Ok, so there is not really a war. Just difference of opinions.<\/p>\n
I wrote an app back in February called “Billing Hours” that essentially lets contractors keep track of their billable hours and expense entries and then either export that information as csv or a pdf report or you can invoice your customers. And it is fairly popular when I give it away free and it gets picked up by the right lists for that time period.<\/p>\n
Otherwise nothing. Its lost in the world that is now the mess of the AppStore. The press all but ignores me when I try to get them involved. They get a ton of new apps every day and I just haven’t got on the radar like I used to be for Windows Mobile. You really need to have ‘worked’ your way into the good ol’ boys club at like WWDC or because you came from the Mac World for them to give you the time of day, even with a good product. So without Apple noticing, let’s just say it hasn’t been a successful experiment yet.<\/p>\n
Now granted I wrote this app in just a few weeks. But I also gave it as many or more of the features than the couple of stand outs in this market had. And I gave it a very clean iOS7 look…. So while I plan on doing some updates to add a few more cool features that have been suggested, the product for a 1.0 was pretty darn good.<\/p>\n
So now Im standing back and watching the release of a very similar product, that actually took probably at least a YEAR to get out after it was announced. It looks over designed, overly cutesy, with not enough substance, which is what the developer is known for. He actually gives talks on how “simple” apps have to be, and so he hasn’t noticed that his products could be wildly more successful if he would do the same design, but not hold back features. This is a professional time tracker that’s main thing it has going for it is bouncy animations and cute little sounds.<\/p>\n
The UI is different and even nice, but the whole design seems to be based around switching projects every few minutes(or even hours). From my experience most consultants do not jump around from job to job during the day to necessitate this. They are lucky if they have 2-3 projects going at once, and have an extreme lack of focus if they work on several projects too often..<\/p>\n
But the guy is a self labeled “Influencer” in the iOS world. After all he did win a design award back when skeuomorphism was the rage. He has brown nosed his way into a bunch of journalists good graces, with his naive facade. “Oh I won a design award, you mean I shouldn’t take advantage of Apples WWDC college scholarship and should act like a real company now and let more needing kids go?” “What, you don’t think its fine that I have my new apps price inflated but I will give away promo codes for that price as a ‘contest’ to have people do my tweeting for me?” So I just am sitting back and watching what this kid with more contacts in the iOS world than me, who will likely get a bunch of unheralded praise for his cute buttons where they aren’t needed in a product that is overpriced for its feature set….. And hoping he discovers what I have, that it is a niche market with 20+ players already and he wasted hours upon hours more than I did to discover that fact….<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n
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