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Mon, 20 Dec 2010 Like many other Mac developers, each December I try to take a look back at the past year, and look ahead to the coming year. Here are some of the highlights: Sales. Sales this year are on pace to finish about 15% higher than 2010. The main reason for this is greater success with promotions, specifically my participation in daily promotional offers at MacZot and in a software bundle sponsored by MacBundlePro. These promotions, while yielding only a small amount of revenue per sale, brought in so many new users for my program that the boost to my bottom line was substantial. I know there is some disagreement among developers about the value of these types of promotions, but in my case there's no doubt--they are a big plus. I'll be continuing to look for promotional opportunities in the coming year, as well. Improving the integration of my apps via custom libraries/extensions. If you've followed this blog at all, you know I've spent a lot of time this year working on custom Tcl libraries to access specific parts of the Cocoa/Mac API's: drag-and-drop, AppleScript/Apple Events, printing, icon display and manipulation, services, unified toolbar, and more. This has dramatically improved the user experience offered by my programs. The drawback, however, is that I have invested less effort in adding new features to my applications, nor have I developed any new products for my portfolio. Now that my software platform has more robust integration with OS X, in the coming year I plan to spend much more time on improving and adding application-specific features--and, finally, developing new applications. The Mac App Store. This change, announced in October, is very exciting: it offers the opportunity for a much larger audience for Mac programs, offering ease of searching and installation. I'm going to add most of my applications to the App Store, and development of new apps will be done with the App Store in mind. I'm hoping that this leads to a significant increase in sales for my products. Needless to say, I'm excited. Thanks for your support in 2010 and I'm looking forward to 2011! Apple's announced that the Mac App Store will be open for business on January 6, 2011, and have given developers a deadline of December 31 to submit their apps for inclusion on opening day. I'm busy getting a couple of applications ready to submit, and I hope to see them included for sale on January 6. I know I've been going back and forth on how, or even whether, to integrate the Mac App Store into my software business. I've arrived at what I think will be the best strategy for my customers and myself. What I've decided to do is to maintain two sales channels for my software: the Mac App Store for the majority of my programs, and my own website for all of my programs, including ones in the App Store and ones that wouldn't qualify. This approach means more work on my part, because I will have to maintain two builds of my software, one for the App Store and one for outside the App Store. I've had to make some significant changes in how my programs are built and structured internally as a result of this. But this approach is the best one for my customers. One, it will allow anyone to download demo programs of my software from my website; demo versions aren't allowed in the App Store. It will also allow those customers who do not want to purchase from the App Store to purchase from my site directly. Finally, it will provide continued upgrade support for my existing customers, who otherwise might have to re-purchase my products from the App Store. Apart from the work on maintaining two separate builds of my products, the App Store is also driving actual improvements to my apps themselves. Under the hood, I've replaced many functions that previously called to built-in command-line tools on the Mac with native implementations. For instance, instead of calling to the command-line "osascript" tool to run AppleScripts, I use a Tcl library that accesses AppleScript directly (one of the libraries I worked to update earlier this year). This is both faster than executing the command-line tool, and more stable; it appears to avoid the conflicts with third-party AppleScript extensions that have caused frequent crashes in some of my programs. I'm also calling into native API's to play alerts, check to see if certain programs are active, and more. In addition to speed and stability for certain functions, I'm also improving the UI of my apps by implementing a true "unified toolbar" appearance; I've submitted a patch to the core Tcl/Tk developers to make this functionality available to other Tk developers. The App Store represents an exciting opportunity, and I hope to see my apps listed there for sale starting on January 6. I'm working hard toward that end. |
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