Mike Lee is a product engineer in the Netherlands.
Follow @bmf on Twitter. If you have comments, email bmf@le.mu.rs.
For more information about Appsterdam, check out http://appsterdam.rs and follow @appsterdamrs.
We understand that if you’re not in the city you’re probably not going to fly out for this, especially since you’re already coming out here November 4-6 for the Appsterdam 2 Launch Party Weekend. Still, you’d like to get your questions answered, and you’d like them to be answered when you’re awake. Have no fear. We’ve considered the best way for everyone to get their questions answered, while preserving anonymity.
Just send us your questions. We’ll coalesce the things people want to know into one big anonymous blob. Then we’ll use that blob to produce content during the summit that will be available online at 10 a.m. California time, two hours per day, both days. We will make sure your questions are addressed.
At the Appsterdam Foundation, we ask ourselves, what do App Makers need? In the same way, your delegates at the legal summit are going to be asking themselves, what do App Makers need to defend themselves against patent extortion? If you have some thoughts on that, by all means, send them along.
You can use the signup form to get your question across. If you’ve already signed up, that’s OK. Or, you can email us. You can also tweet @optanthill or use the hashtag #anthill.
It’s past 5 a.m., and I should really be asleep, but something somebody told me today has gotten stuck in my brain and it isn’t going to let me sleep until I get it out. It has come to my attention that the Jailbreak community really does not like me.
That’s fine. Haters gonna hate. But, in this instance, I feel like this whole thing is based on some cosmic misunderstandings, so in the interest of unity and tolerance, I’d like to clear a few things up.
First, there was the Denny’s incident. This happened two WWDCs ago during the usual post-drinking visit to Denny’s. My crew was sitting, coincidentally, next to Jay Freeman’s crew. Jay and I engaged in some lively, but amicable debate on whether Apple viewed Jailbreak with animosity or apathy.
From where I was sitting, the younger guys with Jay were being hostile and rude. We really just wanted to eat our food and get some sleep, but they were scrapping for a fight. I tried to be good humored, but when one kid called me a fanboy, I felt the need to drop the kibosh.
Getting right up in his face, fully aware of the fact that I can be terrifying, I informed him that I was a Microsoft fanboy who hated Apple, but that Apple had earned my respect, and that going around calling people fanboys because they disagree with him is intellectual laziness.
Then I sat down, ate my food, and left. I wasn’t offended or anything. We all get full of piss and vinegar sometimes. We’re passionate people. That’s what enables us to do the work that we do. Of course, by the time the story got around and back to me you’d think the Sharks and Jets had accidentally gone to the same Denny’s.
I got a laugh out of it at the time, but seeing as Judy and I had our second and third dates that week, it really wasn’t the biggest thing on my mind. Apparently I really freaked those kids out. I had no idea. I’m really sorry guys. Seriously nothing personal.
Since then Jay and I at least have had many friendly conversations. I had no idea this story was still going around, nor that it had since picked up some friends. Again the old telephone game strikes. As I understand it, I’m said to be going around calling Jailbreak an abomination to humanity or some such.
That’s just silly. I’m a dyed in the wool hacker. One of my favorite things about Appsterdam is the government uses the word hacker correctly. I was around when Jailbreak started. We built it because we wanted to make iPhone apps and there was no SDK.
By “we” I mean the community. I didn’t personally contribute to Jailbreak, because Wil Shipley forbade it, since it was already sucking up a third of the company’s engineering resources, but I was passionate about the iPhone since 9:42, and watched the whole thing very closely. I then went on to co-found a company originally dedicated to lovingly bringing the best of Jailbreak to the new SDK.
Had I chosen money instead of wisdom, what I would be doing in my retirement is building robots with iPhones for brains. That’s my big secret dream, and pretty much requires Jailbreak. The last thing I want is for it to go away.
That being said, I do personally disagree with both the anti-Apple tone and some of the decisions of that crew. The latter, I believe, hurts App Makers and consumers alike, and the former is a disrespectful waste of energy.
But that doesn’t change the fact that I have the utmost respect for that team. They’re incredibly smart guys, and valuable members of our community. I welcome them, and all App Makers, to come see us in Appsterdam. Honestly guys, you’d dig it the most.
In all seriousness, I don’t hate anyone—certainly not those guys—so enough with the schoolyard antics, backbiting, and rumormongering. We, and our entire community, have bigger fish to fry.
We’ve been mum since announcing the Appsterdam Legal Defense Initiative, busy organizing things behind the scenes. We’re now ready to start signing people up and accepting donations, which you can help us with by visiting the official Operation Anthill web site. You can connect to Operation Anthill on Facebook and Twitter, hashtag #anthill.
We’re organizing a legal summit in Appsterdam somewhere between October 3-15. We’re thinking 2 days, with a day of presentations and a day of workshops. I’m letting you know now so you can start clearing your schedule. I’ll give you the exact dates as soon as possible, so you can book travel.
Whether you’re being extorted with patents now, or are afraid for the future, this will be your chance to get the legal advice you need to protect your business.
I knew the day would come when Steve Jobs would retire, and I could have predicted that I would blog about it, but I didn’t expect to cry. The feeling of tears welling up in my eyes took me by surprise. It wasn’t the shock of the announcement, or the soonness of it, but the implication of it.
It would be one thing if Steve got up on stage, said, “We’re richer than Europe. I think I’ve proved my point,” dropped the mic, and walked into the sunset. Instead Steve said, “I have always said if there ever came a day when I could no longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple’s CEO, I would be the first to let you know. Unfortunately, that day has come.”
I’m crying because I never got to meet Steve Jobs, never got to shake his hand, never got to suffer his direct criticism. I’m crying because I’m afraid I never will.
My personal relationship with Steve Jobs, like most people’s personal relationships with Steve Jobs, means all the world to me, and nothing at all to Steve Jobs. When I needed a ticket to the first WWDC to ever sell out, I was told to appeal to the man himself. I didn’t even know you could email Steve. It just didn’t even occur to me that was something one could do.
My first email to Steve was lengthy, giving a full accounting of myself, my career, my history with Apple, and the value of having me, my company, and our little music game, at the conference. It took most of the day for me to write it. The response: “Sorry, we are truly sold out.” Terse poetry, worth not getting the ticket just to own that little piece of classic Steve.
That wasn’t the only time I wrote to Steve Jobs. Years ago I had a premonition that he was sick again, and wrote him a letter about it. I never sent that letter. I thought he would find it intrusive and creepy, especially if it was true. And it was true, sadly.
When I outgrew Wil Shipley as my mentor, I made Steve my mentor. I didn’t actually propose this to him. That would be absurd. I just started studying him, reverse engineering his techniques, learning to perform his tricks, on stage and off.
When I went to work for Apple, I went to work for Steve. To be inside Infinite Loop is to have the rare privilege of hearing Steve Jobs speak off the cuff. I would see him around, but I never approached him. He is always extremely busy. And extremely skinny.
Legend has it that when Apple sends retail employees to Infinite Loop for training, they warn them not to look at Steve. I guess there was a serious problem with people getting caught in him like deer in headlights. They were probably blocking the sidewalk. He hates that.
I never talked to Steve at Apple. Not once. I would talk about Steve. I was appalled at how little people at Apple knew about him for all the time they spent worrying about what he was thinking. “He’s not an unknowable entity,” I would say, exasperated. “There are books you can read about him.”
After my shift at the sausage factory, I would go home to continue coding in my Silicon Valley garage, get ferociously stoned, and email Steve.
I emailed him before camping out at Valley Fair for the iPad launch (sixth in the door, behind Steve Wozniak). I was so excited about it, and I wanted him to know how excited I was. I told him about going to the Star Trek Experience and how all the tablets ever envisioned for Star Trek look like crap compared to the iPad.
I emailed him to tell him that I had to choose between being in the same room as Steve Jobs or a naked woman, and chose the woman, because I thought that’s what he would do. I wanted to let him know that bmf@apple.com was a pirate. I hoped that would make him smile.
I emailed Steve for the last time before leaving Apple and Silicon Valley behind to ask a question: when I was a kid and I thought of the future, it wasn’t as good as my life is now, so what am I meant to think of now when I think of the future?
Like the other late night missives, Steve never responded, which made me realize the answer was obvious: the future is ours to invent.
A lot of aspiring App Makers contact me, wondering how to get started turning their idea into an actual product. Should they hire a coder, or learn to code themselves? Or should they start with a designer? Or an investor? My advice, as always, is to start at the end. That is, make a video that shows people using your app.
This accomplishes several things. First and foremost, it establishes the story of your product, which is what people will tell each other about your product. It also gives you focus. People always tell you to do one thing and do it well. This establishes that one thing right up front.
When you’re making the video what you’re doing is you’re putting yourself in your customer’s shoes. You’re stopping to think, in a formal way, about what it’s like for people to use your product. As you go through those motions, you realize what the product needs to be, the genesis of design.
Making a video also establishes a vision of the product. I’m a big fan of generating marketing materials early in the product development process, because it helps everyone know just what exactly you’re intending to build. Great products come from great teams, but only if everyone agrees on what they’re building.
By the time your video is finished, you’ll know what you’re building, what it looks like, and how it works. You’ve also got the video itself, which you’ll show to potential recruits, investors, and customers. In addition to showing the world why they would use your product, the video shows them how they would use your product. This is Apple’s favorite trick: pre-training people with commercials, making the products seem intuitive.
App videos have become increasingly popular if only because they fill the gap left by app stores cutting out trial periods. If you can’t try it, at least you can see someone else trying it. For a lot of people, that’s the push they need to buy. That also means that app videos are as competitive as apps themselves.
The standard presentation rules apply. You want to entertain, inspire, and educate, in that order. A minute is a gigabyte of attention span, so try to keep the video short. Be creative, but don’t go overboard. Getting the audio quality right is more important than all the stunts in the world.
