As of yesterday, apps all have ratings based on various content like cartoon violence. Try resubmitted now that parental controls are on the way and don't check "None" for cartoon violence. See what happens.
Sans-hardware (not supported until 3.0), there are a lot of apps for the iPhone that do credit card processing, including the one that's on Apple TV ad right now: http://innerfence.com
As someone who has spent countless hours looking for a good wireless point of sale system this is going to be huge.
Small retailers will snap this up and avoid the evil merchant companies. All of the inventory management and reporting lives in the cloud. Right now, besides opentable, all of the POS stuff is either really expensive or garbage.
The only comparable thing right now is a Symbol MC70 with Windows Mobile and an external swiper. Apple retail uses them and they are $3k+ a pop. You can get some knock of Pidion 1300s for $1200. All the software is "enterprise" garbage.
This device will be given away at cost. Pair it with an ipod touch and small business climb on board in mass. A whole new slew of small business, babysitters, and freelancers will accept credit cards.
They cleanup in merchant fees at the very least, and quite possibly create the holy grail of mobile-to-mobile payments -- all nicely integrated into twitter.
Most freelancers I work with (granted: high tech folks, generally) already do. Paypal, how I love you, let me count the ways...
Speaking of which: if you want to be extra special nice to your favorite freelancer, pay them through Paypal's batch interface. It reduces the cost to receive the money from essentially 2.9% of the transaction to a flat fee of $1. When you're settling up $2000 invoices, that means a significant amount of money in their pocket rather than Paypal's. All it takes is for you to write a one-line text file and click a button on Paypal.
I actually just spent a fair amount of time researching iPhone credit card processing for a client.
Innerfence's product is definitely the best of the bunch. However, all of the card processing apps on the app store , including Innerfence's, just talk to the Authorize.net payment system. Another one also supports paypal in addition to authorize.net.
As someone who has built both iPhone apps and built apps which use authorize.net for payment processing, I'll say that this isn't trivial, but it certainly isn't a huge challenge if you know what you are doing.
Thus, I can't help but think there must be something else to Dorsey's idea.
I have to imagine that Dorsey knows this which makes me wonder if he has something up his sleeve, unless he thinks that his reputation in the business will help carry the project. This is, after all, the tech industry; we shouldn't underestimate the viral.
Banking is strong - this is just one of the ways to upload.
Obviously, if we could do what we want with ubiquitous Flash, we would. But since we can't ...
Silverlight's first time install is actually quite reasonable - it doesn't even require a browser restart. And we've had more people try it than I would have believed.
The landscape is always changing. At some point Flash 10 will be a reality. Since it's just the two of us, we're paying a lot of attention to the shifting landscape (for example, Yahoo's recent stuff). If and when a better alternative is available, we will definitely switch to it.
In fact, that's precisely what we do. It's easy to see how you might have gotten the wrong impression, since our front page is deliberately light on technical details.
We're trying to bridge the gap between tech-savvy photo sharing -- using web pages and not clogging up people's inboxes -- and the vast majority of people who don't understand URLs and just want to see the pictures.
Our tool creates a web page that's under the user's control, just like you say, and it simply sends out an email that links to the page. But in an HTML-capable mail reader, you also get a nice grid of image links to the photo thumbnails. (Click a thumb goes to the larger version on the web.)
Hopefully, it's the best of both worlds. My mom (she's not a focus group) gets to see the pictures, and she doesn't need to remember a URL to go to or tell other people about. On the other hand, I don't have to wait five minutes for gnus to download her enormous photo attachments.
I wasn't kidding. :) The advice in that blog post is fine if users like your mom are not going to be part of your target audience, or if she'll use it just because she's your mom. But if you send her to the homepage and she can't figure it out, I think thats a great focus group. If she's not technical (obviously, I don't know your mom) and she thinks its a breeze, you've done an incredible job. I won't say more, since having conversations about people's mothers never seem to turn out good, but in this case, I think it would be great to see how your mom uses it. Note that I said "how she uses it," not if she likes it. Of course your mom will like it :) Er, hopefully.
One thing Derek failed to mention that might be interesting to the HN set: we're using Catalyst, which is a Perl-based MVC framework. It's a little unorthodox, as the popular choices these days seem to be RoR and django.
We've been really happy with Catalyst, especially its Chained dispatch type. And CPAN has been really helpful since there's just the two of us working on this right now. :-)
Catalyst has an active mailing list and IRC channel full of helpful people. For more information, check out http://www.catalystframework.org/.
As the author of Catalyst::DispatchType::Chained, thanks!
I think most of us in the Cat community consider it a secret weapon - it's not optimised for simple, fast stuff like rails is and it's not optimised for content sites like Django is but it scales really nicely to large projects and CPAN helps keep them from getting too large in the first place.
Perl and python are very different languages. They're both good. You might find you're vastly more productive in python. I'm vastly more productive in Perl.
(declaration of bias: I'm a Catalyst core team member and would be delighted to see you on #catalyst on irc.perl.org :)
If you already know perl, then there's no reason not to use Catalyst. While it's lacking in the shiny marketing (build a blog in 5 minutes) that other frameworks seem to like, it's a good bit more flexible in terms of your choices of Models and Views, and in the way that you can present dispatch logic than other frameworks.
