Pricetag on Apps on Apple App Store

Yesterday, the world of the Internet (Digg especially) was filled with all the glorious news that Apple has released an SDK beta system for developers to create third party applications for the iPhone and iPod Touch. The main sales pitch was directed towards businesses and the ability to have a solid all in one device with the iPhone.

This particular move is in response to Blackberry's growing popularity among business people as well as Google's introduction to the mobile world of development with the release of their Android platform a couple months ago.

The release date for the App Store, as well as iPhone update 2.0 (required for use of the App Store), is scheduled for sometime in June.

Now my question: what are apps from the App Store going to cost?

I've used JailBreakMe on my iPod Touch and found that it works great up to a certain point. The point being the fact that it just stops working after awhile and programs begin to crash unexpectedly.

Everything through a "jail broken" iPhone or iPod Touch is being developed at the price of donations by the users. I donate when I feel that an application is great and deserves to evolve through even further development. This is where the problem is. Developers aren't getting paid for their service and therefore the best possible product doesn't hit the market.

Now the App Store is the solution. We pay for the products we want and work with them. Judging from the ridiculous package price of $19.95 for 4 applications on the iPod Touch, I'm going to place the average cost of an app from the App Store at $5.

$5 is decent for a great application that works! Obviously games from EA (like Spore) are going to cost more as well as anything that enables the iPod Touch or iPhone to do something absolutely brilliant (as if they haven't already done so) will cost more as well. But a standard application like a news aggregate or anything that increases productivity will be around $5.

I can handle $5.

I could be wrong though! What do you think?

Have a great day!

A Little Advanced Tech Insight on Earth Day

As everyone probably knows, Sunday is Earth Day. Environmentalists rejoice! Al Gore's Christmas! A good day to start taking note of the environment and the world you live in.

Considering the main focus of this blog has been technology and college life viewpoints, I thought I would share a great website to anyone on any kind of budget that shows immediate results: greendimes.com.

With as much as I detest to admit it, I saw Matt Damon (thank you Team America) talk about this site on of all shows: The Oprah Winfrey Show. Credit where credit is due.

This site is based around a great concept! I will leave it up to the readers to find all of the interesting facts about this site, but the general concept is simple. Everyday, just about everyone that has submitted any kind of form receives "junk mail" (e.g. flyers, credit card offers) that are all printed on paper. Most of the time, these are recycled and reused for the betterment of the world. But, what if we were to limit the number of those received in order to reduce the number of trees and gallons of water needed to make the paper? This sites promises to do just that with the donation of $.10 a day! $3 dollars a month!

It's a great project and one could only imagine the possibilities if this website is successful! Give it a try and see what happens! The list of benefits can found on a fairly easy to navigate website and I recommend that everyone at least give it a glance.

Other websites like Lifehacker are running a few articles on ways to go green in your home and with your computer. I can only imagine that many other sites are, or will be, doing that as well.

So on Sunday, take notice of the beautiful world we live in and try to do your part for the rest of the world. Environmentalism is not one of my strong suits, but there are things that everyone can do to help out!

Feel free to leave comments, subscribe to my blog through RSS or E-mail now and have a great evening!

Technorati Tags: Earth Day, Al Gore, greendimes.com, Lifehacker, enviromentalism

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