New in the App Catalog for 28 April 2010 13

for $40 the child app better turn into a real life babysitter, cuz that's a little steep!

It's like someone plugged a child-care book into helpdesk software:
"Child-support, my name is Jim. How is your child acting up today?"

I have to smile at those who have so quickly been conditioned by $.99 fart apps and Phyllis Diller Quotes apps and $9.99 mass appeal game apps who forget that a mobile device is a platform for a delivery of valuable content as well.

"Apps" don't have to mean "CR-apps". I applaud the work of Doug Reeder at Hominid Software (Outline Tracker and Outline Tracker Free) and Matt Hebley at SnapperFish (The Best for My Child, and co-developer of the hit PalmOS app SnapperMail) for spending the time to THINK about how a form-factor of the mobile device platform and the user interface of the device can synergize with the user or developer content and application purpose to bring great utility and make life easier. Product development at it's best is about the approach these folks take-- and as they find their respective markets and fine-tune their solutions and approaches and pricing, they deserve a reward for that.

The silliest thing for a developer to do who is creating a functional software solution (and not just another picture-scraping, girlie/nature wallpaper app in the AdMob network) is to undervalue it upon release.

Pregnant women spend $30 for What to Expect When You're Expecting and What to Expect the First Year, and carry these books everywhere. Yet the author of these books has not created anything approaching the sophistication of Snapperfish's app here. A free pregnancy calculator and some pictures of development progress and baby names? Yeah, you'd expect that to be a free 'ad' for the book.

Folks, this is real software development focused on users interacting with content. How many real solutions with this approach do we have on webOS so far? Far too few. And if we want more developers, the solution is NOT to sell just 5X more devices-- it won't be enough yet to lure developers-- the developers will need to see that the "economy" being developed will sustain their development effort.

Why did DataViz push back from their development keyboards? Likely, it was partly due to Palm's inability to provide partial (cost-shared) NRE project funding for an editable suite that would kick off the project, and partly due to the small current device base, and partly due to the prevailing low prices for quality software in the webOS market discouraging DataViz from believing there was a solid business case for recovering their investment within X months, given Palm's uncertain situation (at that time.)

(Happily, with HP ownership, my theory is that we can likely expect a new announcement from DataViz within 3-4 months reversing the former post/letter, once they secure a commitment from HP for partial development funding reimbursement, and a bundling revenue share arrangement.)

Again, to return to the point of this post/response: In order to draw more developers to this platform, We NEED developers like SnapperFish and Hominid and ...others... willing to stick their necks out and lead the development of more sophisticated, thoughtful, user-oriented solutions for this powerful platform. This will be aided by the promise of HP as the controller of the platform's destiny and "scalability" into new products (Tablets!) in the future, but many developers will (wisely for them, economically perhaps) be sitting and watching how things develop for Palm/webOS for another 7-9 months (and making revenues off of Android/iPhone growth) before jumping in.

Supporting valuable solutions from early pioneer developers (at higher pricing) helps build the economy the platform needs. Incidentally, it wouldn't hurt if that pricing for solid, valuable solutions also spilled over into affecting pricing on other platforms, too.

Mike