Notes From Andy

I cannot fathom why the authors of some shareware apps don’t put the price on the app’s web page. I have to click a “Buy Now” link to find out. This feels to me like either someone was a bonehead and neglected to display something people obviously want to know, or they’re trying to hide something.

Is there a school of thought — perhaps empirical evidence — that this practice increases sales? That would at least explain it, but I’d still find it annoying.

Other than the company logo, the following should be the most prominent items on an app’s web page:

• High concept. A very quick description of the product. I should be able to see at a glance what it does for me.
• Requirements. Whether it’s for Mac, PC, and/or other.
• How to get. A download link, the price, and a “Buy Now” link. These items should be grouped together.

There can be other goodies — feature lists, screenshots, screencasts, testimonial blurbs, and so forth — but the above items should be absolutely trivial to spot.

Here are some examples.

Bad. IllumineX doesn’t display the price for ecto on the product’s main page. [UPDATE: See the comments for a clarification from Gary of IllumineX.] The download link is all the way across the page from the “how to buy” link and looks very lonely:

So-so. Lemkesoft displays the price for GraphicConverter, but it could stand out a little more:

Also the price is not next to the download link, which you have to scroll down to see.

Great. Red Sweater Software does it exactly right. Each product’s home page shows the most important information at the top in a clear layout that’s consistent across products like MarsEdit and Black Ink:

Everybody, please do what Red Sweater does.

I see Kutiman has a Wikipedia page.

Also there’s an article on 43folders that, besides embedding the awesome “Mother of All Funk Chords” video below, makes this point:

Unsolicited tip for media company c-levels: if your reaction to this crate of magic is “Hm. I wonder how we’d go about suing someone who ‘did this’ with our IP?” instead of, “Holy crap, clearly, this is the freaking future of entertainment,” it’s probably time to put some ramen on your Visa and start making stuff up for your LinkedIn page.

Thinking some more about the tools he used — I wonder if he downloaded the videos as mp4’s (which is easy to do) and then imported them into Final Cut Pro or some such. I don’t know much about video tools so I’m just guessing.

Saw the really cool mashup below on avc.com. I wonder what tools Kutiman used to make it.

I would love to have a desktop application geared toward making these — kind of a GarageBand for YouTube mashups. Browse YouTube, manage a library of downloaded clips, assemble them into tracks, alter pitch and speed, and spit out the final product ready for uploading to YouTube, including attribution of all the links that were used. If such an app exists I would love to know about it. Besides the technical and UI challenges, I imagine such an app might push the boundaries of YouTube’s terms of usage.

Perhaps you’ve heard of lmgtfy.com. It provides you a snippy answer (“let me Google that for you”) when someone asks a question that could easily have been answered with a Google search. I find that pretty annoying myself, especially when there are obvious search terms (often embedded in the question itself) that would seem likely to produce relevant hits.

Them: Where can I find the Moriarity sample code?

You: http://lmgtfy.com/?q=moriarity+sample+code

The link goes to an animated page that literally spells out for the questioner how they could have done their own Google search if only they hadn’t been so clueless and/or lazy.

But now let’s turn that around. What if you’re the one with the question, and you’ve already tried the obvious Google search and there were either no helpful results or too many results for you to pick a good answer? Or you have a feeling you could find the answer with the right search terms, but none of the searches you tried was quite right?

To take the example above — if you’d seen Apple’s Moriarity code mentioned somewhere, you might easily misremember it as “Moriarty”, as in the name of Sherlock Holmes’s archenemy. (Remember an early precursor of Spotlight was called “Sherlock”.) You might easily search for the “wrong” thing and wonder why the heck the “obvious” Google search didn’t work.

Enter iagity.com. It would present a page that says “I already Googled it, thank you”, followed by a link to the Google search you tried.

You: Where can I find the Moriarty [sic] sample code?
http://iagity.com/?q=moriarty+site%3Aapple.com
http://iagity.com/?q=moriarty+sample+code

Them: Google for “moriarity sample code”. Note the extra “i” in “moriarity”. You could also have found it by Googling for “moriarty” on developer.apple.com instead of apple.com.

By providing an “I already Googled” link, you can pre-empt the wise guys whose first instinct will be to send you an unhelpful “let me Google” link. With two clicks they’ll be able to see for themselves why the search you tried didn’t work for you. If they have a helpful suggestion of what to Google for, they can tell you to Google for it. But they can’t accuse you of not trying.

The iagity home page should provide a bookmarklet that I can add to my Favorites bar. When I’m looking at Google search results, I should be able to click the bookmarklet and it should convert the Google search URL to an iagity URL. I wish lmgtfy.com had such a bookmarklet, because when I tell people to Google something I usually Google it myself first. (Before you tell me http://lmgtfy.com/?q=lmgtfy+bookmarklet — I already Googled it, thank you. There are bookmarkets, but I haven’t found one that does what I described.)

As of this writing, iagity.com is available. I might take it, but I’m behind on so many things already. If someone wants to beat me to it, knock yourself out.