Mobster Lobster : Policies

It has always struck me as cruel and unusual that after paying full retail price for software customers are expected to shell out even more money just to keep up with the latest version of a product they've already paid for. I believe the practice of charging for upgrades is fundamentally unfair in the same way that it is unfair that movie studios can charge me again every time to buy movies I already own in a newer format, so I'm not going to do it. My policy is that once you buy one of my applications, you will get all future upgrades to that application for free, for ever, no matter what.

I can't offer refunds unfortunately. Apple doesn't provide any mechanism for offering refunds and I don't think they should. What they should offer is a try-before-you-buy mechanism. Some developers have taken to deploying "lite" and "full" versions of their apps and this is something I may consider in the future.

I am pleased to offer free support for any customer who owns one of my applications via the form on my contact page. I will also try to help with pre-sales questions. Please bear in mind I am a one man company and I work full time - I might not be able to respond to your message immediately but I'll do my best.

Hopefully you won't be disappointed with your purchase but if you are, please consider contacting me before posting negative reviews. If you think the application is missing important features, tell me what they are and I might well agree with you and add those features. If you've discovered a bug I will make every effort to fix it in the next release, but I won't know about it unless you tell me.

I have programmed the site to actively disallow access to Internet Explorer 6 users and show this page instead which explains why. In a nutshell it's because Internet Explorer 6 is a dreadful browser and supporting it both increases development time significantly. All other browsers will display the site. I aim to support the current stable releases of Firefox, Safari, Opera and Camino on Mac OS Leopard+, and Firefox, Safari, Opera, Chrome on Windows XP+ as well as Internet Explorer 7+. Other standards-compliant browsers should render the site correctly but I can't realistically test every minority browser every time I make a change.

Some of the features of the site such as the screenshot browser use JavaScript animation which can be sluggish on very old computers. I made a decision to use these features to enhance the user experience and unfortunately there is no easy way for me to test the performance of the PC to make use of these features conditionally. The site won't break because of it, it will just run slowly and unfortunately that is likely to be a common experience for owners of older PCs.

I have tested the site in all of my supported browsers but I actually develop using Firefox so that is the only browser where I can honestly say I've tested every page and every feature and I know it will work perfectly. If you experience a browser compatibility issue with the site in a browser I support, please let me know.

I use Google Analytics to learn how people are using my site. It doesn't give me IP addresses of individual users, though I could get that information if I really wanted to from my server's log files. Like pretty much all webmasters, I use analytics to understand patterns of usage, not to study the particular activities of individuals.

I use a feature of Google's AJAX APIs to determine what country you are in so that I can display app prices in local currency. Although this API gives me fairly precise locations, I don't save them or use them anywhere on the site.

I am experimenting with not requiring a return email address on my contact form. I sometimes want to leave feedback without giving the recipient the opportunity to respond to me, so I'd like my customers to have this option. It may turn out not to be practical if I end up getting bug reports with insufficient detail for example and I can't ask for more information, so I'll be reviewing this policy some time down the line. I will never use your email address for anything other than responding to your enquiry from the site. I have no plans to do mailshots about my applications but if I ever did it would be for readers who had explicitly subscribed to receive them.

I have decided to require an email address for comments on blog entries. This is essentially to discourage comment spam. I will be moderating comments - I'll try not to be too authoritarian about things but at the end of the day it's my site and and anything I find particularly offensive won't appear on the blog.