Coffee

App Store pricing is back in the news again. These lines from Florian Kugler, quoted by Vinny Coyne, caught my attention.

We’re in the business of creating products which offer very little value to people. It’s our choice if that’s what we want to pursue.

No. A million times no. This may be merely splitting semantic hairs, but the idea that the product you create offers little value to your customer is not only wrongheaded but cancerously so. If someone goes to the trouble of downloading and using your product then it must have value for them. The problem is that they perceive it as having little value, in a way taking it for granted. I have lost track of the number of people I work with — people who make their living designing, pitching and managing the production of app — acting shocked and outraged when they discover developers charging for apps. These are people who know how much work goes into the creation of an app, both in terms of time and money. And yet they still treat the final result of all this work as being worthless. The problem of app value is one of perception, and it's a problem which the developer community needs to address.

UIButton states

UIButton allows you to set difference appearance properties (fore- and background images, title text and colour, and so on) to be displayed according to what state the button is currently in. What to my eternal shame I hadn't realised until the other day is that these states (selected, highlighted and disabled) are not mutually exclusive. This is mentioned in passing in the documentation for the UIControlState enum, but doesn't appear to be emphasised anywhere else. I blame the property-setting UI in Interface Builder for my confusion. It only allows configuration of the four main states, and not for combinations of states.

Misleading.

Combinations of states? Yes. So if you every wanted to set different disabled images for when the button is selected or unselected, you have to do the configuring in code, passing an ORed bitmask of states (such as UIControlStateSelected|UIControlStateDisabled ) to the relevant setter method.

2DO

Since I failed so completely with last year's Big List of Things to Do without suffering any negative repercussions, I thought I'd try again this year with an even longer list. Here we go:

• Publish the other couple of short stories which I've got almost edited.
• Start, finish and publish a novella (the one provisionally entitled "This is not a Game").
• Learn to juggle.
• Produce a work of interactive fiction (and in the process develop the game engine and tools to allow me to create more).
• Finish my re-write and iPadification of "Plaques".
• Write the script for a graphic novel (possibly just a short) and commission someone to draw it for me.
• Learn to snowboard.
• Write up the scripts for the couple of animated shorts I have ideas for (and maybe look at finding someone to make them).
• Learn to sail a boat.
• Find a form of storytelling which will actually attract readers/viewers (or whatever that particular media's consumers are called).
• Get the battery in my watch fixed.
• Consider what it means to be a creator trying to create in the current over-saturated, content-bloated environment.
• Design and 3D-print something.
• Enter as many writing competitions as I can find.

Plenty of suitably vague stuff there. I must surely be able to achieve at least one of them, eh?