By far our most requested feature on Staction has been an iPhone optimized version. I think a lot of users may have just considered us obstinate for not having one sooner. It seems like such a small thing to do… Shrink the interface, and call it good.

Unfortunately, we had a big problem. The Staction website is designed to be used with a keyboard. The whole application is built around using the mouse as little as possible. But on the iPhone the keyboard is, well, small. Using a tiny keyboard to bang out tags, and a clunky half-visible auto-completer just wasn’t the experience we wanted to give our users. It wasn’t the experience we wanted for ourselves… It just wasn’t great, – believe us, we tried it.

After lots of experimenting, eventually we realized we had to rely on touching and scrolling for tag input. Like with lots of ideas, -it seems quite obvious looking back.

As of Today

As of today, all of our paid accounts have access to the Staction web app. Simply visit your normal account URL, and you’ll be directed to the optimized site. (You can still access the regular site if you like.)

Once logged in, you’ll have access to all the most commonly used features of Staction. Creating todos, logging time, and keeping up with your teammates.

Make sure to tap “+” and add Staction to your home screen, – it works really well that way.

If you want to see the web app, but don’t have an iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad you can visit your normal account URL and add a /m at the end like this:

http://accountname.staction.com/m

We think you’re really going to like the web app experience. In some ways it’s the best Staction experience yet.

Why Not the Free Account?

We’re going to be honest in a way that I don’t think most companies would. We really hope that the web app drives upgrades for us. By far the biggest portion of Staction users are on the free account. It seems that when we created our plans for Staction, we gave away too much on the low end.

It’s no problem, -we’re happy to have our users, on any account that fits their needs. But we do have to make money to keep our jobs!

Talking over the problem, we came up with a plan that we hope will make sense to you. As we add new features to our apps, you’ll probably see most of them added only to the paid accounts at first. As we recoup the cost of our development time through the upgrades that the features drive, we hope to trickle the features down to the free accounts as well.

We’re hoping this is a sustainable system that can keep everyone happy. Paid accounts just get the features a bit sooner than everyone else. We hope you’ll think it makes as much sense as we do.

As far as I know, I don’t own any computers anymore. I own screens, keyboards, and mice. The computer has disappeared. The iPhone as far as I’m concerned is about as small as useful computing can get given the limitations of technology we can currently imagine. It could get thinner, or maybe a tiny bit shorter, but any more, and it gets less useful. Despite that, there’s still a computer hidden inside there.

I can imagine a time when the screen and input devices go away, and we just speak or gesture at computers to get results, but I think that’s a long ways off. Keep Reading

This short article by Neven Mrgan reminded me of something I was always going to mention. The iPhone voice recognition system is not perfect, – but it’s the very first time I’ve ever used speech to control a device where I felt like it worked. From hands free calling, to picking playlists, it’s actually improved my life. For the record, I wholeheartedly second Neven’s additions of these new commands:

• “What time is it?”
• “New voice memo”

And I’d like to add to the list:

• “Play Audiobook:”

Although the music selection is fantastically implemented, I always have to do a hack playlist to get an audiobook to play.

If you’re an iPhone developer, you’re faced with a tough problem. You have to differentiate your app from the 25,000+ other apps in the app store, many of which solve the same problem that your creation purports to solve, and convince people that they really do want to spend their money (and their time) on your app.

Let’s face it, selling is hard. Really hard. You can try and list out features and benefits, or you can focus on the beautiful design of your product, or, if you’re Sandwich Dynamics, you can just make a lighthearted joke out of your new iPhone app as a way to introduce it and explain what it is and what it does.

The beauty of the video is that by the end of it you feel as if you are watching a couple friends goofing off. They are genuine and genuinely funny – which makes it much easier for you to open your wallet. Which illustrates an often forgotten, but tremendously important, point about selling. If you treat your customers as friends, instead of users, you’ll not only have an easier time making the original sale, but an easier time throughout the entire customer life cycle.