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Making it easier to buy things: the magic behind the Mac App Store

By Patrick Gant

About a week ago, Apple launched its Mac App Store—essentially an offshoot of its App Store for iPod/iPhone/iPad. By all accounts so far, it’s been a pretty successful launch, scoring one million downloads on its first day alone.

Even some developers who had initial reservations about this new way of buying software are being won over.

I can see a few things that are putting wind in the sails of those who’ve partnered with Apple on this experimental venture. First, pricing is fair but competitive within the App Store—particularly among small-sized apps that do one thing really well, as opposed to the bloated swiss-army knife approach that so many developers used to impose on their applications. Second, apps are presented compellingly as impulse buys. Not hard to part with $4.99 for Angry Birds. Plenty spend more than that on a fancy cup of coffee these days. The third factor is licensing, or rather, the lack of it with Mac Store Apps. No more having to save licensing codes. Buy the app and it’s yours.

Clearly, there’s lots to celebrate here for Mac developers, but there’s a lesson here that every business can learn from, too.

You sell more when you make it as easy as possible for your customers to buy from you.

(Photo: Apple)

Why I don’t use Evernote anymore

By Patrick Gant

at symbolHaving a portable database is a really important part of my workflow as a writer. My research hat is always on, but it used to be hard for me to keep my research notes, bookmarks, text and PDF files well-managed and synced over several Macs in the office fleet. I used Evernote for a while but switched to Yojimbo.

Here’s why. Evernote is great until you decide you want to export your data to another database. That’s when problems arise. Even though Evernote talks a good game about being export-friendly, you’re faced with having all of your rich-text file notes being converted to html.

[Update] Apparently there is some kind of workaround to this, but it’s curious that this issue has yet to be addressed fully by the app’s developers.

Bottom line: it’s your data. It is a mistake to take all your hard work that’s gone into filling your knowledge bucket and compromising with it a proprietary system tries hard to lock you in.

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