Have you ever noticed that sites that don’t let you pick security questions usually have questions that don’t have private answers?

• What was the name of your first pet / girlfriend?
• Where were you born?
• Hometown?
• Favorite Color?

Couldn’t any of us answer most of these about our favorite celebrities? Granted that might be a slight edge case, but chances are your friends, neighbors, and even some coworkers and classmates you don’t even talk to that often know the answer to these. Hell if you have your faceboook profile a little to open anyone can figure it out. And girls, using your middle name instead of your last name does not obfuscate you. Google yourself sometime.

I’m proposing some more reasonable defaults here: Things so secretive your significant other wouldn’t be able to unlock your account.

• How many wo[men] have you slept with as of [select milestone or timestamp]
• how many since?
• How often do you ignore a disabled vehicle clearly in need of assistance
• Where did you see the UFO in 1986
• How many times did a cop give you a “warning” for speeding
• When did you see Bigfoot
• What type of porn is the real reason you clear history / use private browsing
• You like Krabby Patties, don’t you Squidward
• How many times have you watched Grease, the movie, uninterrupted, alone, on purpose, and sang along
• What’s in the secret sauce
• Which child are you most proud of
• What everyday object has touched your genitals, then you saw someone else use (for its intended purpose) and kept quiet?
• Which one of his/her brothers/sisters/friends would you most like to sleep with
• Who has sexually harassed you at work (and you’ve kept quiet)
• What perfectly legal substances have you knowingly abused
• Who’s Timmy’s biological father
• Where are the bodies

By the way, you should probably hide if one of these questions made you uncomfortable or laugh a little to hard – it might reveal your secret and WORSE your email password.

I hope it’s common knowledge by now that anything out of the top 400 for its category has literally 0 downloads. While there are probably some good ideas regarding how to fix the “tailing off” problem of self fulfilling ratings, I’m going to focus this post on the idea that maybe if the app store were small enough to browse entirely through people might actually do so.

I’m proposing making the following changes to REDUCE the number of apps in the App Store.

Make Games a whole Separate App
I don’t think this requires any elaboration. Games are just too much of the App Store. That’s great. iOS is a great gaming platform. Acknowledge it already and move the games into a much improved Game Center store.

Reject anything that would better be represented in an iBooks file
News Stand and the entire “Books” category need to go away. Even the apps that DO do something novel (Al Gore’s ‘Our Choice’) can be done in iBooks author. Like games above, these categories should now be purchased from different apps.

Reject “iPhone Only” apps
The SpeedTest.net app works great in 2X mode on the iPad, but why do I have to do this to myself? It looks stupid. Apple wants to push quality. There are no “Phone only” features that developers have access to that can’t be checked against with the .plist device requirements. One of two-good things will come of this. Either SpeedTest.net and every bank ever will update their apps, or I’ll find a network speed test app that IS universal.

Reject “XL/HD” apps
While impractical to ban iPad Only apps (some ideas just can’t be minimized well) this is kind of the other half to banning iPhone only apps. If they are required to be universal, then there will be no “HD versions” of them now will there?

Reject non-retina Apps
They’re kind of doing this by requiring retina screenshots in iTunes Connect but you can trick it by just giving it any 960×640 image file.

Remove non-updated apps
This one is a little hard in the details, but I propose something like the day iOS 6 comes out, any apps that were built against iOS 4 (this does not mean apps that support iOS 4) will be removed and their status changed to “Rejected” until the developer provides an update built with iOS 6. I don’t know if this would affect a significant number of apps, but since enforcing this could be automated I don’t see why not to do it. It’s not like you’ll want to try running something built against iOS 4 on iOS 6.

Automate and Curate the “featured” lists
Create a much longer list of “featured” apps in each category, only displaying 20 or whatever at a time, and once any of those apps reaches to top 10 in its category remove it from the featured list and slide in the next app in line. Perhaps change the reviewer options on the backend to a simple Up Vote / No Vote / Down Vote if the app should get featured. Down Vote means it will not be added to the queue. No Vote will place it at the bottom of the queue. Up Vote will place it at the top of the queue (immediately below those already visible). If you are already in the queue and you submit an update, Up Vote will will move it higher in the queue. Down Vote will remove it from the queue if it was already there. No Vote will not bring it back down to the bottom of the queue.

Answering “No, it never deserves to be featured” will require and explanation on the reviewers part, and really, any explanation (your UI is slow, I know you don’t own those Pokémon sprites, etc) is probably grounds for rejection if Apple really wants to brag about having high quality apps.

Speaking of bragging, I do support Apple blacklisting cross platform apps from any featured sections (not rankings of course). Sorry Marco.

There are a few types of In App Purchases: Consumable, Non-consumable, and various subscription types. The recent (and ongoing) frustration is over games that use the Consumable type. Some games, like Angry Birds Space, use it for “ammunition”, while others like countless “something zoo something” games use it for in game currency that is otherwise hard to achieve. From the In App Purchase documentation:

• Consumable products must be purchased each time the user needs that item. For example, one-time services are commonly implemented as consumable products.
• You may not offer items that represent intermediary currency because it is important that users know the specific good or service they are buying.

All those semi-scammy zoo apps get around that “intermediary currency” rule because they don’t sell “200 Coins” they sell “Barrel of Coins” and “Chest of Coins”.

But why do we need this type? I won’t argue that it doesn’t make money (albeit perhaps mostly at the expense of children’s parents) but what’s wrong with the other models? Would you really tolerate if you had to buy your ammo in Halo 4 200 missiles at a time? Of course not. But I bet you’d be willing to pay once for new net maps or a bigger missile launcher that you could use any number of times. This is how the “mighty eagle” worked in the “classic” Angry Birds games: a one time purchase for something you could use over and over again, but otherwise didn’t NEED to complete the game.

To get off the topic of games, let’s look at Photoshop Express (no, not Photoshop Touch). It’s a free app that offers an IAP for more filters/effects like median blurring-err I mean “noise reduction”. This “freemium” app is very near the top of the top grossing without doing anything “evil” or scummy. Many have argued that is the tactic Instagram should’ve/could’ve used to generate its own income.

IAP are the closest Apple is ever going to give us to upgrade pricing, other than the “Coda 2” method. But we, as developers, need to use them properly. iDecorate 3.2, currently awaiting approval, offers new content as non-consumable IAP. You pay once, and you can use the new stamps as many times as you like on any of your devices. I’m not taking away anything from current users. I’m not not gouging with consumables. I’m not marooning non-upgraders with a static version forever (the worst part about the “Coda 2” method).

I hope we can all agree that for apps without server side components, all we need are non-consumable IAPs. The market is proving otherwise, but maybe we can persuade Apple to do the right thing.

Notes

• I purchased both Coda and Coda 2 from the App Store
• I have purchased the add ons for Photoshop Mobile
• Mighty Eagles are actually easy enough to earn in Angry Birds Space so they’re merely “less evil” than the zoo apps.

My Retina MacBook Pro is here and so far so good. Everyone else has said how great it is, how crappy non-retina Apps look (c’mon BBEdit, I complimented you in my last post), how stupid MagSafe 2 is (I use the adapter with the L-MagSafe 1 on the cinema display), etc. I want to talk about the reason I bought this thing: using three external displays.

The Hardware

• 24″ LED Cinema Display
• 24″ LED Cinema Display and Monoprice mini Displayport extension cable
• Dell 2007FP via HDMI to DVI cable
• one USB to the closer cinema display, hubbing to everyone else

The cinema displays are obviously 1920×1200 (since they’re the 24″ model) and that Dell is 1600×1200. I have a 1080p display hanging around too but I liked the idea of a consistent 1200 vertical pixels. The 20″ Dell is also Matte (contrasting with everything else) so it’s nice to have that for comparison.

My total external real estate is 1600×1200 + 2x1920x1200 = 6,528,000
“Best for Retina” is 5,184,000
“More Space” (like 1920 x 1200) is 9,216,000

Leaving the lid open on “More Space” with all the external displays connected pushes the GPU pretty hard and it causes the machine to behave a little like G5s. Idling to finder stuff, writing, low level stuff is completely silent. But, like the G5s, the exact second you hit Render or Compile the fans spin up and the moment the progress bar vanishes they go back to silent. Of course, with the display closed and only pushing the external displays, it takes more to get the fans to spin up, and they’ll be more quiet.

While I love my 11″ Air and will continue to use that as my laptop when I travel, the 15″ Retina MacBook Pro is very portable. I did go out and buy a 15″ Incase bag for when I change my mind. I don’t care how slim it is, 15″ (for me) is tabletop, not laptop. That is not a criticism.

The GeekBench score for this is over 12,000. My dual quad 2.8GHz 2008 Mac Pro from my day job scored around 10,500. That’s a hell of a lot of progress for four years. I can see now why Apple only needs to make 16 Core Mac Pro’s for render farms and not much else.

VMWare seems to be in need of better retina support. While I don’t expect Windows 7 to run perfectly at 2X, there is a problem with VMWare’s rendering. If you set the Virtual Machine’s display to say 3840 x 2400, VMWare rasters it down to whatever size your display is in POINTs, so it draws 3840×2400 in a 1920×1200 context and then that bitmap is then upscaled to 3840×2400 for the retina display. It looks bad, so I’m running my virtual machines at 1920×1200 rather than use a hiDPI mode (at least until VMWare addresses this. We’ll see).

I tried out AirPlay mirroring and found that by default it un-retina’s the onboard display and only draws at 1920×1080. While a little ugly, I suppose it gives it less work to do to send it over the air. It frustratingly also defaults to Overscan Compensation On. I hate Overscanning.

The iOS Simulators use retina pixels when using retina simulators (before they were giant, using your displays physical pixels). Non-retina simulators are displayed at the same physical size using pixel doubling.

The MagSafe 2 is my least favorite feature. The internet has done enough complaining about it so I won’t add to the noise. I will, however, suggest that MagSafe 1 should’ve been this size because that makes USB 2 the biggest port on the device. When the first MacBook Air came out it should have been clear that MagSafe 1 might be too big. Since I’m using the cinema display power, I have the adapter. It works well and I get to enjoy the L-shape.

After being quoted by Ben Brooks and Mac Stories, I’ve been getting some attention for my apparent singling out of TextExpander. So, for the record, I DO trust Smile not to do anything evil with my keystrokes. They’re not Google. And, as I’ve mentioned in other posts, I do use the Creative Suite and VMWare, both App Store “hold outs”. I trust all of these apps not to be evil, but that doesn’t mean they should get to be in the store as is. Apple doesn’t do exceptions. If they let TextExpander in they’d have to let an Angry Birds strategy guide that installs a keylogger in. If they let disk utilities in, they’d have to let that same “strategy guide” have block level access to the disk, and that’s not what anyone wants.

To all the Mac developers out there, if you’re app doesn’t “fit” into Sandboxing guidelines for a good reason (like your app has no functionality with those features removed) then go ahead, sell it on your site, and the additional traffic from blogs proclaiming you a white knight against Apple might just make up the difference in revenue from not being more discoverable in the store.

However, if you have one little feature (like you’re an email client that can’t scrape my iPhoto library anymore but can still do everything else) then please, PLEASE take a page from BBEdit and just make two versions and explain the difference to users. It’s really not that hard.

Today my Retina MacBook Pro arrived so I’m having all the fun of installing everything on a new machine. The App Store stuff was easy to install, but going around the web finding everything else (or using my archive of DMGs and ISOs) is less fun. While I love the pricing on CS6 cloud, now I have Adobe’s crappy update daemon installed. VMWare might be too close to the metal and they don’t complain when you redownload so they get a pass for now. But it’s nice to keep the list so short. I’m glad I’m not going around to Panic and BareBones and Pixelmator’s websites and digging up keys from some archive. Those days are over.

One more point I’d like to address is that when these apps “leave” Apple, not the developer, is screwing the users of those apps.
…
How many of these apps have free upgrades from 1.0 to 4.0? That’s what I thought. Current users “not getting a new version” is exactly what these developers want because the App Store doesn’t have upgrade pricing. If someone buys SomeApp 3.0 on the Mac App Store, then the developer says “4.0 is our site only” they’re still getting their upgrade money. And if they really wanted they could give users a way to prove owning an App Store copy to receive a discount (or just hold a 50% off sale when the new version comes out like VMWare does).

A year from now Apps aren’t going to be “leaving” anymore, they’ll be long gone since Sandboxing will have become “normal” rather than new. I bet the Mac App Store with it’s pro apps will be doing just fine, and I bet there will be (at least some) Microsoft and maybe more Adobe titles.

Finally, Sandboxing was not some secret. Apple has made it clear that this was coming. If it takes until you get that rejection email to realize this then one has to wonder about the developer a little.

—

If anyone from Smile is listening, I would use a TextExpander app for all my text expanding needs and have no problem pasting. We’re all pro users right? Pasting isn’t a big deal to us. You should still be on the App Store, and offer downloads to install the background service from the web, like BBEdit’s app store version does with their command line tools.

Ben Brooks on Andrew Munsell’s ‘Captchas Are Becoming Ridiculous’

The thing is (at the risk of sounding like a broken record) if you just charge every user for a sign up, then you never need to worry about captchas. Because even if a SPAM bot signs up, well you get paid and that’s not a sustainable model for spammers.

I pay the small monthly fee for access to Ben’s blog and it’s a great experience. Without ads or sponsorship, all of Ben’s content is just for me: the reader.

***edit a day later**

Oh yeah, I should probably say something about how I feel about Captchas. Just like attempting to curb piracy, all they do is piss off legitimate users. The robots will get into your system no matter what. People will pirate your apps no matter what. But I don’t believe in comments or any part of the internet that gives you anonymity so what do I know

Let me first start by saying I don’t think Apple would do a 16:9 device with 640 being concretely stuck a the “9”. 16:10, like most of the MacBooks, makes much more sense, and would be a nice even 1024×640 (isn’t that the Kindle fire 7 resolution?). However, there might be a more practical reason for 1136. UIToolBars, the most commonly used control, are 88 physical pixels on retina iPhones. 960+2×88=1136. An iPhone which was 1136 physical pixels tall would have room to run all current apps as is, with room for a UIToolBar above AND below (which also makes updating apps that have a UINavBar on top and a UIToolBar on the bottom such as Safari trivial to redesign). 44 logical pixels btw is the often-cited-as-of-late Apple UI guideline for touch targets.

Two points remain though.

1. With either resolution, putting this in landscape will be stupid
2. My hands are already too small to operate the current phone one-handed in portrait for anything other than poorly texting. Rather than a handicap I consider this a good way to test for women users, who don’t want a bigger iPhone

When the rumors were fresh, we all did the math and figured out if Apple squashed the home button and moved the speaker and camera up a bit there would be room for a new resolution without increasing the size of the device. They could also just black out the new regions when not being used and if the IPS panel was good enough you would think you’re using an iPhone 4 (we all know a black but on LCD looks like a black but on LCD).

The marketing on this thing is going to be really stupid too. “Taller, 16:9, but only 79% of the true HD 720p Nexus. Go buy that for watching movies”. No I’m not saying 720p is a good resolution for a phone. I’m just saying if you make a 16:9 device, it’s probably so videos “look better”, but they won’t because they’ll still be scaled no matter what. Let’s review the common 16:9 resolutions of web content:

• 1920 x 1080
• 1280 x 720
• 854 x 480
• 640 x 360

I have a better idea. If they’re going to make an iPad out of iPhone panels for the sake of making a smaller iPad, why not make an iPhone out of iPad panels? A slightly bigger device that is otherwise identical except being a little easier to read. I’m reminded once again of the iBook G4, available in 12″ and 14″ but both packing 1024×768 pixels.

Maybe a larger form factor gives them more battery and more room to support LTE. Honestly, I don’t care. AT&T LTE is virtually non-existant and Verizon LTE is still a list of metropolitan areas. It’s still a marketing pissing contest. I don’t need a 25mb downstream in areas that WiFi is likely to also exist. Cover the Appalachian Trail with LTE if you want to impress me. But in cities where WiFi signals compete with each other, we don’t need LTE yet. Uniform 1mbs nationwide would be much more impressive. My vacation drive up interstate 81 still had legit deadzones this year.

I guess it’s a round about way of saying it, but a taller iPhone doesn’t look cool. Shrinking it down to the thickness of a 4th generation iPod Touch would be cool.

I think I read somewhere that Office is en route to doing the whole gatekeeper signed non-app-store-app thing. Critics of the Mac App Store may see this as evidence as “well, if we need to buy Office directly from MS, why bother with the App Store for anything?”

I see it a little differently. As people are “forced” to use the App Store for system updates, iWork may become more visible. I can’t remember the source, but someone said that Microsoft’s mistake on iOS wasn’t NOT having versions, it was letting us learn we didn’t NEED Office.

The same holds true for Adobe. If not for Final Cut Pro X, Photoshop would be the only Adobe app I need (sorry Pixelmator – you’re getting there though). I prefer Coda to DreamWeaver, Final Cut Pro 7 to Premiere CS 5, and Final Cut Pro 7 to After Effects even (I only ever used After Effects because Premiere prior to Premiere Pro / CS couldn’t keyframe its way out of a wet paper bag). – Sorry, wasn’t meant to be a ‘I still feel burned by Final Cut Pro X’ post… I’ll get back on track…

Back on track, the important App Store holdouts for now are Adobe*, Microsoft*, and VMWare**, none of which I think have a problem with Sandboxing, just want 100% of revenue.

* Adobe and Office currently install a boatload of stuff outside the app bundle and have some shared frameworks between apps. In this day and age this seems kind of messy and too “dll hell” and I’d like to see them clean up a bit. As Adobe has included some titles in the App Store, I expect Microsoft to start with something free like the Remote Desktop Connect client.

** VMWare may lose from features I hate like system wide open-with-this-Windows-app and the Virtual Machine menubar item. But Virtual Machines themselves are the simplest example of the sandboxing content so I doubt architecturally there’d be any difficulty here.

I should probably mention that I stopped using Parallels the day VMWare came out of beta and never looked back. I’m doing the whole subscription thing for CS 6. And the only MS products I use are Remote Desktop Connect and an MSDN operating systems subscription.

If you caught iDecorate 3.1 on the App Store, I apologize. For reasons that are still unclear, my app store version just didn’t match up with my builds. For whatever reason (I think interlaced PNGs might be to blame) all of the free stamps in the app store version weren’t included in the bundle. No matter how many times I did a clean and build in Xcode they always showed up on my test devices.

At this point I’m blaming the general quirkiness of Xcode projects (the .xcodeproj file) and am starting with a fresh one. That doesn’t mean it’s not my fault for not doing more thorough testing somehow. I’ll throw in some more “free with any purchase” stamps I originally planned to sell to atone for these problems. If I submit this weekend Apple might hopefully approve by August 9th, which means it’s a neck and neck race with the delivery of my Retina MacBook Pro.

When you think about it, the apps that don’t get along with sandboxing are doing things I now realize I don’t want my apps doing. TextExpander for example works by being a system-wide keylogger. Apps that can use stuff from your iPhoto library do so by just reading it, with or without permission. Sure BBEdit can’t sudo-open (unless you run it as root) but it can still do everything else, and they let you install their command line tools from the web if you like. Panic and Pixelmator are making killings on the Mac App Store (Panic even “figured out” how to charge for upgrades).

So, when some email client I never heard of complains they can’t scrape my iPhoto library or TextExpander complains they can’t keylog the whole OS, I don’t care.

With Lightroom now going neck and neck with Aperture on the App Store, and Coda 2, Acorn, and Pixelmator making boatloads of money, I don’t think there is anything “wrong” with the sandboxing restrictions. And as long as apps run as “Coda” rather than “joemmac”, I know I never need to blame an app for system problems.