Well I was going to write a whole big blog post on this, but this guy just said pretty much everything I wanted to. Watanabe is a complete ass, and a cursory search gives lie to his protests of being a good guy just trying to earn a buck. He’s a sleaze-bag.
For extra credit, go through the comments for all those pages calling him a jackass, and find all the comments from David using aliases. It’s lots of fun. He’s got a pretty particular writing style, and it’s not hard to pick him out.
Update: It’s my personal belief that David was intentionally deceptive, and actively trying to hide his manipulation of the search results, but if he wasn’t doing that, and he was a person with any degree of skill in dealing constructively with other humans, his response would have gone something like this:
Mea Culpa! It was not my intention to hide the fact that I’ve moved from a donation model to an ad supported model, but I can understand why people would assume the worst. Ads were not clearly differentiated from search results, and I haven’t published which terms will bring about ads. For the next version I’ll be clearly visually identifying when searches are returning ads or affiliate links, and here is the list of searches that return them. The mac community is unlike any other, and I know they’re dedicated to supporting independent developers. I screwed up, and I hope that I can re-earn the trust of the community through these changes and continuing to write great software. Until the next version is ready, here’s a version of the software that has the ad code removed.