Zhephree

Way back when, in the early days of foursquare, one could “shout” something without having to check-in. As of right now, when you check in to a venue on foursquare, you have the option of adding a shout (comment) to your check-in to explain what you’re doing.

For instance, when you check in to your house, you could say “Watching TV” or “Studying” so that your friends know that you’re at home and if you’re watching TV, maybe you’re up for something, or, if you’re studying, to leave you alone so you can concentrate. You could maybe shout “Happy Birthday, Dave!” when you check in to a bar for Dave’s birthday celebration. This lets you give context to your check-in when the venue doesn’t have events like sports complexes, music venues, and movie theatres have.

But in the old days, you could shout on foursquare and say things like “Watching TV” or “What’s everyone up to tonight?” without attaching that shout to a venue. Foursquare referred to these as “venue-less check-ins”. But for some reason, around v2.0 of the official apps, the option to send a shout without a venue disappeared. I left it in in the webOS app, and it still works. The official apps just don’t have the option for it.

I was never a big fan of the feature, and few people used it. And I get why foursquare would move away from that model — foursquare is about location. Not adding a venue to a shout loses context and takes away from the main point of foursquare.

But now, I believe, since the shout feature no longer exists, there is a flood of shouts-as-venues occurring. You’ve seen them when you check in somewhere close to a residential area. In the mix of schools and coffee shops and grocery stores, you see venues like “Watching TV!”, “Happy birthday kayla!!!!!”, “bored”, etc. They usually have some unrelated category attached to them like Strip Club or Speakeasy. They clutter up the venue listings and slow down the check-in process, as well as make the foursquare database dirty and look unreliable.

You can see how bad this problem is by doing a search for certain keywords on the foursquare website. I did this here (around New Orleans) and here are my results:

• “playing” - 80 Results
  Ex: “playing basketball”, “Playing Basketball!!!!!!”, “Playing Xbox”, “Playing The wii!!!!!!!!!” 
• “watching” - 64 Results
  Ex: “Watching A Movie”, “Watching TV!!!!”, “Watching ESPN” 
• “happy” - 81 Results
  Ex: “happy(;”, “HAPPY THANKSGIVING!!!!!!”, “not happy”, “HAPPY BIRTHDAY ALEXANDRA!!!!!”, “hApPy eAsTeR!”
• “presence” - 92 Results 
  Ex: “Carleys presence”, “Betty’s Presence”, “In The Presence of Oreo”, “In Virginia Hammets Presence!!!”, “The Presence of Christian and Alexis(:”
• “bored” - 67 Results 
  Ex: “Bored”, “Bored!!!”, “bored:/”, “BORED!!!!”, “Whos Bored !!!”, “Bored At Home”, “BORED AS HELL!”, “SOOOOO BORED”, “Being Bored”, “Im So Bored”
• “going to” - 86 Results
  Ex: “Going to Camp”, “going to skewwell”, “Going to Orthodontist :(“, “Going to A Wedding”
• “on my way” - 29 Results
  Ex:  ”On My Way”, “In A Cab On My Way Downtown”, “On My Way To Mississippi!!!”

And that’s just around New Orleans. I know everyone uses foursquare differently, and that’s fine. Homes, Offices, and Streets are legit venues, but not everyone will check in to a street or their house. The issue is that these aren’t places. They aren’t venues. They have no address or business license, and therefore shouldn’t be venues. Not only that, they block real venues from showing up higher in the list of nearby places. Or, if you’re searching for a venue with one of these words in it, you may not find it easily. For instance, there’s a Chinese food place here called “Happy Wok.” If you’re on your phone, you’d probably just search for “happy”, which would yield a bunch of people saying they are or aren’t happy or telling people happy birthday, and not the Chinese place you wanted.

It feels like, since the shout feature isn’t available, people are taking to making venues as status updates, which isn’t the right way to do it.

So, how can foursquare fix this?

Well, when adding a new venue, the app and server search for possible existing venues nearby to make sure you aren’t duplicating an existing venue. Something similar could be done for these key phrases. For instance, if you attempt to add a new venue with the word “watching” in it, foursquare could pop up an alert and say something like “It looks like you want to shout something instead of check in! You should try checking in to an existing venue and shouting this with your check-in instead.” and then give the user the option to add the venue anyway, in the off chance it’s legit.

They could also require an address for locations with those keywords, or suggest that the category be a Home instead of any of the other options. At least if the venues were Homes, they would only be displayed to the creator of the venue and their friends, keeping the venue list clean for other users.

I know this isn’t a huge deal, but it is annoying and degrades the foursquare experience. I hope foursquare is looking into making this better.

How I Leverage ifttt and tumblr for My New Blog

frobbadotcom:

I recently relaunched this site. I went with something new and a little unconventional. The old site was completely custom built, with a really simple back end. It was a giant plain-text area and a field for a title. That was it. I used my own bastardization of MarkDown to create HTML in my posts….

A little insight to how I made my personal site work, using PHP and some web services.

Brogrammers and Other Disgraces to Technology

frobbadotcom:

I’m a programmer. Okay, to be fair, I usually call myself a developer, but let’s face it: that means I’m a programmer.

For years and years, programmers or any sort of person in the technology field have always been looked at as these nerdy guys with pocket protectors living in their parents’…

A piece I wrote on my personal blog that I felt had some relevance here.

I’ve been toying with the idea of open sourcing Wooden Rows for a while and I’ve finally bitten the bullet and released the app under the Apache2 license. You can now grab the source from GitHub.

The app will remain on sale in the webOS App Catalog for $3.99 and I still plan on bringing it to iOS and Android for a price as well. This is sort of an experiment.

My hope is that this excels development and brings the app to other platforms quicker. I also hope this brings new data sources for users. You’re free to fork the source and build your own app from it, build your own client that stores data on my server, whatever.

I’ll be monitoring things and seeing how it goes. I hope to build a community around Wooden Rows as a platform and not just some proprietary system I built.

The API will not be documented (at least, not anytime soon), but new features are welcomed and if new API end points must be added for new features, I will be handling this personally. The server-side code will remain closed source.

I hope this brings some great new ideas will we all work on the app together and I’m curious to see what new toys develop from my source.

It’s not clean. It’s not efficient. But it works and is a decent app. I want to see it become more with your help.

Every so often, a blog will write a blurb about my apps or me or I’ll guest on a podcast. It’s pretty awesome to have people like your stuff enough to spend time writing/talking about it. But, as a guy with uncommonly-spelled names who gives ridiculous names to his apps, sometimes these get misspelled and mispronounced. This post is for anyone who mercifully gives me some sort of press. It’s also a great way to showcase my ability to come off as a pretentious dick.

MY NAME:
My name is Geoffrey Gauchet. Both start with a “G”. My first name is pronounced exactly like “Jeffrey”. It ends in “rey” and not “ery”. My last name is pronounced “GO-shay”. The “Gau” is just like the English word “Go” and the “chet” is just like the last syllable in “crochet” and “sashay”. It ends in a single “t”.

MY COMPANY:
The name is Zhephree. There is an “h” immediately after the “Z”. Pronunciation is tough, sorta. The “Zh” makes a sound like the middle sound in “fusion” or the ending sound in “beige”. It’s like an “s” sound if you were humming while saying it. Here’s a technical guide to making the sound. The remaining portion — “ephree” — is pronounced just like my first name without the “G”.

MY APPS:
foursquare for webOS - According to the company, “foursquare” is always lowercase, except when it starts a sentence. Examples: “I just became the mayor on foursquare.” or “Foursquare is a great app.” My app should always have “for webOS” appended to it to differentiate my app from the company.

neato! - As with foursquare, it is always lowercase, except when beginning a sentence. The exclamation point (!) must always be appended to the name.

growlr - Again, always lowercase except when at the beginning of a sentence. There is no “e” in the name, similar to “Flickr” or “Tumblr”. There is no exclamation point in the name. It would also be acceptable to append “for Untappd” to the name, but isn’t required. “Untappd” also has no “e” in the name and is capitalized.

incredible! - Noticing a trend? Always lowercase, except when starting a sentence. Exclamation point must always be appended to the name.

Wooden Rows - C-c-c-c-c-combo breaker! This app is spelled properly and typed in proper-case with no punctuation.

And this concludes my egotistical, self-important blog post.

neato! bound for cross-platform bliss

Hopefully sooner than later. We’ll see!

It’s no secret that I love foursquare. Not only have I developed the unofficial webOS app, but my wife organizes Foursquare Day events here in New Orleans, and hell, I even proposed to her via a foursquare tip.

I like cross-posting, too. I’ll often post statuses to Twitter and Facebook at the same time. Sometimes, I like to share special check-ins to Facebook: concerts, new restaurants, that sort of thing. Memories I like to store on Facebook, or share with my friends and family not on foursquare. 

Lots of people always complained about the old-style foursquare check-in postings on Facebook. But no one ever really complains about Facebook check-ins on Facebook. In fact, I get MORE likes and comments on check-ins through Facebook than I do on foursquare check-ins pushed to Facebook.

I love the Facebook Timeline. I love that foursquare is now tied into Timeline. I like the aggregations on my own Timeline. It looks great and is a nice summary of things I’ve done. But I absolutely HATE the way foursquare check-ins appear in the News Feed now. They somehow made them more obnoxious.

The reason? The giant-ass map. It takes up a huge bit of News Feed real estate. A foursquare check-in pushed to Facebook (with no shout) takes up 225px, vertically. A check-in with a single-line shout takes up about 245px.

Here’s a screenshot of my News Feed where two different friends happened to send check-ins to my News Feed back-to-back.

As you can see, of the 937 available vertical pixels, the 2 foursquare check-ins take up over 58% of that vertical space. That is WAY too much.

However, by simply removing the maps, he get a much more streamlined News Feed.

The foursquare icon is eye-catching enough for me to see the check-in. Not only that, but the post itself is very noticeable. The city and state are printed below the venue name and the shout, so I already know these two check-ins are not near where I am right now. I can keep scrolling and read my News Feed.

However, if those check-ins were in New Orleans (where I am) and I wasn’t sure of the location of the place, I’d just click the link. Very simple, and not at all cumbersome.

The News Feed is a place to get rich headlines from your friends. It does not need the entire story in it. If I want to know where that venue is, I’ll click the link.

I’d much rather the foursquare check-in activities appear like the Facebook check-ins — simple, clean, one or two lines of text. The map is too much. Are they pretty? Yes. They look better than the old posts, but they’re also obnoxiously large. They’re distracting. They’re all I see when I scroll through. I don’t want that.

Anyway, I hope this changes down the road, but I seem to be in the minority on this topic.

So, for now, I won’t be pushing any foursquare check-ins to Facebook. 

UPDATE!: Hooray! The foursquare check-ins pushed to Facebook now only appear on your profile and the activity feed, not the News Feed! Yay!

I'm Shaving My Head to Stop Kids' Cancer

As I’ve done for the previous four years, I’m shaving my head in solidarity with kids that are undergoing cancer treatments. Not only is this a symbolic gesture, it does make the kids feel better.

But more than symbolic gestures, we need a cure and to find cure we need research. And to have research, we need money.

So, if you can, please consider donating a dollar or more to the St. Baldrick’s Foundation. These guys do tremendous work and it’s an amazing cause. 

I’d greatly appreciate it!

We're Not Paying Enough for Apps

I definitely agree with the sentiment of this article, but the author is still an idiot. He still never bought the app, even after being convinced that the cheaper, free apps were lower quality.

Finding the sweet spot of app pricing is an art. Price too low, and you’re undervaluing your product. While a low price may move more units, your profit is roughly the same (as evidenced by Steam’s data in the article, and my personal experience). And, with a lower price, you now have more users. As a solo or indie dev, this means your quality of support and frequency of updates suffers, which means your customers get an inferior product.

Pricing your app higher, though, does make life easier. You’ll sell fewer copies of the app and likely drive up the amount of piracy (though, in my experience, people pirate my $1.43 app as often as my $3.99 apps, which is to say a lot). However, having fewer users means that the personal level of support my customers are used to can continue. And, if I’m supporting fewer users, I can have more time to improve the app and push out updates.

If I have 100 users that bought my app at $3.99, I can support the 10 or 20 of them that will ever contact me for support and still have free time to live my life, time to improve the app, and time to make more apps. However, if I drop the price to $0.99, I’ll now have around 400 users. I have now made the exact same amount of money, but now I have more users to support and more users expecting updates. As a solo developer, this means my ability to support users dwindles and my time to improve the app dwindles. This sucks for everyone.

In fact, if you look at the gross sales of a $3.99 app to 100 users (100 is a quick, round number to do some math on), it’s around $400 (before app stores take their cut). So, you make $400, your users love the app, they get personalized support direct from me via Twitter or email, they get frequent updates, and I have time to hang out with my wife. Everyone’s happy!

Now, let’s say I drop the price of my app to $0.99. The lower price point means more users are likely to download the app and give it a try as there’s less to lose if they don’t like it. In my experience, this is exactly what happens — lower price equals more downloads. However, the amount of extra downloads rarely (if ever) exceeds enough to increase my profit. At $0.99, I garner about 4x’s as many downloads, yielding 400 users. 400 users at $0.99 means my gross sales is still $400. 

By lowering the cost of my app, I have higher download counts and more users, but still have been compensated the same amount as if only 100 users downloaded my app at full price. The only difference is now I have four times as many users to support, which means four times as many users with problems and issues. The 10 or 20 users that might contact me for support before has now increased to 40 or 80 users contacting me. My response time on support requests increases, which makes for angrier customers. This also means that I’m now spending time fielding support requests instead of developing and improving the app. This also means that my free time dwindles. This also means that my happiness drops, destroying the very reason I develop in the first place.

And what do I have to show for all that added effort and stress? The ability to say 400 people downloaded my app rather than 100. No additional revenue. No new features. No extra praise. Now, consider this while using real download numbers. 1000 vs 4000, 10000 vs 40000. The problems increase exponentially (400 to 800 requests, 4000 to 8000 requests).

Not only that, but more users means more hits to my web server for data retrievals and log ins, image uploads, etc. More hits to my server means more bandwidth usage, which equates to more money. I am now receiving a net profit that is less than the higher price point with fewer users, in addition to the headaches outlined above.

Obviously, money isn’t the main reason I develop. I love doing it. I like creating things. But, I have bills to pay and my stomach’s growling is pretty loud, so I tend to enjoy putting food into it.

Additionally, I enjoy making something that other people enjoy and can use every day. I can’t do this when I’m spending all my development time answering emails or engaging in a Twitter conversation.

I’m seeing this in just 4 days of lowering Wooden Rows to $1.99 for a 1 week promotion with HP. I’ll probably never do a sale like this again as a result, but we’ll see how it turns out by Thursday when the sale ends.

So, for me, as an indie developer, I’d prefer to have fewer users at a higher price point than more users at a lower price point.

Update: @tross1312 on Twitter raises an interesting question: 

Do you think people who buy at $1 but not $4 bring different expectations? Perhaps a difference in type, not just numbers.

I definitely think this is the case. If an app is priced at $3.99 and a user decides the app isn’t important enough to them to spend that amount on it and doesn’t purchase the app, but will buy it if the price is dropped likely doesn’t see the value in the application as a whole. The odds that users that only buy at a sale or lower price will contact you for support are higher. I’ve had more support requests and more negative reviews of the app since lowering the price. Users willing to pay the original asking price (be it $4 or $1) are more likely to understand the value of the app are less likely to require support (except for legitimate bugs in the the development of the app).

While half watching the Oscars and putting back some Shiner Hefeweizen, I managed to complete v1.4.1 of Wooden Rows and submit it to HP.

Notably, it fixed the bug where you couldn’t lend out items. I also made the Migration Assistant a little less dumb, but I’ll admit it’s not perfect, but it gets the job done.

The full change log is below:

• Fixed bug that prevented you from lending items
• When viewing old Amazon items, data in local database is now displayed
• Added option to keep search results dialog open when adding new item
• Higher resolution book cover images
• Added ability to change the image for existing items when editing
• Website for shared items has better CD images
• Website for shared items has new Amazon advertisements
• Website for shared items now displays the provider of the data
• Migration Assistant: “Use This” disabled until search results come in
• Migration Assistant: Next & prev buttons are disabled if they can’t go forward or back
• Fixed a bug where add dialog’s image was showing an older item’s image
• Added Twitter and website links in App Menu

Remember, the app is still on sale for $1.99 in the US App Catalog until Thursday. After that, it’ll go back up to $3.99.

Hopefully, this build will be the version that will soon become Wooden Rows on iOS and Android.