Developing Perspective

Latest Episodes:

#216: The Hustle. Apr 23, 2015

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Thinking through why I have such a hang up about talking about and asking for Money. Why this is probably not such a great thing for my business and what I might do to fix it.

My WatchKit Apps

#215: Insidious Features. Apr 17, 2015

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How to build little features into your applications that re-wire your user’s brains to come to expect a certain behavior. These ‘insidious’ features are a delightful way to help build loyalty with your customers.

#214: App Store Snowstorm. Apr 09, 2015

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Simultaneous Invention or setting realistic expectations for uniqueness.

Simultaneous Invention

#212: Four Phases of a Gold Rush. Feb 27, 2015

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In the run up to Apple’s media event on March 9th I keep hearing the phrase ‘Gold Rush’ over and over again. Today I unpack that concept and whether it might apply to the Apple Watch.

The Phases of Gold Rush:

The Rumor
The Legend
The Rush
The Reality

Luck = Opportunity + Preparation

There is unfortunately no shortcut to gaining expertise in a subject. You can only truly understand something by working on it, by immersing yourself in it, by building terrible prototypes and throwing them away. You cannot throw away what you haven’t made.

#211: Asterisk Free Marketing. Feb 11, 2015

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Prompted by some thinking I did around building the App Preview for Pedometer++, I start to wonder about honesty in advertising. How honesty should I be? What level of candor is appropriate, helpful, reasonable?

Building an App Preview

#210: Polymaths. Jan 30, 2015

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I’m not a huge fan of the term polymath. It sounds kinda pretentious but sometimes the best word for something is that way. Today I was struck by the wild variety of tasks and skills that it takes to run a business principally on your own. So I wanted to walk through some of disparate aspects of the ‘job’. Hopefully giving someone who is considering going out on their own some good food for thought.

My intention isn’t to scare anyone off, but just to help you understand the inherent complexity of this line of work, and an appreciation for the things other people handle for you in a J-O-B, job.

General Development

Software engineering
Bug tracking
Product Design
Release planning
Customer support
Version Control
iTunes Connect submission lifecycle

iOS Development

Objective C, Xcode, Interface Builder
Device and iOS version management
Photoshop, PaintCode
Testing / QA

Server Development

Ruby on Rails
Postgres
Memcached, nginx, redis
Queueing, sidekiq
Linux system administration, Backups, Security updates

Operations

iTunes Connect, contracts, payments,
Accounting, Taxes and banking.
Budgeting
Compliance, Local, State, Federal, Business Licenses
Benefits / Welness
General hosting, email, domains, etc

Marketing

Websites
‘Brand’, personal and otherwise
Photoshop
Marketing concepts and ideas
Microeconomics

#209: Not so Fast. Jan 23, 2015

Show notes

Today I walk through my history thinking about Swift. From WWDC to now I’ve done a lot of thinking about Swift as whether I should be using it. The result makes me feel a bit conflicted, but the brutally pragmatic part of me is winning out.

#208: Sam Soffes. Jan 15, 2015

Show notes

I take a break out of my normal 15 minute format for a return of my occational interview series. This week I’m delighted to talk to Sam Soffes about balancing your own product work with doing consulting, different ways of thinking about success and deciding what it is you want to do with your time.

Sam has been developing for iOS since 2008 and has worked on a wide variety of successful products. He is currently working on Whiskey, a Markdown editor for Mac and iOS.