plaguing these devices even more apparent. I am hesitant to throw my weight behind either Nook or Kindle because I don’t want to be locked into a single hardware platform solely because I have invested myself into their proprietary book format.