ajlburke's comments

Sort of off-topic, but the big banner picture at the top has a lot of obvious Photoshop rubber-stamping in the bottom left around the edge of the crater. It's presumably covering up blank bits from the photo stitching, but I worry it'll inspire conspiracy types.

(For the record, I think it's easier to land a bunch of people on the moon than to fake it convincingly with 1960s special effects and then successfully cover it up for 45 years.)

Looks cool - but coming from being in a similar automatic-diary iOS app space (Remembary), I'm really curious about your business model.

You have a team of 9 people and you've been working for 2 years - presumably costing well into the six (seven?) figures by now? Outside of Angry Birds and such, making serious money is pretty difficult in the App Store these days. Freemium for something as personal as a diary is tricky, since advertising is obviously a no-go - are you charging for the hosting? Is there a time limit?

I'm just a solo dev working on (and promoting) apps part-time, and you're VC-funded and have a whole team including someone who was "head of revenue for CityVille at Zynga," - so presumably you have something clever up your sleeves. I'm just curious.

I'm sure Momento and Day One make good money, but that much?

For those who don't know French (approximate):

Candide asked the Turk, "Do you have a vast and magnificent estate?" "I only have twenty acres," the Turk replied. "I cultivate them with my children; The work wards off three great evils: boredom, vice, and want."

- From Voltaire's "Candide" - one of the more fun (and short!) 'Great Books'.

Yeah but what happens to the pigs in the end? Chickens are still around afterwards to lay more eggs.

I"m really going to miss the Roy Building when they tear it down / turn it into condos. I can't think of a better place to host your early-stage startup / indie dev office in Halifax: prime downtown location, relatively inexpensive rent, flexible terms, "Maltese Falcon" 1940s decor. I've had two offices there, but eventually moved on (just across the street though).

That would be "Desert Bus" - an attempt to make the worst video game ever. Of course people have formed leagues and tournaments to play it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penn_%26_Tellers_Smoke_and_Mirr...

"Wobbler had written an actual computer game like this once. It was called 'Journey to Alpha Centauri'. It was a screen with some dots on it. ... He'd seen on TV that it took three thousand years to get to Alpha Centauri. He had written it so that if anyone kept their computer on for three thousand years, they'd be rewarded by a little dot appearing in the middle of the screen, and then a message saying, 'Welcome to Alpha Centauri. Now go home.' "

- Terry Pratchett, Only You Can Save Mankind

Nice post-mortem of a quirky bug. I think we're only going to be getting more problems as web services can change their APIs instantly, while iOS apps have a build-test-deploy cycle measured in weeks.

Don't get me started about Facebook

Well, it was a very positive review. http://appadvice.com/appnn/2011/01/remembary-great-ipad-jour...

But yes agreed on getting to know press people - although it's a balancing act to not seem too creepy while being friendly.

Sure - although the amount of upfront work required varies with your definition of "Minimum" and "Viable".

I've done full-cycle apps with branding, architecture, UX, QA, promotion, etc. and yes they start at $30k - but they're finished polished products, while the discussion here seems to be about MVPs.

As I said above, the biggest conflicts I see between developers and clients are over the meanings of "Minimum" "Viable" and "Product".

Getting a good review in AppAdvice completely changed the fortunes of my app, especially because after that Apple started noticing it too.

However, AppAdvice is one of the biggest review sites out there, and reviews on smaller sites didn't have anywhere near as much impact. Also, getting that review was really lucky, and I haven't been able to recreate that magic since.

That said, as a single-person developer, I've found that I need to spend as much time and energy on hustle and promotion as I do on development and testing - and even with that I've only been moderately successful.

His quote does seem a bit high. In my experience (Rails and iOS developer) if your back end is mostly RESTful resources and a simple data structure, and your front end is standard iOS components like simple tableviews and a NavigationController, you can get an MVP done in the $5k-$10k range in a week or two.

HOWEVER: everybody has a different opinion of what is meant by "Minimum", "Viable", and "Product". $5k gets you only bog-standard UI components and a simple data model. Animations? Fancy graphics? Optimized performance? Search? Custom UI? Graceful error handling? Localization/Internationalization/Translation? Integrating with Facebook and dealing with their constant poorly-documented changes to their API? These tend to be little bullet points in the spec, but each on their own can take as much work as the MVP does.

With modern tools it's pretty easy to build a basic version of an app quite quickly. But it turns out that most people don't actually want a basic version. Often they have to see the basic version first to realize that, though.

So the question ends up being: how important is schedule/cost to you compared with details/performance?

To be honest, though, most people who come to me wanting a simple iOS app are better off with a mobile-optimized webapp instead. Much quicker to build, already cross-platform, and no deployment delays while waiting for App Store approval. Mobile apps might not be as sexy as a native app, but saving lots of money is also pretty sexy.

I had heard about how cool MIDI was, but wasn't blown away until I saw a demo of MAX back in 1992. MAX let you generate and re-wire MIDI signals in real time with a simple but powerful graphical interface (it's still around and now does real-time DSP audio and video processing too).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_(software)

Later that year I got my hands on a synthesizer and a copy of MAX and it became the first 'real' programming that I did. The real-time feedback made it easy to learn and debug, while its graphical nature made it highly prone to actual 'spaghetti code' unless I properly modularized everything. I quickly learned that I was a better programmer than musician - so I set up MAX to 'cybernetically enhance' my own playing.

If it wasn't for MIDI's fairly simple protocol and MAX's powerful tools built around it, I might not even be a programmer today.

That's funny - but our current PM Stephen Harper isn't exactly a towering paragon of liberty and justice. He also has much more direct power over how the country works than Obama or Romney.

... although there's a great discussion to be had about free health care making it much easier to be a startup/entrepreneur/freelancer.

Congratulations! I think sync is much easier when it's done up front rather than bolted on later.

I'm wondering if sync might have stalled the Momento guys - they had big plans for Android and iPad versions but haven't brought anything out besides small fixes in over a year. (Disclosure: I'm in the iOS diary space too).

Shameless plug: you might like Remembary (http://remembary.com/) - it's based more around writing in your diary, but it also pulls in Twitter and Facebook and RSS feeds like Momento. It also automatically finds the pictures you took each day, and puts any geotagged stuff into a no-work-required map. It automatically fetches your calendar entries (well actually it doesn't at this exact moment due to an iOS6 bug but it will in about a week), It doesn't have a desktop client but it was originally built for iPad and now has an iPhone version. It has a manual data export/import option instead of 'syncing' but I decided that privacy is more important than seamlessness. It doesn't really have tags or address book integration, but given your other other requirements I think you might find it interesting.

Looks nice. I'm curious though: the site mentions that everything is synced through the Cloud. Did you use iCloud or is it a home-grown solution - or something else? Sync is hard - and I've found iCloud sync in practice is still pretty hard.

I've found audiobooks work really well - there's no screen glow to keep you up and most players let you set up a shutdown timer.

The Audible edition of Gibbon's "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" has worked really well for me: it's a fascinating panorama of history, but very episodic so you don't miss out on plot points if you actually fall asleep; the writing style is clear, elegant, and often funny; and the narrator has a calming voice and a smooth even tone throughout all 1300+ years of history so you won't be jarred awake by changes in volume.

Good to know they're still there - too bad they haven't expanded much though.

I saw similar booths in the Munich airport a few years ago, where they were called "NapCab". I had had a rough overnight flight and a messy transfer in Heathrow, a six hour layover in Munich, and of course server problems came up while I was in the air - so a small private room with calm lighting, power, and an internet connection was a godsend.

It worked with a credit card and cost (IIRC) about 15 euros per hour (10 euros/hr in the evening). There was a touch-screen for setting lighting, audio environment, and a wake-up alarm. It also had a bottle opener and a bottle of water. When you're finished, I gather that janitorial staff are notified and the NapCab is cleaned up and restocked for the next person.

Their website doesn't seem to be active anymore, so maybe the company didn't succeed - but here's a not-very-good picture of what mine looked like:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/26099052@N03/4733241817/in/set-...