I've considered standing outside on a hot day with a cooler of icecream sandwiches. At $1 each it's even more cost efficient, though people may not be as willing to stop and chat as they are in starbucks.

Hey, interesting post. Thanks for sharing. I had a few questions:

Did you do anything special for Debt Snowball that made it more successful than your other apps, or was it just a good product?

Do you do all the design and code for your apps, or do you outsource graphic design?

Are you worried that developing on 5 platforms will spread yourself too thin?

I didn't do anything different per se, but I did have a little bit of luck at launch. I generally send emails to some of the top bloggers to try to get reviews, and by virtue of it being good with a really nice looking design, I got 2 good reviews in the same day. Those sales plus any organic sales pushed it pretty high.

I do all the code and I've done varying levels of outsourcing the design. I've done all the design for some smaller apps, I've hired people using elance.com, and more recently I've been partnering with some top level designers (Debt Snowball+ was partnering with a really good designer).

As for spreading too thin, I hope not. I won't be doing all of my apps as I don't have nearly enough time for that. There is only 1 app at this point that makes sense on desktop, and I only plan on doing the most successful apps on the other platforms for the time being. We'll see how it goes, but I think the diversification will be very much worth some amount of spreading thin.

This is a good idea. The market is fairly small (people who are both tech savvy enough to understand what's going on and altruistic enough to want to participate), but that's ok.

I see very clear benefits over just putting your email address in your SSID. 1)Anonymity 2)Users may learn to trust the wifis.org brand. People can leave feedback about you on the site. I kind of see it as a couchsurfing for wifi.

That being said, I wouldn't bother trying to monetize. It can't cost him more than a few bucks a month to run this and unless he changes the product a bit (either provide higher value or larger market), I don't see monetization being particularly successful. Right now it is a great resume builder and a way to promote other projects that may be more lucrative (e.g. "Hey remember the guy from wifis.org, well now he's working on X"). If he's really worried about the hosting costs, he can put a donate button on the page.

Check out ctrl+p. It's an updated and more portable version of command-t

I second syntastic. Syntastic+JSHint probably catches 90% of my js errors (front-end javascript, not server side, fyi)

cool. I will give it a shot. I use google video chat regularly. Also, if you can add a way to easily share my screen (or even screenshots), that would be amazing. I have been wanting a way to 'push' my screen to coworkers, even within the same office.

Sharing the screen is definitely in our plans for functionality we're building next.

I've been doing HTML5 app development (via phonegap) on iPhone and Android for some time now, and I agree with a lot of what you said. You can make a really smooth, native feeling app using HTML5, but there are lots of things that don't work well. On iphone, there are lots of problems with fixed positioned elements, and on Android there are issues with translate3d. Both platforms have problems with "tap" events. These are all things that are important if you want a "native feel" in your app. However, there are workarounds.

I also agree that needing 3 front-end teams for app development just doesn't make any sense, especially for a small company. Since you can get near native performance with HTML5, it seems well worth the compromises.

FYI, my app doesn't use any mobile js frameworks, just Backbone.js (and phonegap).

yep, i talk about it in my blog here: http://vparikh.com/2012/04/19/space-age-web-development-with...

What are the client-side performance implications? I am worried about running this on mobile clients (mobile web or within phonegap). Three things in particular:

1. Running complex DB queries on the client

2. The in-memory database cache described in the documentation using a lot of memory

3. Having little control over how often the client hits the server and vice versa.

Sweet video! The best part of the evening was when someone repeatedly text their name until the recent entry times read "4, 20".

I think you could do more with the SMS reply, like have it send a random puzzle and award points for a solution (may have to be careful not to repeatedly unlock the door), send a horoscope based on a user profile, etc.

Yeah, I would like to make the replies much smarter & possibly include who is there ("Welcome Mark, Brian just got here"). Additionally it would be nice to proactively text people ("Mark, where are you? 3 of your friends have already arrived and are waiting for you"). I think there are a lot of fun things to add.