Weblog

Apple's Mac App Store

Sun, 07 Nov 2010 22:49:11 -0800

While presenting the next Mac operating system, Lion, Steve Jobs announced that Apple is bringing the App Store to the Mac. This has caused a flurry in the blogosphere regarding the pros and cons of such a move. I won't rehash such arguments here but simply say I am on the fence as to how beneficial such a store will be to us as developers.

One question I feel our Mac-based customers will be wondering is if Cadent wineCellar will be moving to the new App Store and what effect that will have on the current wineCellar licensing.

First off, let me say that we are committed to supporting both Mac and Windows versions of wineCellar. As such, we have to continue offering wineCellar in its current form to our Windows-based clients regardless of what we do on the Mac side. That being said, there is no reason to not keep offering the Mac version this way as well. If we do go into Apple's App Store, that will just become another sales avenue.

There are three big differences between what we do now and the App Store:

iAd Sponsored wineCellar

Fri, 13 Aug 2010 11:55:49 -0700

Over a year ago, I wrote a blog indicating no interest in following the advertising model for getting income. I have taken a lot of heat over that one (being called old-fashion or out-of-date primarily). Well, to try and "keep up with the times", I decided we will do an experiment and try out Apple's iAd program with the mobile version of wineCellar.

As seen in our News/Events section, wineCellarAd has been launched on the App Store and is an iAd sponsored version of wineCellar. We did this quietly a couple of weeks ago to see how the whole system works (remember, we are new to this ad-based approach).

Watching the ad statistics has been, well, disappointing. Here are some current stats:

Though there are ad requests coming from many countries from wineCellarAd, only two are being served any ads at all: US and UK. Everyone else gets to use wineCellarAd ad-free (so much for being ad-sponsored!)
In the US and UK, we are only getting between a 40% and 50% fill rate. That means that even in countries which are getting ads, less than half the times the app asks for an ad is it getting one.
The overall fill rate, taking into account all countries, is only 8%.
Click-through rate is currently sitting at 0%!!! That means no one who has received an ad has clicked on it.
Let's be honest: a wine cellar app is not nearly as popular as say a fart app or flashlight app so getting an ad rate into the thousands is very difficult. Add in a fill rate of only 8%, and getting to even 1000 impressions is near impossible.

The lesson for me here: as I wrote before, the ad model is certainly not for everyone. If you are a viral or popular app, then yes you can make some money from being ad sponsored. If you are a niche market such as we are, then ads may not even buy you a latte.

Developing a quality product takes time and support (and latte's). This is especially true in a niche market such as ours. Using an ad-based model not only does not provide much/any income to support development, it is actually quite demoralizing to see all those zeros on Apple's iAd stats page while you are trying to help someone requiring support.

Dropped the Ball

Thu, 01 Apr 2010 11:40:32 -0700

Wow, have I ever dropped the ball when testing the Mac version of Cadent wineCellar! For over a year now I did not catch a very obvious bug which must have aggravated many users who were trying out Cadent wineCellar for the first time.

Basically, when you first start wineCellar, it creates an initial default database for you to use. This "was" supposed to be created under your Documents folder on a Mac. An oversight on my part left this default location hardcoded to be the Documents folder for the user "doug"! Since I expect most users our there do not have a username doug, this completely broke wineCellar for everyone on a Mac when it is first launched. Two main symptoms: 1- popup menus on the Add Wine screen would not initially work, and 2- wines do not get saved. This second one is especially bad and I am amazed this did not get caught until now.

If you create a new database using File->New Database or open the sample database using File->Open Database, then things would correct themselves and all would be well. I can only imagine that this is what current Mac users have been doing.

iPhone App Out, Now What?

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 15:51:31 -0800

As you can see from the news section, the iPhone version of the wineCellar application is available on the Apple App Store. This brings to a close a personal objective I had of creating 4 supported platforms for the wineCellar app:

MacOS 10.4+ version.
Windows XP+ version.
Web/Cloud version.
iPhone version.

Now what? Well, there are many suggested enhancements to the app I can now pursue. Also, having all 4 platforms fully up and running creates a nice starting point for new apps and services I can base on this architecture. And let's not forget about the original product, monitorLite! There is a lot I want to do with that product but have not had time yet!

In many ways, getting to this point is really just the beginning of where I have been trying to take Cadent's product development. It has been a long road slowed down by the need to do contract work to keep things funded. It would be a total dream to be able to stop the contract work and just fund everything from product sales. Here's hoping that 2010 makes such a transition possible!