iPhone developers in danger of excessively playing the blame game.

There is a growing trend that I've been seeing with the iPhone developer community and it's bothering me. Blame Apple this, blame Apple that. Playing the blame game. I've already done that a couple of times. There are valid ones that Apple did did a bad job in communicating with App developers and I've read horror stories on how apps are being held up in Apple's review cycle for months and later was rejected for a trival violation of their UI guide.

As a matter of fact, I've personally have had that experience with smackBOTS Challenge, our light version of smackBOTS. smackBOTS Challenge had gotten the notice of unexpected delay and went into limbo for 2 months. One fine day, I got a phone call from Apple's legal department and the Apple representative on the other side told me that the delay was due to the fact that we mentioned prizes in our App description and that's not allowed. He suggested we removed all references of any prizes in our description and he will forward the app review to the reviewers. 2 days later, smackBOTS Challenge was approved. I blamed Apple for this because it took them 2 months to communicate such a minute detail that was taken care of in a matter of minutes.

So alright, enough with my own stories but seriously, because of the way app reviews have been and the way that the appstore functions, developers everywhere are trying to push updates out as soon as possible. This practice is fine until app developers do that to the extend of sacrificing the quality of their apps, ie. releasing buggy software. So what prompted me this write all this rant? Well, another rant by Joe Stump that got posted on Techcrunch. Apparently, Joe has inside connections at Apple and he tried to work those connections to get more insights to why his app review was getting delayed. While it's great that Joe has his connections but imagine the number of developers like us, who did not. But I was happy to hear that his inside connections just referred him to email app reviewers instead and that's just being fair and not playing favors.

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robots are fighting on our iphones

Robot app from LeftRightStudios

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Life after YC and TechStars: What's our plan?

YC and TechStars results are out and we were not invited to either of the programs. That was hard to suck down, so I took a day off from hacking to reflect on our YC and TechStars application journey. The idea started off with a problem that I encounter day in and out so naturally I feel this pain would present itself to many other social application users like myself.

I also spent a bit of time reading through threads on HN from others that too had got the whynot/non-selection email. Here's a few conversations that I feel was worthwhile following:

What we did to (not) get into Techstars

What we did to (not) get into Techstars - Part 2

Ask HN: Got rejected by YC 6-12 months ago? Where are you now?

The YC Rejection thread

Different thoughts rushed into my mind when I received the email from YC. "Is this it? Was the idea not good enough? What's lacking from our team?". I spent the entire day reviewing our applications again, reading through some of PG's article and came to some conclusions myself. However, that is not the motivation of what I would like to share with this post.

So what's life after YC and TechStars for us? We're pretty clear on this at this point:

Getting real feedback
We told ourselves that this is going to be big. We know we are building something cool. But there is just one thing that keeps hovering in our head. Is this going to be the next "Coolest App That No One Uses". We've talked to friends about the product and gotten rave responses, so what's holding us back then? Starbucks. Getting quality feedback from strangers, like-minded hackers and seasoned entreprenuers. Paul mentioned this in his interview at Startup2Startup: It is not unusual for Y Combinator startups to show their website to Starbucks customers and ask "would you use this?"

Location, location , location
We're moving to San Francisco. We battled between Colorado and San Francisco but silicon valley prevailed. We are going to keep crunching on the product to a demo-able version and hang out at Tech meetups and starbucks, no other place beats San Francisco for such social events/meetups.

Release as promised
We plan to release a beta by May 31st. We plan to send David and Paul an email when we get to that stage. The reason behind this is because we did not have a prototype when we applied. This is the best way to show David and Paul that we executed and here's the super cool product that we've pitched about. I hope they'll be kind enough to give the advice or feedback that we love to have. 

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Afro samurai

Sent from my iPhone

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Phoenix - If I Ever Feel Better

Great electro-pop song heard on Entourage this week:

From a YouTube comment by djgeoffe: Came out in 2000. Was an underground French gem that got released on Astralwerks stateside. Probably sold about 50,000 copies at the time. With its recent exposure it's probably selling again like hotcakes at iTunes. Proper electronic music with a pop slant. Awesome.

Probably the first time in the history of the universe a YouTube comment has been USEFUL.

The HBO show Entourage has turned out to be a great source of really solid, fantastic music... kind of like the OC soundtrack back in the day. (Not embarrassed to admit I was a big fan of the OC and the OC mix cd's.)

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The Era of HD Short Films is here... Canon 5D Mark II / Nikon D90 = new revolution in super high quality optics + high definition

     

Click here to download:

The_Era_of_HD_Short_Films_is_h.zip (187 KB)

These are real video frame captures from a short film created using the Canon 5D Mark II and top-of-the-line L-lenses. Luckily I already own a bunch of the L lenses already... so for the first time, we'll be able to do full HD footage using top-of-the-line still camera optics at a cost-quality level heretofore never seen before.

Imagine: Naturally lit wide aperture full motion HD video. Drop a 35mm f/1.4 on this camera, and be able to record what a candlelit dinner looks like and feels like -- using actual candle light.

Laforet is a photographer; he has no professional film experience and had never used the 5D Mark II before, yet was able to storyboard, cast, shoot and edit the clip in just two days, with less than 12 hours notice. In particular he noted that dumping the MPEG-4 video takes way less time than it would with an actual HD camera. The only issue that would stop a person from shooting a TV pilot solely with this camera is sound matching, he says. If that's covered, you're gold.

via Gizmodo

Wow, I can't wait... as if I didn't have enough to do already. If I got a Red One, I would have gotten the Canon EOS lens adapter anyway... now I don't even need to shell out for a different camera system.

This is a quantum leap forward... so much so, that I can't wait to see the impact on online publishing sites, like ours right here. It's a very exciting time to be helping people post all their stuff online.

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My new phone wallpaper

Sent from my iPhone

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