Eric Fernandez's Blog

Saurik has opened the new Cydia Store and has the first package available for purchase. Cyntact!

“Show profile pictures in contact lists! Cyntact even enhances contact lists in third party App Store Applications. It is not it’s own applications: think of it as a new feature for Contacts.”

Saurik also has some reasoning as to why he would make the app cost money.

“Yes, this is a very simple package. No, I do not intendto make a habit of charging for little packages like this in the future: my plan is to continue releasing most of my work for free.

Please bear with me, and read this:

There are some important reasons why I chose Cyntact to be the first package sold using the Cydia Store:

First, it works: I have been testing this package for months and know there are no memory leaks or threading issues in it. I personally have about 600 contacts and I have pictures for most of them, so I also know it scales.

This means that I am hopefully not going to have to handle any serious support requests on Cyntact itself: this is fundamentally important as I’m certainly going to e spending the rest of my week debugging issues of the form “you lost my dollar”, and really don’t want to have any extra work.

Secondly, I feel Cyntact truly honors what it means to be an “unofficial app: this is the kind of package that Apple would have to make a fundamental change to their entire vision, even technologically, to allow in their store.

So, will we one day see Cycorder in the App Store? Maybe. Will Apple eventually decide to add this feature to Contacts? Certainly. But I guarantee that you will never seea package like cyntact to buy in the App Store.

Finally, I have yet to meet someone who has told me they wouldn’t pay a dollar for this package (at least, of people who would spend a dollar on anything, ever): Cyntact is awesome.”

So, go check out the app!