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The NANY 2018 Special Event
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Check out the new free software and fun stuff released as part of our NANY (New Apps for the New Year) 2018 event on January 1, 2018: here.

Since 2007 we have held an annual event that we call NANY (New Apps for the New Year), where we ask the coders who hang out on DonationCoder to create some new piece of free software and share it with the world on January 1st of the new year. NANY is really the funnest thing we do on this site, and it's one of the few times we can all play together. There are no winners or losers, it's simply a celebration of programming and creating new software and sharing it with the world.

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Apples, Walled Gardens, and Screw Deals - Oh My!

funny-pictures-ambush-cat.jpg
Sad cautionary tale from Matt Ingram over at GigaOM.

The Danger of Playing in Apple’s Walled Garden

Every so often a news item comes along that reinforces the downside of building your business on someone else’s platform, and this week’s poster child is iFlowReader, an e-book app for the iPhone and iPad. The company behind the app announced today that it is shutting its doors for good, and it puts the blame for its demise squarely on Apple and its new 30-percent levy on in-app sales. The benefits of getting into bed with Apple are obvious: access to a huge universe of motivated users and built-in payment handling. But the downsides for those who play inside Apple’s walled garden should be just as obvious — namely, that you lose control over some fundamental aspects of your business.

The bitterness that iFlowReader feels about Apple suddenly changing the rules of the app game spills out of every line in the company’s blog post, in which the company advises users that it will be “going out of business” as of May 31, and that this is a “sad day for innovation.”

Link here for full article.

Be sure to check out some of the links found within the article.  The blog post making iFlowReader's going out of business announcement is an especially painful read.  I took the liberty of providing a copy below (emphasis added) for reference should iFlowReader's website disappear because it's really worth reading. Especially if you're planning on getting into bed with Apple as a developer.

...

Regardless of whether iFlowReader was overly trusting, much too optimistic, or simply naive, Matt Ingram's conclusion pretty much says it all:

Would iFlowReader have failed even without Apple’s new fees? Perhaps. But the fact that the company changed the rules for content-based app makers so dramatically probably pushed it over the edge, and theoretically it could do the same to anyone. That’s just the nature of playing Apple’s game — the house always wins.

Click here to read more and discuss..

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