Uproar Blog

We have decided to close Uproar. This decision was a long time coming, but was not easy. It’s commonplace in the tech entrepreneurship world to say “fail fast and fail often,” which sounds easy enough. The hard parts are actually recognizing when something is failing and then deciding whether to double down or let it fail. We’re all familiar with Techcrunch-headline style implosions, but most of the things you start are simply going to fizzle out and it’ll be up to you to call it.

Uproar has been fizzling for quite a while now. Although we didn’t keep official score, I think we gave ourselves an ultimatum at least 3 times. For a variety of personal and professional reasons, we simply did not give Uproar the attention it needed in order to gain launch velocity.

Uproar was not losing money; we’ve run the business as lean as we could and it became profitable almost immediately after launching Gratuitous. So why close it down completely? We could have kept floating and maybe eventually Uproar would have picked up more steam—right? It’s simple: splitting our attention between Uproar and other important opportunities was producing less-than-best efforts on all fronts. It was time to choose and the choice finally became obvious.

This is part of the beauty in bootstrapping a venture. You are free to pursue the best course of action without worrying about staying the course or asking permission.

Rick will be concentrating on his freelance business, creating iOS and web projects for his clients.

Kevin will become a father this fall and will continue to develop iOS products for the App Store. Ownership of Gratuitous will transfer to Kevin and will be available for free in the App Store once the transfer is complete.

We’ll keep the blog and podcast around for at least a few years since there are inbound links here. We’ve updated the homepage and, as usual, you can follow us both on Twitter:

@kpshek
@rickdt

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This week we discuss our experience at Big Omaha and what’s next for Uproar.

The music for this podcast, used by permission, is by Pretty Lights (intro) and Avi Ghosh (outro).

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In further pursuit of the business model, Kevin and Rick discuss developing a “portfolio of apps” approach.

Links of interest

The music for this podcast, used by permission, is by Pretty Lights (intro).

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This week we discuss Uproar’s taxes, the challenges between building a product for yourself vs a 3rd party, and the challenges of bootstrapping vs a pure startup.

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Apple hires Matt Casamassina from IGN to be their global editorial games manager
Another week, another App Store rejection. This time the kid-friendly programming app, Scratch.
Pulitzer Prize winner Mark Fiore has his political cartoon app finally approved after a 4 month battle
Interview with Iconfactory’s Craig Hockenberry on tips to get your app approved
Rick’s using Trip Cubby to help track expenses
Georgia TV station replaces paper with iPads for their anchors
“You haven’t blown them away until they send you a check”

The music for this podcast, used by permission, is by Pretty Lights (intro) and Avi Ghosh (outro). The transition music is from Nine Inch Nail’s Ghosts I-IV album, a Creative Commons 3 licensed work.

Tonight I started work on an iPhone project for a client. As with all iPhone projects, it is important to determine what version of the iPhone OS SDK you will be targeting. Thus, I need to pick my base and deployment SDK targets.

The base SDK is defined in Xcode as:

The name or path of the base SDK being used during the build. The product will be built against the headers and libraries located inside the indicated SDK.

Simply put, the base SDK is the maximum version of the iPhone OS that your code uses.

The deployment SDK is defined in Xcode as:

Code will load on this and later versions of iPhone OS. Framework APIs that are unavailable in earlier versions will be weak-linked; your code should check for null function pointers or specific system versions before calling newer APIs.

Simply put, the deployment SDK is the minimum version of the iPhone OS that your app requires.

Let’s say you’re creating an iPhone game and you want this app to be available to users still on iPhone OS 2.0. However, you’d really like to be able to take advantage of the GameKit API which was added in iPhone OS 3.0. In this case, you would set your SDK targets as follows:

Base SDK: iPhone OS 3.0
Deployment SDK: iPhone OS 2.0

The base SDK is indicating that your game is compiled against the iPhone OS 3.0. Thus, your app can only use APIs available in the iPhone OS 3.0 and earlier. The deployment SDK is indicating that your game can be used on any device running at least iPhone OS 2.0. Thus, your app can be used on a device running a later OS (eg, iPhone OS 2.1, 3.0, 3.0.1, 4.0, etc) — anything iPhone OS 2.0 or greater is fine. Take a look at this Apple example showing how you can optionally use a later API from your base SDK while still being compatible with your earlier deployment SDK version.

You set the base and deployment SDKs on the your app target. This is accessed by highlighting your app target and clicking the Info button in Xcode. The screenshots below show where you can find the configuration for the base and deployment SDKs.

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Kevin and Rick were too busy this week to be bothered putting together a proper podcast. Instead, please enjoy 15 minutes of us rambling on about the news and stuff

The music for this podcast, used by permission, is by Pretty Lights (intro) and Avi Ghosh (outro). The transition music is from Nine Inch Nail’s Ghosts I-IV album, a Creative Commons 3 licensed work.

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We start off with a discussion of the iPhone OS 4.0 announcement and how it affects developers and businesses on the Apple platform. We then talk about what we’ve been doing with Uproar over the past couple of months as well as where we’re taking the business.

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