-
Website
http://gifterapp.com/blog/blog.html -
Original page
http://gifterapp.com/blog/files/bedd9a6a1425818f49ef0645cc71044c-1.html -
Subscribe
All Comments -
Community
-
-
Top Commenters
-
Popular Threads
All Comments
Thats a great job. Working from different location and pullin something like this is big task and job well done. Wish your app is succesfull.
Despite being able to do all of that, we were really up against a wall to ship Gifter in time for the App Store launch. In order to simplify our launch and testing load we decided to limit ourselves to using a single one of those backends, the pregenerated XML backend. So rather than having Gifter directly query various services it is currently getting static files from us.
A last minute issues with one site prevented us from using the REST interfaces we had intended to, and left us with no way to query for specific items in order to build our categories. We are able to download their entire inventory every day, and filter it down. It is a bit overkill, and in the long term we will move away from it, but in the short term it allows us to present the items we want without changing anything user visible. So for the time being that is worth the extra bandwidth and processing.
So the 12GB a day is really a huge work around, but it was one we had to do just because of the time constraints.
I'll be posting a bit more about some of the architecture of Gifter and some general principles about performance tuning for the iPhone at some point in the future.
* Development - you say 4 months, and you say "we" so that imples there's more than 1 of you - so 2 (or more?) people's salary for 4 months.
* Ideas - again, how long did you spend coming up with the idea?
Even you didn't actually spend any money on the above, you have to look at it as if you did: since you were not *making* money during that time, you need to factor in the amount you would have normally made into the overall cost.
An excellent post nonetheless..!
Although really, the best would be to use the wonderfully unambiguous octets (12 gigaoctets or 12 gibioctets?).
James: GB. Isn't "gigaoctet" French?
Why spend money on the developer conference? I think egos controlled the purse strings on that expense. Also, you obviously didn't have enough base-level experience to realize you didn't need to buy fancy-schmancy software to do your web and icon work - there is tons of more than adequate free stuff out there. And now days, most server farms are very reliable - it isn't like you are trying to guide the space shuttle home and need mission critical 24/7/365 service.
.
As for servers, we're not just serving this web page - our app doesn't work without its backend. So reliability was an important factor in our hosting choice - $28/month seems like a deal for what we're getting, to me.
Nice to know I did guess correctly about what you thought WWDC was worth ;)
I think most of the people going "what the hell you spent $3000 on that *and* included it in your cost analysis?!" are vastly underestimating how useful WWDC is.
and well, judging from the comments on proggit about this very post, i'm sure you'd agree ;)
http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/info/6rrnh/...
In future years I think that WWDC will seem less necessary, once there are mailing lists with archives you can search, etc. But this year it was definitely equivalent to another couple months worth of development time.
Over the course of doing Gifter 1.0 I probably wrote 3-4x times as as much code as actually went into it. We experimented, and we threw out a lot of stuff, since we were learning about both the development environment, and what actually worked on the device. It has some pretty unique interface and performance constraints. Again another factor that will probably be much better for future development, once the NDAs are lifted.
Also, for a few posts back up, I was a bit sloppy in the comment, but I went 12GB (12 *1024 *1024*1024 bytes).
And that silly NDA...I'm not sure why Apple hasn't lifted the NDA yet, but there's definitely a few resources I can think of for the not-NDA'd stuff, e.g. erica sadun's list and http://forums.macrumors.com/forumdisplay.php?f=135.
While I can (and did) read those and sometimes glean information from them, I would not actually post questions in them.
For reference, I love WWDC. I skipped the last year or two, but it is always a great experience, both as a developer, and back when I worked for Apple. This year was certainly unique in a number of ways because of the iPhone.
Thanks for being open. For someone who isn't a developer the issue of development time is huge gaping hole in trying to figure out how much an app would cost.
Its not quite an apples to apples comparison with Guy's “By the Numbers: How I built a Web 2.0, User-Generated Content, Citizen Journalism, Long-Tail, Social Media Site for $12,107.09" until that number is factored in.
If you were to hire someone else to develop it. What do you think/estimate the final cost would be then?
Thanks and best of luck, I'll be looking for you on the App Store. What category is it in?
Also I could easily beat that price since I've made iPhone apps myself with existing hosting etc, which I guess by your system means they cost $0.
Basically I'm saying if you don't count time as a cost then you're taking crazy pills.
So now you say you want to make money out of this - how do you do that since its free? That woulöd be the really interesting side to know more about. No problem to sit around and create stuff but to make income - thats the key!