2011-05-07
We’ve gotten a lot of requests for this, and we’ve finally put it in the can: We’ve just hit the App Store with an iPad version of Emerald Chronometer, called “Emerald Chronometer HD”. You can see the press release here, some images here, and the App Store page here.
Once again this was more work than you might think, because of the way the app works with its OpenGL implementation. Something as simple as rotation, which is trivial on a simple app with standard UIKit views, becomes a lot more complicated when you have an OpenGL view and UIKit views and you want to animate it all smoothly during an orientation change. Watch carefully what happens when you rotate the device while grid mode is up; that represents a week of development effort. :-) We did get to make use of the higher-resolution images we developed for the Retina display, however.
Anyway, we’re pretty happy with the way it looks, in both portrait and landscape modes. And in grid mode with 2-4 watches, all of the watches are the same size as they are in Emerald Chronometer on the iPhone (or larger), so it’s a nice way to see more than one watch at once and still be able to read each one.
The new app is priced at USD $5, the same price as Emerald Chronometer has been since it entered the store. At the same time, we are reducing the price of Emerald Chronometer to USD $2; this reflects both an overall downward trend in app pricing in the past three years and also the additional value (and development effort) associated with the iPad app.
We hope you like the new app!
honolulufan 2011-05-08 19:14:02
I bought EC for my iphone shortly after it came out and love it. I particularly liked Terra for calculating time zone differences for work but also Mauna Kea and Miami. That said I probably use Thebes the most often for timing my tea! So I was excited to hear that ECHD was now available for my ipad and no longer had to look at the blurry images on that device. I was a bit miffed to see that I had to pay another $5 for this “upgrade”. However, after reading your desciption of the extra effort that went into creating it and seeing the images you put up on your website, I was convinced and bought it. It was well worth it. Thank you for creating a great product.
br3t 2011-05-16 21:00:15
I understand the need to charge, and I like your app, but you should at least make a consession to those of us who have purchased the app previously for the iPhone/iPod. We paid $5 for that app which now you are charging $2, so if I wanted it for both my iPhone and iPad, I would only have to pay $7 now, whereas now the total cost I have paid for your apps will be $10. Seems a little unfair to those of us who have supported your app from the get go. The concession I speak of isn’t wanting it for free, but equal to what others who buy it for both mediums would pay, thus those that paid $5 for the iPhone app should be eligible to purchase this one for $2. Maybe I should just wait a few years and see if you drop the price of this one also.
Steve 2011-05-17 09:37:41
@br3t: Thanks for taking the time to comment. I understand what you’re saying; we got one other comment via email along the same lines, and we did think about that exact problem before deciding on our pricing. The issue we had, and have, is we don’t know of a straightforward way to charge early owners of Emerald Chronometer (the ones like you who paid $5 for it) differently from the newer ones who are paying $2. Apple doesn’t give us any information about our customers, so we have no way to decide how much to charge for the upgrade. (Also, adding ‘in-app purchasing’ would have been another chunk of work for us, though that wasn’t a huge factor in our decision). And Apple doesn’t allow us to charge different people different prices for the same product (EC HD), so there would be no way to give a discount on a new product purchase to some customers and not others. We could have avoided the issue by keeping EC’s price constant rather than dropping it to $2, but we really wanted to get it more in line with other similar iPhone apps (it was only selling 3 or 4 copies per day), and we did want to lower the cost of owning both products for at least the new customers. It’s unfortunate but there are many cases where the initial adopters of a product, the ones who make it possible to go forward, often wind up footing more of the bill than those that come later.
In the end we’re engineers, not pricing experts (though we’re learning!), and while we’d like to get some money back for our efforts our primary goal is to have fun and to get something out there that people will enjoy. So we do what we can that seems not to be too wrong and go back to the “real work” of writing software, designing displays, and documenting how it all works. We think we can produce more value that way. And it’s surely more fun. :-)
If it’s any consolation (and I realize it may not be), if the price of EC reflected what it actually cost to develop, divided by the number of customers that have bought it in the past 3 years, it would cost about $30, rather than the $5 that EC HD costs or the $2 we’re now charging for EC. Because this is a hobby for Bill and me we effectively subsidize its development ourselves by “donating” our time far and above what we get back in revenue. We do this because we love what we do and we get a buzz from having other people enjoy what we make. We’ll hold no ill will towards anyone who thinks we’re not being fair or who thinks we’re charging too much and decides not to purchase, but we can tell you with no doubt whatsoever that the cost of owning either of these products, or even both of them if you paid the original $5 for EC, doesn’t begin to cover the cost of developing them.
- Steve
timl2k11 2011-10-30 08:34:22
Someone should write a book about learning astronomy with EC. I know it ha helped me learn a great deal of difficult concepts that I had spent years trying to wrap my head around. The watches get you thinking. You want to understand, an that is a strong motivator for learning. EC must be one the most underrated apps in the App store. Maybe then teachers would start using it to teach astronomy and students would download it to their iPads. :) I started writing about Alexandria and quickly realized there were at least ten pages there, as so many concepts can be explored from just that one watch. So simple, but still so informational.
markkelly62@gmail.com 2017-04-25 16:28:19
Seems almost redundant to be giving praise to this App as almost everything has been said. To the App Developers, Thank you x 10 for coding this App. Please consider coding fo the Apple Watch as I would pay for that enhancement. MJK Brisbane QLD Australia +61439500500