The voice in our screencasts is not native, that’s right. Lots of people have contacted us that they enjoyed the tutorials despite this accent. Nevertheless, you may be joyful to learn that the casts are currently being re-recorded using a native speaker, but with british accent. I hope you don’t mind that.

Also, Ulysses the book is referenced only once in each video, with explicit notice and with an image. I have to admit that I have a hard time to figure what might be confusing about this. If you have more thoughts or would like to give more details, we would really appreciate more feedback via email to support@the-soulmen.com.

You can’t claim to never download anything from the App Store on general principle, and then complain about app downloads being too complicated or unstable.
And not just because those claims would be ridiculous.

On the other hand, if you only download software from Steam, you would be forgiven to assume all online stores are like that.

1. Click “buy”
2. Enter password (essentially agreeing to credit card access)
3. There is no step three, just launch the app

You can even skip step two, if you’re already logged in to the store. Most importantly though, I don’t need to activate any “offline”-mode to run my apps whilst offline. The system is smart enough to detect a) me being offline and b) me launching an app while being offline which probably means I want to run it which I am entitled to if it’s on my hard drive. So…

As for going App Store exclusive: We’re a small team, and we have limited resources. The App Store offers an all-in-one approach, where we don’t have to think about

- Installers
- .dmg downloads (and launches from within a .dmg)
- Localized disk images
- Compressed downloads
- Sparkle (with users disabling “check for updates” because of privacy concerns raised by Little Snitch *sigh*)
- Serial numbers
- PayPal
- Share*It
- Credit Cards
- Multiple compiles…

Piracy is an issue, but it has been before, and if you couldn’t find a 2.0 crack, you just didn’t look hard enough. ;)
Also, as we made clear with 2.0 and its new serial number scheme, we accept piracy as a fact and just deal with it by — not caring anymore.

Steam has an “offline mode” which caches the account credentials so you can be.. offline. It suffers the same issue though, in that you still have to activate (hope you didn’t get hacked, banned, app license got revoked due to VALVe/Apple politics, or you went to a region they’ve decided not to authorize because they want to sell products you already own to you again just for being somewhere else. And yes, Valve has locked people out of their games because of the serial’s origin. Retroactively too. Apple has pulled apps that were perfectly fine for inane reasons as well (See: Pulsar.))

In fact Steam at least remembers your credentials; when I buy from Steam (a rare occurance) or from indie shops:

1. Click buy.
2. Enter details (usually log in to PayPal)
3. Paste serial in to app, enjoy for eternity.

From iTunes:

1. Click buy.
2. Log in to iTunes (it can’t remember who I am to save its life)
3. Oh no, we’ve tinkered with the EULA to screw you over. Even though you just agreed last week you need to agree to it again.
4. Log in to iTunes (it forgot who I was apparently.)
5. Start download, hope it doesn’t stall.

Steam updates automatically (which I actually *hate*), Indie-ware uses Sparkle (“Update’s here, want it? Yes? Okay, done.”), Apple lets you repeat the login-accept-login-download(maybe) for updates. Yeah, that’s convinience.

And my problem was never with developers wanting to add the App Store as an outlet (that’s fine), it’s developers saying “Even though all of the problems we think are solved by Apple are really not issues at all, we have to spend money to market our apps anyway (because the App Store is only as good as Google search unless you get featured), we’re going to deprive users their right to privacy and future-proof use of computers.” The DRM for iTunes doesn’t even work, it’s been cracked. You’re *LESS SAFE* using FairPlay’s shrinkwrap than you were with a custom (even poorly built) system.

I did a check, the only avenues for Ulysses piracy are an outdated 1.x version; at the drop of a hat, Installuous Desktop Version could make 2.x and a host of other software available easier than ever. Yeah, that’s improvement.

Also, every user on your Mac is allowed to launch the apps, online or not. You can have users set up that can launch the apps, without the users even having an Apple ID assigned. You can also re-download apps to another computer (5), if you just log in to the App Store with your Apple ID and, well, re-download your purchases.

As it stands, since there’s no check to see if the user really “is” the ID, you can bring your friends over, have them all install their purchases on your Mac and then just run all their apps. It would be illegal, as per the license being broken and all, but it would *work*.

How can you even compare this to SecuROM et al?

Not even Steam comes close, since you need to be logged in with the Steam account that did the purchase…

It doesn’t have to do with it being just on the App Store, it has to do with the over-reaching authority the App Store also imposes on users. Granted most people don’t give two thumps if their computers belong to themselves or work a year from now, so as I said it’s a minority.

The issue (for me) is not that there’s a single marketplace, reduced price, or even that it’s “screened” but solely that the licensing system relies on the premise of online limited activations and application developers don’t get the choice to “opt out” if they don’t like it (indies DO get the choice whether or not to treat customers like criminals, and invasive solutions like this are traditionally not often used in the mac world).

At least Steam lets you use unlimited computers (albiet one at a time), the App Store requires you to not only log in but manually maintain a chain of “authorized” computers in Autodesk/Microsoft/SecuROM fashion. This is what I don’t like, and why I will not buy anything from the App Store. :P