Federico Viticci writes for MacStories:

I’m not as anxious about backups as I used to be. With the move from local storage to cloud services, I feel comfortable knowing that my documents always exist somewhere.

His caveat is important: Viticci primarily works on small files that don’t require local storage and he uses a lot of cloud-based services (Gmail, Plex, iTunes in the Cloud, Rdio, Evernote). Still, I find the idea of only running a weekly SuperDuper back-up pretty chilling (along with his statement that his documents exist “somewhere”). I’ve been hit far too many times by hardware failure to rely on such a system, and so here’s my current set-up, which I’m just about happy with:

• Current work in Dropbox.
• Daily incremental bootable back-up to SuperDuper at about 1 a.m.
• Additional weekly back-up to SuperDuper on a Friday night.
• Important documents saved to CrashPlan.

I say ‘just about happy’, because I wanted to add Time Machine to this mix (for ongoing versioned back-up), but Time Machine just didn’t work with any of the hard drives I had to hand. (Subsequent Twitter-based discussions also suggested Time Machine currently has some pretty major bugs that can lock up OS X Mountain Lion in some circumstances, which happened to me a few times before I ditched the app.) I’d also be happier if everything was in CrashPlan, but until British broadband gets out of the stone age and offers decent upload speeds, I have to be a little more selective.

Still, my current system has the following advantages:

• Dropbox for current work ensures it can be accessed from anywhere I have a web connection, including through iOS devices.
• The daily clone is bootable, meaning if my Mac’s drive dies, I can get started very quickly by booting from the clone, ‘losing’ only whatever I’d so far done today on the local drive (mostly email, which I can easily enough get from CrashPlan).
• The weekly clone enables me to go back and grab files if I accidentally delete something or mess up settings, or if I download and install an iOS app update that turns out to be a train-wreck.
• CrashPlan is accessible online and updates as I work, providing an extra layer of security.

In addition, iOS devices are regularly backed up to the Mac, meaning their back-ups are regularly backed up.

I’m sure this all sounds mental to some people, but without my computer, I’m done for work-wise. I’m therefore ultra-careful about keeping my data safe; but so should you be, unless you wouldn’t be bothered one day if you tried to turn on your computer or a device and ended up faced with a dead screen.

Would You Pay $15 for a Better iOS Mail App? burbles Ashley Feinberg for Gizmodo today. This was provoked by Mail Pilot’s developer having the sheer audacity to charge fifteen whole dollars for an entirely new IMAP email client. THE NERVE!

Feinberg further prattled:

That price would be steep for any app

Really? For any app?

especially one that’s competing against multiple free, perfectly usable alternatives.

Because, as we all know, you’d have to be a total idiot to pay for an app where “free, perfectly usable alternatives” exist. Free, perfectly usable alternatives are always the best kinds of apps! Let’s never use anything apart from free, perfectly usable alternatives, such as commercial, possibly amazing, productivity-boosting, time-saving, value-for-money alternatives!

So the question is, are you willing to pay $15 for the app? Is any app really worth that much?

Clearly not, because developers don’t need to eat or pay mortgages or try anything new or do anything amazing. Really, they should be there to do our bidding and release apps entirely for free. Who cares that they’ll then have to stop developing as a job and instead do it in their spare time as a hobby? As long as we all get our “free, perfectly usable alternatives”, everything will be great!

I recently interviewed a number of game developers for an article on freemium gaming. Ste Pickford, co-creator of Magnetic Billiards (buy it now if you have an iOS device), was, like most developers I spoke to, broadly positive about the concept of freemium, free-to-play and IAP, but more guarded about the current realities. He was worried about the abuse of the system by certain companies, and said:

At the moment, the main danger is that the industry is implementing free-to-play poorly in many products. We risk alienating a lot of gamers with inappropriate, anti-consumer monetisation, which is a shame. We should be bringing all gamers along for the ride.

It feels like accountants are in charge at a lot of the developers making successful free-to-play games, where whatever is most effective at generating revenue is implemented, without considering whether this is revenue generated by people enjoying themselves, or generated by tricking, frustrating or exploiting players. I think the distinction matters in the long run.

I don’t think targeting kids—who perhaps aren’t spending their own money, or don’t appreciate the value of money yet—with $100 consumable IAPs is right, and will inevitably lead to heavy handed government legislation that will make things harder for all developers, even the ones behaving responsibly.

Said legislation hasn’t happened yet, but the BBC today reported that the UK’s Office of Fair Trading is now looking into games aimed at children that include IAPs, to ascertain how aggressively content (and, by extension, payment) is pushed, and to

find out if the games are “misleading, commercially aggressive or otherwise unfair” when they give people the chance to buy extras.

I imagine this will turn into an almighty scrap between lobbyists from gaming companies, parents who believe (rightly or wrongly) that they have been ripped off, and a British media always looking for a story that will drive traffic. But the knock-on effect at best is further erosion of trust in mobile gaming. As Pickford said to me, this kind of thing impacts not just on those developers who are exploiting players, but every developer that utilises in-app purchases.

As Pickford concluded:

At its best, free-to-play contains within it the ability to allow your biggest fans to spend more on a game they’re really enjoying than they would otherwise; while most console games are overpriced, I’ve had way more than $60 worth of entertainment from a few games that I played to death. That’s a good thing, when done correctly, and can incentivise developers to make better games. But free-to-play at its best is still a rarity.

That last point is something that needs to change—and fast—if mobile gaming isn’t to be irreparably damaged.

According to ZDNet, a leaked roadmap for Microsoft’s ‘Gemini’ wave of Office updates indicates the suite will arrive on the iPad—in 2014. I wonder whether anyone will really care by then. For at least the last two years—and really for longer than that—Microsoft has played a dangerous game, training people to realise they don’t need Office.

On the iPad, a mobile platform where people happily pay for apps, and where Apple ably demonstrated you could build Office-like apps, Microsoft did nothing for so long. Subsequently, Apple’s own Pages, Numbers and Keynote apps sold well, and various other Office-compatible apps appeared. Others gravitated towards apps that supported Google Docs while some writers simply used plain text editors for writing work. Four years in, will they suddenly scoot back to Office, or just stick with what they’re currently happy using? (With Android‘s growth, Microsoft’s making the same mistake on that platform, too.)

Online, Microsoft sat and watched as Google scooped up everyone who wanted an ‘everywhere’ Office-like suite and gave it to them for free. In my tech writing, ‘Google Docs’ as a phrase now seems more prominent than Office. Microsoft’s now fighting back in this space, but just as people were once snared by the ‘must have Office’ mentality, plenty are now happily nestled in Google’s amble online bosom. (Google also showed that the majority of people don’t need Office’s entire feature-set—just the basics for rapidly creating and sharing text, documents and presentations.)

Even on the Mac, Microsoft’s dropped a ball, in the form of Office for the Mac App Store, which, as you’ll notice on visiting said store, does not exist. There are likely technical and business reasons why this is the case, but the net result is that new Mac users visit the Mac App Store, do a search for ‘Office’ and are immediately presented with Pages, Keynote and Numbers, which are temptingly affordable.

It’s a baffling path for Microsoft to have taken. Perhaps the company didn’t have the resources to deal with iOS, Android, the web and the Mac App Store, or perhaps it simply didn’t have the vision. Maybe it was banking on pivoting from ‘Office everywhere’ to ‘Office on Windows and Microsoft’s mobile platform’, to secure marketshare. Whatever the reasons for Office’s appearance on popular platforms stalling, this in hindsight looks like a major oversight.

Note that I don’t for a second believe Office is ‘doomed’ or that it won’t continue to be important for many people (not least businesses); however, where Office was once a default in pretty much everyone’s mind, now it’s not—and that’s a dangerous end result for Microsoft.

A couple of years ago, Panic built Status Board, providing insight into ongoing projects and useful info. Yesterday, it got released as an iPad app. It costs £6.99/$9.99 and already there are complaints about how expensive the app is, which I find a pity. The App Store really has destroyed people’s sense of value when it comes to software and games. While £6.99/$9.99 would be expensive for a one-note throwaway app, it seems perfectly reasonable for a productivity aid you might use daily.

On this subject, iMore’s Rene Ritchie yesterday asked an interesting question:

If, in 2008, the lowest selling price for apps had been $10 instead of free, how different would the App Store economy be today?

Under the assumption that free apps also wouldn’t have been allowed, a much higher tier-one price-point would have made things play out very differently on the App Store.

First and foremost, it wouldn’t be so full of junk. I rifle through new-app and new-game lists a lot and most of the content is awful. Anyone can make an app and then anyone can attempt to sell it at a low-low price. However, this also means that anyone can make an app and then anyone can attempt to sell it at a low-low price. In other words, despite what some people would have you believe, this isn’t always a terrible thing—some of the low-cost apps in the App Store have been indie marvels that have subsequently propelled the authors on to greatness. (It would of course be nicer if all the gems floated to the surface rather than too many of them sinking in the App Store sludge, but if life was all sunshine and roses, Brits wouldn’t be able to constantly moan about the weather. Or something.)

Secondly, the app revolution would have been slower rather than an explosion. People were clearly very happy to impulse buy at the low App Store tiers, but that wouldn’t have been the case had everything started at $9.99. Instead of iPhones full of apps, most people wouldn’t have gone beyond stock apps, and more tech-savvy users would have been considerably choosier. This would have had the knock-on effect of eradicating many one-shot utilities and probably the majority of games. There’s an expectation with higher-cost content, after all. I doubt Apple would then have been issuing press releases with the kind of huge sales and app-download numbers we’ve seen since the App Store’s launch. (One benefit, however, is that those apps that did become very popular might have been more likely to result in a viable business, compared to products that sell plenty of copies for a dollar and still don’t provide enough income to the developer.)

Thirdly, at the very high end I doubt a great deal would be different in terms of general quality. The very best apps and games on the App Store are phenomenal, despite (or in spite) of the current pricing structure. Stepping into a world of ten-dollar minimums wouldn’t, I think, make those very best apps any better. It would, though, probably cut down on the range and experimentation on offer, given that fewer people would be buying; and in the current market there’s always that possibility of a sale when you need to boost your app’s visibility on bargain sites. There’s more scope for risk with varied pricing.

A final thought is that perhaps a high App Store tier-one would have also galvanised web apps much earlier (almost immediately). Many cheap apps (and even games) we now see on the App Store would have been created online instead, using web standards. For advocates of ‘free’, ‘open’ and interoperability, that would have been a huge win, but it’s hard to see how in a world of free and dirt-cheap apps how people will be dragged away to web apps (well, unless they’re as good as Forecast). For Apple, though, this would have been a loss—its primarily “there’s an app for that” differentiator would have been largely meaningless if all the apps were online and ably supported by rival platforms. (Open web advocates would argue this is where we’re headed anyway in the long term. I remain a little sceptical of that, unless the open web can boost product discoverability and deal more ably with monetisation of web apps.)

My thinking, then, is that I’m mostly glad Apple didn’t force a high tier-one price-point. However, I do wonder whether it should have gone for more of a middle-ground. Indie dev Jeff Minter of Llamasoft recently said he’s pretty much given up on iOS, because it’s not sustainable for him to make games on the platform and sell them at tier-one or tier-two prices. He was hoping people would gravitate towards the ‘price of a pint’ for their games. Unfortunately, evidence suggests people now even baulk at paying anything at all for an app or game (although some are subsequently happy to buy lots of in-app purchases once snared). Since 2008, developers have been concerned about a rush to the bottom—to the 69p/$0.99 price point that makes survival tough; now, they have to deal with potentially receiving nothing at all for their work, and figuring out how to get some income from microtransactions. Perhaps by injecting more perceived value into apps by raising prices a little, this can, to some extent, be avoided, but ‘free’ now almost seems like an inevitability; on that basis, it’ll be interesting to see how the battle plays out between free native apps and free web apps.