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.

CocoaBuilder is a consolidated, searchable archive of all posts to the cocoa-dev, macosx-dev, and xcode-users mailing lists. It's a terrific resource for Mac developers.

CocoaBuilder strips out email addresses to protect your privacy, but it includes your full name in the title of each page. So to see all the posts you've ever made, you can simply search for your name, as long as your name is fairly unique.

It occurred to me that if you're applying for a Cocoa job, you could include a search link in your cover letter. This would be an easy way to help the employer get an idea of you as a person. By browsing your posts, they can get a sense of your Cocoa cred, your writing style, your willingness to help, your ability to learn, how far back you go with Cocoa, and even how nicely you play with others. Of course they could easily do the search themselves, and some probably do, but why not give them one-click convenience?

Although I happened to think of this while browsing CocoaBuilder, it would work for any public forum on any topic, as long as there's a way to search for yourself in the archives, either directly or via Google.

Here are search links for my posts to the Cocoa lists. I wonder if I should change the name I use to something more likely to be unique down the road.

• direct search on CocoaBuilder, most recent first
• indirect search via Google

The results include all my dopey posts as well as the good ones, but I don't think there's a Google hack that can fix that.

Most classes have behaviors. Many behaviors don't have class.

(I learned about chiasmus from Dr. Mardy.)