Use Dark Sky, or don't use Dark Sky. But don't tell me it's somehow not worth $3 a year. The math doesn't lie.
Here we go again. A long-awaited app finally comes to Android — and the developer has the gall to ask for $3 a year to use the really good parts of it. Instead of, ya know, mucking the whole thing up with ads, or charging more money a single time, or ...
Yes, we're going to have this discussion again.
The question at hand isn't whether weather app is worth $2.99 a year. If you've already got a weather app you love and that does what you want and that doesn't cost you less more than eight tenths of a penny a day and doesn't have ads, awesome. Use it.
And the question isn't why you're willing to pay $5 a day for coffee-flavored sugar water that you'll piss out by lunchtime — but think a $3-a-year weather app costs too much. There's some basic math at work there, and it's not supporting your argument, no matter how many times you try to make it.
No, my question is this: Who cares?
I get that we have to have something to complain about on Twitter. (What else is it for, right?) But this one's really silly. There's no need to overthink this. If you want a weather app that attempts to tell you within minutes that it's going to rain, and you're willing to pay a paltry sum for such an app — do it. If you're not, no worries.
Three dollars. A year. Not even a month. If that's too much for something you're potentially going to use every day, then ...
It's as simple as that. There's no reason to overthink things. I should yell out my car window when the driver in front of me needs two hands to take ownership of the oversized snow-covered sugar mountain, while I await my more humble latte?
It's OK to be a cheap bastard. It's OK to be frugal. And it's OK to spend a little more sometimes on a thing you're going to be using a lot. (Particularly, I'd argue, when what you're spending goes fairly directly to the folks who actually made the thing you're buying.)
What's truly dumb is wasting as much time as I've just done here, discussing this very thing. Time to grab my coffee and head outside. It's nice out today.
(But first, a few other things I think I think
- . Just because you see something on Facebook doesn't make it true. (And, in fact, probably means it's not.)
- Speaking of Facebook, this "trending topics" controversy is ridiculous. Countless organizations use people to chose what you see as "trending" every day.
- I did it for years, for a newspaper. It was called a "wire editor." We chose the AP stories that everyone read the next day. Is there bias? Of course. And if you know your bias, you can do your job better.
- I'm choosing what you're reading in this column right now.
- Facebook , though. That's how it works.
- But ? It's an effing joke, right? This is what the U.S. Senate is spending its time on?
- Speaking of good responses, I think . Good response to a dumb mistake. (That affected very few people.)
- Glad Google's providing OTA links for Nexus updates now. I'll say it again — it's worth learning how to do that basic command line stuff.
- If only so I don't have to .
- I stole the Ricoh Theta S from Russell. This is the 360 camera to get, IMHO.
That's it for this week. We're headed to Google I/O. You can , and things kick off in earnest on Wednesday!