Using Patronage to Finance Apps

25. November 2015 · Categories: Software

When Marco Arment decided to make his podcasting app Overcast free and ask for donations instead, there was some pushback that it would destroy developer pricing. Actually I believe that it is a viable model for popular apps, but that it will have less impact on developer pricing than free-to-play games.

Patronage basically changes the motivation to pay from “I want to use the app, so I pay” to “I am feeling better when I support this app”. Patronage will normally deliver less revenues, as only some of the people with a money surplus will pay, but then often more than what the market price would be. It requires a large base of affluent users that could become patrons to generate a good amount of revenue. So it is a viable business model for apps that deliver good value to a lot of customers. It essentially leaves a lot of money in the table, and when the value delivered is much greater than the cost to provide it, it suffices to have a small percentage of users supporting the development.

As could be already seen in the popularity of Pocket and Instapaper, such markets delivering huge surpluses are an attractive target for Venture Capital. VCs want to make money, so they attempt to corner the entire market so that they can extract money from ancillary services thanks to their market position. This is also why the influence on other software markets is more limited: Patronage only works in markets that are also attractive targets for VC founded companies, and is in my eyes vastly preferable to having a market dominated by a rent extracting startup. I simply trust the users to do better with their saved money than what a rentier would do with his surplus.

Electric Cars and Range Anxiety

16. November 2015 · Categories: General

Because car batteries are unlikely to get much better energy density, we will probably have to accept that electric cars will typically only have a range of about an hour, since batteries will be too expensive otherwise. I believe that people would actually accept this provided there is a wide net of charging stations available that allow you to charge the battery within five minutes. There are however two problems that would need to be overcome:

  • Along the motorways, we would need to have either charging while driving, or enough stations to handle the 10000 cars/h we can have during the holidays. Assuming 120km/h speed and 5m per hour recharge, that would amount to stations with 70 fast chargers every 10km. 
  • To drive for an hour at a reasonable speed, you need around 25kWh. Assuming a loss of 5% during charging and five minutes, this amounts to 15kW heat that must be removed.

It shows that for electrical cars to take over, a lot of infrastructure will need to be adjusted.

A9 Performance Details

26. September 2015 · Categories: Apple

If we look at the GeekBench scores of the 6s in detail, we see clearly see where the improvements come from. Memory copy is roughly 45% faster, this indicates that Apple has done a good job improving the interface to the main memory. Taken together with the now 3MB of level 2 cache, it is no surprise that the LUA scores have made a huge jump, with the interpreter causing a lot less misses. The AES scores see the lowest improvement, since it is almost completely hardware accelerated, and so only profits from the increased frequency. It is also noteworthy to see the improvements in SHA1 and some of the filters; these indicate that Apple must have improved the pipelining of a few commands, reducing the stalls from waiting for a result to arrive. I believe these pipeline stalls are also behind Apples push to have apps stored in an intermediate form on the App Store, this would allow Apple to change the processor behavior even if it meant that code optimized for an older processor would run slower.

70% Performance Jump With A9

11. September 2015 · Categories: Apple

There is one number that leaves me scratching my head from the Apple Event: the 70% performance increase for the A9 processor. This is an astonishing jump in performance given that Apple was already using a 20nm process for the A8. It will be interesting to see how this increase is achieved. Possible avenues are more cores, higher frequencies enabled by better controlling leakages, and better optimized logics. Given that Apple has already caught up to Intel in performance per cycle and core, I would have assumed that Apple would have continued with the slower pace set by the A8. 

Modern Cameras

04. September 2015 · Categories: Photos

The problem with dedicated cameras is that they have a very dated interface that is not for modern times, and that for simply sharing an impression the quality of the smartphones is already overshooting. So dedicated cameras are now only for people seeking to snap great photos, and willing to put up with a lot of annoyances to finally share those photos. 
To share, the connection must be wireless, and once set up, pictures must appear magically on the smartphone: you want the experience to be: shoot on the camera, quick check on camera, pick up phone to share the photo. Allow for automatic posting to be configured on the phone. Spending 30 seconds to move a file via memory card is simply too much, not to mention not even possible with most phones.

The issue is of course that it is impossible to achieve this kind of integration without help from the smartphones, that they must provide a way to implement background transfers. The technology is there, but it must be supported by Google and Apple. Apple actually has implemented everything to make AirDrop a reality, it would need to provide a way to extend it to third parties. Of course the camera makers have lost the influence to get these connections made.

The user interface of the cameras is also pretty problematic, especially since they have now so many options to configure instead of allowing us to concentrate on the artistic process of creating impressive photos. As an intermediate step one should move everything not typically changed during shooting to the much better interface on the phone.

iPad Midlife Crisis

15. August 2015 · Categories: Apple

With slowing sales for the iPad, while the iPhone is going from strength to strength, Neil Cybart wonders if it has already plateaued, if it turns out to be a consumption device for the web and Netflix, and not a computer to replace the Mac. 

I actually believe that the iPad is loosing sales because the iPhone is supplanting it as the better consumption device, that the 6 plus is the device those iPad mini owners really wanted, and that the iPad has not yet improved to the point where you can do more complicated tasks easily.

While Apple will support running two apps side by side with iOS 9, it still has work to do to replace the collaboration that is enabled in a crude manner by the file system on PCs. Add to this that the App Store is not very supportive to financially support quality applications, not to mention the risk of censorship by Apple, and we are not seeing many new, great apps: iPhoto discontinued, and I do not remember any great new apps since Pixelmator, OmniGraffle, Paper. 

On the hardware side, I believe we slowly realize that the iPad is portable, but not mobile computing, and that it is therefore reasonable to trade a larger surface for better productivity, and accept a bit of extra bulk as the trade off. The trouble is that the threshold for something you can comfortably hold in your hands for longer periods is roughly 400g, maybe 500g. Once we are able to buy an iPad with whole day battery life and a 12″ screen area for this weight, it will replace most PCs and Macs in use.

Give me a Huge Monitor

05. June 2015 · Categories: General

Spending a lot of time in front of a computer, I’d really love to have a larger monitor than my current 27″. The options for this are not very good, there is the Philips BDM4065UC, which is essentially a 40″ 4K TV-display with display port input, but it is far from being good as a monitor. For one thing, the screen is too high and not wide enough, as I find it easier to have multiple windows full height side by side. And the display is not optimized for monitor use, as it does not have square pixels and colors are not reasonably accurate out of the box. 

What I’d love to see instead is to see the technology used in today’s 27″ monitors applied to create a large monitor. It should fit within the 8 million pixels for 4K, so a good size would be 4200 * 1800 pixels, at 120 dpi. That covers 35″ by 15″ (89cm by 38cm), with a diagonal of 38″. 120 dpi is about the highest resolution we can have without a 100% scaling becoming unreadable, and the width allows us to have three or four windows side by side. 

If we want to stay with 110 dpi, a 24:9 format would be much more suitable, for example 1740 by 4640, that is 16″ by 42″ (40cm by 107cm). 

Prerecorded Phone Replies

04. June 2015 · Categories: Apple

The iPhone has a neat feature to reply to an incoming call with a prerecorded text. I find the standard texts pretty useless, and have them replaced with: Sorry, I’m busy. I’ll call you back in 30 minutes, plus variants for 2 hours, and tonight. I choose those because someone calling me typically does not want to know why I cannot respond, but when she can expect the call back. And I can explain the why in the phone call later, with more empathy.

Apple Watch Activity Rings

03. June 2015 · Categories: Apple

David Smith feels the activity rings are too hard to read. I agree, they are hard to discern between almost closed and closed. But I feel a better way to show this would be to have the last quarter of the ring fade out, and then restore it to normal again once closed. This is because we are much better at seeing differences than absolute values, and with David’s suggestion you would be hard pressed to see the difference between three almost closed and three closed rings at a glance.

  

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