
Creating a Retail Demo for Apple - wallflower
https://www.swiftjectivec.com/creating-a-retail-demo/
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com2kid
During one of my internships I was charged with setting up one of the
laptops[1] Bill Gates's demo'd on at CES.

The demos were carefully crafted between the ISVs, Microsoft's marketing, and
for the real bleeding edge stuff, Microsoft's own developers.

What I remember most is how carefully the machines were setup. We'd come up
with install scripts and manual installation steps that were designed to
ensure maximum stability for what were often beta releases. The entire process
was designed to be repeatable again and again with excellent documentation so
if something popped up on the showroom floor getting back to a working state
was as close to foolproof as possible.

[1] Obv. I did other things, but there was a lot of work around prepping for
trade show demos.

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e28eta
I was on a team that did the same, a long time ago. I’d be interested in a
follow up if they ever ask for an update. Or can you push updates to them?

I’m also curious how you structured the changes. Does this work exist on a
separate branch that you’d need to update/replicate in order to push an
update? Or did you merge it to master, and will be living with that added
complexity during everyday development? Or something else?

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dehrmann
> Or did you merge it to master, and will be living with that added complexity
> during everyday development

One place I worked, we had a demo version of the product's web interface, and
this is how we did it. Maintaining it wasn't fun, and people didn't pay much
attention to it so it started to rot. We eventually removed it because
marketing switched to something else because it was so bad, but I'm wondering
if there's another way.

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saagarjha
Does Apple pay for the extra work necessary to prepare these? Did you notice
an uptick in sales from being featured in the retail demo?

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sjroot
Why would Apple pay developers for this work? If OP didn’t want to advertise
their app this way, Apple could’ve easily asked another dev.

Granted, I’m sure the uptick in sales more than compensated OP for their time.
If it didn’t, then this HN article probably will. :)

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jordanmorgan10
Oh hey! I wrote this. Cool to see it on HN. Happy to answer any other
questions if anyone has any.

