Linked List: February 11, 2014

Tuesday, 11 February 2014

Weekend Read 1.0 

New screenplay reader for the iPhone from Quote-Unquote Apps. Screenplays are notoriously difficult to read on a small screen, because the format is tied to 8.5 × 11 pages. Weekend Read cleverly reflows PDF text, yet keeps in a recognizable screenplay style. Works with Fountain, Final Draft, and just plain Markdown files, too. Free for up to 4 documents at a time, $10 in-app-purchase to unlock unlimited documents. (Clever business model — a way to do “try before you buy” in the App Store.)

Beautiful Pixels on Vesper 

Mikhail Madnani:

Vesper is not just a minimal notes app for iPhone. It is one of the most polished pieces of software I have ever used.

28 Days of Fame: The Strange, True Story of ‘Flappy Bird’ 

Christina Warren, detailing the entire Flappy Bird story in splendid detail:

Much of the data surrounding Flappy Bird and its viral success came courtesy of Zach Williams, a developer who analyzed the numbers behind the game. […]

The game’s sheer success has led some critics to accuse Nguyen of using shady practices — including buying traffic or paying for fake reviews — in order to help Flappy Bird ascend the app charts. After looking at the data that corresponds to when Flappy Bird started to build word-of-mouth buzz, however, we can’t find any signs of impropriety, or manipulation of reviews or ratings.

The fact that Flappy Bird wasn’t a scam — but a naturally occurring spectacle that came out of nowhere — only makes its triumph that much more incredible and its removal from the App Store that much more bittersweet.

By January 25, there were 500,000 tweets per day containing “Flappy Bird”.

Flappy Bird Creator Dong Nguyen Says App ‘Gone Forever’ Because It Was ‘An Addictive Product’ 

Lan Anh Nguyen, reporting for Forbes from Hanoi, where she interviewed Dong Nguyen:

The circumstances surrounding the interview, conducted in Vietnamese, were as much of a soap opera as his public ruminations about whether to take down the app. The interview with Forbes took place in a hotel in Hanoi, with a strict condition that Forbes not reveal Nguyen’s face. It was delayed several hours, in part because Nguyen had a sudden meeting with Vietnam’s deputy prime minister Vu Duc Dam — a remarkable turn of events for someone unknown a week ago. Nguyen says his parents didn’t even know that Flappy Bird existed, much less his role in it, until media coverage spun out of control in the past few days.

The 29-year-old, who sports a close-cropped haircut, appeared stressed. He smoked several cigarettes over the course of the 45-minute interview, and doodled monkey heads on a pad of paper.

(“Nguyen” is the most common surname in Vietnam; I presume the two are not related.)

‘These People Are All Crazy’ 

Jeff Vogel, on the indie games world and the Flappy Bird saga:

For years now, the iTunes (and lately Google Play) app store has been this gigantic, rushing torrent of infinite money, and everyone has scrambled to grab their piece.

It’s the most soulless, joyless, metric-obsessed market/ethics-free-zone imaginable. There is nothing that can’t and won’t have all fun and creativity sucked out of it to earn an extra penny from the “whales” (i.e. compulsives) who will happily shell out a hundred bucks a month to get Candy Crush Saga to let them play Bejeweled. (Hot tip: Uninstall Candy Crush Saga and play all the Bejeweled you want forever ad-free for three bucks.)

So for the last couple weeks, people, when they weren’t raging about EA’s pillaging all of their happy memories of Dungeon Keeper, were noting the runaway success of a tiny, free, ad-supported game called Flappy Bird.

Interesting to think about this aspect of the App Store in the context of the previous item, on the lack of alignment between Real Networks’ profits and their users’ best interests.

The Graph That Changed Jon Bell 

Jon Bell of UX Launchpad, on his time at Real Networks a decade ago:

One day my manager showed me a horrible graph. It was pretty simple: the graph was steady, then it dropped straight down, then after a short period, the line shot straight back up and stayed level again.

“That’s what happens when we do the right thing”, he said while pointing at the drop, “and that’s how much money we lose. We tried it just to see how bad it was for our bottom line. And this is what the data tells us.”

“Wow,” I said, taken aback. My employer clearly had two options: “do the right thing” or “be profitable”. That was the position they had maneuvered themselves into through a series of bad management decisions.

Once you’re backed into a corner like this, where your users’ happiness and satisfaction are no longer aligned with your revenue, you’ve already lost. It’s like the dark side of the Force — you should never even start down that path, or you’ll be corrupted.