The app details don’t give any information about how this is actually working. As far as I can tell the app makes a VNC-type connection to a virtual machine on Amazon EC2. Works like a charm.

Get it while it lasts though, seems like the sort of app Apple might pull from the App Store.

Don’t have time to fully explore these ideas in a blog post this morning, but here’s a breakdown of my ideas/wishlist. In order of probability.

• Background processes
  • Not much of a hit to battery or CPU performance with simple apps like twitter or IM clients. Apple could tweak the OS to handle background processes even better.
  • All new smartphones have this ability. iPhone needs it to stay competitive.
• Themes
  • New source of revenue
  • Could be what the paint splotches on the invite are alluding to
  • Only reason not to do it would be inconsistent UI. But, with themes officially supported Apple could apply their stringent review process.
• Lockscreen
  • The lockscreen functionality is really cool.
  • Current jailbroken functionality doesn’t seem fully baked. I think Apple could make major improvements.
  • A dashboard widget type interface would seem to make sense.

// end stream of consciousness.

Take heed, apparently blogging about apple store service is an an excellent way to generate backlinks. According to Google webmaster tools my post late last month about my poor Apple Store service experience generated 625 links. The next highest, How To Watch Comedy Central Videos From Canada only garnered 27 – and that post has been up on reddit a few times.

I believe the problem is entirely due to the lack of a designated “checkout” area. If you haven’t ever stepped foot in an Apple Store, the main staff (I think Apple refers to them as “Concierge”) walk around the store seemingly aimlessly waiting for customers to flag them down, there are no checkout counters or cash registers. I can see the logic behind this type of set up: without a designated check-out area you don’t have long, ugly lines forming around the store and you don’t waste retail space. Without designated “cashiers,” all staff are able to help customers with any task. In theory, it’s more efficient than a traditional retailer.

In practice, the whole system breaks down if there are equal numbers of customers wanting help and staff.

It’s not always entirely clear whether a staff member is helping a customer or not; they may need to run to another part of the store to do one thing or another – in this situation, you find yourself trying to flag down someone who’s either ignoring you or has to sluff you off. In and of itself, this is not a problem unique to the Apple Store, this happens at any retailer when you’re trying to get help on a busier day. At the Apple Store because there are no designated checkouts, you’re forced in to this customer-unfriendly situation even if you do not need any help with your purchase. At best it’s a minor annoyance, at worst it doesn’t leave me feeling like a very valuable customer. I almost feel like this behavior serves to reinforce the old Apple-elitist attitudes, i.e. Apple only has a limited amount of time to dole out to the peons. Not only that, this type of system favors the visible and vocal customer, a dis-service to the typical-introverted-geek that makes up the core of Apple’s customer-base.

Most retails stores have a queuing area is because it works, it’s an accepted shopping convention that all customers know how to interact with. The key component in good customer service is setting expectations, a queue is a good way to accomplish this. If I see 10 people waiting at a checkout I can roughly estimate how long it will take me buy something or get service, I can adjust my patience accordingly. With staff randomly scattered around the store I’m not able to easily determine how many staff are engaged with a customer, how many are free and how many customers are waiting on a giving staff member – i.e. I don’t have enough information to calculate how much time to expect to be spending in the store. Queues also make it very easy to distinguish between customers waiting on service and customer who are just browsing or staring into space. When informal queues form around a given staff member it’s impossible to tell who’s “in line” and who’s not. As I alluded to earlier, this can cause the customer who’s “next” to yell at your wife for not waiting her turn.

The Apple Store is chaos. Whenever I try to get help I feel like a little lost puppy. Maybe that’s how Steve Jobs wants it. If I could have made this purchase online, I would have.

I’m going to go through a couple of different steps in the process and talk about some of the unexpected problems. I must say though, I was not very impressed. Nothing about the process is very “Apple-like.”

1. Opening The Account
After you’ve paid your $99 developer fee, there are still a number of legal/contractual hoops you need to jump through before you can atually upload an app for approval. As a Canadian developer, there were some additional hoops.

First, I’m not sure if you can actually sell an app without a GST number. I have a registered business, so this would not have been an issue for me.  But because of the way the sales work I would not be surprised if you were required to have a registered business.

Second, when purchases are made through the Canadian iTunes Store, Apple collects GST for you. This is good because it means you don’t have to worry about the accounting. In order for Canada Revenue Agency to allow Apple to do this for you, you need to fill out a specific tax form. By “fill out” I mean, physically. Apple has a PDF download of the doc available. But they require the original. You have to snail mail it! Apple suggests that they’ll process the doc within one week of recieving it.

Third, if/when you get paid, are are paid by Apple USA (in US Funds). When a US company pays an outside employee/contractor/etc those earnings are subject to international income tax treaties. If no treaty is specified, the IRS will compel Apple to withhold 30% of your earnings. For Canadian software developers, the tax treaty specified a 0% withholding. If you do not want Apple to withhold 30% of your earnings, you are required to obtain an “Employer Identification Number” from the IRS.

I put this off for awhile because I assumed it would be painful. To my surprise, getting this number was one of the most pleasant customer service experiences I’ve ever had over the telephone.

Fourth, this is fairly minor. Apple pays you via wire transfers. So you need to dig up some archaic routing numbers. Seemed to be a fairly common question for the CSR I spoke to at my bank. I imagine this could be a little more difficult to dig up if you use a Credit Union or something.

Once you’ve jumped through all these hoops, you’ll have all the information you need to fill out  the 4 or 5 contract and payment related forms in iTunes Connect. Then you wait. After a week of waiting for Apple to accept my forms, I emailed support. They did not respond, but it was magically up and running the next day.

2. App Approval
Getting an app approved is an entirely nebulous process. Once you upload your app, it just sits there in the “pending review” status until it gets approved. There’s no way to get any sort of updates, there is no indication of where you are in the queue. It’s frustrating.

My app took about 2 weeks to be approved.

3. iTunes Connect
iTunes connect is the web interface that you’re forced to use in order to manage everything related to getting an app into iTunes, getting paid, tracking sales, etc. It is easily one of the worst web apps I have ever used. From the looks of it, Apple just took the  mechanism they had in place to allow bands/labels to manage iTunes music sales and hacked in some hooks to allow app uploads. A lot of the terminalogy used seems to refer to album sales.

The interface is clunky. The site is slow. It doesn’t really work properly on an iPhone. The web-based app upload form doesn’t even really work – they encourage you to use a mac app to upload the application bundles (which works like a charm BTW).

I could live with all of these problems if I actually got decent download and sales statistics. But, you can only look at downloads/sales in a GIANT un-readable 2000px-wide table! (Or CSV – which is moderately useful when imported into a spreadsheet). You can’t compare stats, track trends or do anything really useful with the sales data.  The total sales aren’t even really tallied properly – they’re broken up by country, even though you’re paid by region. You can’t see your month-to-date or year-to-date sales. You have to compile and calculate all of this on your own.

Apple should be ashamed of this piece of junk webapp.

4. Payment?
Apple has hidden a really important tidbit of info in their documenation, something that might have discouraged me from selling my app if I had known ahead of time. Apple only cuts you a check if you have sold (the equivalent of) US$250 PER REGION! Long story short, I am probably never going to get paid for my app. The iTunes sales world is divided into 6 regions: USA and the rest of the world, UK, EU, CA, AU, JP. If you sell $240 in the US and $10 in Canada, you don’t get paid!

I can’t speak to the late payment, non-payment issues the internet has been talking about, I haven’t breached that $250 threshold yet.

I can tell that Apple just released my financial statements for March. Now, it’s really not terribly unusual for companies to release these sorts of finiancial statements 1 month behind, but I’d think a fully automated ONLINE store would be able to generate these reports instantly. In addition to the tardiness, the numbers in the finiancial statements are quite a bit lower than the weekly sales stats that iTunes connect was generating in March.

Conclusion

It sucks.

At the end of the day, Apple is not very friendly to their developers. There’s no oversite, no real point of contact with Apple. If you have a problem, there’s not much you can do about it. My suggestion is, don’t even bother trying to sell your app. Release it for free for the love of the game.

That said, there are a few major myths about the operating system that need to be busted.

1. It’s easier to use
For a long time, Macs (even before OS X) had the unfortunate distinction as the “dummy” computer, good for old people and computer illiterates. Because of this sterotype, I had assumed the the user-interface was somehow inherently easier to use. This is absoultely untrue.
Some things are a little easier. Installing apps is a little easier, sometimes, depending on the installer. Systems preferences is a laid out a little better than the Windows control panels, especially Vista’s. Apps integrate with the OS a little better. Spotlight is pretty awesome. But in general, things are just different, no better or worse than Windows.

A number of important apps/features are actually harder to use:

• cmd vs ctrl: The OS X equivalent of the control key – in windows (and gnome for that matter) – is command. ctrl+z in windows, translates to cmd+z in osx. The issue here is keyboard layout. The cmd key is located right next to the spacebar. This makes any shift+cmd combination extremely difficult to pull off.
• Finder Sucks!: Finder is just not a very good way to manipulate files. The main problem is the lack of an “up” button to navigate to the parent directory. Finder has a back button – “back” isn’t always “up.” Finder also has a dropdown which lists all the directories in the path, while this is a more efficient way to go navigate “up” 2 directories or more, it’s less efficient when you want to navigate up 1 directory – 2 clicks to use the dropdown vs. 1 click to use an “up” button.
  Another issue is the accordion directory interface you get in list view – 1 click opens the directory in the current view, 2 clicks opens the directory as your current view.
  The list view itself is also broken. There is no way to organize the list view to match the default windows list view. I.E. Directories at the top, files below, in alphabetical order.
  Don’t even get me started on the “save file” interface.
• Menu Bar: While I think the top of the screen is actually the correct location for things like the clock and other indicators, the menu bar paradigm does not work well with multiple displays. When I open an app on my secondary display I have to go back to the primary display everytime I want to use the app’s menus. Really does not make any sense.
• Dock: It’s kind of useless.
• Alert Boxes: Application alerts (eg. “Are you sure you want to exit”) appear at the top of the app window, as opposed to the center of the screen. This is another minor UI mistake, imho.

2. Security features are not annoying
OS X warns me the first I open a file or run an app I’ve downloaded off the internet (even if i actually downloaded the file in an archive). Enough said.

3. It doesn’t crash
In a week of use I’ve had 2 or 3 (stable) apps crash, the OS froze and needed to be powercycled once. This is not a good start.

UPDATE!:

Setupmac.com has a solution to my issue with the up button.
First, the keyboard shortcut ⌘↑ goes to the “enclosing folder.” I think this alone solves my problem!!
Second, they also have a patch to add an up button to the finder toolbar.
Link

I’ll put out some vegan cookies and soy milk on the hearth.