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Did the same thing at my college. We crawled their course catalog. They blocked our IP.

Our big addition was being able to sort classes by time and day, the university ended up adding that feature, so I guess we got what we wanted?


Great software for half off doesn't seem like a scam to me. The app still works.


http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4271587

"I didn't buy Sparrow thinking I was paying for a piece of software that was feature-complete. I bought Sparrow mail as a piece of innovative software along with the promise of lots of great future updates to come."

I agree with this. I bought Sparrow when it had a pretty big bug with folder management on my IMAP account. I emailed them and they fixed it in an update, but there was still lots of room for Sparrow to grow (If Apple allows them to do push, other integration with the OS like Siri, etc).

It looks like Sparrow will turn into the Gmail client for iOS, which is a shit sandwich for everyone who doesn't use Gmail.


If you're buying something based on potential future improvements, and promises for those improvements are not part of the deal, then you have only yourself to blame if it doesn't work out. They have no obligation to conform to your expectations. If you don't want to have problems like this, then only buy software that actually does what you need right now.


Timing a sale right before an announcement you're well aware will drop sales numbers off a steep cliff looks pretty deceptive to me.


It's a standalone app, it's not going to stop functioning. $4.99 is a deal, regardless of whether there would be future versions or not.


> $4.99 is a deal, regardless of whether there would be future versions or not.

Then they should've put it on sale for $4.99 today, after the announcement, with a note in the description that it will no longer receive new features.

If it's indeed a deal, surely all the people who bought last week would've bought this week.


Yes, but it needs security updates and possibly bug fixes. That's the very least you'd expect when purchasing software. I bought Sparrow for the iPhone and Mac directly after they were released and really never used them.

But imagine that you just bought either Sparrow a few days ago, or even worse, made it part of your workflow.

It sucks.

On the other hand, it's always an inherent danger with proprietary software. Open software gets maintained by Debian for like forever ;). I learnt that lesson after the demise of Be Inc.


Deals fall apart at the last minute all. the. time. You can't just stop doing business.


You can delay your half-off sale for a week.


So buyers are just a hedge?


Maybe $4.99 is a lot of money to him. It could be the amount which makes or breaks his startup. ;)


Congrats on launching Sam!


Thanks Sam :)


I have trouble thinking this 60 year old programmer exists. There were only 2000 computers in existence in 1960. Today a 60 year old programmer that spent a career in computer science is a very small group of people.

I'm going to wait and see how this really turns out.


1960? If one's career is considered to start at age 22, a 60-year-old would have started in 1974.


Good point :) To be fair I started writing code much younger, but I still chose a bad date.

I still think my main point is valid.


Thanks a lot!


Currently it is because of the page view controller, but I'm thinking about dropping that in the future. I'll definitely being iOS 5 only at that point.


This list is one of the first list that seems to really coincide with the things that bother me about the app.

I do like the idea of making the left side tappable, and I really do want to change my animation and hope to get time to fix that soon.

Just so you know when viewing a story you can tap the headline to go back. This feature was mostly added for myself, I hope to get a designer to design me something that communicates returning to the front page better than my current methods.

I can tell you've done some iOS work cause you can see some of the shortcuts I took to ship this on time. I hope to fix these soon :)


Feel free to email me at sam@sammcd.com if you would like to discuss this more.

I just want to say that I did not use your app as a source at all when designing my app, but I did use newspapers.


If this is the case, why did you not use a gothic, New York Times-y font for your header graphic, such as is much, much more typical for newspapers than the font you did use? Why does your header graphic appear to be nearly identical to mine? Why is your functionality nearly identical to mine? It's just a massive coincidence?


I simply went to http://www.dafont.com/ and searched until I found a font I liked, thats all that happened here.


Thanks a lot for your feedback.

Like I've already commented its great to hear from you and see which of the features I think are important are also important to people who have tried the app.


+1 for Instapaper integration.


Thanks a lot!


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