Mike Cohen

links for 2008-11-17

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  • openradar
    (tags: apple development)
  • Carnival of Light: McCartney wants world to hear 'lost' Beatles epic |
    Music |
    The Observer
    For Beatles fans across the world it has gained near mythical status. The 14-minute improvised track called 'Carnival of Light' was recorded in 1967 and played just once in public. It was never released because three of the Fab Four thought it too adventurous.

    The track, a jumble of shrieks and psychedelic effects, is said to be as far from the melodic ballads that made Sir Paul McCartney famous as it is possible to imagine. But now McCartney has said that the public will have the chance to judge for themselves.

    (tags: music)

iPhone App Pricing and Sales

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Andy Finnell has written a great blog post discussing iPhone app pricing. I found that his average of 16 sales a day for a non-free application is exactly on target. That’s the usual number I see for iDjembe.

On the other hand, ICanHasCheezburger, which is free, sold about 4500 copies on Nov. 13, when it was #74 on the top 100 free application list. Since then it settled down to about 2500 on the 15th. If #74 sells 4500 copies, the top free application must have sold at least 10,000 or more (my guess).

Free applications will always sell more than one that costs money, but I’m sure a top selling paid application could easily sell over 1000 copies a day. Most paid applications are nowhere near those heights.

I have no intention of quitting my day job to write iPhone software, though. I priced iDjembe at 0.99 because it’s a simple app and I just wanted to get something out there, although I am planning a big update. I won’t release it until after the update to ICanHasCheezburger and a new application I’m developing that will be associated with a particular website.

WordPress 2.7

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I’ve upgraded this blog to WordPress 2.7b3. As always, the upgrade was quick & painless. The only plugin that broke is Leopard Admin, which isn’t really that important any more with the new admin dashboard. I’ll probably upgrade MacMegasite in a few days after more testing to make sure it doesn’t break the forums & other plugins.

MacBook Dual Monitor Setup

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I find the new MacBook’s 1280×800 display a little too small to work with comfortably, so I got a new Samsung 22″ monitor, which can display 1680×1050. Aperture & Photoshop are so much nicer on the big screen, and it gives me a lot more room to work in XCode and Interface Builder. Parallels will even let me run a virtual machine in full-screen on one monitor while I work in Mac OS X on the other screen.

Parallels fullscreen with external monitor

Sudden MacBook freezes

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On several occasions, my MacBook randomly froze. When it happens, the mouse pointer will suddenly stop moving, usually in the middle of typing. After I reboot, there are no unusual messages in the log around the time of the freeze, and hardware test finds no problems.