Losing the battles but winning the war

Wow. 

Apple may have lost battles 1 (IBM PC + MS DOS) and 2 (Desktop GUIs) to Microsoft, but did they just win the war with their SDK?

Gartner says that 250 million or so PCs were sold in 2007.  They also say that 1.15 Billion (with a B) cell phones sold in 2007.

In 6 months, Apple has built a smartphone sales share roughly equal to Microsofts' (28% of US smartphones vs. MSFT's 31% vs RIM's 41%).

Microsoft makes $1-$2 per unit for the OS license for Windows Mobile.  They have no recurring revenue stream per unit.  Apple is making a profit on iPhones plus reportedly getting an $8/mo/user kickback from AT&T in the US.  One assumes they have a similar arrangement with other carriers in other countries.

Can Apple convince developers to build cool mobile apps?  Yup.  They've got a suite of truly modern development tools and a well-thought-out and documented platform for building them.  Ever looked at Microsoft's mobile dev tools?  Ugh.  And Visual Studio targeting WM5 or 6 is a damn sight better than the BlackBerry toolchain.  

More importantly, can Apple, by convincing folks to buy iPhones instead of iPods and instead of other smartphones, get to 10% of worldwide cell phone sales over time?

I think the answer might be Yes.

MacBook Air first impressions

So, we were lucky enough to get one of the first MacBook Airs delivered to us on Monday.

First impression: holy crap, this thing is an amazing feat of engineering.  It's more of an appliance than a laptop; it exudes the same kind of feeling as an iPhone.  It's a purpose-created device, not a general purpose computer.

Speed?  Yeah, it's not the speed demon a new MacBook Pro is.  But I'm not at all sure that matters.  With 2gb of RAM you get decent perf even with occasional use of VMWare or Parallels.  I do wish I could throw 4gb into it, though, which would be my only real complaint.

For a machine to drag around an airport, or to carry to a cafe and hang out, it's truly wonderful. It's also decent as a developer's machine; no it doesn't compile things as fast as an 8-core Mac Pro but I can't easily carry one of those in my bag.

BTW, all the nonsense about EVDO USB modems not fitting is truly nonsense.  My Sprint Novatel U727 fits just fine in the side slot, no extender cable needed.

My biggest criticism: no Firewire port.  Not for the inability to import video; but for the lack of Firewire target disk mode, which always gets a "wow" from PC users and is truly a lifesaver when you need to rescue something off a machine.

He comes in peace

Big congrats to DCJ over at Red Sweater (our favorite color, of course) on closing his purchase of the awesome MarsEdit blog editor supreme. As you might imagine, we're big fans of the name, and we'll be happy to have him on our side the next time those pesky Venusians come by and get rowdy.

Happy New Year!

Midnight is approaching us fast here in Seattle, and for some of our customers and friends in other parts of the world, it's already happened.

2006 has been a great year for us -- we launched our first two products, SlingShot and LifeBoat. We gave away a bunch of money to worthy causes, in keeping with our goal of giving away 6% of our profits to charities, including $1350 in one day.

What will 2007 bring? For us, we're hoping for more of the same. I'm hoping to bring out some updates to our existing apps, plus we have an idea for a cool new app (they say the third time is a charm :)

Here's to hoping all of you have a wonderful, happy, and healthy 2007.

Childs Play Day

As you might know, as part of starting our little Martian venture we made a commitment to donating part of our profits each year to charity. We've been extremely lucky in life, and we like to give back.

So I'm happy to say that we're going to be participating in a "Child's Play Day" tomorrow, December 7. A number of Mac Indie developers will be joining together and donating all our sales for the day to the Child's Play charity, which tries to make the holidays a little nicer for sick children. We will be donating all the proceeds from tomorrow's (Dec. 7th) sales of SlingShot and LifeBoat.

You can find more info on the Child's Play charity by clicking here, and see a list of all the other fine indie Mac software you can buy on Dec. 7 to support this cause over at the Mac Iron Coder site.

LifeBoat!

We've got a neat new little product to announce! Martian LifeBoat makes it really easy to keep data backed up &mdash just plug in a USB Flash Drive, and it will automatically make a backup of whatever files and folders you specify onto it for safe keeping!

LifeBoat allows you to define "LifeBoats", sets of files and
folders that get backed up each time a particular USB Flash Drive or External Hard Disk is connected to your computer. The instant the specified device is plugged in, LifeBoat automatically begins the backup process.

This is an example of a developer building an app we wanted -- it's really neat to just plug in my USB flash key at the end of the day and be able to throw a backup of my most important stuff into my jacket pocket a few seconds later.

Check it out!

Radio Silence

So, it's been a while since we posted. A couple of things have happened, including a big office move, a birthday, some health issues, and, oh, Apple released iTunes 7.0.

A few users reported a couple of minor bugs with SlingShot when using it with iTunes 7.0, so we've countered with SlingShot 2.0.3...take that, darned bugs!

....and some thoughts on the next 6 months

And some thoughts on the future:

1. We've got yet another product in the hopper, this one's a small utility that we think a lot of people could use. We're getting close to done with the coding, and then we'll need some testers to play with it. If you're interested, drop us a line and tell us you're up for helping out the testing (it's called Martian LifeBoat btw, in case you were curious :).

2. Yes, it's true that iTunes was just the first example of "per-app" sync we want to do with SlingShot. You can probably guess at what the next app is, and that we'd like to support as many of the iApps as we can.

3. Coming up real soon is IronCoder v2.0, being run by the honorable Judge Gus. If you've ever dreamed of being adored by hundreds of hot mac indie groupies (betcha never thought there were any :) and generally worshipped for your mad Mac OS X coding skills, this is the contest for you. Also there's like prizes and stuff. :)

4. We're 6 months into this whole indie thing, and it's truly awesome. We owe a huge thanks to all our customers who make us feel great and who help us pay the bills a little.

5. Almost forgot -- part of our business plan is to help make the world a slightly better place, and to try and pay back a little of the good fortune life has brought our way. As part of that, we donate 6% of our profits every year to charity. We've got several ideas, but if you've got a charity you admire that you'd like us to consider, please let us know.

Ok, back to watching the fireworks!

A July 4th Update

Ahh, Independence Day....the best day of the year to kick back and take a little stock of where we've been over the last 6 months and where we're going over the next 6. So here's a couple of completely random thoughts about this year so far:

1. We released our first product, SlingShot, and lots of you have downloaded it -- and more people than we thought have bought it (thanks for that, btw :).

2. We've gotten to know a couple of other cool Mac indie devs, all of whom work on cool stuff and are really supportive of each other. It turns out the Mac community has more than just a great set of end customers -- it has a great set of developers too.

3. We did a really cool update to SlingShot a couple weeks ago that added support for keeping music synchronized between two computers...this was actually the original idea for SlingShot, but it turned out that the iTunes integration was such a bear that we decided to do something smaller for the first release. Fortunately, it seems like people really like this kind of per-app syncing, so we're going to do some more of it (more on that below).

4. Wow, support mail is tough to get through. Every time I read a mail from a customer I feel a little like we've failed them in some small way. The flip side of course is that when you can solve the problem you feel (just a little bit) like a hero :)

SlingShot 2.0 has landed!

We're totally thrilled to announce that SlingShot 2.0 is finally here!

The major new functionality is the ability to Publish and Subscribe to iTunes Playlists -- so you can sync and backup your songs between computers.

What's great is that this was the original genesis of the idea for SlingShot. I have both a desktop and a laptop, and whenever I go on a trip I like to update the laptop with the latest music I've ripped from my CDs or bought off the iTunes Music Store. But copying the files over manually was such a pain -- now it's a few clicks away. It feels wonderful to finally fulfill even a small vision for a product, and to have been able to do it in only a few short months.

Check it out and let us know what you think! Thanks especially to all the folks who helped beta test this new version for us.

P.S. Guess what's the next major feature we'll be adding for version 3.0? Hint: it might involve pretty pictures...