We are in the depths of the worst economic slump in the past 80 years, and for many this makes the already difficult task of  business building even harder.  Entrepreneurs need to be reminded that they are in the good company of other determined people, that there is a reason they do what they do, and turning a sharp ear to hip hop is a great way to fulfill that.

Many successful hip hop performers come from difficult socio-economic backgrounds.  Broken families, poverty and exposure to criminal conduct are recurring themes.  In rhyming about the trials and tribulations of the hustle, rappers often share their own history of determination.

Part of credibility in the Hip Hop hustle is rising from these extremely difficult circumstances where the odds of success are far longer than the typical entrepreneur.  Those champions of hip hop who actually make it often turn their lyrical and musical focus towards their own journey.

Speaking of Difficult Circumstances

Belmont University entrepreneurship professor Jeff Cornwall recently published an article detailing  four steps to beating the recession blues.   While I agree with a number of Cornwall’s points his reference to the  Serenity Prayer and overall tone of the entry can’t help but strike something of a somber and discouraging note.

Music has the power to motivate and educate so to supplement Cornwalls’ four steps, I present four two (see endnote) recent hip hop songs that can serve as an inspiration to any entrepreneur who is struggling to make it.  The songs are presented in order of increasing adult language and content.

Inspirational Hip Hop song #1: The Roots (featuring John Legend): “The Fire” (iTunes)

The Roots get much respect for me on their ninth studio release, How I Got Over. Besides including a track with a Joanna Newsom sample, they included this incredible tune titled “The Fire.” Okay Player has released several photo stills from Filipino director Rik Cordero’s (wikipedia, twitter) recently completed WW2-inspired music video for this song.

The chorus alone is enough to put “The FIre” on the list, sung with heart by R&B vocalist and songwriter John Legend, it explains:

There’s something in your heart,

and its in your eyes

It’s the fire, inside you

Let it burn

You don’t say good luck

You say don’t give up

It’s the fire, inside you

Endnote: This blog post was originally written July 1th, 2010.  I never finished it, but wanted to publish it anyway.  A year late is better than never.

I turned 30 and jumped off a tall bridge to celebrate. I moved to Seattle, and continue to work on the most exciting technology ever created for people like me.

I had people enter and exit my life over the year. At times life was dramatic. There were many special days both happy and sad. I’ve never captured or shared more of my existence.  More than anything I had some big, quiet supporters this year.

Goodbye 2010, thank you for all of the memories.

For posterity, I’ve copied Mark’s explanation here. For his full explanation and his code example, follow the link above.

My favorite way to explain how delegates work involves animals.

Let’s say you are going to create a particular bird. You start with a predefined class definition of a bird (provided in the existing framework as, say, CFBird). The existing framework class assumes all birds have certain things in common — they hatch and grow the same, poop the same, fly the same, and lay eggs the same way, etc. (tee hee, I said poop.  ) But different birds look different, are different sizes, chirp differently, eat different things, and may mate differently.

So let’s say Apple provided you with the basic bird class (with hatching, growing, pooping, flying and egg-laying behavior already built in).

Here now in this more advanced age of object-oriented design, there’s a concept (design pattern) called “delegation” and it’s a cool way to easily implement custom classes, assuming ahead of time that you’ll likely never need to worry about anything else about creating birds other than specifying how they differ from each other — how they look (size and color) and how they chirp, eat and mate.

So, the people who designed the CFBird class have set up a “protocol” which specifies the “delegate methods” (kinda like “callbacks” in C) which is all your new class will need to implement to create your custom bird, and you’re done! Basically the class is going to call into your code when your particular bird is drawn, when it chirps, eats and mates. These tasks are “delegated” to you in your subclass of CFBird.

Everything else is handled for you, and you only need to concern yourself with what is different about your bird, and forget about what is the same amongst all birds, simplifying your life and making things more consistent.

In your code, when you specify your new class of bird, in the @implementation you’ll make reference to a <protocol>, and by doing so you are telling the system that you agree to implement the methods specified in that protocol which will detail exactly how your particular bird is going to look, chirp, eat, and mate. Done and done.

The subclassing comes first, and the possible delegate methods follow if you specify a protocol to follow.

In one of the tab’s views I had a standard button with a Touch Up Inside event that I had connected to a buttonClicked method in the view’s controller.  For some reason, when I tapped that button the app would crash.  This was not happening when I built the same stuff in a single view app.

I went searching and was happy to find that the problem was well described and solved in the developer forums of MacNN.  It turns out that when you have have multiple view controllers for separate .xib files being controlled by a Tab Bar Controller you need to take an extra step of setting the Class Identity for that particular view. Here’s how:

1. Open up MainWindow.xib in Interface Builder
2. Expand the Tab Bar Controller item. (Your views are displayed)
3. Single-click the controller containing your button.
4. Hit ⌘-4 to bring up the Properties Inspector.
5. Under Class Identity at the top, you’ll see the Class is set to UIViewController.  You need to use the dropdown to select the controller for that particular view.  In my case it was called SounderViewController, but it should match the name of the controller where your button clicked method is.

Voila.  Hope that helped you. If it did, please leave a comment. If it didn’t, please leave a comment.  Follow me on Twitter for iOS, music and life musings: @jetsetter.

For security purposes, Google occasionally requires you to re-enter your normal password when using their various web services.  When you change your password, you may need to pass a captcha test to re-enable IMAP on your gmail.  Props go to MadebyMark for the link.

Google has a pretty unassuming unlock page here you must visit with using the browser on the mobile device you’re unlocking.   Pass the password and captcha test and your iPhone should be able to get google mail again.  Google did not notify me that I might need to pass a captcha test after updating my account password. How was I supposed to know that updating a password might disable gmail IMAP support?  The answer is buried in a Google support forum.

UPDATE: If you are using the native mail application on the iPad, you will have to do the same device unlock you performed on your iPhone.  I’m interested in any information that better explains how Google authorizes the use of mobile devices.  Please @jetsetter or post in the comments if you have further observations.

I’m pumped to announce availability of Rock Show 2.0.  This is the first version of Rock Show that works on the iPad and both the iPhone and iPod Touch.  A lot of fixes and tweaks are in this version of the application, along with some new posters as well!

Two articles are up about the release, Padgadget is hosting one item and a second can be found at IntoMobile.  For a full low-down and updated info on the app, visit its page: http://www.rockshow.fm

Apple doesn’t give much guidance on this important chunk of text. “Write your Application Description with a focus on what makes the functionality or design of your app unique.” was a tip from this past June from the App Store Tips blog.

We know that 4000 characters is the limit.  And App descriptions are made up of simple text, including unicode symbols like checkboxes (✔) and more (♣☢☂).  Apple takes your unicode text and formats it for display on the web via Web Preview, in iTunes and on the iOS devices themselves (the app store).

Since you probably have very specific points you want to get across, and users have a very short attention span, you need to pay attention to how Apple will format what you write.  In this entry I discuss how to create app descriptions that look great everywhere Apple publishes your app description.

Word Wrap and the Fold

Word wrap occurs in app descriptions when enough characters fill up a line.  Each line has a maximum number of characters and when a word goes over that, it is bumped to the next line.  This is important because one word of word wrap can waste an entire line of potential ad copy.  This is important: the length of your lines in your app description affects the placement of the fold.

The fold is the point where iTunes, Web Preview or the iPad App Store app decide to make the user click or tap the More… button.  Everything below the fold is out of sight, out of mind.  Without the data to prove it, my hunch is that at least half the time, users are not bothering to click More… before deciding whether they are installing an app or not.

All this means is that you must use the space above the fold as effectively as possible.

All app purchase vectors limit the top of fold line display to three lines.  Two important rules here:

1. Blank lines count as lines.
2. Lines over 120 characters in length will lead to word wrap and the use of an additional line above the fold line.

App Description Formatting on iTunes and Web Preview

Web Preview and iTunes behave in a similar way, Web Preview is just that, a summary of your app description and screenshots along with a link to view the app in iTunes.  The final step on a computer is to have iTunes open to the page where the user clicks purchase to download the app.  A history of Web Preview and SEO implications may be found here.

Both iTunes and Web Preview show the same number of lines from your app description before the “break” point.  A break point is where all text is hidden below the fold, and the user must click the More… link to display the rest.

Let’s look at some examples. The following three shots were taken from Web Preview.  iTunes displays the same amount of information as Web Preview, however only Web Preview has fixed width.  Resize the iTunes app window, allows longer word-wrapping lines but ultimately the same amount of information above the fold as Web Preview.

Note: Click any images to see the full size.

Here the app publisher has chosen to highlight two specific sentences and put a line of space between them for readibility.  Note that if the first line was longer than 120 characters, top of fold would be a complete and a partial line (due to the wrap) and the third would simply be a blank space.

Here the app publisher has one long line of text with no carriage returns.  This means that all three allowable lines of text are the result of one word wrapped line.  This is the maximum amount of information you can cram into the top of fold, but it does not read very well here.  Wait until you see how ad copy like this looks in the iPhone’s App Store.  For your reference, this one line of text is about 343 characters in length.

Looking at the devices

Currently there are two different sizes in the iOS hardware family.  The long one, (iPhone and iPod Touch devices), and the wide one, (iPad devices).  In addition, there are three types of binaries, iPhone only apps, iPad only apps and Universal apps, which work on both iPhone (iPod Touch too) and iPad.

If your app is only for iPhone you need to focus on how it is displayed in the iPhone’s app store.  If it is only for iPad, you need to look at it there.  In either case you also need to look at how Apple’s relatively new Web Preview page displays your app description too.

App Description Formatting on the iPhone

Often users install apps directly on their device, rather than using iTunes and syncing a purchase.  It is certainly less clunky and you have instant satisfaction of getting to run the app right away.  That means your app description marketing copy should be influenced by how the lines of text look when displayed on each of these devices.

Here are some screenshots of how word wrapping of text affects readability on the iPhone App Store app.  Note that the iPhone app store app only supports portrait orientation.

Interestingly, a long line of text looks like a nice paragraph on the iPhone.  Also, Apple uses the bullet character to bullet features.

Note here that the long lines make the display of this text awkward and difficult to read.  (I use it anyhow!)

Note a few things here:

1. The first and third lines are used so Web Preview and iTunes display both lines top of fold.
2. The bulleted lists do not word wrap, (the max char per line is 45).
3. Unicode goodness makes it look crisp.
4. Attention goes to lines 17 and 18 in the app description.  They are the final ones before the user would scroll down to see the screen shots.

Here’s Rock Show’s Web Preview:

App Description Formatting on the iPad

The iPad app store app supports both landscape and portrait modes.  It also brings back the idea of the fold and its exposing link, “More…”  In this way, the iPad’s app store application is formated more like iTunes’ traditional display.  See for yourself by comparing iBooks Web Preview with the landscape view of the iPad App Store app. iBooks also happens to have a fancy custom background that 3rd party developers generally won’t have access to:

Conclusion

There isn’t an easy way to preview how your app’s text will look in all these different store fronts until after it is published , but you can at least know what you’re up against.

Experiment with your language and line length.  Every opportunity for a new installation of your software on an iOS device holds not only immediate, but residual value.  Since potential users may view your value proposition from a few different angles, pay attention to the quirks and write accordingly.

Great song, cool remix.  I’ve been seeing these embedded waveform and music playback widgets by SoundCloud.  Deadmau5 also uses this services for posting experimental clips.  I like the in-timeline comments.

A Note on Media Alignment

It is worth noting that we’re beginning to see more media outlets align with or against Apple.  From my frequent review of popular mobile news coverage, it has become clear that Gizmodo and PC World do their best to highlight gaffes and problems in the iTunes ecosystem or just about iAnything.  Meanwhile a blog like MacRumors seeks to downplay news that might be viewed as concerning or add to the distress from iphone4antennaegate. (I just made that up).

While the title of these publications alone should serve as a strong indicator, keeping track is important.   The Clintons are well known for keeping their loyalty lists in order and it is entirely reasonable to assume Apple is doing the same.   For the record, I run an iOS app development group and generally advocate for the iOS platform.

The Recent Gaming of the App Store

Back to the issue at hand, MacRumors published a piece titled, “Reports of ‘App Store Hacked’ Greatly Exaggerated” that sought to downplay concerns related to the book category being hijacked by a rogue developer for over four days.  Indeed, the book category is small, however any evidence that challenges the fairness of the App store only adds to the mindset that not all developers get a fair shot.

When news like this is published it suggests that as an app developer, you not only must court and respond to any marketing opportunities provided by Apple (few and far between) but also worry about your app competing on its own merits in the top 50 ranking.

Apple ID Password Policy

Currently the only requirement for a password that may be used to access iTunes, MobileMe, the iOS developer portal and more is that it be 6 characters in length.  As far as I can tell, there are no other requirements and no common passwords are blocked.  (I briefly changed my password to ‘password’ to test this.)

To quote Wikipedia’s entry, “Password policies are usually a tradeoff between theoretical security and the practicalities of human behavior.”  In the case of the iTunes music store the practicalities of human behavior are that the general public is really bad at remembering passwords, especially if they require numbers or upper case letters.

From Apple’s perspective, when someone forgets their password they can not buy virtual goods, whether that be music, videos or apps.  It is my belief that Apple forces you to re-enter your password when ‘buying’ free applications or upgrading previous applications specifically to make sure you always know your password just in case you decide you want to buy something.

Given the number of accounts out there linked directly to credit cards, it is fair to assume that if Apple were to implement a stronger password policy it would have a negative effect on sales.  And, at least for the moment, the number of negative publicity associated with compromised accounts and their use to game the app store does not outweigh this figure.

Apple ID password requirements appear to have been unchanged for years, as hack reports have been reported for some time.  What is new is the app store gaming.  No one cares about others’ poor password choices until they start affecting their own bottom line.