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Show HN: My first native iOS app – Cone, a real time color picker

coneapp.io

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Re: Show HN: My first native iOS app – Cone, a real time color picker

#151

You're underselling this hugely! $0.99 is far too cheap

It was this price point that got me to buy it to try it out. If it were $1.99+ I probably wouldn't have. Psychological stuff...

Yep. It's a sad state we're in. It's just too risky to pay more for an app from a publisher who is not well-known. All too often, installing an app for $3-5+ is disappointing when you discover the app is not what you were expecting. I rarely pay for apps, simply because I'd have paid thousands of dollars over the lifetime of a single phone, only to uninstall 95% of apps after discovering it was not for me.

Is an in-app purchase required to offer something tangible? Instead of using ads and offering an in-app purchase to remove ads, I'd love to see cheap apps (ie: free or $0.99, without ads) with options for in-app purchases - maybe $3, $5, $10, $20 - that are nothing more than a voluntary donation to pay more for an app I find worthwhile.

If I could volunteer to pay more for apps after using them for an extended period of time (fully unlocked, no trial gimmicks), I'd likely have spent a lot more money than I have thus far. I won't pay thousands for a bunch of crappy used-once apps, but I'd pay a few hundred for the bundle of apps I've kept.

Re: Show HN: My first native iOS app – Cone, a real time color picker

#152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like how you kept the site and dependencies simple. 34.7KB of js (~21 is mostly color definitions), and 4.2KB of css. Just FYI: 1. You could save ~15.75kb by minifying your JS/CSS (a bit nit-picky since your resources are a fraction of what most sites have) 2. The 1MB background image comes out to 570.6 KB through tinypng.com (47% off!). If lossless is more your thing, you could save about 5% by running it through…

If you're willing to go lossy, also look at PNGQuant - https://pngquant.org/ I've started using it on all of my web images. I've yet to see the loss on a couple dozen images, but the size drops by up to 66%, even after being run through imageoptim.

tinypng is actually based on pngquant + more optimizations not in pngquant

Re: Show HN: My first native iOS app – Cone, a real time color picker

#154
post #25

Hi, HN! Really excited to share my little project here. Being a colorblind designer, it was often hard for me to figure the color names and decide which colors to use. Hence, I decided to make this app. Cone lets you pick colors in real time using the phone's camera. It lets you build color palettes while on the run, capturing and recording color for later comment/discussion, sending the colors to someone else quickl…

This looks nice (and has many knowledgable people say so) and simple, so I don't want to come off as too much of a critic.

But, can I just say that I think the use of "real time" for an interactive color picker is a bit over the top?

I mean, what would the opposite be? You click a color, then one hour later you get an e-mail? Color picking in one shape or another has been done for 30+ years[1], and it has always been real-time, it's a basic interactive tool when working with computer images.

I realize it maps the color from a camera-fed image to a human-readable name (which perhaps wasn't always done in the past), but that's still not an operation I'd expect to have to wait for, not even when running on a mobile phone.

In short, I think those two words should be removed.

[1] This number is only slightly out of thin air; I picked colors on my Amiga in the late 80s.

Re: Show HN: My first native iOS app – Cone, a real time color picker

#155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of that is probably due to Swift's runtime library.

Surely if you're using core Swift, or core Objective-C, the runtime is a shared lib shipped with the OS? I can't imagine that every single app built on Swift or Objective-C is bundling the exact same foundation? That seems so unlike Apple to miss such a massive optimization to reduce the download size of nearly every app. I can understand there being exceptions with some apps that use custom setups, but surely the ma…

I'm not an expert in the why, but as far as I am aware the whole of Swift is shipped as part of each app as it is still being developed. There is a road map to ship with the OS I believe but it's not for a while

Re: Show HN: My first native iOS app – Cone, a real time color picker

#156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was this price point that got me to buy it to try it out. If it were $1.99+ I probably wouldn't have. Psychological stuff...

Yep. It's a sad state we're in. It's just too risky to pay more for an app from a publisher who is not well-known. All too often, installing an app for $3-5+ is disappointing when you discover the app is not what you were expecting. I rarely pay for apps, simply because I'd have paid thousands of dollars over the lifetime of a single phone, only to uninstall 95% of apps after discovering it was not for me. Is an in-a…

If I could get a refund if an app sucked I'd be infinitely more willing to try out random paid apps.

Use the steam method if necessary, only auto-refund it if you've used it less than x hours

Re: Show HN: My first native iOS app – Cone, a real time color picker

#157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely if you're using core Swift, or core Objective-C, the runtime is a shared lib shipped with the OS? I can't imagine that every single app built on Swift or Objective-C is bundling the exact same foundation? That seems so unlike Apple to miss such a massive optimization to reduce the download size of nearly every app. I can understand there being exceptions with some apps that use custom setups, but surely the ma…

I'm not an expert in the why, but as far as I am aware the whole of Swift is shipped as part of each app as it is still being developed. There is a road map to ship with the OS I believe but it's not for a while

It's because swift doesn't have ABI stability yet.

Re: Show HN: My first native iOS app – Cone, a real time color picker

#159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not an expert in the why, but as far as I am aware the whole of Swift is shipped as part of each app as it is still being developed. There is a road map to ship with the OS I believe but it's not for a while

It's because swift doesn't have ABI stability yet.

Thanks

Re: Show HN: My first native iOS app – Cone, a real time color picker

#160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of that is probably due to Swift's runtime library.

Surely if you're using core Swift, or core Objective-C, the runtime is a shared lib shipped with the OS? I can't imagine that every single app built on Swift or Objective-C is bundling the exact same foundation? That seems so unlike Apple to miss such a massive optimization to reduce the download size of nearly every app. I can understand there being exceptions with some apps that use custom setups, but surely the ma…

> I can't imagine that every single app built on Swift or Objective-C is bundling the exact same foundation

In fact, every single app built on Swift is bundling the full set of runtime libraries, both on iOS and Mac. This will continue until the Swift ABI is finalised.

This is why I don't ship Swift yet.

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