TamsPalm - the Palm OS Blog

My friend Tobi at Palm’s has undug the following press photos of the blue Centro for your enjoyment - click on any of them in order to feast your eyes on a bigger version. Finally, developers may also like the one with the white screen - it can IMHO be used to create mockups of your app running on an electric blue Centro:

A big thank-you goes out to Tobias Kuderna for providing these images!

The PalmGear -> PocketGear merger has caused pain and agony for many developers(I have heard many horror stories, and also had my fair share of bad experiences). However, the story sent in by developer Dan Nabutovsky truly puts morphine icing on the valium cake developers need to stay calm - read on:

Ok, here is my story. Hope this helps me.

At the end of 2007, palmgear created new site, Pocketgear.com. My program has not been moved to the new site. After a careful search, I found the following sentence in their site:

“While we have eliminated much of the outdated and freeware listings, actively selling current titles have been migrated to the new PocketGear.”
(http://www.pocketgear.com/en_US/html/developersGuide.jsp)

My application (Agushka Backgammon) was neither free($9.95) nor outdated (I upgraded it at the end of 2007). Its last sale on palmgear.com was on October 10, 2007. It is also remarkable that they removed freeware programs, while at the same time they claim to “provide our customers with the premiere place to go for all of their smartphone content.” As we all know, customers just hate freeware.

Nobody bothered to inform me about my application not being accepted at the new site or about a new site at all. Pocketgear.com simply told that “There is no customer with the e-mail address you specified.” All my e-mail requests about the issue were ignored. I should myself discover what happened and how to get into my developer address (throw developers.palmgear.com)

For some obscure reason, sales of my application stopped on palmgear (but continued on handango). This is in spite the fact that my application can be found on palmgear or pocketgear as easily as before.

I don’t see why should I keep an application which, according to pocketgear.com, does not bring any revenue. Therefore, I disabled it, but to no avail: it is still visible on palmgear. My emails about the issue were ignored.

Finally, I decided that I am fed up with palmgear. I increased the price from $9.95 to $19.95 and wrote them to remove my application because I have copyright on it. They, guess what, ignored my emails, AND they did not increase the price. Here I am, totally pissed at them, and don’t know how to get rid of this site.

Even though I personally can not complain about them ignoring my emails(of course, being the webmaster of a Palm Os web site does help a bit); many of the things Dan reports have also been confirmed to me by other (big) developers immediately after the switch.

Anyways, I have now forwarded the whole story to my contact PalmGear and expect a reply soon(will be published here). As always, MobiHand remains a cheap and unproblematic alternative; HandAngo remains expensive as always(but also is said to work well).

Do you have any horror stories to share? If yes, please send them to Tamog@gmx.at and I’ll see what we can achieve together!

Jan Slodicka from Resco’s has just informed me that his excellent Photo Viewer has seen an update!

Version 3 of the program improves the product’s fax support, makes cropping easier and is significantly faster when handling large folders. Owners of Treos with a green “call” key also get a new feature - they can now use this key in order to open the context menu.

People who have purchased the program in last year can get a new unlock key for free by following the procedures outlined on this web page. All other Resco Viewer owners must pay 50% of the regular price - more information on this option is to be found here.

Apparently, the idea of sending shady/invalid cease-and-desist letters didn’t grow on the minds of a few people who don’t quite understand English - it looks like the principle of trying to shut up journalists and bloggers seems to be pretty wide-spread.

A company called MobiTV sent a cease-and-desist letter to Howard Chui of HowardForums - and got fillips from literally hundreds of analysts.

If there’s one advice that you I beg you to take from me: never attack an analyst unless you are 100% sure you can take him down quickly and without anyone noticing. If you cannot get the guy offline immediately and for good(which is highly unlikely), rest assured that you’ll receive massive flak from the community.

Instead, get in touch with the guy and see what can be worked out. Most(all) of us are reasonable fellows who usually don’t want to fu** anyone over - miscommunications can happen and can usually be cleared out cheaply and easily…

It has been a long time since TamsPalm last talked about marketing and advertising - but this thingy simply caught my attention too much to let it slip:

Essentially, we are looking at a very big pharmacy called KaiserKrone that is currently rebuilding its shops and needs to route customers to a secondary location.

Instead of just putting up a big arrow saying ‘go to container’, the company created interesting graphics showing plants growing out of its products…to symbolize the growth of its shop.

A little bit of creativity can go a long way towards keeping customers loyal and happy.

When have you been creative recently?

For the longest of time I have been an avid supporter of open source projects. I still am. However, there is one inherent problem with not being paid for your development time: There is a distinct lack of commitment and dedication in comarison to closed source and commercial applications.

Take everyone’s favorite IDE OnBoardC, for example. The application is good enough, but there is definitely room for improvement and optimization, particularly in the area of code generation.

But we’ll save compiler optimization for another day… There is one major problem with OnBoardC that really bugs me (along with many other OnBoardC users): The lack of Bird integration. When you look at the OnBoardC source code, it looks like it is almost child’s play to do this… “Then why hasn’t it been done, Ryan?” you may ask. Simple, really; It is a lack of dedication on the projects administration’s part.

According to the OnBoardC Developer’s Charter the following must happen in order for a change to the source code to be made:

1. A bug or feature request is posted appropriately on the Sourceforge project page.

2. A member of the OnBoardC project must propose a vote for the upgrade to happen.

3. A second developer seconds this.

4. Via the Sourceforge Developer’s mailing list (which, by the way, has been inactive as of 21st December 2005) a vote is made on whether the proposed change should be enacted.

5. If it is approved by more than half of the project members the Point Of Contact is chosen and they are in charge of handling the task. At this point they are in charge of handling the code, obtaining the Roger and committing the code.

As for Bird integration, we are still on step 4, and it seems it will stay that way indefinitely. I originally purposed a vote per the charter, and Steve Little himself has seconded a vote, yet where is it?

Now, granted, Steve and Dave Beers have other things going on, I fully understand this. I just feel that administrators almost have an obligation to be the driving force in their project and actually DO SOMETHING. If an administration is too busy, then appoint another administrator who is able to spend more time on the code.

For example (And I’m sure he’ll be mad at me for even mentioning his name for another project) John Wilund, the now primary developer of SrcEdit, would make a wonderul OnBC administrator. The SrcEdit bundled with OnBoardC version 2.51 is an ok source editor, but a bit outdated. When you download the latest SrcEdit from the Trac page, the improvements will make you very happy. What’s more is that the SrcEdit development is far more active than OnBoardC development has been in a long time. If you were to E-Mail a bug report to John, you can expect a bug fix very soon, and this fix will work as stated. John is in the rare situation where his area of work affords a lot of free time to programming.

Now I’m pretty sure John isn’t up to working on OnBoardC, on top of a number of other projects he ahs, but I still believe that OnBoardC development could use some fresh blood.

To put this somewhat ranty post into focus, I have a moral (and there is the collective groan from all of the TamsPalm readers): For any open source project to survive, not just OnBoardC, it as to be active and most importantly needs a strong administration that can fuel this activity.

—End Note—

I first wrote this in a ©2007 Ryan Rix “Moment of Brilliance” and, originally, I had no real plans of posting this. It is a bit harsh to David and Steve, but hopefully it will spur some sort of action (as long as that action isn’t a defamation of character lawsuit ;-)) But maybe it will just end up pissing Dave and Steve off, which, believe it or not was not the intent of this post.

So far, my experience has shown me that the biggest single source of income is the ‘afterlaunch’ publicity and pr campaign. So, the idea to a$$ out a few extra spotlight minutes by offering a single, big site an exclusive preview was an easy birth - but the execution can get hairy(I should have known that being a blogger myself).

Essentially, an analyst is a slow beast. He usually has other chores except that email of yours - so expect at least 12h of initial delay. If the review gets dispatched to a secondant, add in an extra 24 to 48h. So, we are at 2 days by now…without a single line in tejpWriter.

After that, the analyst enqueues the program for hotsyncing onto his Palm. Add in another 3h here…

The actual analysis process takes up to 7 days(I do 12h reviews…rarely) - so much about realtimeness…

Overall, getting exclusive previews is a great way to extend the mindshare you get off your PR activities. However, the premium comes at a price…time. Expecting an analyst to cough up a review in 24h may work at TamsPalm’s - but is next to impossible everywhere else. Give the guy at least 7 days of time - or miss out on the extra publicity…

How do you handle previews?

This ad has recently begun to pop up all over Vienna(click for bigger version):

The reason I post this is that it is one of the worst ads I ever saw. It lacks a catchy graphic, one doesn’t immediately understand what its for, it has no visual hierarchy,…

Whatever you do - don’t copy that ad’s style…

Our favorite not-so-Micro-ISV Eric Sink shares a bit of information on his newly-launched magazine advertising campaign. While the sales he reaches and the sums he pays are not exactly what a small Palm OS ISV has, the hints given could nevertheless be interesting for optimizing your ad campaigns:

http://www.ericsink.com/entries/Mag_Ads_March2007.html

At the school I attend, we have a professor who was a former sales manager at Siemens and now teaches more-less for fun only. He seems to be pretty interested in getting his stuff published (by me) - and manages this by doing the following:

Good blackboard graphs suitable for photographing with camera phones
Mr. B’s diagrams are big and not cramped - even a Palm Treo 600’s camera can render usable pictures off them.

Lax publication rights - no fee for web publication, no resolution limits
Mr. B does not insist on flat fees or per-megapixel fees if his graphs get published on web sites. Ever.(sic!)

If he doesn’t hold the copyright himself, he gladly provides the original source - very helpful.

Lax copyright protection
Mr. B does not insist on being advance notified of each and every line of the publication - telling him that your graph will be published on this and that site usually is more than enough.

If you want to get yourself published, you need to support the analysts. Understanding that analysts depend on you as much as you depend on them takes you a very far way into PR wonderland - in fact, getting this idea is more than 50% of what needs to be done to be a successful PR man…

TamsPalm readers were recently given a discount on a few Tamoggemon titles(fixed the discount now…so if you want to use it, go ahead) - but the discount didn’t work out. The ESD system simply refused to give the discount out…

In order to understand what happened here, we need to understand MobiHand’s discount architecture(at least how I think it works). You have a first level of discounts that are enabled on a product level and are called promotional price - these discounts work globally and on each and every MobiHand store. The second level of discounts are the various coupons and bundles that get published on Palm OS news sites…

Now, if you have a promotional price open and also a coupon, the coupon gets disabled automatically.

So, in order to make MobiHand discounts work well, simply keep an eye on your promotional prices. Either promotional price or discount - but you can’t do both…

Any hints?

P.s. The discount code now works again - if you want a cool discount on FileFind or DailyQuote, here you go!

Most ads on the various Palm sites(including mine) are black on white. Creating an ad that is white on black would definitely male for an interesting variation - but getting it right is much harder.

Smashing Magazine published a list of 30 “dark designs” for web sites that they consider excellent:
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2007/01/13/30-dark-designs-you-shouldve-seen/

Take a look if you are bored for a moment, and tell us if you created a new ad for your Palm products and want to explain it to the public =).

In Austria, some subway stations contain small ‘ad booths’ than can be rented by various companies. These companies then display their wares there in order to motivate bypassers top - um - come and purchase.

So far so good - until I saw this booth(today - its U2 Rathaus station for all readers in vienna):

An empty booth? WTF!!!

The moral of the story is: always have a “replacement ad” in the back of your sleeve when using any kind of rented ad space. For example, if you buy a web banner space on a site for advertising your Palm OS programs,there should be a banner available all the time. The analyst wont refund you if there’s no banner on the site for a few days, and your Palm OS stuff won’t sell either.

In fact, in such a situation, a bad banner is better than no banner…

What do you think?

I started reading marketing and advertising literature a few months ago - and one of the most important hints you get in the literature is to totally avoid doing discount campaigns under any circumstances. So far so good - but since my regular ads didn’t make much revenue so far and marketing is the art of breaking rules, this ad was launched literally hours before new years eve in Austria:

The discounts coupled with it were handsome(a bit more than 30% off) - and the folks over at PalmAddicts made a great job publishing the discounts.The effects were astonishing! Each one of my Palm OS products sold about half as much as it sells when a new version gets released(with the full PR campaign), and the revenues kept rolling in for a few days even after the discounts ended(with customers gladly paying the full price). After that, they fell off again into the void, leaving me richer by quite a few dollars(about a month’s worth of sales).

By the way, for all of you number freaks: BinaryClock outsold FileFind 2:1, which outsold Daily Quote 2:1 again. AutoSync and LedManager did not participate in the discount.

So, for me, discount campaigns definitely work and will probably be repeated. This proves once again that not everything written in literature is correct - marketing gurus far and wide, please tell me what you think!

Background image by da_mere. Licensed under Creative Commons:Attribution. Thank you for making this image available!