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MaskerAid iOS App

caseyliss.com

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Re: MaskerAid iOS App

#141

Post by kemayo »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #110
kemayo wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a little strange to hear, since it's genuinely not possible (as far as I can tell) in the main part of the app . Stories, yes, but not in the feed. It's as if people use these things in wildly divergent ways, I guess.

Good point, I forgot that’s only for stories. The iOS markup editor isn’t nearly as friendly for slapping on emojis and resizing them with two fingers. That said there seem to be various photo editing apps that do make it easier that OP app is competing with.

I did actually skim through other apps that've been linked in the thread, and I didn't see one that seemed like a direct competitor with the combination of emoji + automatic face detection. Granted, this could be me defining the market too narrowly, and many people might get by without one of these just fine.

(My own App Store searching turned up one called Face Blur which seemed to have emoji as an option... as a subscription, which seems like a non-starter.)

Re: MaskerAid iOS App

#142

Post by scarface74 »

xnyan wrote: post #137
vohu43 wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Guess you have no idea with what apps you can make money :) If you have a decent app and good pricing you can convert something between 1-5% of downloads to paying customers. With his audience and reach he can easily make real money. Probably not life changing, but still a few hundred bucks each month.

He said on a podcast that he spent "6 months" developing it. I very much doubt that was 6 months of full-time work, but even if that was only 10 hours a week, and even if the "cost" was let's say $100 (probably much more) an hour, that's around $25k or 7 straight years of $300 a month (that never goes down for 7 years, aka impossible) to recoup his investment. That's an absolute low end, I think you could easily argu…

Just for reference, $25K spent in time and then being able to talk intelligently about modern iOS development on a podcast that generates $16K an episode seems like a good investment.

And “time isn’t money”. It wasn’t like the time he spent developing it would have been spent working on something else.

Re: MaskerAid iOS App

#143

Post by scarface74 »

minton wrote: post #17

It seems like a significant investment to spend six months developing an iOS app solo, knowing it will likely be cloned and copied within a month.

“Investment in what?” It just took some time working on a hobby and “sharpening the ax”. I waste more time watching Netflix.

If he had wanted to make serious money as an app developer, he wouldn’t have quit his day job.

Re: MaskerAid iOS App

#144

Post by post_break »

jachee wrote: post #96
kennydude wrote: post #75

I love it. I'd love to also see something like this that can hide or change number plates of cars before posting online.

Why? I’ve never understood this practice. The number plate is already out in public nearly 24/7 anyway, what difference does it make if it’s unobscured in a photograph, unless it’s a stolen car or plate or something?

It’s not too difficult to use that information to find out where the car probably parks at night. The difference being the odds of a random finding the car plate useful vs online an abuser, criminal is higher.

Re: MaskerAid iOS App

#145

Post by perardi »

greedo wrote: post #127
Grustaf wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We obviously can't know, but hearing someone talk about something gives you an idea. My impression is that Casey is quite weak (as in average), but meticulous. Siracusa is almost certainly the one with the best understanding of theory, but hard to say how he is practically. He could be very good at what he's doing. Marco also doesn't seem very strong in raw programming (he resisted Swift for half a decade, complains…

I think Marco's resistance to Swift doesn't indicate anything about programming skill. Based on his low level audio programming (he hates to rely on code outside of his own), he's quite an accomplished programmer, unafraid of complex problems or reinventing the wheel when an existing library doesn't satisfy his desires. I doubt he would survive well in the world of unit tests, CI/CD, Jira and managers though. And I e…

Yeah, gotta defend Marco here, though I have my quibbles with him on this show. (He has the most first-worldiest of problems.)

He has gone in deep on performant low-level audio code, and how it integrates with the system APIs. He’s done a lot of interesting stuff with programmatic drawing of icons in his apps. He did a lot of good caching work back in the Instapaper days, when cell connections were almost like dialup.

He seemed to be reluctant to learn Swift, because Swift would have gotten him…what? I think he thought that Objective-C was mature, tested, comprehensible, and battle-tested in production. And it wasn’t going to change out from underneath him…which you sure couldn’t say about Swift for the first few years. You eventually had to adopt it, as Apple is moving to Swift-only, but I think Objective-C let him accomplish his goals, and a lot of the good security stuff in Swift is maybe not super relevant to his app development.

(Ugh, PHP, though…)

Re: MaskerAid iOS App

#146

Post by Grustaf »

scarface74 wrote: post #140
greedo wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've listened to ATP since day one. My impression of Siracusa as a programmer is limited to the few apps he's released. But he could be a fantastic programmer at his "jobby-job." Or he could just be average. We have no way of telling, despite how intelligent both his writing and his speaking on the podcast might convey. Marco is very successful with Tumblr, Instapaper, and Overcast, yet we don't know how good a progr…

> yet we don't know how good a programmer he is You know he is good because… > Marco is very successful with Tumblr, Instapaper, and Overcast, I don’t need to “see his code” to know whether he is good. He is able to produce software that people pay money to acquire without the sliminess. Software is a means to an end. Not an end onto itself.

He's undoubtedly a world class indie developer, but we were discussing his abilities as a programmer, in the sense of writing good code. True, it's not necessarily important or valuable in life, but that is what we were talking about.

Most of the people I worked with at my FAANG job were excellent programmers, surely better than Marco, but none of them would have any chance of even coming up with a decent idea for an app, let alone carry it through and launch it. So they are absolutely useless as indie developers. It's just different skill sets.

Re: MaskerAid iOS App

#147

Post by greedo »

scarface74 wrote: post #140
greedo wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've listened to ATP since day one. My impression of Siracusa as a programmer is limited to the few apps he's released. But he could be a fantastic programmer at his "jobby-job." Or he could just be average. We have no way of telling, despite how intelligent both his writing and his speaking on the podcast might convey. Marco is very successful with Tumblr, Instapaper, and Overcast, yet we don't know how good a progr…

> yet we don't know how good a programmer he is You know he is good because… > Marco is very successful with Tumblr, Instapaper, and Overcast, I don’t need to “see his code” to know whether he is good. He is able to produce software that people pay money to acquire without the sliminess. Software is a means to an end. Not an end onto itself.

You're conflating smart business choices with good programming. His code could be well marketed shit that just barely works under the covers, but he sells it well (Narrator's voice: "It isn't shit...")

Marco is an excellent indie developer because he selects markets he has a good understanding of, finds his niche, then simply outclasses his competition by being ahead on features. He also has a loyal following from his podcasts, and is an aspirational figure for a lot of devs hoping to make money (or break free of corp serfdom).

A well written program/app isn't a necessary requirement for success.

Re: MaskerAid iOS App

#148

Post by greedo »

perardi wrote: post #145
greedo wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Marco's resistance to Swift doesn't indicate anything about programming skill. Based on his low level audio programming (he hates to rely on code outside of his own), he's quite an accomplished programmer, unafraid of complex problems or reinventing the wheel when an existing library doesn't satisfy his desires. I doubt he would survive well in the world of unit tests, CI/CD, Jira and managers though. And I e…

Yeah, gotta defend Marco here, though I have my quibbles with him on this show. (He has the most first-worldiest of problems.) He has gone in deep on performant low-level audio code, and how it integrates with the system APIs. He’s done a lot of interesting stuff with programmatic drawing of icons in his apps. He did a lot of good caching work back in the Instapaper days, when cell connections were almost like dialup…

I love how Marco just feels like throwing money at one of life's problems is the best solution. I think he would be the first to tell you the role of luck in his success. Yes, he worked long hard hours at Tumblr, and eventually that paid off financially when Tumblr was sold. He was smart to scratch an itch when the iPhone first came out by releasing Instapaper, and smart to realize when it was time to sell it. He was smart to realize his itch for a good podcast player might be universal. So I think he's an incredible businessman who is really only limited by his unwillingness to yoke himself to a corporation.

His use of Obj-C and PHP are just as pragmatic to me. He's an expert at Obj-C and possibly at PHP, and why change? Let Swift mature, see if Obj-C becomes deprecated, and then move on. He can obviously learn new languages since he's dabbled in Rust etc.

I do wish ATP focused more on tech stuff and less on how to live your best life on Fire Island. But I enjoy it every week.

Re: MaskerAid iOS App

#149

Post by [deleted] »

greedo wrote: post #147
scarface74 wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> yet we don't know how good a programmer he is You know he is good because… > Marco is very successful with Tumblr, Instapaper, and Overcast, I don’t need to “see his code” to know whether he is good. He is able to produce software that people pay money to acquire without the sliminess. Software is a means to an end. Not an end onto itself.

You're conflating smart business choices with good programming. His code could be well marketed shit that just barely works under the covers, but he sells it well (Narrator's voice: "It isn't shit...") Marco is an excellent indie developer because he selects markets he has a good understanding of, finds his niche, then simply outclasses his competition by being ahead on features. He also has a loyal following from hi…

[deleted]

Re: MaskerAid iOS App

#150

Post by tedmiston »

Grustaf wrote: post #7
prea wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What's even the point of posting a photo of your child, with the face hidden? Seems very niche. Might be a cultural US thing, but this is something my wife does a lot and I see a lot of people doing. It's one of those things that might not make sense if you don't have kids.

I have kids, and don't mind posting their photos. But if I did, why post at all? It just seems weird. "Here's my son, minus the face. Oh he's so cute!"

I also find it bizarre and think similarly... if you're going to cover up the person's face, why post it at all?

I have seen some people use these on dating apps where they don't want their own children's or other people's children's faces to be visible. I understand that use case a bit more from a privacy perspective.

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