1FPS|by David Chartier

The Register points out the differences in the communities that Nokia and Apple have been able to foster with their mobile platforms in Nokia: Our community is the best money can buy:

Many of you find the Apple cult downright creepy - and it is. But there’s no doubt that the enthusiasm exhibited by fanboys (and fangirls) is genuine. There are few sadder sights in London than the “flagship” Nokia Store on Regent Street, almost directly opposite Apple’s temple.

Good quotes from Nokia’s product manager on the issue.

Jens Alfke penned a smart piece about the great potential for developers to make a decent chunk of change by offering small iPhone apps for $0.99 once the upcoming app store goes live (hat tip to John Gruber for the find). In his piece, Alfke made a great comment on the pitfalls of open source freeware that sums up my stance really well:

Obviously open source software will be free, in both senses, and anyone who wants can publish freeware. But a lot of freeware gets abandoned by its developers, because the developers are just doing it for fun and run out of time or energy. That’s sad. And I think a moderate infusion of cash can definitely help alleviate those problems. As a customer, I’d be very happy to know that my dollar was helping to keep the developer totally enthused about adding new features and fixing my pet-peeve bugs.

I’m a lot happier paying $5 for a Safari plug-in or $50 for a great productivity app when I know its author makes his or her living, at least in party, by devloping software. I love open source and I think it’s a great industry, but I’ve seen way too many open source + freeware products simply fade away because its developer works a completely unrelated day job and gets sick of maintaining the app and dealing with support.To be sure, paying for an app is by no means a rock-hard guarantee that its developer will keep cranking away at it until I lose the ability to function with a computer. But I think you will find a much higher ratio of applications that receive steady attention from commercial developers‚Äîeven semi-commercial like the ones Alfke mentions‚Äîthan from open source developers. As an avid computer user for work, school, and hobby, that higher potential for reliability and support makes me feel a lot more secure when paying for a license. Open, standard file formats that can easily be moved from one open source app to another are great. But eliminating the need to move to different apps altogether is greater.

Pownce quietly opened up its API last night allowing developers to build real apps and all sorts of other goodness. I don’t know too many developers on Pownce or who are interested in Pownce yet, but this should help change that (Iconfactory - we can haz Powncerrific plz?).

The first interesting thing I have seen appear, however, is a simple Pownce bookmarklet from Guillermo Esteves. He posted it early this morning, and it works pretty well.

I’m excited to see what else the community can come up with, as I still prefer Pownce and its features to Twitter’s over-simplification and constant growing pains. Developers, please start your engines.

Insightful post from Daniel Jalkut, the developer behind MarsEdit and FastScripts, on the convenient and simple power Twitter provides for user-powered marketing:

The point, to me, is that the kinds of conversation being facilitated by Twitter are exactly the kinds of talk that foster product endorsements, explicit and otherwise. While publicly blogging your affection for a product takes some deliberation and determination, it’s easy as heck to quip “FastScripts, FTW!” in a moment of delight, or “I’m really digging the new FlickrExport” as you put a product through its paces. Spontaneous declarations of truth are a major part of Twitter culture, and this works perfectly for word of mouth marketing.

New services for tracking topics and conversations over Twitter appear almost daily, it’s really quite a spectacular phenomenon. It’s equally interesting to hear exactly how people like Jalkut are using these tools.

For those interested in the nerdy backside of Twitter, the service’s developers run a technology blog with which they wax ecstatic about their trade. On it the team has already released Starling, a core component of Twitter’s operations, as open source. They’ve also been very open about their efforts to track a recent problem of missing updates. If you’re a developer or simply interested in dev-y topics, this will probably be a good blog to keep an eye on.

For those interested in the more typical user-friendly side of Twitter with general news, new apps and features, the team also maintains a regular blog that’s just as interesting.

Daniel Jalkut - Free Idea: Cooperative Advertising

Enough preface, here’s the idea: a network of Mac-businesses trading a tiny patch of our web page in exchange for the cooperative advertising of our colleagues.

Love the idea. He’s using The Deck as inspiration, and it sounds great. This is one of the things I love so much about the Mac OS X community, as well as the developer community:

It’s often pointed out that the Mac developer community is just that, a community. We take it for granted, but it seems unusual that a large collection of people should be so simultaneously devoted both to money-making and to helping each other out. Frankly, it’s one of the things that prevents development on the Mac from becoming a grind: the fact that even your biggest competitor will probably sit down with you for a friendly chat. Heck, they’ll probably even buy your lunch!

As a community, we share lots of things ranging from advice, to icon designers, to source code. But we don’t share advertising. Why is that?

If this gets off the ground, it will also be interesting to see who’s using whose products.

Wow, I’ve been using VersionTracker’s feeds for I-don’t-know-how-long and I never realized there might be something better out there; look how much more useful MacUpdate’s feeds are to their readers. A brief description of the app and a Free/Shareware/Demo rating to boot. VersionTracker-b-gone!

On a sidenote: MacUpdate, I think you should add a fourth software classification - Donationware. Not everything ‘free’ is simply free, and I strongly believe developers deserve credit and compensation for their indispensable work.

[tags]donationware, developers[/tags]

“Alex Hung, a co-developer of the blogging client ecto, muses on his experience with programming on both Windows and Mac OS X.”

read more | digg story

I’m excited to score more from-the-mouth content likes this for Download Squad, as a story really can’t get much more genuine. Some of these topics might be on the nerd side of the fence, but I’m really excited to help create a dialog with developers about their experiences.