Thanks to Tom Hesser for inviting me to be on the show. It was a blast!

You can read the review here:

http://www.iphoneappreviews.net/2008/12/13/lightastic/

You might also read the comments, I’ve responded to the review and provide a sneak peek of what’s in store for our little app.

You can check it out here.

While you’re there, check out some of the other amazing iPhone apps they’re featuring. I’m happy to find I own several that they show, and I found a few more great apps I didn’t know about at all.

Thanks, Apple!

The show just went live, and you can listen to it here. This particular episode focuses on using your Mac (and iPhone!) for managing your finances, and Victor thought Loan Shark fit right it. It’s good stuff, so head on over!

During the show, Dave (with whom I’ve had dust-ups before) claims that Podcasting in iTunes had nothing to do with why Ray Slakinski and I gave up developing iPodderX, the first true podcasting application. Of course, Dave never talked to Ray or me about this. He makes a blanket statement about iPodderX with absolutely no information whatsoever (something he regularly lambasts journalists for).

The fact of the matter is this: Yes, iTunes killed iPodderX, plain and simple. Here’s a graph of our sales:

As you can easily see, iTunes 4.9 with podcasting caused a precipitous drop in sales.

Sure, Ray and I could have pursued iPodderX for a while longer, and we debated long and hard about what to do. But, as usual, Dave is missing out on a couple of really important details.

First, unlike Dave, I’m not independently wealthy. Like most people, I need to work to pay the bills. Creating and distributing software for free doesn’t appeal to my girlfriend, my bank, or my mortgage holder, and while Ray and I would have loved to continue working on iPodderX, it simply didn’t make financial sense.

Second, podcasting is simply the reading of syndicated information, in most cases in an RSS feed. This means that podcasting clients are basically specialized RSS readers. In fact, iPodderX had already become a full-fledged newsreader long before iTunes 4.9. If we had kept developing iPodderX, we’d have had not one, but two 800 pound gorillas to deal with: Apple with iTunes, and Newsgator with NetNewsWire.

We had no interest in fighting these two behemoths; it’s not hard to see that we’d have gotten crushed. And, given that NetNewsWire/Newsgator is now free (and other RSS readers are following suit), I am more certain than ever that Ray and I made the right decision at the right time.

It’s funny that Winer uses this podcast to plug the “podcasting application” he’s working on himself. I wish him luck, but, as I survey the market, I know he’ll get very few users, and certainly not enough to make a dent in the iTunes hegemony.

iTunes won, Dave, but you go right ahead tilting at those windmills.

[Update: Here's Ray's take.]

[Update 2: Ray has updated his post to include graphical data from the iPodder/Juice project. Even though theirs was open source and free, their download count mimics our sales, and the release of iTunes 4.9 had the same effect on them.]

I’ll have more details soon…

There is nothing worse than a presenter who hooks up to a projector only to show the audience his cluttered desktop.

Thanks, JunkieBlog!

We’ll be talking about FoggyNoggin Software, of course, but I’m sure we’ll also be talking about my days helping get podcasting off the ground. It’s should be fun, and anyone can join in!

Get your product reviewed on TAB (The Apple Blog)

Normally, that wouldn’t be worth noting, except that as you read the article, The Apple Blog is actually asking product developers to buy a review. The price: $200.

Yes, for $200, you can get your product reviewed on The Apple Blog. I find this truly offensive. Paying for a review is essentially paying for advertising. Yet TAB, in what is very obviously a money grab, has decided that it’s going to disguise those ads as editorial content.

Now, Josh says that for the $200 he’ll review the product, and, in all fairness, he says that the review may not be positive. But that sounds like a huge conflict of interest to me, and one that I don’t think The Apple Blog can easily bypass. Does the word “Payola” sound familiar?

Any review on TAB can and should be called into question. You simply don’t know the motivation for good reviews. Is the review positive because it’s a good product? Or is it positive because TAB wants to continue collecting those juicy $200 review fees?

In my opinion, The Apple Blog has an obligation to its readers to denote which “reviews” are real and which have been paid for. Anything less is a complete lack of honesty and a huge disrepect for its readership.

Update: Gruber agrees.

Update 2: Looks like Josh has appended his original post saying that all “paid reviews” will be marked as such. Still, I think there’s a big conflict of interest and I don’t trust this. The best thing for TAB to do would be to swallow their pride and kill the ridiculous program outright.

Update 3: TAB issues an apology and abandons the idea.

Desktopple Pro

Desktopple Pro takes hiding your Desktop to the next level, and it adds features that make it a perfect accessory to all those Getting Things Done addicts out there.

Some of the new features

• Multiple Screen support, with separate settings for each screen
• Menu Bar dimming: dim the Menu Bar to help you focus
• AutoHide: Launch a specified application, and Desktopple will hide the Desktop automatically
• Menu Icon themes
• And much more!

Of course, you can check out the details on the product page.

Enjoy!