Pitching

The Intern (Double Fine Adventure) // One of the most creative internship applications I have ever seen. Presentation, portfolio, and personality, all in one hilarious Monkey Island-inspired adventure game. There is no way this story could have ended differently than this. // via Andreas Monitzer

How cold calling (properly) works better than AdWords // Creating value for you and the customer is the most honest proposition – and it’s one that customers understand and respect. Example pitch: “Hi, I’m Robert and I run a blog focused on deer management. I am looking for a few people to visit, tour your facilities, and talk with you about your business. I can then write up the experience and link you up on the blog.” // via Francis Irving

App Store

Money and the App Store: a few figures that might help an indie developer // The App Store is great for indie app makers, but actually earning enough to make a living, let alone getting crazy-rich, is much harder than many people think. Interesting tidbit: The median earnings per app rise markedly with the number of published apps – experience matters. (Good thing then that I just doubled the number of apps to my name.)

Download Volume Needed To Hit Top 25 Per Category // I believe the per-category Top 25 to be the most important cut-off, because these are the apps initially shown to users who browse the category on their iPhone. Being a Productivity app, Memento would need 1,300 purchases per day. Long way to go…!

iOS Dev

MPFoldTransition // Getting fold transitions right is surprisingly hard. We made something like this last year for a wall calendar component in an iPad app, and tweaking the shadows and the perspective angles took way more time than planned. Great to see this open-sourced! // via iOS Dev Weekly

MGTileMenu // Matt Gemmell builds something really cool, open-sources it under a fair give-credit-or-pay license, introduces it with one long, well-written blog post along with demo videos, and argues that “if you’re using MGTileMenu, you’re a developer – so I expect you to […] provide a fix along with each bug report”. With his blend of respectful attitude and soft-spoken personality, it’s hard not to like this guy. // also via iOS Dev Weekly, which you should really subscribe to if you haven’t yet.

iCloud and UIDocument: Beyond the Basics // Yet another good walk-through tutorial by Ray Wenderlich. It nudged me towards integrating iCloud in Memento.

Change

Two wonderful articles from The New Yorker.

Walmart and the Dangers of Corporate Corruption // Change is hard – but possible, if enough people stand up for their values.

Clayton Christensen’s Disruptive Innovation // Fascinating profile of the man who coined the now-ubiquitous notion of “disruptive” innovation. Why do innovative companies grow immensely for many years and then get superseded and eclipsed by others? By Christensen’s sensible argument, what happens is that “bad, cheap, low-end” products (cassette tapes, digital cameras, Toyota cars) fly under the successful companies’ radar and, through gradual improvements, change the game and put the established companies out of business.

Turn of the Century

Harry Kessler’s Diaries // Another riveting profile from The New Yorker, subtitled “Count Harry Kessler met everyone and saw everything.” The coffee-house society, the cosmopolitan networks of intellectuals, artists, and scientists, and the ideal of combining the arts, humanities, science, and technology to make the world a better place all remind me of Stefan Zweig’s great memoir The World of Yesterday (German original: Die Welt von Gestern).

I inadvertently published preliminary versions (of this and the German weekly picks earlier today, which needed fact-checking and getting a quotation right. Sorry about that.