Update: I’ve been informed this isn’t a cocoa app at all! I didn’t even bother to see if it had any nibs. Wow, go mono!

Agree:

• In the interview he said that shareware developers get taken more seriously and that a free app in your market doesn’t mean at all that you shouldn’t enter the market. It means quite the opposite. A freeware app just shows that the market is ripe, so to speak. This is a very interesting concept. For market I’m targeting with my app, there really aren’t any apps out there. If I come out with a shareware app, I am way more likely to be taken seriously than the EXACT same program that costs no money. It is a weird fact. People feel comfortable paying for services. When they don’t, they feel like they aren’t getting anything and they feel like it is a cheap piece of crap (even if it isn’t…).
• He believes that you should find a feature in your app that stands out and really polish it. Even if that means putting other features on the back burner and even removing them from your program. This complies with my philosophy of “Do it right, or don’t do it at all”. For example, if you are going to put a half-assed update system in your app, don’t. People will remember your half-assed update system even when you upgrade it to a kick-ass one. It is a weird fact of nature. If you don’t have features that blow people away when you first release your app…you are doomed to mediocrity.

Disagree:

• Routinely Wil has said on his blog that you should just do the bare minimum when making your programs and that if something works, don’t mess with it. He says if you need to have something handle one thing and one thing only, just make it do one thing. I disagree. This thinking is probably why Delicious Library (the oh so cool program from his company, Delicious Monster) hasn’t added many features in more than a year. I have spent a lot of time on SearchMagic. A lot of that time has gone to making the code nice and clean and making it very modular and robust. For example, I created a class called SMURLRequest that handles all of the downloading of pages for parsing. Before, I had used NSString’s initWithContentsOfURL: method and it worked fine, but I wanted to be able to do more so I spent the hour or so needed to make it much more robust. After the work, I hadn’t really accomplished anything, but my code was cleaner and I could do more with it if I so wanted to. Not soon after I had done that, I figured I wanted to add POST support. Easy, I just modify the SMURLRequest class…Not long after that, I realized I wanted to add script support. So that scripts could be the source of text to parse and display (really cool feature…think spotlight search…). Easy, I just modified SMURLRequest (took 2 minutes). My point is, make something a little more robust than you think you should. Chances are you will be modifying it anyway. And spending that time up front to make it more robust means that down the line when you have an aching feature request from a paying customer, you can easily grant the request in very little time.

In case you haven’t figured it out, I’m going to be releasing SearchMagic (I’m also thinking about changing the title…email me some suggestions) 2.0 very soon and guess what it will be called. SearchMagic 1.0! It will also be shareware. Yeah, that’s right. I’m thinking along the lines of $10. It should be worth it to some people.