[mynameisvlad]

> I don't feel comfortable charging people for something they might not even be able to run.

Honestly, if you're charging users, then there's absolutely no question about it, you get the membership. Your entire "expecting the user to do so" point completely goes out the window the second you said it's a paid app. If you have the revenue, then it's simply a cost of doing business in the Apple world. Plus, once again, you're being way overdramatic. "might not even be able to run" is taking it a bit too far. Your app will be able to run. If you don't trust your users enough to click twice, then maybe you need to learn to trust them more. It's not like it's a hard thing to do, and it only needs to happen once.

Remember, this is Apple's OS, Apple's ecosystem, and Apple's SDKs. You play by their rules or not at all. That's the way it's always been, and that's the way it will probably always be (but never say never, look at Microsoft, they're doing things nobody would have ever expected). Yes, it sucks. Yes, it isn't fair. But as with all major companies, it never is. They will always have the upper hand because they're the ones providing the user base and all the tools necessary to get the apps out there and onto their machines. As long as you are developing for their platform, you have to play by their rules. Honestly, be happy they haven't moved the default to the much more restrictive "Mac App Store" yet.

And to be fair, I see where Apple (and Microsoft, IIRC they have SmartScreen which does the same sort of thing but to a lesser extent) are coming from. I'm sure that it lowers the chance of accidentally executing viruses by quite a bit and also slowly is teaching users to think before they execute (especially if you have to right click and click Open).

[chc]

> Honestly, if you're charging users, then there's absolutely no question about it, you get the membership. Your entire "expecting the user to do so" point completely goes out the window the second you said it's a paid app. If you have the revenue, then it's simply a cost of doing business in the Apple world.

Yes, because Apple demands rent. They create a problem and then charge you to fix it. This is called rent-seeking. I think that is a bad behavior.

> Plus, once again, you're being way overdramatic. "might not even be able to run" is taking it a bit too far. Your app will be able to run. If you don't trust your users enough to click twice, then maybe you need to learn to trust them more. It's not like it's a hard thing to do, and it only needs to happen once.

I used to do tech support for a medium-sized office. I would frequently get called to people's desks because their computer wasn't working, only to find that their email client had put up a dialog with the message "The email address '[e-mail]' is not a valid address", I'd have to verbally tell them they mistyped the address — sometimes, even after this, they'd just stare at me like a deer in the headlights and I'd have to type in ".com" for them before they felt like they could use their computer again. And then they'd do it again the next day.

I remember patio11 once shared an anecdote about a school teacher who called his support number because she thought Bingo Card Creator had broken Google. It turned out that she'd gotten a new home computer and Bing was the default search provider, and she couldn't figure out how to operate Bing because it wasn't Google.

I have to wonder if you have had to do a lot of support work, because I think you're trusting users way too much. There are many, many people who are really not stupid, but get flustered when doing unfamiliar tasks on a computer.

> Remember, this is Apple's OS, Apple's ecosystem, and Apple's SDKs. You play by their rules or not at all. That's the way it's always been

No, it isn't. It wasn't even this way just five years ago. I was one of the early adopters of OS X, and one of the things I loved about it was how open it was, so even some kid like me (at the time) could easily make software. Apple has gotten worse and worse about this over the past decade.

[comex]

It is not just rent; it is a security feature. Whether this feature is being used wisely is another question...

A few months ago I sent Apple security an email about a fake Flash installer with a valid Developer ID certificate. It turned out that someone else had written an article about the same malware five days ago, and reported it to Apple, yet the certificate was not revoked yet - so it doesn't seem that Apple has a 'rapid response' system in place currently (or then, anyway), perhaps because incidents are still relatively uncommon. But they did promptly thank me for my report, and I bet they ended up doing something about it (I ought to check) - and thanks to Developer ID, they at least had some kind of payment trail as well as a name, likely making it harder for the same person to get additional certificates.

Of course, this trail could be achieved with a lower price. But you do get a number of benefits with the subscription, and since the Mac and iOS developer programs merged into one today, at the same $99 as each previously was individually, if you develop for both the price just halved. It's a start, at any rate.

[gruez]

>thanks to Developer ID, they at least had some kind of payment trail as well as a name, likely making it harder for the same person to get additional certificates

What's preventing me from paying some person in a third world country to get a certificate in his name?

[beagle3]

Nothing does. But that person will likely have no loyalty to you, and would give every info he has about you to Apple for an additional $100.

You don't need to be NSA level to hide your tracks there, but it's not trivial either. And Apple is likely to work with the FBI/Interpol about that if whatever evil deeds your software does is sufficiently high profile. Theses guys might also not be good enough to catch you - but they have access to the NSA data for parallel construction, allegedly. And the NSA has incriminating evidence against you.

[coldtea]

Plus that certificate will be revoked pronto.

[mynameisvlad]

> No, it isn't. It wasn't even this way just five years ago. I was one of the early adopters of OS X, and one of the things I loved about it was how open it was, so even some 17-year-old kid like me could easily make software. Apple has gotten worse and worse about this over the past decade.

I never said that was the way it's always been. I said that "playing by their rules or not at all" was the way it's always been. Which is true, Apple is very big on controlling every aspect of the user experience. It was a matter of time before their massive obsessiveness leaked from iOS to OSX, but it's always been Apple's rules or nothing. Their rules for OSX have historically been very lax, but that wasn't my point at all.

> Yes, because Apple demands rent. They create a problem and then charge you to fix it. This is called rent-seeking. I think that is a bad behavior.

Well, they're providing a service for $99 that extends beyond the signing to be able to run in OSX. They include the ability to list in the various app stores, to have beta programs, access to early APIs, access to developer forums, and more. All that costs them money. They have to get that from somewhere.

> I have to wonder if you have had to do a lot of support work, because I think you're trusting users way too much.

I trust my users just fine. Just because there's one or two crazy stories (I mean, everyone has a few stories of horribly stupid users) does not mean the majority of users are that bad. If you're targeting all 100% of possible users, then sure, those instructions would be useless. However, I'd be confident enough to say that 90-95% (honestly probably leaning towards 95, but still) of users will be able to follow those incredibly simple instructions. So at that point, you have to ask yourself if the $99 (plus all the other perks like early access to APIs) is worth having those 5-10% of users who can't follow them. Because that's what it really comes down to.

[biturd]

I feel being a staunch Mac user from the beginning has been detrimental to me. My first computer was a commodore 64, which I typed the programs out of the book into the terminal and it made balls move around on the screen and such. But I was really young, and no one was there to catch me, so I never thought to fiddle with it, I thought it was like a set of instructions and you had to follow them. I did not yet understand creativity at that age.

I then later, many years later, was given a Mac Plus. I could use BBS software to chat, but remember thinking, it is very hard to even type a conversation back and forth to a user elsewhere with a modem. There really was no software for it, or if there was, it was hard to find or even know about.

How did you know to learn C and then get a compiler? And how did you afford the software to develop back then? Wasn't code warrior around several thousand?

[jamestnz]

Wow, your history matches mine quite closely (manually typing BASIC programs into the C64 whilst not really "getting it", then going on to the Classic Mac OS and onto BBSes). I first got into the Mac around System 6 with a Mac 512Ke, then onto a Plus and other machines from there... remember hacking at apps with ResEdit?

Also keep in mind that the standard language for the classic Mac was originally Pascal[1], not C.

In addition to Metrowerks CodeWarrior (which I also recall being pricey), there was also the Borland TurboC++ family. And starting from around System 7 there was MPW from Apple[2], which targeted a number of languages and was eventually free.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacApp

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_Programmer's_Workshop

[chc]

Well, I was talking about OS X, which was released around 2000, probably much later than your Mac Plus days. OS X included a whole Unixy environment and shipped the Developer Tools (GCC + the precursor to Xcode) on a second CD. I had already done some programming before that, though, in Mac game-making software (World Builder and Adventure Simulator), and with JavaScript on the Web, but the ability to really program my computer with Objective-C and Cocoa was amazing.

There was also a free development environment by Apple for OS 8 (maybe earlier, I don't know) called MPW. I think it was originally a paid product, but Apple ended up just giving MPW away because everybody used CodeWarrior. But I found it difficult to use and didn't get much further than some basic C lessons I found somewhere on the Internet. All the more advanced stuff I found wouldn't work (I think it was probably targeted at Windows or Unix, but all I knew at the time was that MPW couldn't compile it).

[gaius]

CodeWarrior academic was much, much cheaper.

[biturd]

Do you have a link to the patio11 anecdote?

[chc]

I'm having trouble finding the anecdote itself where the customer was angry about the change in Googles. Maybe it was in a podcast rather than on HN -- hard to remember, it was several years ago. Here's a later post where he was discussing what he'd learned from incidents like that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1808001

[patio11]

I think you're conflating two anecdotes.

The "You broke my Googles. Give my Googles back or I'll tell my husband on you." incident was a customer who installed Bingo Card Creator N minutes before Google had systemic worldwide downtime due to an internal misconfiguration. (http://googleblog.blogspot.jp/2009/01/this-site-may-harm-you...) Her reasoning was "Google worked, I installed BCC, Google doesn't work anymore, accordingly, BCC must have broken Google." Except s/Google/the Googles/g.

My blue Googles/green Googles story happened with several different customers. Basically, they have a mental model of the Internet where it is a lot like a hard drive: your Internet at school and your Internet at home are totes different Internets and so it makes sense that the contents of one are different than the other. They call their Internets Googles, because Google "is the front page of the Internet" or "runs the Internet" or "makes the Internet." One of the Googles -- the blue Googles -- is what a technologist might more readily understand as Microsoft Internet Explorer configured to open to a Bing homepage on a school computer. This "blue Google" will, for any given query, produce different results than the same query run on "green Google" (Chrome/Google/home PC), hence providing further experimental evidence that the user understands adequately what is going on.

The difference between the blue Googles and the green Googles was chiefly relevant to my business in attempting to convince customers that, regardless of the fact that they signed up with an account from the blue Googles, they did not have to sign up for a separate account on the green Googles and then somehow move things from the blue Googles to the green Googles to be able to print them out at home.