Originally this blog post wasn’t going to be going up for another week or so, but with the recent explosion of people complaining about the (teeny tiny!) upgrade price of Atebits’ Tweetie application, and the people who seemed to revolt at the idea of paying a very small amount for a wonderful piece of software, a piece of software that they use day in and day out for months on end, I decided this would get posted now.

What is this about? Part of it is how some users seem to think that coding an application is easy. These users seem to think a developer takes twenty minutes throwing together an application, and then gets rich from it. Not true.

Another part is how the iPhone has devalued the mobile software market, and to an extent the Mac software market. These same users who would have paid $20 for an application not 2 years ago now revolt at the idea of paying $10 for the same thing.

Before I start talking about the current version of Notify, I will first take a look at the “first” version of Notify, the version that only a few people got to see. The “first” Notify was actually my first venture into coding a serious Mac OS X application. I’d done some stupid little things beforehand, like writing a lame little number game, but nothing that actually prepared me for how hard it is to write a properly designed, well coded application. For those of you who don’t code, it is hard. You can write something that works quite well, but making it maintainable is another thing entirely. Jeff Atwood has an excellent article on technical debt, and what it means to software projects. Needless to say, the first Notify wasn’t exactly well coded, nor was it exactly well designed.