Actually, I listened to the podcast while jogging and with all the traffic and noise around, the name sounded like ‘epic knight’. My first reaction was: what a strange but awesome name…

I think creating a learning AI wouldn’t have much of an effect on the game (since there’s the random dice thing).

Sounds like Jason is building a platform, which the general wisdom says you shouldn’t do. If it really brings a massive productivity boost to the table (over existing frameworks and how they are installed, maintained, scaled etc), it could be worth the risk, but it certainly sounds like a ginormous undertaking. Best of luck.

Justin, You don’t look to be trying very hard to get to 50 people for your webinar but I’m still up for it 🙂

I’ve only just listened to the podcast as we’ve been head-down in an iPhone app that we pushed through to Apple yesterday.

So, sign me up to the alpha – I’d love to be involved, it sounds like a fantastic project. I’m expecting a janky interface and no documentation but a fantastic system – sounds excellent.

Justin, surely you’ve hit the 50 for the webinar by now??? Do I need to sign up under some different accounts (only kidding).

Keep up the great podcasts
Charlie

You’re absolutely correct that AppIgnite should provide hand-holding via wizards for less technical users as well as offer a faster, more streamlined path for advanced users. This is something I’ve thought a lot about and will probably discuss on the podcast in the coming months.

The example you provided as the “IT director of a small hospital … needing to write a web application for a support help desk” is exactly the kind of problem I had imagined that AppIgnite could solve. Thanks so much for taking the time to describe it.

On “plugg-eeyo” vs “plugg-hi-ho”: being French I would naturally try to pronounce it “plugg-eeyo” and I think that sounds hip and cool. I very much like the new branding and new features – so I could no longer resist become a paying customer! 🙂

Congrats again to Jason for AppIgnite. Let me know when I can go back and play some more with the app I started. I think that Jason is definitely on to something. Another analogy for people who know Ruby on Rails is that AppIgnite is a super-scaffolding mechanism. The Rails scaffolding made Rails very appealing to new developers and anyone prototyping a concept. The only caveat is to take a scaffold to a production quality takes a lot of work especially for the UX. So I started to wonder if you could partner with Peldi to tie in a custom and simpler version of Balsamic Mockups to help people customize the page layout.

Another idea would be to create an ecosystem of addins (kind of what jQuery did) for professional AppIgniters. Having an API or a plugin system would let them create all sorts of extensions and take some load off of you so that you don’t have to always extend the product.

One differentiator I see in AppIgnite that other previous attempts at this concept have never really mastered is security – i.e. user management and access control policies. That’s a huge advantage since this is something that non-developers or dev-amateurs usually can’t easily do without professional developers.
On pricing, the per user monthly fee for private apps makes sense. But for public apps, I tend to agree with @Aaron@Phrasemix on the challenge of a percentage off the top. Maybe you can do something similar to what Heroku is doing.

On the Swarm game: like Jason I am not much a game player at all. But the iPad based board game sounds really good. What about making an online version (like for XBox live)? If you ported the game to MS XNA the game could run both on a Windows PC and on an XBox.

Justin, enjoy your trip to Europe. I am jealous about the visit to France as I have not been back in a few years and miss it. It’s a good thing I live in Colorado and love it there.

For example if you are in .NET then Nhibernate is ultra flexible.

Jason :
@Aaron@Phrasemix On the other hand, if you created a public app that you charged money for, then AppIgnite would take some percentage off the top. I don’t really know what that number would end up being, but that’s just kind of what I’ve been thinking about. To make that happen I want to build in a payment system, so that if you launch an app on AppIgnite the payment is processed seamlessly by AppIgnite and the amount forwarded to your account thereby saving you the trouble of setting up a merchant account and implementing a payment system. While I haven’t yet done any research in this area, it seems like it should be doable and would be a valuable thing to provide.

I wonder if taking a % off the top would strongly disincentivize people from building really cool stuff on the system, particularly if it’s a high % cut. A % cut would make the system more attractive to someone who knows they’re not going to make much money off the app, and less attractive for a more ambitions project. So you’d end up with fewer really cool apps that you could point to as examples of how powerful your platform is.

If I’m looking to build something that has some potential to it, I’d be more likely to use AppIgnite if the costs were based on a flat rate or based on bandwidth/processor usage.

Just my $.02

My goal is for AppIgnite to be able to generate 100% of simple or vanilla flavored apps and 80-90% of more complex, specialized apps. A mechanism for feature requests and a developer market place are both ideas that I plan on implementing and the ability to request features is something you should see very soon.

Also, I’m thinking of creating two separate types of pricing – one for private apps and one for public apps. So, if you wanted to create a private app that performs some type of business function inside your company, then you would pay some per user monthly fee. On the other hand, if you created a public app that you charged money for, then AppIgnite would take some percentage off the top. I don’t really know what that number would end up being, but that’s just kind of what I’ve been thinking about. To make that happen I want to build in a payment system so that if you launch an app on AppIgnite the payment is processed seamlessly by AppIgnite and the amount forwarded to your account. This would save you the considerable trouble of setting up a merchant account and of implementing a payment system. While I haven’t yet done any research in this area, it seems like it should be doable and would be a valuable thing to provide.

Anyway, I’ll send you an alpha test account within the next few days so that you can start playing around with AppIgnite and watch it evolve.

Thanks again for the great feedback!

As I was listening to you guys discuss AppIgnite, I got an idea about one way you could squeeze some money out of it, as well as make the experience better for the target audience of non-programmer power users. I’ve had an idea for an app that I want to build that involves pulling audio files from a database and stitching them together. I know enough not to expect AppIgnite to be able to stitch together audio files out of the box. But there are also all of these other aspects of the app will need to be built that it could easily handle – logins, user profiles, pulling up the audio data to be combined, etc. It’s just that last 20% that I would need to hire a developer for. And I imagine there are going to be a lot of other people in the same boat. So I wonder if you’d consider creating a developer marketplace. Essentially, a place where a user like me could put up a feature request and have a marketplace of developers who know how to work with the system to add custom features. Then AppIgnite would take a cut of the profits.

I really appreciate the podcast and look forward to listening to it each week. Thanks for the time you guys spend doing it.

Aaron

I think the Power User option has more of a reach. I have met a lot of people in companies who are like a tech Macgyver. Hacking together some solution because IT is either too busy or non existent. The only problem with that customer is trying to reach them is more difficult because they don’t even know to look for this solution (Which ties into BAMS comment) plus would mean more work getting the word out.

The more advanced Developer Tool solution also has promise, I know I would pay for the service if it meant I can turn out an app in 2 hours versus 4 weeks. And it would be easier to get the solution in front of other developers.

So, maybe you can serve both customer types. 🙂 But regardless of which you choose, be careful not to build it too watered down for the developer and too complex for Larry the Power User in the Marketing department.