As I’ve mentioned before, I was involved with the 20MacApps promotion. Up to this point, I’ve been publicly optimistic about the promotion despite working as if it had gone bad. For instance, I promised to give registration codes for Paperclip to anyone that had bought into the promotion. The deadline for the start of the promotion had passed and I pretty much assumed that it wouldn’t start. I didn’t want users to be left without anything after having shelled out a good bit of money. However, my emails to users that took me up on the offer included the caveat that if the promotion started again, they might receive another registration code which they could pass to their friends. On online forums, I’ve been preparing for the notion that 20MacApps might fail but hoping for the best.

Today, the Mac Geek Gab recommended that people who bought into 20MacApps should request a refund. The host explains that he’s been in contact with Mark Howson, the promoter for 20MacApps, so I assumed the recommendation comes after hearing the details to which others aren’t privy. I figured if that’s the case, I’ll go ahead on record and provide my own thoughts on the promotion without any unnecessary enthusiasm or optimism.

So much promise

Let me go back to when I first got involved with 20MacApps. The idea, as explained to me, was that there’d be a new Mac application every two weeks for forty weeks. I was invited to be a part of it. The promotion sounded awesome. I had only heard of Mark Howson through my involvement with TheMacPak (also currently on hiatus). This was around the middle of December. I initially said that I wouldn’t bother unless I had a great idea for an application. A week or so later, I found inspiration and started on Paperclip. Howson contacted me again and, this time, I joined the promotion.

When this all happened, I really didn’t know anything about Howson. I knew he was with TheMacPak but I wasn’t aware of his other promotions. According to a few threads on the MacHeist forums, the other promotions hadn’t gone as well. I should have investigated Howson a little more but, until this point, things seemed to be on the up and up so I didn’t ask too many questions. Everything seemed straitforward enough.

The first ripples

My first inclination that things may not be right was the control that Howson wanted over my application. I want to reiterate that Paperclip is my application. Howson had some guy create an early icon for Paperclip and insisted that I use it. At the time, I figured I might as well. I didn’t have an icon at that moment and I could always hire someone to design one before it shipped. Then he made a few other suggestions. I don’t mind people giving me suggestions at all. And I don’t want it to sound like that’s the problem. No, the problem was that I felt that Howson thought he had a controlling stake in the development of Paperclip.

For instance, we clashed over two fairly significant things. First, Howson wanted Paperclip to be named “Clip.” I don’t like that. It’s too close to iClip and doesn’t really do much for me. I thought Paperclip had a better ring and seemed a bit more explanatory. I stuck to my guns and Howson said that he had convinced others to see it my way. I don’t work with a committee so I don’t know who he was convincing. The other thing was that Howson really wanted the default font to be Marker Felt. Personally, I hate Marker Felt as a typing font. It’s fine for stylistic stuff and small uses, but I don’t want to read a lot of it. Howson was insistent and never really let that one go (until he quit talking to me altogether) but I controlled the source code so I never made Marker Felt default. You can change that (cmd-T when in a note in Paperclip), so Marker Felt is all yours if you want.

I should go back and say that Howson was very amiable during all of this. There was absolutely no animosity. They were some of the easiest disagreements I had ever had and, at the time, I didn’t mind them at all. It just put the notion in the back of my mind that Howson thought 20MacApps owned my application. On the 20MacApps forums, Paperclip had a thread that was titled “Clip.”

I ran into this again after I had added the Welcome video to Paperclip. The video has text-to-speech read to the user. Howson insisted that I send a script to him so that he could have a professional do the voiceover. Again, this passed by fairly easily but it was a bit off putting how eager he was to have some of his content in my app.

Slightly bigger waves

Sometime in early January, I had Paperclip in a working beta form. Howson was excited about making it the first app in the promotion. I was amused and a bit skeptical. I liked the idea that I’d be leading off. People would see it, it’d back a bigger splash than if it were released sometime in the middle, etc. However, Paperclip had under a month of development and it showed. Now I had just a couple of weeks to pull it all together. I wondered about the state of the other developers. I thought I was being pulled in late and now I’m the lead off batter.

Howson also was insistent that I use his beta program. People who bought into 20MacApps could pay a bit more and be part of the beta team. Okay, whatever. The problem is that I never had direct access to the beta testers. It was like developing in a box. I’d send a release to Howson and he’d forward it on. I never saw a bug report until a handful of them were dumped in my inbox. In one email. I couldn’t use that. And many of the reports that I eventually shifted through were for bugs I had fixed several days or even a couple of weeks prior. If I’m pulling together an application due at the end of the month, I need prompt bug reports. Not a massive collection from several weeks tossed into one email. I was forbidden to put together my own beta team since part of the promotion was that people paid to have this responsibility. I see the logic and I hate to give away something that other people paid for but I don’t think reporting bugs should be for sale. When people report bugs, they are doing me a service. The fact that people paid for that didn’t seem right. The fact that the system didn’t really work out hurt Paperclip.

I kind of expected that Howson and I would negotiate a formal agreement during the month of January. I probably should have done that before I started working on anything but I had asked for time before I even started with the promotion and I knew I could sell whatever I eventually made. I felt like it was one of those things we could hash out before the promotion started. I became more worried the longer it was pushed back. In retrospect, not having a formal agreement was probably the best thing for me and the customers. I know of at least one other dev signed on with 20MacApps that never had a formal agreement so it may have been par for the course.

Silence and the storm

Before the end of January, I quit hearing from Howson. The forums at 20MacApps also went offline. I did, however, start receiving a massive number of complaints from customers. I guess since I was the first at bat and they knew about me, they needed someone with which to talk. I wish I could have told them something more than “I don’t know” but I honestly didn’t know anything more than they did. I could, however, promise them that I’d uphold my end of my agreement with Howson. I would deliver my application in February (the official start date of the promotion had been pushed back to Feb 1st).

February came and I still didn’t know anything. I hadn’t heard from Howson or a representative. The 20MacApps forums were still down. And I still had customers asking me about the promotion. I had made promises to many customers that I’d release Paperclip in February so I started prepping it as it was. I knew it had some rough spots (Finder and Safari support wasn’t quite what it ought to have been, but that’ll be fixed in 1.0.2 due out this week) that resulted from my not having a bevy of beta testers but I couldn’t make excuses. It didn’t seem right to make people who had been waiting for so long wait longer.

So I released. And it was a great release. I’ve been very happy with its success. I’ve heard reports that Howson has complained that his first developer (me) had caused a “tiny nightmare” because the first app had been released. I find it a bit odd that there’s a complaint about someone keeping up their end of the bargain despite the promotion falling apart. Also, I haven’t heard from him yet even though he’s blaming me for at least some part of the failure of the promotion.

Thanks for reading so far

At the end of the day, I really don’t have any real anger towards Howson. The promotion failed (and I suspect it will stay failed) and I can walk away. I haven’t been paid for delivering Paperclip for 20MacApps, nor have I received anything for providing Share and SiteTagger as promotional deals for those purchasing 20MacApps, nor have I received payment for selling Share and SiteTagger on TheMacPak. I’ve provided registration codes for Share and SiteTagger for the 20MacApps promotion because customers didn’t receive them so I know I’ve sold at least a few. I figure I’ll never see that money and that’s okay. I hope I’ve made up for it with the good will of my customers.

In the end, I’m not turned off to software promotions but I wouldn’t do one with Howson. I’m afraid that the tone of this post is rather negative but I’ve only enumerated the problems I had working with him. I never felt frustrated or antagonized through the process and I had incentive to work on an application that pleases me. I don’t consider 20MacApps to be big personal loss but I feel for the users that paid money. Like Mac Geek Gab, I recommend that purchasers request their money back. Unlike Mac Geek Gab, I don’t think technical issues are the problem.