by Cristian Pascu on January 13, 2010
Anyone that has an iPhone knows how the AppStore works: You search for an app, get to see its extensive description and a few screenshots and, if you decide to, you’ll purchase it on the spot.
There is an app for anything and, in some case, several applications for the same thing. But then, how do you get to choose the best one? Usually being very inexpensive, you can afford to buy several apps until you find the right one for you. But, in a world of shareware and 15-30-60-90-days trials, this is fairly new (to me, at least. I had a revelation this morning.). Even in the real world you get to first try the thing you want to buy. And if you don’t try it first, you’d have some sort of money back guarantee.
To be clear, I’m not complaining about the bucks I spend in vain on iPhone apps, but I’m curious to know what exactly makes AppStore’s model work. Is it the low price? Is it the AppStore app filter and review process, or the hype behind Apple-everything? Is it the seamless purchase process? Could be any of these, I guess, or a combination of them all.
Thinking about it a little more, one can wonder if the some model would work in the world of software outside the AppStore? Would you pay a small amount a money in order to try any of the software out there? Would this make software more affordable? I guess that’s one of the reasons why subscription based purchases are more and more popular. Nothing new here, that’s for sure.
With all these in mind, I still find it a bit shocking to purchase an app just to dump it two races later. 
PS: BTW, are other mobile app stores based on the same business model?
by Cristian Pascu on January 13, 2010
Happy New Year, everyone!
I hope you all had fun during the holidays. While I also tried to do some work in the extra free time that holidays usually bring, I did my best spending time with family and friends. And now, here we are, starting a new year, full of promises and challenges.
And what’s best to start the year with other than a release? No significant new feature, but lots of small improvements that I’m sure you’ll appreciate. Here they are:
Specify CheckBox selected state
There were several people that have requested this, and I must admit that it was absolutely silly for me not to support it from the first place. What’s even more silly is that simplicity of the solution that I came with in the end. While I was kinda reluctant to add yet one more control in the Properties panel just for Selected/Unselected property, one day it just strike me: Why not just use the already supported syntax for checkboxes? And so I did! Now, to specify a selected checkbox, just use [x] or [X] in the label of the chekbox. FlairBuilder will just know what to do with it.
TextInput and Password enhancements
These two components are related and both got a few enhancements. As for instance, the text length property that you can use to build conditions with. For instance, if you need to do different things based on the length of the field, than these property will sure be useful for you.
Then, I also fixed a few things. The inputs now really supports rounded corners. It seems that it was broken as you couldn’t have rounded corners without having a border. One of those bugs, you know…
The On Change actions were not executing because the event was not triggered internally. Now fixed.
Other improvements
Holding SHIFT also disables snapping when resizing a component. BUT, this happens only when resizing NOT using the corner handles. When resizing with the corner handles, holding SHIFT will maintain the aspect ratio of the component.
The default page size is now 960×1000. I think that 780px was not wide enough for most of the web apps today.
You can now select the Tabs and the Accordion easier using the little overlay, just like you already could do it with the CardStack component. I’m also considering making it easier to move these components around as Ctrl+Drag is not always obvious.
And finally, the Window component got a little change in look’n'feel. It used to have the header text in bold and 12px font size. I changed it to be more consistent with components like Accordion or Tabs. I am considering letting you customize, but there is a little work that I have to do in order to make it happen.
This should be all, for now. As usual, you’ll hear from me pretty often. I hope it will be more often than usual, if not with releases, at least with news or shared thoughts. Time will tell.
Unknown, here I come!
