rackforms's comments

As far as our new environment: The scratchpad seems like a neat tool for larger code 'experiments', but to it's placement in the overall tools is puzzling. The Scratchpad and Console should be combined without needing to enable "Toggle split console", at least for bottom docking.

Firebug brilliantly combined these two to form the ultimate JavaScript REPL, doing so in the way that maximized available screen space (side by side). To replicate the same functionality the new system requires two space wasting windows spanning the entire width of the browser.

Also, and am I crazy here: but one of the commands to run code in the Scratchpad is Command-R. That just refreshes the entire page, which would appear to make it the worse short-cut in the history of modern software. The one shortcut to run code that does seem to work, Command-I, is incredibly inconvenient to type. Yes we have buttons, but shortcuts are nice too.

Overall though: Firebug was and has been a revelation. It's empowered me to write better code in less time, and I'm pleased to see it live on.

In my own experience then we've got Apple purposely cutting off vast swaths of potential buyers due to lackluster/irregular updates and high prices on one end, and seemingly unaware of a vast market for education and lower price users on the other.

A declining market is one thing but this, so far as it looks to me, is Apple simply throwing potential customers away. That's not riding a wave, it's just plain bad business. What am I missing here?

Started in 2007, profitable every year since.

Web-based form and application creation software offered both as a stand-alone purchase or fully operational cloud subscription. Currently outputs as PHP or C#, can be extended to just about any other language/platform.

Very loyal users, often generating excellent leads for software consulting projects.

Currently finishing up code for several partnerships including offline forms, workflow integration, and several others. The hope is these partnerships could bring huge wins in existing markets.

Want to sell for a simple reason: every year I tell myself I'll start marketing properly, and every year I ignore that and write code instead.

It's time to place this project in the hands of someone or some organization that can grow it into the powerhouse it can be.

If interested let's chat!

Chromebooks are fantastic products but I grew up in the Microsoft dominated 90's and hated it. It feels like Apple's almost trying to make itself obsolete in markets it once owned. Competition please!

I'm now running the latest version of FF, but still able to use my plugin.

Firefox really started to annoy me with its constant and needless updates a few months back; the tipping point being breaking almost all legacy extensions (in 46, I believe). This totally broke the Zend Debugger extension, the only way forward would be to totally change my development environment. I'm 38 and now, and apparently well beyond the days when the "new and shiny" hold value. These days I just want stability and reliability.

Firefox keeps charging forward and, as far as I can tell, has brought nothing to the table except new security issues and breaking that which once worked.

I haven't updated since 41 and you know what, it's nearly perfect. It's fast, does what I need it to do, and just plain old works.

Firefox appears to have become a perfect example of developing for the sake of.

I worked with Blubrry to create a new donate tag:

http://create.blubrry.com/resources/powerpress/advanced-tool...

If the feed supports this tag, a simple donate link appears in SkipCast and when tapped, takes you directly to the donate page. This tag can be supported by any Podcast client.

To me this is a clear win-win situation, though the feature depends heavily on adoption of simple, easy to use and deploy donation services, and of course the user supplying the tag.

One good example of the donate model working is the Crate and Crowbar podcast (PC Gaming). They created a Patreon and literally shut it down after a few months. The reason: they got hundreds in weekly, recurring donations and simply didn't need that much money.

Donations can work, and could be a huge boon to smaller, independent Podcasters. This could in turn ensure a healthy ecosystem that's more resilient to monolithic entities.

The price point deserves a more thorough write up. For now:

I released SkipCast last July at $2.99. Considering I had video playback, advanced audio effects (including skip silence), and lots more, I thought this was a solid fit for the current marketplace.

The result: In the next 5 months I'd get just 6 sales, 3 of which were from family members (thanks mom!). Total app store revenue: $18.

Of course I did my best to market the little bugger, and even added features as the result of partnerships with the aforementioned RawVoice. Press releases went out, Nada.

And so after 6 months, out of sheer curiosity I went totally free and saw my downloads SKYROCKET to ... 5-6 a day.

--

At this point then I had a choice. I ain't getting sales and I ain't getting free downloads.

And so I did what anyone with a lick of pride would. Charge real money. I literally did it to not get sales, as I wasn't getting them anyway. At least this way I'm not whoring myself out. Honestly, for how many hours I put into this project it felt wonderful to jack that price up!

The kicker: Since the price increase I've finally had enough sales to cover my developer fee, and I've only recently renewed for another year.

The reason? I think it's easy to see why.

For one, it immediately sets you apart in the app store. You're scrolling around and see a $24 app and you're bound to take notice.

Of course most will scoff, but, apparently, enough have not. It at least gets someone on my app store page.

Second, I make specific mention of the price in the very first line of the description, and later, actually mention the fact that I'm trying something different.

Look, the bottom line is in my naiveté I thought that in a potential marketplace of 1 billion users there was room enough for 15 or so Podcast clients. Turns our I was wrong. I can't control that, but what I can do is add my voice to the ranks who should stand up to cheep bastards who expect all software to be free. You want SkipCast, you'll have to pay for it.

Man it feels good to say that : )

If your Podcast feed contains the tag:

<rawvoice:donate type="text/html" href="URL HERE">Label</rawvoice:donate>

SkipCast displays an in-app link to that location with the text 'Donate'. Uptake for this feature has been quite positive.

I'd love to expand support for this to other systems and tags. It's an interesting little feature, and as an avid Podcast listener as well as app developer, hope content creators find success with it. It's quite literally the least we can do as developers.

Finally: Quick shout out to KATG, I've spend hours staring at your cover art as it was one of my favorite test feeds used when developing the app!

Also, to another reply a bit further down, I actually started fresh with a new domain about 6 months after the initial penalty, and used 301 redirects from the old (penalized) site to the new.

I did this to reduce confusion from my existing users, as their was no reason why they should have to retype or bookmark a new domain name. Sure I was going through a very rough patch, but my users should not have to as well!

I had a simple bit of logic that said if you were coming from the old domain, to pop up a message say hi, we had a name change. Not ideal, but that's the best I could come up with.

Little did I know that the 301 actually transferred the penalty to the new site. Shortly after launching I was hit with a second penalty, and the thought of having to change domain names again was just...it's just wrong. The inconvenience and confusion this creates for users is still being felt to this day. I routinely get emails from users of the first domain asking if I'm the same company.

So yeah, I've been trying here, but my lucks been pretty bad : )

A quick spot of history: I started my business in 2007. Organic traffic grew steadily until 2012 when I suffered a Penguin penalty that promptly wiped me off the map.

Until that point I had reached a steady 1 or 2 spot in organic rankings for the keywords that exactly described my product and service, which, considering the market I'm in had around 12 competitors (at that time), and considering my site was built for humans, had no keyword stuffing, and so on, felt, well, justified.

At very minimum if you were in the market for what my product did a visit to my site was a great experience. The site was fast, easy to read, well laid out, the product rocked, and so on.

I stress those points as the penalty left me reeling. I had heard about SEO before sure, but considered it a gross exercise in unnatural manipulation -- I would never go down that road. Hell, it took me months to realize I had a "penalty", and then several more to figure out it was from this thing named after an arctic fish.

And yet here I was penalized, and where my question comes in. I have a few small pieces of information that may be relevant.

About a year before my penalty I started a blog covering general product announcements and other items of interest to programmers. These items almost never had links, and if they did, would be directly related to the subject mater. As a concrete example, I wrote a post about learning SSE in assembly, and linked to an Intel blog post on the same subject.

However, I did allow comments on this blog at first, and exactly two times I logged in to find spam comments linking to discount shoes or handbags. These comments were promptly removed, and, after that second time, I disabled comments altogether.

Fast forward two years into the penalty (yes, two years in!). It's mid-2014 and I've been researching what happened. Turns out at the time of my initial penalty I had well over a million "back links" pointing to my site. All were from incredibly shady sites. Chinese language pages with literally hundreds of "form posts", 99% filled with absolute gibberish text. But within that mass of garbage would be a link to my site, the homepage no less, advertising discount Louis Vuitton handbags. The link would generally be along the lines of (broken HTML intentional) href = "formboss.net" > Discount Handbags </a

At first the scam seems obvious: If my site had links pointing to knockoff handbag retailers, then my high Google rank would transfer over...wait...huh?

See, that's where I get stuck. I see the individual pieces, but I cannot piece the scam together in any way that makes scene. The Chinese sites that linked to me, who in the world would be reading those? Further, they linked to my home page. Short of being hacked (which I never was), how would a home page link make sense?

The short-lived links on my blog: Sure, they linked to outside sources, and so conceivably my high rank would valuable, but why the 1,000,000+ inbound links to my site?

That’s the part that keeps me awake at night. The thing I had control over, the outbound links -- Zapped ‘em immediately. The damage clearly came from those inbound links, but they make no sense to me.

What was the game I played for?

A popup in AdWords says I've violated "Unsupported content free desktop software". RackForms Express is a free version of my flagship product, that one actually being advertised.

You're feelings may very well differ, but if I've clicked on a link, organic or ad, and I get offered a solution to the problem I was seeking an answer for, that seem like a pretty good deal. If nothing else, this differentiation may well be the difference between getting a sale or not.

The appeal process is to fill out this form: https://support.google.com/adwordspolicy/contact/advertise_s..., but from my reading in Google's product forms this doesn't always work. If this fails, the end result will be to remove free software from the net.

We're all for blocking those horrible "Download Firefox" ads, but this change, and the resulting aftermath, feels...I don't know, dangerous. If the end result is small companies like mine pulling valuable resources from the web, I think we all loose.

Fingers crossed my appeal goes through.

That said: the app sends basic notifications when in-app, user-initiated events of interest occur.

The server code is PHP, based off of this fantastic little tutorial: http://www.raywenderlich.com/32963/apple-push-notification-s...

I modified and use the code in the simplest possible way:

I created the API layer using my wonderful form builder software (https://www.rackforms.com). Yup, it's form software flexible enough to write endpoints. Check it out : )

The app sends simple GET requests to my server, which are in turn handled by the API job. If a notification is required, the API INSERT's a record into a MySQL table called push_queue.

The magic, I suppose, happens with a constantly running PHP script called push.php. This guy's monitored by a simple cron job that checks for its running status every minute. if it's down, cron automatically restarts the script. The notifications are not time-sensitive that 1 minute delays are a deal breaker, and of course any sent during that time are handled automatically when the script restarts.

APN Feedback is handled by a second one-the-hour cron job, which calls a simple script called feedback.php. A touch of code was added to deal with the core user's device token being removed for "followers" of that user.

Three Key Takeaways:

1. The entire server setup part took me about 5 hours, API code (which we'd need to write regardless) not withstanding. The biggest hurdle was the cron stuff, I shall never forget cron -v cron! Using a third-party service would have been almost the same time, I'd imagine. The best part is future projects will literally be counted in the minutes for start to finish notification server duties.

2. I got to use a language I adore (PHP), and learned a bunch with others I was quite new too (shell scripting, cron, etc).

3. Finally: No app is guaranteed success. I know many of these services have/had! generous free tiers, but after my first app (http://www.skipcast.net) and its frankly lousy performance, fool me once indeed.

If, by some miracle, this new app gains traction, sure, I'll consider a third party. Until then, I'll do it my self thank you very much.

In all -- a wonderful experience that I'm keen to tweak and learn more from at deployment time.

I dug around the net and found a working solution I could install on my own server, and now that's exactly what I've got: The experience of doing this on my own, the flexibility to grow as needed, and the code to implement again and again without needing anyone or anything else.

Building apps these days is a massive gamble for small guys like me. We often spend dozens of hours with little to no possibility of return.

Any action I can take that reduces stress points and increase my knowledge base, (and this would have been a massive stress point) I'll take.